Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/07 - The Latest Startup Gunning For Gmail

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

WhatsApp wants to make it harder for things to go viral. Airbnb buys some runway. Foursquare merges with another location data company. Checking in with Masa Son. And the latest startup to say it wants to blow up email and unseat Gmail. Sponsors: Caramba.store code: Brian20 F5.com/ride Links: WhatsApp to impose new limit on forwarding to fight fake news (The Guardian) Airbnb is raising $1 billion amid fallout from coronanvirus (CNBC) Foursquare Merges With Factual, Another Location-Data Provider (WSJ) Masayoshi Son Talks WeWork, Vision Fund and Softbank Under Siege (Forbes) Pixel April updates land, bringing eyes-open face unlock setting to the Pixel 4 (Android Police) Microsoft Buys Corp.com So Bad Guys Can’t (KrebsonSecurity) This tiny startup thinks it can do email better than Google (Protocol) Subscribe to the ad free feed! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Tuesday, April 7th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, WhatsApp wants to make it harder for things to go viral. Airbnb buys some runway, 4Square merges with another location data company, checking in with Masasan, and the latest startup to say it wants to blow up email and unseat Gmail. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. In an effort to fight fake news in this time of pandemic, WhatsApp is now limiting the forwarding of viral messages. that have been forwarded five or more times to only one group at a time. So let me say that a little more clearly.

If something has been forwarded to you on WhatsApp more than five times and you receive it, you will no longer be able to just mass forward it to every single chat you're participating in. Instead, you will have to pass it along by hand one forward at a time, quoting Alex Hearn at the Guardian. The change does not completely prevent widespread forwarding since ultimately a message can be passed on however many times a user is happy to hit the forward button. But by inserting friction into the process, the company hopes to slow some of the most viral messages on its platforms, such as the widely spread falsehood that coronavirus is related to 5G. That claim has led to the vandalization of more than 20 phone masks in Britain in the past week. Quote, we've seen a significant increase

in the amount of forwarding which users have told us can feel overwhelming and can contribute to the spread of misinformation, said a WhatsApp spokesperson in a blog post on Tuesday morning. We believe it's important to slow the spread of these messages to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation, end quote. WhatsApp does have priors for taking steps like this. Back in 2018, WhatsApp tested limiting the forwarding of messages in India in order to fight the spread of fake news there, which had led to incidents of actual violence. Keeping an eye on the Airbnb situation, the company has reportedly raised $1 billion in new debt and equity. financing from Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners. Yes, the valuation on the deal is most likely down from the $31 billion valuation of 2017, but according to sources, the funding is not

contingent on near-term performance or a target IPO date. So Airbnb might have gotten a pretty good deal here, quoting CNBC. The terms of the round were not disclosed, but a source familiar with the matter said, there is no ratchet or any other coercive terms. It's attractive for Airbnb. The source added, the funding doesn't depend on Airbnb's performance or reaching a target date to go public. Silver Lake and Sixth Street are new investors, and according to a source, the company chose them because they are, quote, focused on the mission and, quote, believe travel is enduring, end quote. We talked a while ago about how Foursquare has successfully pivoted in recent years to become one of the premier location data companies. while now Foursquare is merging with another location data company, factual in an all-stock deal, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The announcement comes less than a year after Foursquare bought Placed, another purveyor of location data and software from SNAP.

Foursquare, which first gained fame for an app that allowed people to share their location with friends, pivoted in recent years to providing location data and software to businesses, including marketers and ad agencies, helping them see how well their ads steered people to stores and restaurants. restaurants. While the placed deal improved Foursquare's ability to gauge the effectiveness of ads by measuring foot traffic, the merger with Factual will build on its ad targeting capabilities, executives said. Factual's location software helps marketers home in on customer segments. For instance, people who have visited certain car dealerships in the last 30 days. Factual or Foursquare's data is already integrated into the digital advertising platforms of companies that include Oracle, Roku, and the Trade Desk. Quote, location. data has tremendous power because of intent, said factual founder Gil Elbas.

Foursquare already allows advertisers to target different audience groups, but factual's underlying data set is better, said Foursquare chief executive David Schim, who will continue in the role after the deal closes. Quote, when it comes to audience segments, factual is number one. We're not number one, Mr. Schim said. Foursquare is number one when it comes to attribution and ad effectiveness, when it comes to app developer tools, end quote. 4Square, which is based in New York and factual based in Los Angeles, together generated more than $150 million in revenue last year, executive said the combined company will operate as 4Square Labs Incorporated, end quote.

