With all the Star Wars: The Force Awakens news and teaser dropping last week the buzz for all things Star Wars is at a fever pitch! Craving more Star wars related news I hop on YouTube to see what Star Wars fans were saying about the new trailer. During my many searches I came […]
“The screen is becoming the most important place in the world,” says InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . In fact, it’s hard to get through a conversation with him without hearing it. And, considering that his company has grown to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he has reason to believe his own affirmation. InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion, which is nearly double its valuation as of mid-2017 on the heels of its $100 million Series E financing. Spark Capital led the round with participation from Goldman Sachs, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, FirstMark and Geodesic Capital. Atlassian also participated in the round. Earlier this year, Atlassian and InVision built out much deeper integrations, allowing Jira, Confluence and Trello users to instantly collaborate via InVision. As part of the deal, Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn will be joining the board alongside existing board members, Amish Jani, Vas Natarajan, Simon Nebel, Lee Fixel, and Mark Hastings. InVision started out back in 2011 as a simple prototyping tool. It let designers build out their experience without asking the engineering/dev team to actually build it, to then send to the engineering and product and marketing and executive teams for collaboration and/or approval. Over the years, the company has stretched its efforts both up and downstream in the process, building out a full collaboration suite called InVision Cloud (so that every member of the organization can be involved in the design process), Studio, a design platform meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch, and InVision Design System Manager, where design teams can manage their assets and best practices from one place. But perhaps more impressive than InVision’s ability to build design products for designers is its ability to attract users that aren’t designers. “Originally, I don’t think we appreciated how much the freemium model acted as a fly wheel internally within an organization,” said Megan Quinn. “Those designers weren’t just inviting designers from their own team or other teams, but PMs and Marketing and Customer Service and executives to collaborate and approve the designs. From the outside, InVision looks like a design company. But really, they start with the designer as a core customer and spread virally within an organization to serve a multitude.” InVision has simply dominated prototyping and collaboration, today announcing it has surpassed 5 million users. What’s more, InVision has a wide variety of customers. The startup has a long and impressive list of digital first customers — including Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and Twitter — but also serves 97 percent of the Fortune 100, with customers like Adidas, General Electric, NASA, IKEA, Starbucks, and Toyota. Part of that can be attributed to the quality of the products, but the fundamental shift to digital (as predicted by Valberg) is most certainly under way. Whether brands like it or not, customers are interacting with them more and more from behind a screen, and digital customer experience is becoming more and more important to all companies. In fact, a McKinsey study showed that companies that are in the top quartile scores of the McKinsey Design Index outperformed their counterparts in both revenues and total returns to shareholders by as much as a factor of two. But as with any transition, some folks are adverse to change. Valberg identifies industry education and evangelism as two big challenges for InVision. “Organizations are not quick to change on things like design, which is why we’ve built out a Design Transformation Team,” said Valberg. “The team goes in and gets hands on with brands to help them with new practices and to achieve design maturity within the organization.” With a fresh $115 million and 5 million users, InVision has just about everything it needs to step into a new tier of competition. Even amongst behemoths like Adobe, which pulled in $2.29 billion in revenue in Q3 alone, InVision has provided products that can both compliment and compete. But Quinn believes that the future of InVision rests on execution. “As with most companies, the biggest challenge will be continued excellence in execution,” said Quinn. “InVision has all the right tail winds with the right team, a great product, and excellent customers. It’s all about building and executing ahead of where the pack is going.” ... Read More
Supermicro has sent a letter to its customers saying that it has found no evidence of malicious chips on its motherboards. The company asked third-party company Nardello & Co to audit Super Micro’s hardware. On October 4, a Bloomberg report claimed that China’s spies managed to conceal tiny malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Those chips would then end up in data centers operated by Supermicro customers, such as Amazon and Apple. The article quickly became controversial as nobody could corroborate the story. Both Apple and Amazon issued multiple rebuttals, putting their own reputation on the line. In letter to Congress, Apple sends strongest denial over ‘spy chip’ story Supermicro instantly denied the report and hired an outside investigations firm. Many customers also conducted multiple audits. Nardello tested motherboards that are currently in production as well as models that have been sold to Apple and Amazon in the past. The firm also looked at suspicious software activities. Today, Nardello concluded that there’s no evidence of malicious hardware on the motherboards. “As we have stated repeatedly since these allegations were reported, no government agency has ever informed us that it has found malicious hardware on our products; no customer has ever informed us that it found malicious hardware on our products; and we have never seen any evidence of malicious hardware on our products,” Supermicro executives wrote in the letter. Bloomberg hasn’t published any retraction or irrefutable proof since then. But the damage is done and Supermicro shares took a nosedive, dropping over 41 percent right after the initial report was published. ... Read More
LG has announced a “capsule-based craft beer system,” because nothing says “craft” more than easy one-button operation. It’s called the LG HomeBrew, of course, and LG will be unveiling it in full at CES next month. The capsules contain malt, yeast, hop oil, and flavoring, while the machine “automates the whole procedure from fermentation, carbonation and aging to serving and cleaning,” according to LG. The HomeBrew will have five beers available: an American IPA, an American pale ale, an English stout, a Belgian-style Witbier, and a dry Czech pilsner. LG says that the machine will take around two weeks to produce up to five liters, though that’ll depend on the beer type. There’s a mobile companion app where you can check on the status of... Continue reading… ... Read More
Infinity Blade, the medieval fighting / role-playing mobile game series from Epic Games, is no more, as the developer has removed all three entries in the franchise from Apple’s App Store. The series has been dormant since 2013, when Infinity Blade III was released and Epic and co-developer Chair Entertainment announced the third game would mark the end of the planned trilogy. However, Epic has continued to support the games throughout the last half-decade — until today, it seems. In a statement, Epic says “it has become increasingly difficult for our team to support the Infinity Blade series at a level that meets our standards.” If you own the games, you can re-download them on any device by using an account that originally bought... Continue reading… ... Read More
Reggie Fils-Aime says trade show still generates the most engagement of any entertainment event, but stresses need for E3 to keep changing... Read More
Rockstar's game wins three in all, with SIE Santa Monica's God of War picking up two... Read More
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