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Facebook has quietly published internal research that was earlier obtained by the Wall Street Journal — and reported as evidence the tech giant knew about Instagram’s toxic impact on teenaged girls’ mental health.

The two slide decks can be found here and here.

The tech giant also said it provided the material to Congress earlier today.

However Facebook hasn’t simply released the slides — it has added its own running commentary which seeks to downplay the significance of the internal research following days of press commentary couching the Instagram teen girls’ mental health revelations as Facebook’s ‘Big Tobacco’ moment.

Last week the WSJ reported on internal documents its journalists had obtained, including slides from a presentation in which Facebook appeared to acknowledge that the service makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.

The tech giant’s crisis PR machine  swung into action — with a rebuttal blog post published on Sunday.

In a further addition now the tech giant has put two internal research slide decks online which appear to form at least a part of the WSJ’s source material. The reason it has taken the company days to publish this material appears to be that its crisis PR team was busy figuring out how best to reframe the contents.

The material has been published with some light redactions (removing the names of the researchers involved, for example) — but also with extensive ‘annotations’ in which Facebook can be seen attempting to reframe the significance of the research, saying it was part of wider, ongoing work to “ensure that our platform is having the most positive impact possible”.

It also tries to downplay the significant of specific negative observations — suggesting, for example, that the sample size of teens who had reported problems was very small.

“The methodology is not fit to provide statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health or to evaluate causal claims between social media and health/well-being,” Facebook writes in an introduction annotation on one of the slide decks. Aka ‘nothing to see here’.

Later on, commenting on a slide entitled “mental health findings” (which is subtitled: “Deep dive into the Reach, Intensity, IG Impact, Expectation, Self Reported Usage and Support of mental health issues. Overall analysis and analysis split by age when relevant”), Facebook writes categorically that: “Nothing in this report is intended to reflect a clinical definition of mental health, a diagnosis of a mental health condition, or a grounding in academic and scientific literature.”

While on a slide that contains the striking observation that “Most wished Instagram had given them better control over what they saw”, Facebook nitpicks that the colors used by its researchers to shade the cells of the table which presents the data might have created a misleading interpretation — “because the different color shading represents very small difference within each row”. 

If the sight of Facebook publicly questioning the significance of internal work and quibbling with some of the decisions made by its own researchers seems unprepossessing, remember that the stakes of this particular crisis for the adtech giant are very high.

The WSJ’s reporting has already derailed a planned launch of a ‘tweens’ version of the photo sharing app.

While US lawmakers are also demanding answers.

More broadly, there are global moves put child protection at the center of digital regulations — such as the UK’s forthcoming Online Safety Act (while its Age Appropriate Design Code is already in force).

So there are — potentially — very serious ramifications for how Instagram will be able to operate in the future, certainly vis-a-vis children and teenagers, as regulations get drafted and passed.

UK publishes draft Online Safety Bill

Facebook’s plan to launch a version of Instagram for under 13s emerged earlier this year, also via investigative reporting — with Buzzfeed obtaining an internal memo which described “youth work” as a priority for Instagram.

But on Monday CEO Adam Mosseri said the company was “pausing” ‘Instagram kids’ to take more time to listen to the countless child safety experts screaming at it to stop in the name of all that is good and right (we paraphrase).

Whether the social media behemoth will voluntarily make that “pause” permanent looks doubtful — given how much effort it’s expending to try to reframe the significance of its own research.

Though regulators may ultimately step in and impose child safety guardrails.

“Contrary to how the objectives have been framed, this research was designed to understand user perceptions and not to provide measures of prevalence, statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health or to evaluate causal claims between Instagram and health/well-being,” Facebook writes in another reframing notation, before going on to “clarify” that the 30% figure (relating to teenaged girls who felt its platform made their body image issues worse) “only” applied to the “subset of survey takers who first reported experiencing an issue in the past 30 days and not all users or all teen girls”. 

So, basically, Facebook wants you to know that Instagram “only” makes mental health problems worse for fewer teenage girls than you might have thought.

(In another annotation it goes on to claim that “fewer than 150 teen girls spread across… six countries answered questions about their experience of body image and Instagram”. As if to say, that’s totally okay then.)

The tech giant’s wider spin with the annotated slides is an attempt to imply that its research work shows proactive ‘customer care’ in action — as it claims the research is part of conscious efforts to explore problems experienced by Instagram users so that it can “develop products and experience for support”, as it puts it.

Yeah we lol’d too.

After all, this is the company that was previously caught running experiments on unwitting users to see if it could manipulate their emotions.

In that case Facebook succeeded in nudging a bunch of users who it showed more negative news feeds to to post more negative things themselves. Oh and that was back in 2014! So you could say emotional manipulation is Facebook’s DNA… 

But fast forward to 2021 and Facebook wants you the public, and concerned parents everywhere, as well as US and global lawmakers who are now sharpening their pens to apply controls to social media not to worry about teenagers’ mental health — because it can figure out how best to push their buttons to make them feel better, or something.

Turns out, when you’re in the ad sales business, everything your product does is an A/B test against some poor unwitting ‘user’…  

Screengrab from one of Facebook’s annotated slide decks released in response to the WSJ’s reporting about teen Instagram users’ mental health issues (Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch.)

Honda Motor Company announced plans to innovate in new business areas like electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL), bipedal robots and space technology.

Honda R&D Co., Honda Motor Company’s (HMC) innovations arm, will be leading the effort on “outside-the-box research on technologies that will bring about new value for people by expanding the potential of mobility into the third dimension, then the fourth dimension which defies the constraints of time and space, and ultimately into outer space,” according to the company.

