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Thursday, 30 September 2021
As Need in Afghanistan Grows Dire, Aid Groups Plead for Help
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Ozy Media’s chairman resigns as company faces questions.
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Cruise, Waymo get OK to launch robotaxi service in San Francisco
The California Department of Motor Vehicles gave General Motors-backed Cruise and Alphabet-owned Waymo the green light to start charging for autonomous services offered to the public.
On Thursday, Cruise received a “driverless deployment permit,” which means it can receive compensation for services provided without a safety operator in the front seat. Waymo’s “drivered deployment permit” allows the operator to also charge money while operating an AV, but with a driver in the front seat. While they can both in theory charge now for autonomous delivery services, they are still a step away from being able to charge for robotaxi services. That last hurdle will require a permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), but both Waymo and Cruise declined to comment on a potential timeline for launching a commercial ride-hailing service in SF.
They won’t be the only ones making a business out of their AVs on the roads in California. In December, 2020, autonomous delivery startup Nuro became the first company to receive a permit from the California DMV to launch a commercial driverless service on public roads in the state.
Cruise and Waymo have been testing their AVs on public roads with a safety driver since 2015 and 2014, respectively, and without since October 2020 and October 2018. Cruise was also given permission to start giving passengers driverless rides in California in June, so the company has been offering its employees free rides for the past few months. In August, Waymo began its Trusted Tester program in the city, as well, allowing San Franciscans to hail one of its autonomous, electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, with a safety driver on board, for free rides.
Cruise’s most recent authorization grants the company permission to use its fleet of autonomous Chevy Bolt-based vehicles for commercial services on public surface streets within certain parts of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at a maximum speed of 30 miles per hour. Waymo can use its fleet of light-duty AVs within parts of SF and San Mateo counties on public roads with a speed limit of up to 65 miles per hour and with no apparent time restrictions. Both can operate in rain and light fog.
Both Cruise and Waymo declined to comment on when they plan to launch a commercial service in the Bay Area or whether they have plans to begin a delivery service. Last November, Cruise and Walmart partnered in Scottsdale, Arizona to deliver goods with a safety operator in the front seat. Waymo Via’s local delivery business has also been operational in Phoenix, Arizona since January 2020, also with a trained operator onboard, providing services for clients like UPS and AutoNation.
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Growth marketing is not a magic trick, says Ellen Jantsch of Tuff
If you are looking for a growth marketing playbook, stop reading now, because you won’t get one from Tuff. The agency’s founder Ellen Jantsch makes it clear: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to growth.
The team at Tuff knows their stuff — and it’s precisely why they are not selling “magic” or any kind of “mysterious secret sauce.” Instead, they are betting on transparency and experimentation, and it seems to be working well: The agency was warmly recommended to TechCrunch multiple times via our growth marketing survey. (You can share your own recommendations here!)
For instance, Luke Oehlerking, VP of Product and Strategy at solar company Zenernet, explained that Tuff fitted the bill for its ability to “truly move the needle with measurable results” while acting as “an extension of [Zenernet’s] own team.” This doesn’t necessarily involve offline meetings: Oehlerking and Jantsch are both based in Colorado, but Tuff’s team is fully remote, with global clients. Client work aside, Tuff also launched Growth Guide, a remote growth marketing training program for founders.
We asked Jantsch about all that, and found our conversation an interesting complement to our interview with LA-based agency MuteSix: Both share a focus on results and creativity, but Tuff is focused on a wider range of sectors than DTC, while also being smaller. Let’s find out how it works.
Editor’s note: The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.
What is Tuff? Why did you launch it, and how big is it now?
Ellen Jantsch: Tuff is a small (20-person) growth marketing agency that partners closely with startups and scaleups to help them increase revenue and sales. While we have found success working with teams in nearly every industry, from early traction startups to large enterprises, there’s certainly a type that fits us best. The most basic guidelines: If a prospect is looking to acquire new customers and scale their company through modern channels, tools and frameworks, we’re almost always in.