It's been a while, so let's check in with Mossa Sahn, who sat down to chat with Alex Conrad at Forbes, to give updates on WeWork, the role of the Vision Fund within SoftBank, and the overall status of his portfolio generally. quoting Masa himself, despite people's view that SoftBank might be struggling, we continue to grow, San told Conrad, don't think about the past, end quote. But as Conrad points out, that's easier said than done, quoting from his piece. Companies like Real Estate Unicorn Compass and Small Business Loan Provider Cabbage have recently turned to furloughs and layoffs. SoftBank allowed another satellite internet startup one web to file for bankruptcy even after previously investing about $2 billion. More will go under quickly. I would say 15 of them will go bankrupt, Son says. That's okay, he adds, as long as a similar number of 15 or so companies break out.

SoftBank Insiders claim that if the fund can return $150 billion, it can still pay back its limited partners, their principal and guaranteed 7% annual returns and still eke out a profit. So resources will be deployed toward clear winners. Vision Fund partner Lydia Jet says she and her colleagues have a new focus to help portfolio companies renegotiate with lenders and landlords, rebalancing budgets and balance sheets, and learning from its Asian portfolio companies that faced the worst of COVID-19 first. There's a lot going on to help these companies work their way through what will be a long, long journey, she says. From later in the piece, Conrad writes this. What's not in dispute, at SoftBank and Even Vision Fund, it's Masa calling the shots.

as the largest shareholder by far, he controls SoftBank and he sits on one of three members of the Vision Fund's Investment Committee with final say over deals. This is his game to win or lose and history will judge accordingly. Is he the ultimate escape artist, readying his third act, or a bubble chaser who deserves the discount the market attaches to him? Sahn has lately been fond of presenting people with Rorschach-like images to drive home the point of perspective. Look at a shadow, he says. Even within 24 hours, the length of your shadow differs dramatically, even though your height in 24 hours is unchanged. People get scared or overconfident, looking at the length of the shadow, end quote. Over the next few months, Son will find out if it's sunset or sunrise, end quote.

Following up on something from a while ago, when the pixel four phones were announced, remember when people noticed a funny little flaw in them? And that was, you could use the phone's facial recognition feature to unlock the phone even if your eyes were closed. So yeah, people were having visions of suspicious spouses unlocking their partner's phones or kids wanting to buy some in-game swag unlocking your phone by holding it up to your face when you were asleep. Well, no more. As Google has released an update to require eyes open by default, though you still have the option to disable this if you so choose. Quoting Ryan Hager at Android Police. At the phone's

original release, it was a point of contention that the security feature worked even when your eyes were closed. But the new setting, which appeared last month in the Android 11 previews, should make things a little more secure. The toggle that controls it should live in settings, then security, then face unlock, then require eyes to be open. I should note the feature was not enabled on my devices after the update. It had to be manually toggled on. I'd also like to note that face unlock isn't running continuously when you're unlocking your pixel 4, and that hasn't changed with this update. If it fails due to your eyes being closed, it won't succeed just because you open them after it has already failed out. As before, it will need a new trigger for a scan. For example, swiping up to

enter a pin or password or pattern, turning the display off or on again, or even just shaking the phone. It's funny, but it works, end quote. And an update on something from just a few months ago. Remember in February when we told you about the guy who was auctioning off the corp.com domain name? people were worried because due to a namespace collision, Windows computers using active directory might accidentally send sensitive data to the corp.com domain. The owner of the domain, Michael Connor, was trying to get Microsoft to pay up to buy it so that the domain wouldn't fall into the hands of bad actors. Well, it turns out he got his way, quoting Krebs on security. O'Connor told me he was selling the domain after doing basically

nothing with it for 26 years because he was getting on in years and didn't want to, want his kids to inherit this mess. When he put the domain up for sale, I asked if he'd agree to let me know if and when he sold it. On Monday evening, he wrote to say that Microsoft had agreed to purchase it. O'Connor said he could not disclose the terms of the deal, nor could he offer further comment beyond acknowledging the sale of the corp.com domain to Microsoft. In a written statement, Microsoft said it acquired the domain to protect its customers, quote, To help in keeping systems protected, we encourage customers to practice safe security habits When planning for internal domains and network names, the statement reads.

