Take a peek at the new James Bond 2015 Spectre trailer that was released yesterday. The film is produced by Eon Productions and is the twenty-fourth film in the bond series. The film will feature Daniel Craig in his fourth performance as James Bond and Christoph Waltz as Franz Oberhauser, the film’s antagonist. It will […]
Customer reviews play a key role in helping people decide what to buy on consumer-focused marketplaces like Amazon or app stores, and the same tendency exists in the B2B world, where nearly half a trillion dollars is spent annually on software and IT purchases. TrustRadius, one of the startups capitalising on the latter trend with total feedback sessions today standing at close to 190,000 reviews, has now picked up a Series C of $12.5 million led by Next Coast Ventures with existing investors Mayfield Fund and LiveOak Ventures also participating. The funding, which brings the total raised by TrustRadius to $25 million (modest compared to some of its competitors) will be used to build more partnerships and use cases for its reviews, as well as continue expanding that total number of users providing feedback. In addition to its main site — which goes up against a huge number of other online software comparison services like TrustPilot, G2 Crowd, Owler, and many others — TrustRadius is already working with vendors like LogMeIn, Tibco and more (including a number of huge IT companies that have asked not to be named). TrustRadius mainly works with them on two tracks: to source a wider range of reviews from their existing customer bases to improve their profiles on the site; and then to help them use those reviews in their own marketing materials. Partnerships like these form the core of TrustRadius’s business model: people posting reviews or using the site to read them access it for free. Vinay Bhagat, founder and CEO of TrustRadius, believes that his company’s mission — to help IT decision makers vet software by tapping into feedback from other IT buyers — has found particular relevance in the current market. “I think that gravity is on our side,” he said in an interview. “If you think about how the tech industry is evolving and getting things done, IT decisions are getting decentralized and moving out of the CIO’s office. Millennials are ageing into positions of authority, and it means that the way people had previously bought software — by way of salespeople or on the basis of analyst reports — are changing. There is pent-up demand to hear the roar of peers and that’s where we come in.” User-generated reviews have come under a lot of criticism in recent times. Regulators have been going after companies for not being vigilant enough about policing their platforms for “fake” reviews, either planted to big up a product, or by rivals to knock it down, or coming from people who are being paid to put in a good word. The argument has been that the marketplaces hosting those reviews are still bringing in eyeballs and product conversions based on that feedback, so they are less concerned with the corruption even if it longer term can likely sour consumers on the trustworthiness of the whole platform. That belief is not wholly true, of course: Amazon for one has recently been making a huge effort to improve trust, by going after dodgy reviewers and setting up systems to halt the trafficking of counterfeit goods. And Bhagat argued to me that it doesn’t hold for TrustRadius, either. The company has a focused enough mandate — B2B software purchasing — within a crowded enough field, that losing trust by posting blindly positive reviews would get it nowhere fast. At the same time, he noted that the company has held a firm line with its customers on making sure that the “truth” about a product is made clear even if it’s not completely rosy, in the hopes that they can use that to work on improvements, and also provide more balanced feed back at the least from existing customers in order to give a more complete picture. (It also, like other reviews sites, makes people who provide feedback do so using professional credentials like work emails and LinkedIn profiles.) That line has so far carried it into relationships with a number of software companies, which are using reviews as a complement to their own sales teams, and the papers and analysis published by analysts like Gartner and Ovum and Forester, to reach people who are weighing up different options for their IT solutions. “TrustRadius has become an integral part of today’s economic cycle”, said Bill Wagner, CEO of LogMeIn, in a statement. “Software buyers today need detailed reviews to make sure that the product works for a business professional like themselves. TrustRadius provides that in a transparent way, so buyers can make confident decisions, even about enterprise-grade software.” The recent swing in the digital world towards data protection and people getting increasingly aware of how their own personal details are used in ways they never intended, has presented an interesting challenge for the world of online services. Most of us don’t like getting marketing and will generally opt out of any “yes, I consent to getting updates