I started Tuff as a one-woman show because I wanted to do meaningful work with companies (and founders) I liked. While growth was always in the cards, I’ve always been most focused on creating a great place to work with people that care about helping companies with unique ideas as much as I do. After nearly five years in business, I’m proud to say that I’ve been able to check quite a few of those boxes I created for myself in the very beginning and added a handful of others along the way.
What range of services do you provide?
Our bread and butter is building efficient, holistic, growth-focused marketing strategies. We do this with our method that’s been battle-tested and has proven itself no matter the industry or company life stage. Then, we stay hungry for research and execute to a T, consistently optimizing and refining to find maximum efficiencies.
Throughout it all, we lean on all members of our team. Egoless and curious, we share hypotheses and findings with our partners and each other to find more streamlined paths to growth. But what really sets us apart is our method. Radical transparency is the name of the game. We believe that collaboration and showing our work is the only real way to build foundations for trustworthy partnerships.
Our list of tactics includes but is most certainly not limited to PPC, social ads, technical SEO, content strategy, creative, email and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Are your team members generalists and/or specialists?
We hire for two core roles at Tuff. We have growth marketers who are big-picture strategists, as well as channel experts who are deeply experienced in a particular type of marketing. Each account we work with is paired with a growth marketer and at least three to five different channel experts depending on what we’re testing. Your growth marketer is your map maker and wayfinder — keeping goals clearly defined and the whole team focused on creating the smartest path to growth. Your channel experts are the in-the-weeds, watching-every-dollar-spent efficiency finders and optimizers.
What are the pros and cons of hiring an agency like Tuff, compared to an in-house marketer?
Finding a full-time hire is a great option for many companies. But they come with their own set of pros and cons when compared to a plug-in growth marketing team. The major benefit is the expertise and time they bring to the team. Pulling a full-time, smart marketing hustler that can squeeze the most out of a small budget and stay in lockstep with everything else you have going on can be a huge asset. The biggest downsides and risks are finding the right fit, investing the high cost and hoping that they can remain your go-to even if it becomes time to test tactics that fall outside of their wheelhouse. Ultimately, an in-house hire is right if you’re already confident in the channels that work for you and just need someone to help you refine and grow those 1-2 channels.
When you hire a growth marketing agency, though, the major, overarching benefit is that it typically comes stacked with a full team that can get a holistic view of your business, collaborate to identify the best course of action and delegate execution tasks to true channel experts. With an agency, you can often reallocate resources as you learn and move more quickly because the team has a long history of experience.
Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Respond to our survey and help other startups find top growth marketers they can work with!
How do you charge clients, and why?
Most performance marketing agencies pocket a percentage of the amount of ad spend they’re managing or of revenue generated by their tactics. Neither of those methods is wrong by any means. But we deliberately built our pricing system differently: We charge flat-fee retainers based on the number of services we’re plugging in at once.
Why? Because growth marketing is fickle. Sometimes, even the best GM in the game can predict that a mix of PPC, SEO content and social ads is the golden ticket. But when one of them underperforms, it’s not a sign of something gone wrong, it’s a sign that it’s time to try something new. The way our process functions at Tuff allows us to seamlessly sub in new services or team members to try something new (like CRO or creative development) without a hitch until we find the mix that’s just right.
Can’t your clients simply all follow the same growth marketing playbook?
Scaling any business is hard, and growth marketing is not a [magic] trick. I’ve yet to see a playbook that you can take from one business and apply to the next and get consistent results.
We work with more than just e-commerce businesses; we flex into SaaS, fintech and B2B industries and it’s forced us to truly develop a model/process for growth and not just a playbook, meaning our channel and tactic mix is always different.
I think something that we focus on more than most is quick, fearless testing, then finding ways of operationalizing the early wins so they can become repeatable. It’s one thing to coax wins out of champion channels, and it’s another to know that your big-picture strategy is going to hold up under the pressure of scale.
Your site mentions “rapid experimentation” and “quick wins.” Can you detail how Tuff does that?
We know that even our most experienced growth marketers can develop an original growth plan that doesn’t drive results the way we want it to, despite extensive research and strategizing. That’s one of the reasons why we like growth marketing so much, there’s no gilded road to success.