It sounds like the stuff of a sci-fi novel, and indeed some of these innovations might not end up panning out in the end, but during Thursday’s briefing, the company demonstrated how its core technologies developed over the past 73 years – like combustion, electrification, control and robotics – could evolve to suit the purpose of a future world with vastly different mobility needs.

Hybrid eVTOLs and a corresponding mobility ecosystem

Image Credits: Honda Motor Company

The difference between an eVTOL and a helicopter is mainly that the former has multiple propellers, each of which have an independent motor driven by electricity from a battery, whereas the latter has one large, and loud, rotor at the top. As a result, eVTOLs are generally expected to be safer, quieter and cleaner.

While most of the eVTOL being developed around the world are all-electric, HMC aims to “leverage its electrification technologies and develop Honda eVTOL equipped with a gas turbine hybrid power unit,” according to a statement from the company. The company first announced its intentions to develop technologies in this space during a press conference in April, in which HMC also stated its goals to sell 100% EVs by 2050.

Marcos Frommer, manager of corporate communications at HMC, explained during the press briefing that all-electric eVTOLs have a very short range due to the battery capacity per mass, which means most use cases for these new vehicles will be limited to short distance flights, such as intercity transportation and shuttle flights. Even Joby Aviation, which recently announced plans to commercialize by 2024, only recently completed the longest test flight of an eVTOL to date, and that was about 150 miles on a single charge.

“According to the results of our market research, the largest demand for mobility by eVTOL aircraft is for longer distance such as intercity transportation with a range up to 250 miles,” said Frommer. “Due partly to the electrification of our automobiles Honda is putting its effort in research and development of lithium-ion batteries. However, advancement based on the current lithium-ion battery is expected to increase the energy density per capacity by only about several times in the next 20 years. So we believe that for mobility in the skies, which requires further weight reduction, it’s difficult to achieve long distance using batteries only.”

Frommer said if batteries advance more in the future, HMC can choose to make its eVTOLs all-electric by removing the gas turbine generator.

Honda Introduces Initiatives in New Areas, Taking on Challenges in New Areas while Leveraging Its Core Technologies

The company says it wants to create a new “mobility ecosystem” that features eVTOL at its core and is connected to mobility products on the ground. Per the animated example HMC showed during the briefing, a business executive living in Cape Cod might be able to use a single app to book a hybrid eVTOL to take him to his office in New York City, which would be a mere two hour commute by air. The app might be connected to his personal autonomous Honda vehicle, which would chat to him about the weather as it drove him to a mobility hub for takeoff. When he landed an autonomous shuttle would be there waiting in the Big Apple to take him to his office. After a day of easy commuting, he’d be home in time for dinner on the veranda with his family.

“By utilizing the Model Based Systems Engineering, or MBSE, method, this will be a challenge Honda will take on to transform ourselves from a conventional manufacturing company to a new company that will also design and commercialize systems and services,” said Frommer. “We will be able to deliver new value to our customers only when we complete one big system consisting of various elements, including a reservation system infrastructure, air traffic control, flight operation and existing mobility products such as automobiles. It’s impossible for Honda to handle all of these elements alone and we will need to collaborate with many companies and government agencies.”

HMC plans to conduct technology verification with prototypes in 2023, and conduct flight tests of a hybrid demonstration model in 2025. It will then make a decision on commercialization. If HMC decides to move forward, it hopes to obtain certifications by 2030 so it can launch in the following decade. The company told TechCrunch if it reaches commercialization, customers can expect prices for eVTOLs, which can more than seat four passengers at a time, to be lower than business class on commercial passenger planes.

Details about possible commercialization are still being discussed, however, we are striving to enable all customers to use our eVTOL aircraft at prices lower than the prices of flying business class on a commercial passenger plane. Frommer said HMC expects eVTOL to be the norm by 2040 and has forecasted a market size of about $269 billion by then.

Transcend time and space with the Honda Asimo robot

Honda avatar robot rendering allows a doctor to remotely help a struggling patient.

Honda’s avatar robot concept, Asimo, would allow the user to have a second self that performs tasks and experiences things without being there in person. Users connect and remotely control the avatar by wearing a VR headset and a tactile glove that will ultimately be able to mirror precise hand movements.

“We position this as four dimensional mobility, which transcends time and space going beyond 2D and 3D mobility,” said Frommer.

The company envisions Asimo robots being used for applications like remote surgery, which will likely be very popular in developing nations that don’t have access to world-class surgeons in the future, or space exploration, enabling an avatar version of a person to go to places that are uninhabitable or difficult to reach by humans.

“What will become the core of the realization of such an avatar robot is the multi-fingered robotic hand developed while leveraging  Honda’ strengths in robotics technologies and Honda’s original AI-supported remote control function,” according to the company.  “Therefore, Honda strived for an avatar robot that is capable of using its multi-fingered hand to make full use of tools designed for human use and performs complex tasks quickly and accurately based on the AI-supported and more intuitive control by the user.” 

Toyota also has a similar bipedal avatar robot controlled by telepresence called the T-HR3, and Tesla recently unveiled its plans for a humanoid robot, although the Tesla bot doesn’t appear to be based on remote controlled technology. If Honda goes through with its plans for Asimo, it stands to reason that it would use teleoperation both for easier manipulation and robotic learning. Showing a robot how to do something could just be the best way to train it.

Honda says it wants to put Asimo into practical use in the 2030s and is hoping to conduct testing before the end of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.

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Ramping up space technology research and development

Circulative Renewable Energy System

Honda also announced plans to accelerate R&D in the field of space technology, specifically in lunar development. One theme Honda touched on briefly was its previously announced circulative renewable energy system. In June, Honda R&D Co. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced a joint feasibility study on the system, which is designed to supply oxygen, hydrogen and electricity for human outposts and rovers on the moon so that people can live in space over an extended period of time. The system would leverage Honda’s existing fuel cell technologies and high differential pressure water electrolysis technologies, according to the company.