from XYZ and its partners!” boxes — if we happen to spot them amid the dark patterning of the net. TrustRadius and companies like it have an opportunity through that, though: by targeting IT buyers who have to make complicated purchasing decisions and most likely more than one, and in a way that ensures each purchase works with the rest of an existing tech stack, they represent one of the rare cases of where a user might actually want to hear more. Indeed, one of the company’s plans longer term is to continue developing how it can work with its users through that IT lifecycle by providing suggestions of software based on previous software purchases and also what that user’s feedback has been around a past purchase. “From day one we have been deal with complex purchasing decisions,” Bhagat said. “Buying technology that will be used to run your business is not the same as buying an app that you use casually. It can be make or break for your company.” ... Read More
A key change is in the works for Jukedeck, a pioneering AI startup out of the UK which was building technology to create music using AI — including the ability to interpret video and automatically set music to it. The London company has reportedly been acquired by hot social media music startup TikTok, owned by China’s Bytedance. Jukedeck was previously a TechCrunch London 2015 Battlefield winner. Jukedeck had raised £2.5M, largely from Cambridge Innovation Capital, but also included investors Parkwalk Advisors, Backed VC and Playfair Capital who were the most recent investors. Founder and CEO Ed Newton-Rex changed his LinkedIn profile recently to say he was now working for TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as director of its AI Lab since April this year, according to industry news outlet Music Ally (ironically also the name of the app that Bytedance acquired and merged with TikTok in 2017, minus a space and with a period). Newton-Rex famously rapped his pitch when he presented at TechCrunch Disrupt as a Battlefield finalist (and eventual winner): We have reached out to Newton-Rex for confirmation, however, several of his colleagues have also now updated their LinkedIn profiles to reveal that they also all now work for Bytedance. This includes David Trevelyan and Pierre Chanquion (previously senior software engineers, music production R&D at Jukedeck; now senior software engineers at Bytedance’s AI Lab); Katerina Kosta and Gabriele Medeot (formerly machine learning researchers at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researchers at Bytedance); and Marco Selvi (formerly senior software engineer and machine learning researcher at Jukedeck; now senior machine learning researcher at Bytedance). Jukedeck’s site is now offline and its homepage replaced by a message saying, “We can’t tell you more just yet, but we’re looking forward to continuing to fuel creativity using musical AI!” — indicating that Jukedeck’s technology for adding music to videos is likely to be used by Bytedance inside TikTok. Newton-Rex has often talked about putting the power of music composition into the hands of the masses, and TikTok clearly has scale. The social music app has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide, according to data from mobile research firm Sensor Tower. ... Read More
Pinterest isn’t your typical social network — for starts, its 250 million users spend their time creating collections of things that make them happy, rather than, say, competing to spread news that might end up making someone sad. But when Pinterest users search the platform for something dreary anyhow, the company doesn’t have qualms about stepping in. Today, Pinterest has revealed a new set of “emotional well-being activities” that it will automatically suggest to user who search for phrases that signal that they’re undergoing some anxiety or stress or otherwise feeling bad. And yes — one of those exercises, developed in partnership with the Stanford School of Medicine’s Brainstorm lab, literally asks Pinterest users to take some deep... Continue reading… ... Read More
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s Messenger Kids app is built around a simple premise: children shouldn’t be able to talk to users who haven’t been approved by their parents. But a design flaw allowed users to sidestep that protection through the group chat system, allowing children to enter group chats with unapproved strangers. For the past week, Facebook has been quietly closing down those group chats and alerting users, but has not made any public statements disclosing the issue. The alert, which was obtained by The Verge, reads as follows: Hi [PARENT], We found a technical error that allowed [CHILD]’s friend [FRIEND] to create a group chat with [CHILD] and one or more of [FRIEND]’s parent-approved friends. We want you to know that we’ve turned off this... Continue reading… ... Read More
Group commits to using Azure as exclusive cloud provider in its pursuit of artificial general intelligence... Read More
142 other mobile games removed by government agency in legal crackdown... Read More
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