So, instead of setting a strategy in stone, we’ll start every new partnership with a plan to test a range of different tactics within our chosen channels and check in every single day to gauge performance, reallocate budgets, glean insights and prioritize quick wins. After a few weeks, we’ll be able to emerge from our sea of data to outline what worked, what didn’t work quite as well as planned, and our game plan for driving longer-term success.
How do you make sure these early wins hold up under the pressure of scale?
In our earliest weeks of a partnership with any of our clients, we’re focused on not only driving quick wins, but designing our tests and articulating our hypotheses in ways that not only uncover insights for the following quarter, but for the next year and beyond.
More so, I think some of our strongest attributes as a team are our hunger to keep learning, our curiosity and our fearlessness when it comes to adapting, even if it means turning away from a tactic that’s held up for us in the past.
One of the best ways to illustrate this is the intro message a new prospect sent us last week: “Our current agency was great — until iOS 14.5 and then things went south because they only knew how to do the one thing.”
True, we saw CPCs [cost per click] shoot up and CVR [conversion rate] plummet soon after iOS 14.5 came out just like every other growth marketing team on the planet. But what allows us to scale is the same thing that allowed us to get every one of our clients back on track post-iOS 14.5: fearlessness, curiosity and adeptness.
Why did you choose to have an in-house creative team?
Ad creative is truly distinct from brand creative and, simply, we had a heck of a time finding agencies or even freelancers that could produce content optimized for ad channels on a tight budget and an efficient timeline.
Around the same time that this problem started to hinder our ability to quickly and efficiently optimize our campaigns, there were a handful of founders that reached out looking for a growth marketing team that could drive revenue growth and also validate/battle test their messaging and value props. So, we tried it out: We designed a few tests to measure the effectiveness of different value props, created visual assets that represented those in a clear, efficient way, measured the results and found that it all just clicked.
Long before ad creative was brought in-house, though, we had been working with a set of incredibly talented UX designers. Over the years, CRO became a much more tried-and-true element of our growth marketing strategies, and when the seeds of the ad creative team started to sprout, we knew that bringing creative in-house would anchor everything in place.
How has being a remote team fared out so far?
We’ve been a remote team since day one and this helps us be really thoughtful about ways we communicate internally and with our clients. Aside from setting the growth strategy for each company we work with, choosing the tools and executing tactics, we’ve learned how to be master communicators.
As a remote team, we’ve had to put a lot of time and energy into creating a culture rooted in transparency and authenticity. I like to think that this seeps into our client relationships, too. The more informed, honest and clear conversations we can have as a team and with our clients, the better work we will all do.
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Who needs a BaaS partner, anyway?
Over the last several years, a series of startups have emerged to cut through the complexity of launching financial services by offering technology that sits on top of partner banks’ infrastructure and enables developers to spin up bank accounts, payments and card capabilities through APIs.
These banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startups promise to offer fintech capabilities to other companies without them having to strike deals with partner banks, integrate with the banking core, or hire the technical or compliance personnel necessary to test or launch a new financial product.
As a result, it’s never been faster or easier to launch a fintech app or add a banking component to an existing vertical SaaS business. To get a better understanding of the problem BaaS providers are trying to solve, we spoke with several founders in this space, including Unit CEO Itai Damti, Bond CEO Roy Ng, and Synctera CEO Peter Hazlehurst, among others.
Cutting through the complexity of financial services
In the early days of the fintech market, startups were largely on their own when building or launching a new financial services app. Bringing a new financial product to market typically meant finding a bank partner and signing a long-term contract, creating and implementing compliance policies with that bank, and then finally building out the tech needed to support whatever financial app or service you were looking to offer to end users.
For startups, that meant large upfront investments of time and money just to lay the groundwork for launching a new product long before establishing product-market fit. It also meant a lot of duplicative work not just by startups to build up the necessary infrastructure needed to launch a financial product, but also between banks as they signed up and offered fintech partners access to their banking systems.