We released a security advisory in June of 2009 and a security update that helps keep customer safe. In our ongoing commitment to customer security, we also acquired the corp.com domain, end quote. Finally today, this tends to happen every few years or so. Some new startup decides to make a run at email, either by fixing email or trying to kill it, or at least trying to make it better. and nine times out of ten, these startups are gunning for Gmail, the king of generic email at the moment. Well, we have another contender now in the form of Edison, which is a startup that has been building email apps for years now, quoting David Pearson Protocol.

Edison believes it can build an email experience that respects users' privacy and attention, gives them control over their inbox, and doesn't require countless hours of maintenance. But that takes more than just a new app. so instead Edison built a completely new email service. It's called OnMail, meaning anyone who signs up will get a new email address ending in at OnMail.com. About that name, the company landed on it after much debate and much domain shopping and still doesn't seem sure they love it. The service, though, they like. It's the result of more than two years of work, as Edison wrote its own libraries, its own apps, its own everything. Quote, because Google is the competitor, we recognized we had to

build it from the ground up, Edison's CEO Mikal Berner told me it took longer than he planned, but now it's ready. Onmail offers a number of new ideas about how email should work, like a better system for deciding who's allowed to email you in the first place, and a simpler filing system for messages. More than that, it's a bet that email is just in need of a reboot. Gmail just turned 16 and has only gotten busier and more complex in that time. Outlooks even older and busier. Rather than keep stacking new ideas on top of old ones, Edison decided to be able to to wipe the slate clean and start over, end quote. As I said at the beginning, these things tend to come in waves. I've been watching, for example, Base Cap founders Jason Freed and David Heinemeyer Hansen

writing their own email reinvention, which they're calling hey, and which is supposedly coming in a few months. Still, Onmail is the first one out the door, so let's take a look at it first. What does it do differently? Quoting again, if you use Onmail, the first time a new address emails you, the sender's name shows up at the top of your inbox. You can accept it, meaning that message and future ones will slot into your message list, or you can block it and never see that sender again. It's much simpler than going through the standard unsubscribe rigamarole, and on-mail can catch and kill every future message. Over time, Edison came to rethink the whole notion of the inbox. Within on-mail, you can still see all your messages in a row, but you can also let Edison's algorithms bundle all your

travel confirmations, receipts and newsletters into their own spaces. That kind of super detailed bundling, by the way, was one of the features people loved about Google's now-departed inbox app, but hasn't made its way back into Gmail except in those big inbox tabs. It may have felt like too big a change for Gmail's billion-plus users. As they went along, the Edison team found a laundry list of smaller things they felt like on-mail could fix. They nixed the standard 25-mabyte attachment limit by building an invisible file-sharing service that lives in side onmail. They rebuilt search so that you can type photos from Emily last week instead of from colon, Emily at protocol.com, has colon attachment after 30, 30, 20, 20, 20, for example.

When they were finished, in some ways, the onmail team's take on email looked more like Facebook Messenger than Gmail. They got rid of, or at least hid most of the filing and formatting buttons in email. When you're done with an email, you just click done and it's gone. They hid signatures, disclosures, and more standard email bloat. Most of all, Berner said, Edison optimized for speed. Quote, the speed and reliability, given you're here for two and a half hours a day, that has to be the thing, end quote. But what about a business model?

That is unclear at the moment. On mail is currently free and intends to be free for the foreseeable future. And the company says eventually it will offer paid business focused features only. quote, you've probably heard this so many times, but we don't need a billion users, the founder burner said. Quote, we just need to start to make a difference and then we can grow from there, end quote. Right now, you have to be invited into the beta testing group, which, hey, Edison, we've got some plugged in beta testers right here in our audience.

So get in touch and maybe we can spread some of these beta invites around to help you work out the kinks. My thanks as always to Leo and all the good folks at This Week in Tech for having me on their show again this past weekend. As always, you can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show's subreddit where you can pitch stories that we can talk about on this show every day is our slash ride home. And if you'd like an ad-free version of this podcast, you can sign up for the ad-free feed using the very last link in today's show notes. to you tomorrow.