Honda also discussed using remote-controlled robots on the lunar surface to minimize the risks associated with astronauts being blasted into space and to even allow people to virtually explore the Moon from Earth. The moon robot would include the same multi-fingered hand technology and AI-supported remote control technology that’s being developed for the avatar robot, as well as torque control technology that Honda uses for collision mitigation.

The automaker also hopes to use its core technologies in fluid and combustion as well as guidance and control to build reusable rockets.

“If we can use such rockets to launch small low orbit satellites, we can expect to evolve our core technologies into various services, including connected services,” said Frommer. “All such services will be compatible with Honda technology.”

Frommer said Honda gave its “young engineers” with dreams of building a rocket the go ahead at the end of 2019 to begin R&D. Honda did not provide any further specifics about either of its space initiatives. 

Sinch, the Swedish company that competes with Twilio and others in the world of messaging and other communication APIs is making another big M&A play to build out its platform. It has acquired Pathwire, the cloud-based email provider behind Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid. Sinch said it would pay $925 million in cash, with an additional 51 million new shares in Sinch. Based on yesterday’s closing price for Sinch (it’s traded on the Swedish stock exchange Nasdaq Stockhom and has a market cap of $13.7 billion), this works out to an enterprise value of $1.9 billion (SEK 16.6 billion).

The deal is very large in its own right, but also continues to set up Sinch as a (maybe “the”) key competitor to Twilio. The U.S.-based communications API giant acquired Sendgrid — another major email API provider that, like Pathwire’s products, is popular with developers — for $2 billion in 2018. That was an all-stock deal.

It also points to just how significant email is as a key part of the communications landscape, with services you may never even think twice about but use all the time — booking confirmations, receipts and password resets — falling under this umbrella. Quoting figures from Technavio, Sinch estimates the worldwide delivery market for email is worth $16 billion annually. This figure includes payments for email services, related investments and so on; and specifically “transactional email” (the area Pathwire covers) accounts for 60%+ of this amount.

It also underscores the massive consolidation at work at the moment in this sector. Even Pathwire itself is an example of that. Prior to this exit, it was owned by Thoma Bravo and was itself an acquirer of substantial businesses operating in the same general category of email-as-a-service, with its latest acquisition, of Email on Acid, announced as recently as June of this year. (Was that the spur that got Sinch to bite and buy Pathwire, I wonder?)

This is Sinch’s biggest acquisition to date, and it’s also a huge business. Collectively, Pathwire has shaped up to be a massive platform for those building email experiences within apps, marketing campaigns and other communications services. Today it counts more than 100,000 businesses as customers, which works out to millions of people using Mailjet, Mailgun and other Pathwire products (as well as the analytics and everything else that comes with this). That customer list includes Lyft, Kajabi, Microsoft, Iterable, and DHL.

Incident.io has raised a $4.7 million funding round led by Index Ventures and Point Nine. When your company is facing an outage or a data breach, Incident.io provides the right framework to communicate about the issue — both internally and externally — and make sure it is resolved as quickly as possible.

In addition to Index Ventures and Point Nine, several business angels are also investing in the company, such as Monzo founders Tom Blomfield and Jonas Templestein, Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital, Renaud Visage, the co-founder of Eventbrite, as well as some clients, such as Hiroki Takeuchi of GoCardless and Vinay Hiremath of Loom.

Incident.io starts with a deep integration with Slack. Many teams have to deal with multiple tools. They track an outage on one service and then talk about it with the rest of the team in Slack. That seems inefficient and leads to information disparity.

With Incident.io, everything happens in Slack. Incidents are announced in a Slack channel so that people can get notified when something happens. People can create incidents with a /incident shortcut.

After that, Incident.io automatically creates a separate channel about the specific issue with the current date. Once again, you can interact with the service from the chat box in Slack or click on buttons. For instance, you can assign an issue to someone, add a summary, escalate the issue and more.

And because it’s a Slack channel, people can discuss the issue in that channel as well. This way, all information remains available in the same place. When you add people to an ongoing incident, they receive a summary from Incident.io so that they don’t have to ask unnecessary questions.

That information isn’t just restricted to Slack. Customers get their own Incident.io dashboard with a list of incidents. Each incident gets its own page with participants, a timeline of events. For instance, GitHub pull requests are automatically added to these timelines.

You can leverage this information to create a post-mortem post, share it with the team or your customers. Essentially, companies using Incident.io likely handle issues more gracefully and are more transparent about those issues. It should lead to a better experience for both team members and customers.

Heyflow, a Hamburg, Germany-based startup touting ‘no code’ tools for easily building interactive “clickflows” to boost customer conversions, has bagged a $6 million seed. The round was led by Project A Ventures, with participation from Atlantic Labs and several unnamed angel investors.

Heyflow competes with a growing number of no code/low code tools which aim to simplify customer interactions using customizable templates and/or drag and drop interfaces that let non-techie easily users build conversational and/or graphical flows to gather info from visitors to a website or app.

Its pitch (and, indeed, that of many others’) is that interactive flows are a better conversion tool than more static calls to action.

Combine that with a drag and drop customer interaction flow builder and Heyflow’s nudge to its customers is there’s no excuses for not sporting a more engaging digital experience around user acquisition and onboarding.

There is no shortage of competition in this space, though. Competing approaches include the likes of Airkit (low code, template-based digital customer experience builder); Landbot and Intercom (customer service chatbots); and Typeform (less tedious forms), to name a few.

Heyflow says its special sauce is that it’s a true ‘no code’ play — which it argues makes it best suited to the target user-base of marketers, product managers and business owners while also allowing for engineers to built custom code atop its so-called ‘clickflows’. (“Unlike Airkit, we see this rather as an expansion into organizations and not as an entry,” it suggests.)

It also reckons chatbot interfaces — while having their place — are better suited to customer support rather than its target zone of customer conversion, not being “optimized for converting traffic into signups, leads and sales”, as it puts it.

While, on Heyflow vs Typeform, it suggests its product is more customizable — and also flags that it bakes in analytics and tracking, touting that as another detail which helps its customers build “truly differentiated experiences”.

The 2020-founded startup sells its SaaS as a subscription — not freemium but there is a free trial period of the basic version, which normally costs €33 per month (rising to €151 per month for a Pro Plus version).

The promise of being able to integrate these ‘engaging clickflows’ without needing to type a single line of code means Heyflow can and is (mostly) being used as a standalone solution, per the startup — which says that gives customers access to “more complex layout-ing functionality” (such as nested containers).

But the team confirmed it can also be integrated into a website by copying and pasting a few lines of code.

The founders are Dustin Jaacks (ex-Google) and Amir Bohnenkamp (previously Medwing, BCG Digital Ventures).

Since Heyflow soft-launched its product in January this year they say they’ve seen “rapid growth”, acquiring “hundreds” of paying customers — from small organizations to insurance companies in more than 15 countries.

The seed raise will go on supporting go-to-market and product development efforts, it adds.

“We were able to convert our first customers pre-product. So from day one, we are developing the product with our customers which means building and selling for us go hand in hand. The new funding will therefore be equally invested into product and growth following a vertical approach, starting with the industries that are currently driving most growth for us,” Heyflow tells TechCrunch, adding that the markets and sectors currently driving their growth are: Insurance, Financial Services, Recruiting, Marketing & Advertising (with use-cases including: Onboarding and Signup Flows; Lead Generation Flows; Customer Retention Flows).

Commenting on the seed round in a supporting statement, Dr. Anton Waitz, general partner at Project A, added: “No-code platforms are seeing very strong momentum, as they offer great opportunities for smaller companies without significant engineering capacity. Amir and Dustin are driven by their mission to build a highly intuitive drag and drop product that helps their users to better acquire, convert and onboard customers. Heyflow has seen enthusiastic first demand in the market – and we strongly believe it can become a clear leader in the space.”

A coalition of app-based delivery and ride-hail companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash recently filed a ballot proposition in Massachusetts to continue classifying gig economy workers as independent contractors, rather than employees. If the measure makes it to the November 2022 ballot and passes, drivers could end up earning as little as a quarter of the minimum wage, according to a University of California-Berkeley study published on Wednesday.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center researchers, Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, identified multiple loopholes that would change the guaranteed pay from $18 per hour to $4.82 for a typical 15-hour week driver and $6.74 per hour for a typical 40-hour week driver receiving a health stipend. The MA Coalition for Independent Work, the group responsible for the initiative, claimed UC Berkeley was pushing “false and misleading information about the ballot question that are not only at odds with the facts, but don’t stand up to scrutiny when compared with the success of Prop 22 in California,” according to a statement released by the coalition.

The MA initiative, which was recently given the green light to start collecting signatures needed to get it on the ballot, is modeled after Proposition 22 in California. Prop 22 passed in November 2020, but in August a superior court judge ruled the law unconstitutional, a decision that will very likely be appealed.

As with Prop 22, the disagreement between advocates and opponents of the MA proposal comes down to the definition of “engaged time” and whether drivers have the right to earn pay outside of those hours. Engaged time is defined as the time when drivers are actively engaged in a gig, like when a delivery driver is driving to pick up food and drop it off. The proposed initiative would guarantee drivers an earnings floor equal to 120% of the MA minimum wage, which would be about $18 per hour in 2023 before customer tips, but only while drivers are actively engaged in a gig. It is this type of calculation that DoorDash drivers who recently protested outside the home of CEO Tony Xu said leads to inadequate pay.

“Much of the drivers’ time between paying rides is spent driving and cruising,” wrote Jacobs and Reich. “Drivers may be returning from a low demand drop off site to an area where they are more likely to pick up a ride, or they may be circling in downtown areas where there is no place to park.”

“Uber’s own data indicate that engaged time amounts to only 67% of the drivers’ actual working time,” the researchers continued. “The companies would not pay for the approximately 33 percent of the time that drivers are waiting between passengers or returning from trips to outlying areas. But such time is a necessary part of drivers’ work… Not paying for that time would be the equivalent of a fast-food restaurant or retail store paying the cashier only when a customer is at the counter. We have labor and employment laws precisely to protect workers from this kind of exploitation.”

Meanwhile, Uber has said drivers could have the app on while rejecting or ignoring dispatches, completing trips for other apps or just running errands, and essentially shouldn’t be paid for that time.

The proposed ballot question would also guarantee drivers at least $0.26 per mile to cover the cost of vehicle upkeep and gas, according to the coalition. Jacobs and Reich found that not only is this $0.30 less than the IRS reimbursement rate, but it also, again, only accounts for the time a driver is “active,” which means drivers wouldn’t be reimbursed for vehicle costs accrued in between rides. Using Uber’s studies, the researchers found 6.6 of the miles driven each hour incur costs that would not be reimbursed under the ballot proposal.

Also included in the coalition’s proposal are a series of new benefits including paid sick time, paid family and medical leave, occupational accident insurance and healthcare stipends for those who work at least 15 hours per week. In some cases, a company may require a driver to also submit proof of current enrollment in a qualifying health plan in order to be eligible for the stipend. Most drivers do spend an average of 15 hours per week on the app, say the researchers, but since a third of that time is spent unengaged, a driver would actually have to work 22. hours to be eligible for the stipend. Finding drivers who work those hours and already have insurance coverage would rule out the majority of drivers from qualifying for health stipends, according to Jacobs and Reich.

Finally, because independent contractors are required to pay both employer and employee shares of payroll taxes, drivers would end up having to pay up to 11.8% of their total income, another cost which app-based companies are not offsetting with the current language of their proposal.

“These numbers are completely ridiculous – I wouldn’t be doing this job if I wasn’t making well above minimum wage,” said Luis Ramos, a Lyft driver from Worcester, in a statement from the MA Coalition for Independent Work. “Every driver I know prefers this work because they make good money and they do it whenever they want for however long they want. That’s what we’re trying to protect with this ballot question.”

Massachusetts and California aren’t the only ones debating worker’s rights with app-based companies. In March, Uber lost a legal battle in the United Kingdom over similar driver classifications and had to reclassify drivers as employees, and earlier this month, Dutch courts ruled that Uber drivers are employees not freelancers.

Meesho has more than doubled its valuation in less than six months, to $4.9 billion, as a growing number of high-profile investors back the Indian social commerce startup that is reporting strong growth despite the pandemic.

The Bangalore-headquartered firm said on Thursday it has raised $570 million in its Series F financing round, following a $300 million Series E in April when it was valued at $2.1 billion. Fidelity and B Capital Group co-led the new financing round, bringing the startup’s all-time raise to over $1 billion.

Prosus Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Facebook, and Good Capital also participated in the new round, which didn’t involve any secondary transaction, the startup’s co-founder and chief executive Vidit Aatrey told TechCrunch in an interview.

Meesho — which counts Sequoia Capital India, Y Combinator, and Elevation Capital among its earliest investors — operates a three-sided marketplace that connects suppliers (manufacturers and distributors) and resellers with customers on social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. The resellers buy listed products from the suppliers and make commission on each transaction when they sell to customers.

About 80% of resellers on the platform are women, said Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho with Sanjeev Barnwal in 2015. From the beginning, the startup has aimed to help women start their business without need for any capital.

The two engineers got the insight to start Meesho after spotting that merchants in India were always in touch with their customers on WhatsApp and shared information about new inventories. Some recounted that WhatsApp was driving 30% to 50% of their sales even as the workflow was clumsy. (WhatsApp has amassed over half a billion users in India. Nearly every user in the country with a smartphone uses the Facebook-owned service.)

“When we started in 2015, what was mostly available online was branded products that were being sold to tier 1 customers,” he said, adding that mostly smartphones, other electronics items and branded fashion products were popular then. “Everything else was primarily offline.”

“India is primarily an unorganized market; 80 to 85% of the entire retail GDP is unstructured and long-tail and run by small businesses. But what had gone online at the time was the exact opposite of it,” he said.

“Our mission has been to democratize internet commerce for everyone, including consumers, our Meesho entrepreneurs and small businesses. And I think that’s our space: we will continue to focus on small businesses and on the demand side, we will continue to focus on the next billion customers.”

Meesho founders. Image Credits: Meesho

That’s not to say the startup immediately found success. In the beginning, an early investor in Meesho recalled, Aatrey used to package and make deliveries himself. But things have changed dramatically over the years.

As of April this year, 13 million entrepreneurs and over 100,000 suppliers were using Meesho. Aatrey declined to share new figures, but said “we have grown 3x since the previous fundraise.” Meesho, which like other e-commerce firms was severely impacted by the first wave of the pandemic last year, has fully recovered.

He added that the startup has become a complete “horizontal player, where customers are buying from every category, including fashion, lifestyle, personal care, electronics and accessories, and automotive.”

Earlier this year, Meesho expanded to the grocery category, and Aatrey said the startup is making fast inroads in the space. The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital in part to broaden its research and development efforts and it hopes to increase its team by three times in the next 18 months, he said. It has set an ambitious goal to reach 100 million transacting users by the end of next year.

At stake is the world’s second-largest internet market, where e-commerce has hardly made any dent to the overall retail. Just the social commerce market is expected to be worth up to $20 billion in value by 2025, up from about $1 billion to $1.5 billion last year, analysts at Bernstein said earlier this week.

“Social commerce has the ability to empower more than 40 million small entrepreneurs across India. Today, 85% of sellers using social commerce are small, offline-oriented retailers who use social channels to open up new growth opportunities,” they wrote.

A look at the social commerce market in India and China, where this new e-commerce trend first took shape. (Image Credits: Bernstein)

Flipkart, the largest e-commerce platform in India, has taken notice, too. The firm recently launched Shopsy, its social commerce offering, and said it hopes to onboard 25 million resellers by 2023. Southeast Asian giant Shopee appears to be preparing to launch in India. TechCrunch reported earlier this week that the firm, which is owned by Sea, has quietly launched its seller service in the country. Bernstein analysts, citing their own sources, said they expect Shopee to launch in the South Asian market next month.

“We have evaluated e-commerce opportunities across emerging markets and are excited about Meesho’s focus on strong unit economics and a consumer-first approach,” said Kabir Narang, founding general partner at B Capital Group, in a statement.

“Meesho’s business model has an incredibly compelling value proposition with entrepreneurs, end customers, and suppliers consolidating on one platform. It has rapidly emerged as a leading player in this space. Meesho is now enabling 100 million SMBs across tier 2+ cities, empowering them to sell online, leveraging its digital commerce platform.”

Facebook announced on Tuesday that its 2Africa cable would now extend to over 45,000 kilometers with the addition of nine landings collectively dubbed the 2Africa Pearls. The subsea cable will directly connect three continents — Africa, Europe and Asia.

The extension will see 2Africa become the longest subsea cable system in the world upon completion, Facebook said. It will best the current record set by the SEA-ME-WE 3 line that stretches 39,000 km and connects 33 countries across South East Asia, Middle East and Western Europe.

The continued investment in subsea cables is part of Facebook’s efforts to bring more people online. Initially, the internet giant centered on providing affordable internet to Africa’s population of about 1.2 billion people. The plan morphed with the consortium opting to lay 37,000 km (22,990 miles) of cables connecting 23 counties in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

Last month, Facebook increased this number to 26, adding Seychelles, the Comoros Islands, Angola and a landing to the south-eastern part of Nigeria into the mix. The new branches joined the extension to the Canary Islands (not a country) back in June.

The 2Africa Pearls branch includes new locations connecting terrestrially through Egypt — Bahrain, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

With the addition of the Pearls extension, the system seeks to provide connectivity to an additional 1.8 billion people and 3 billion in total, said Facebook. The company added that these individuals are across 33 countries and represent 36% of the world’s population.

2Africa consortium still comprises China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC. As with the previous extension last month, they selected Nokia’s Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to deploy the nine branches.

However, there wasn’t any update from the consortium as to when they will finalize the subsea cable construction despite the latest development. But judging by previous announcements, we should still expect Facebook and the group of telcos to maintain the set date of late 2023 to early 2024.

After a decade of a handful of dominant social media companies trading what are essentially publishing tools in exchange for serving us all an endless deluge of ads, the winds of change are finally blowing — in a few different directions at once.

Content creators (arguably either a special echelon of influencers or anyone who posts online) are slowly siphoning off some of the power that social media companies have wielded for years. Meanwhile, decentralization is sweeping worlds like finance and art, threatening existing orders and pointing toward a future defined by alternative currencies and digital collectibles. Those trends are bound to converge sooner rather than later, and in some corners of the social internet, it’s already beginning to show.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 last week, Houseparty founder Ben Rubin, now working on a new company called Slashtalk, delved into some of those intersections. Rubin created Meerkat, the darling social app of SXSW 2015, which later evolved into a spontaneous video chat app known as Houseparty. Epic Games bought Houseparty in 2019, but Rubin’s prescience for emerging social trends didn’t stop there.

These days, everyone seems to be abuzz about decentralization. As with any nascent tech trend on the horizon, a lot of jargon gets thrown around. Within the DeFi (decentralized finance) and NFT (non-fungible token) communities, Web3 is the term du jour that captures the revolutionary potential that decentralized networks hold for the future of the internet.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 29, 2021. Welcome to what feels like fall on the East Coast of the United States. Yes, the seasons are changing, but the technology and startup worlds are refusing to shift from the high-velocity pace that they’ve held for what feels like years at this point. Someone should tell them to drink hot tea by a window looking out at trees for a few days instead of doing, well, all that follows in this letter. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google announces slew of search updates: Alphabet company Google is the world leader on search, but with competition starting to nip at its heels, the company is busy rolling out upgrades to its tech. Today the company announced some redesign work, better wildfire tracking and an effort to bake more context into results. All of that is welcome, but doesn’t cut at the core issue of rising ad loads on prime search real estate.
• Direct listings are hot: Recent public-market debuts from Amplitude and Warby Parker indicate that the direct-listing route to public-market liquidity is more than open today. For unicorns perhaps uncomfortable with the traditional IPO, it’s more than good news.
• SoftBank pours $200M into Andela: While Tiger is making the largest media waves these days, SoftBank is still busy doing deals. Today the Japanese telco and investing powerhouse announced a deal to put several hundred million dollars into Andela, a startup that connects tech talent from Africa with companies elsewhere in the world. The round fits neatly in the talent crunch narrative we’ve heard so much about from companies in recent quarters and greater global respect for Africa’s tech scene that we’re seeing in venture capital results as well.

Startups/VC

Before we get into our general startup news roundup, let’s talk climate. Earlier this week TechCrunch put together a deep dive into the huge opportunities for startups working on climate-related issues, efforts that could improve the world and make piles of money. Today’s news really underscores the point.

Today on TechCrunch we learned about DroneSeed’s $36 million round that could help with habitat restoration post-wildfire; how climate volatility helped agtech startup Semios land $100 million; and that two new funds (Investible with AUD$100 million and Energize Ventures with $330 million) are also looking at the climate-tech space.

That’s quite the thematic bundle. Now, the rest of it:

• Read AI wants to help you shut up: Are you in lots of video meetings? Do you talk too much? It can’t just be me. Folks dominating conversations is enough of a problem that Read AI is building tech to help meeting attendees track their speaking time and get it under control. The company just raised $10 million to fuel its efforts.
• Starfish Space is building space tugs: The current space race is not just SpaceX versus whatever else billionaires can cook up. There are a host of startups building for a space-friendly future in which in-space servicing is going to really matter. Starfish just raised $7 million for its work on building space tugs. Which are like tug boats, but smaller, and in orbit. Space tugs! That rules!
• Tonic.ai raises $35M: Today from the enterprise beat, Tonic just raised a huge grip of cash to grow its service that helps provide engineers with synthetic data sets. What are those? Per TechCrunch, it’s “production-like data” that they can use for testing without annoying regulators both inside and outside their companies. So it’s like lorem ipsum, but for even bigger nerds than lorem ipsum is for, I suppose.
• Cocoon raises $20M, wins prize in our hearts for having a good name: Cocoon is building a platform to help employees and employers alike better understand and manage leave. Hence cocoon, aka the thing you spin yourself into when you are not at work. The name is good, the product is neat — admit it, you don’t really understand your corporate leave policy! — now let’s see what market appetite is for the startup.
• VCs want to buy shares in startups working to help workers at venture-backed startups buy shares of their own: Today TechCrunch wrote about EquityBee and its new $55 million investment. The company helps workers at venture-backed companies exercise their options, a process that can be fraught with both tax implications and high cash costs.

3 questions startups must answer before taking on their largest competitors

There is no level playing field in capitalism, but it is easier than ever for a scrappy startup to go head-to-head with industry leaders.

Warby Parker is reshaping consumer expectations about eyewear, just as Poshmark and thredUP made a direct run at eBay and the luxury resale market.

In a world where customers are more loyal to value than branding and 18-month roadmaps are the norm, startups that develop solid competitive plans have an advantage, says Sudheesh Nair, CEO of business intelligence company ThoughtSpot.

“Successful startups will inevitably draw the attention of powerful incumbents in their industry,” he writes for TechCrunch+. “They will fight you, but if you are positioned well for the challenge there has never been a better time to prevail.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• YouTube cracks down on vaccine misinformation: Google’s video giant is now taking its ban-stick to more content than just videos casting bullshit doubt on COVID-19 vaccinations. Now it’s taking on videos casting bullshit doubt on any vaccines. Good. This is going to save lives.
• Everyone’s favorite software company General Motors has a new platform dropping in 2023: It’s called Ultifi — Ult-iffy? Ulti-ee-fee? Ult-ih-fy? — and TechCrunch reports that the company expects the platform to “usher in a sweeping set of capabilities including giving drivers access to in-car subscriptions and using over-the-air updates to offer new apps and services.” Let’s hope.
• Twitch bolsters channel control after hate-raids poison its service: After nasty hate brigading hit a number of Twitch streamers, the Amazon-owned video service announced “new channel-level security features to help curb harassment on the platform.” Good!

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

At Disrupt, Jordan Crook was joined by Ryan Reynolds for a conversation about marketing. You can read the recap on TechCrunch+, “How Ryan Reynolds has mastered authentic marketing.”

72 hours left to save $100 on passes to TC Sessions: SaaS 2021

We’re less than one month away from TC Sessions: SaaS 2021, but your chance to save $100 on the price of admission disappears in just three days. Stop procrastinating, beat the deadline and purchase your pass before the early-bird price expires on October 1.

The Federal Aviation Administration has closed its “mishap investigation” into the July 11 flight of Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and three others, the space tourism company’s first dedicated passenger trip. Future flights will reserve a greater volume of airspace and the company promises better communication, but other than that the company is clear to fly again.

The flight anomaly the FAA was looking into was brought to public awareness by a New Yorker article claiming that VSS Unity, the rocket-powered spacecraft that took the passengers to the edge of space, not only left its protected airspace but descended by a more dangerous method than originally planned. This “red-light entry glide-cone warning” supposedly resulted from the pilots not ascending fast enough and needing to resort to this alternate method to return — though it was reported that aborting the mission is the preferred move.

Though Virgin Galactic acknowledged at the time that “high altitude winds” resulted in a trajectory that “deviated from our initial plan,” there was no danger to the occupants. It called the red-light description of the flight “misleading.”

In any event the FAA does not seem to have made an issue of it, though it did not take kindly to the craft leaving its officially designated flight zone, grounding the company’s aircraft while it looked into the issue. These protected areas are set aside to, among other things, minimize the possibility of damage on the ground, and while Spaceport America is quite far from civilization it’s not something to play fast and loose with. (Incidentally, as someone who was on the ground there during the flight, I can’t help but feel a little alarmed in retrospect.)

For future flights, Virgin Galactic will reserve more airspace to accommodate the potential for anomalous trajectories like this one. The FAA was also cross with the company for failing to communicate said anomalous trajectory to it in real time, so new procedures have been added to ensure this takes place next time … and every time.

Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said in a statement: “We appreciate the FAA’s thorough review of this inquiry. Our test flight program is specifically designed to continually improve our processes and procedures. The updates to our airspace and real-time mission notification protocols will strengthen our preparations as we move closer to the commercial launch of our spaceflight experience.”

“Know your customer” is one of the foundational concepts of business. In the digital age, companies have learned much about their customers by forming individual profiles from third-party cookies, social content, purchased demographics, and more. But in the face of growing demands for privacy, businesses have the opportunity to overhaul their relationship with customer data to focus solely on first-party data and patterns of behavior.

Companies have employed digital analytics, advertising and marketing solutions to track customers and connect their behaviors across touchpoints. This enabled the creation of data profiles, which have been leveraged to deliver personalized experiences that resonate through relevance and context.

Now, however, this practice of profiling and identifying customers is increasingly coming under scrutiny. Regulators are adopting new data and consumer privacy legislation, most recently seen with the Colorado Privacy Act. Moreover, Apple’s privacy implementations in iOS 14.8 and iOS 15 have been adopted by an estimated 96% of users, who have opted to stop apps from tracking their activity for ad targeting. And Google has announced it will no longer support third-party cookies and will stop tracking on an individual basis altogether through its Chrome browser.

While these developments threaten to upend how digital marketing is performed today, they signal a necessary, and effective, shift in the ways brands will understand their customers in the future. Prioritizing individual profiles is far from the fastest or most effective way to understand and address customers’ intentions, needs and struggles. Brands don’t need to know who; they need to know what and why.

Thanks to rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), companies can process and interpret first-party data in real time and develop actionable behavioral intelligence.

Pattern analysis as a way forward

The security industry, which I’ve been involved in for 35 years, provides a template for the path forward. Historically, security professionals have sought to pinpoint individuals’ signatures in order to identify, thwart or at least prosecute bad actors. However, the last few years have marked the rise of some incredibly promising companies and approaches that leverage patterns of signals to proactively surface and stop threats before they happen.

Another day, another direct listing. The once-exotic method of going public is increasingly popular with venture-backed companies as they look to list without running head-first into the IPO pricing issues that have bedeviled a number of high-profile public offerings in the last year.

Precisely who is underpricing whom in those situations is a fun, if slightly academic, question.

Today’s direct listing was Warby Parker, a heavily venture-backed DTC company in the eyewear space. Warby has long had a strong e-commerce component, though it has a growing retail footprint to support its digital sales efforts.

Warby’s direct listing has proved a success. The company not only listed, but did so at a price point that was above its final private-market valuation, and its shares appreciated rapidly during its first day of trading. For the DTC market, the results partially combat the odor that 2020’s ill-fated Casper IPO left lingering around the startup business model category.

Before we close the books on direct listing week, a few quick thoughts on the Warby listing. I found a few healthy things in the debut, and one that’s ever so slightly less sanative. Let’s have some fun!

Good news for DTC startups

In the wake of Casper’s underpowered and rapidly descending public offering, DTC startups got a bit of a bad rap. Rising channel advertising costs biting more deeply into customer acquisition costs while software revenue multiples scaled to new heights thanks to the pandemic and an accelerating digital transformation made the model of actually making physical goods and selling them to consumers seem a bit old-hat.

TikTok is expanding its investment in e-commerce. Earlier this year, the video platform began piloting TikTok Shopping in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, in partnership with Shopify. The deal allowed Shopify merchants with a TikTok For Business account to add a Shopping tab to their TikTok profiles and sync their product catalogs to the app to create mini-storefronts. Now, TikTok is announcing a slate of new brand partners for TikTok Shopping, including Square, Ecwid, and PrestaShop, with Wix, SHOPLINE, OpenCart, and BASE coming soon. It also introduced a fuller slate of solutions for TikTok commerce, including ad products and later this year, a TikTok Shopping API.

The company detailed its further plans for TikTok Shopping at an online event called TikTok World on Tuesday.

Here, TikTok shared how popular commerce had become on its platform. For example, it noted that the #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt hashtag — which users post when sharing products they had discovered through TikTok videos — has grown to include 4.6 billion views and is still climbing. The company also touted how well its video could push users from product awareness to action, claiming that, compared with competitors, TikTok users are 1.7 times more likely to have purchased products through the app, citing a survey conducted by Material in August 2021.

Image Credits: TikTok Shopping

The company said it’s able to work with online merchants in a couple of different ways. One is a direct integration and full-service shopping solution where TikTok manages everything from shipping to fulfillment and point-of-purchase. This is a system TikTok has been testing in Indonesia, as TechCrunch previously reported. It’s also now available in the U.K.

The second way involves working with third-party commerce partners, like Shopify, who can provide sellers with essential backend tools and support.

Later this year, TikTok said it would also launch a TikTok Shopping API, which will allow businesses to integrate their product catalogs directly into TikTok, and eventually include those products in their organic content.

Image Credits: TikTok Shopping

In the meantime, TikTok will offer businesses a handful of other tools to get their products in front of consumers.

With Product Links, first introduced alongside the TikTok Shopping pilot, brands can highlight one or more products directly from an organic TikTok video, which then points uses to product detail pages on their own website. This is essentially TikTok’s version of something like Instagram’s product tags and stickers.

With the new LIVE shopping feature, brands on TikTok can connect with users in the community in real-time, and share dynamic links to products and services while the content is streaming live. In the past, Walmart hosted a couple of LIVE shopping events as a pilot partner on the feature.

The company also now offers a trio of in-feed ad products for online shopping: Collection Ads, Dynamic Showcase Ads (DSAs), and Lead Generation.

Image Credits: TikTok (Collection Ad)

Collection Ads are a new ad product that allows brands to include custom, swipeable product cards in their in-feed videos. Each card can feature a different product for sale and, when tapped, brings users to a fast-loading instant gallery page where TikTok users can browse items and make a purchase. This type of ad can be used to drive traffic to a merchant’s website, and can be particularly useful for things like limited-time deals, seasonal sales, and recent launches. TikTok cited one case study with a brand called Princess Polly which saw a 6x return on ad spend and an over 50% increase on overall product page visits with the ad.

Dynamic Showcase Ads are another new product, and allow brands to promote thousands (or even millions) of product SKUs via personalized video ads. DSA will generate video ads that target specific audiences based on their interests and commerce activities, such as adding items to a cart or viewing a product. TikTok has created a suite of DSA templates that follow the platform’s creative principles of offering creative clips with music and text overlays. TikTok claims early DSA tests indicate the templates are driving higher click-through rates and conversion rates for advertisers but didn’t share metrics. On this effort, it’s partnered with video marketing company SHAKR, plus Productsup and feedonomics who can help integrate product catalogs.

Image Credits: TikTok (DSA)

Lead Generation, meanwhile, continues to be available within in-feed video ads offering brands an easy way to collect information from TikTok users through online forms. These ads are best for businesses that have longer sales cycles, like audio and education. It has also partnered with Zapier and LeadsBridge to automatically connect a brand’s CRM to TikTok for a lead generation campaign. In a test with Southeast Asian marketplace Lazada, nearly half of the users who signed up on a form during the first week of a lead gen campaign ended up selling on the marketplace, TikTok says.

Image Credits: Lazada on TikTok

Combined, this suite of solutions is what makes up TikTok Shopping.

“The future of commerce on TikTok is a shopping experience that allows brands of all sizes to tap into the enthusiasm of our user base,” said TikTok Shopping Head of Product, Javier Irigoyen. “The magic of TikTok happens in the For You page, where e-commerce content is recommended to our users in the same way as short videos and live streams. TikTok is a place where users and brands can connect directly, and where an end-to-end shopping experience can happen organically. That’s the basis on which we’re building a long-term commerce division,” he said.