“The amount of work and pain that is involved in launching even something simple, even just checking accounts — you need to navigate the partner ecosystem of 30 to 40 banks that don’t always understand your business, then you need to write 15 to 20 compliance policies and operationalize them,” said Unit founder and CEO Itai Damti.
Now a lot of that complexity can be outsourced to BaaS companies that already have the bank relationships, APIs for embedding financial services into their apps and the ability to run compliance programs on behalf of their customers. And venture capitalists have lined up to fund them, including rounds announced by companies like Rize ($11.4 million), Synctera ($33 million) and Unit ($51 million) over just the last three months.
But who benefits from working with a BaaS provider?
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Aurora shines spotlight on autonomous truck tech, strategy ahead of SPAC merger
On Interstate 45 in Texas, a billboard with “Aurora” emblazoned at the top in giant white letters offers a cryptic message: “A new way to drive is on the horizon.”
It’s hard to know just how many of the thousands of drivers on this stretch of road know what that means or what Aurora is; the autonomous vehicle technology company is hardly a household name even as it (along with several competitors) aims to forever change how people and packages get from Point A to Point B.
But Aurora, which plans to join the public markets via a merger with a blank-check company, placed the spotlight on its products this week, inviting reporters, analysts, and partners like PACCAR, Toyota and Volvo, as well as existing and potential new investors to ride in its autonomous trucks and get a closer view of its tech. It also shared an update on its operations, including that it is beginning to map and test a new route in Texas.
The so-called “Aurora Illuminated” event was held at an auspicious time for the company. Aurora, which was founded in 2017 by Sterling Anderson, Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson, has more than doubled in size to more than 1,600 employees in less than a year through its acquisition of Uber’s self-driving unit.
It is now on the precipice of becoming a publicly traded company with an implied valuation of $13 billion through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners Y. That deal, which was announced in July and confirmed TechCrunch’s earlier reporting, is expected to go to a shareholder vote this year. If approved, Aurora will make its public debut on the Nasdaq shortly after. The company has not disclosed either of these dates.
To say that Aurora has officially “made it” would be presumptive and premature. But the company has navigated a number of hurdles — notably raising considerable capital, securing key partnerships and ramping up testing — that puts it on the path toward commercialization. And it has made material progress in the competitive autonomous trucking landscape where other well-funded and partnered companies — such as Waymo and publicly traded TuSimple and smaller startups like Gatik and Kodiak Robotics — are playing.
Progress report
Aurora first landed in Texas a year ago. Today, it’s using its autonomous trucks (always with two safety drivers) to carry loads for Barcel, the Takis spicy chips and snacks manufacturer, along a route in Texas between its Dallas, Palmer and Houston terminals. The company also began to carry freight for FedEx between Dallas and Houston as part of a pilot program announced earlier this month. Paccar trucks that are equipped with Aurora’s technology will be used multiple times a week to complete the nearly 500-mile route along Interstate 45, according to FedEx.
The plan is to add more terminals in El Paso and San Antonio, then stretch west to Phoenix and Los Angeles, south to Laredo and east to New Orleans. The network that Aurora envisions will encompass the Western and Eastern seaboards and eventually the entire country.
Aurora has not shared when it expects to move beyond Texas. It just started testing — without freight — the 630-mile route between El Paso and Dallas.
On the routes where it is hauling goods, the company has always delivered within the allotted time frame, according to co-founder and chief product officer Sterling Anderson.
“That’s awesome and an exciting example of operational excellence,” co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson said in an interview at the event. “Over the longer term, because we won’t have the hours-of-service limitations when we’re able to operate our vehicles without drivers on board — that when there is a dramatic leap forward.”
Image Credits: Aurora
The ride
The ride, which TechCrunch took twice, began in the parking lot of its South Dallas Terminal in Palmer, Texas.
The truck is a Peterbilt 579 integrated with Aurora’s autonomous vehicle system and customized in partnership with Paccar. The system, which the company has dubbed the “Aurora Driver,” includes cameras, radar and a combination of long- and medium-range light detection and ranging radar sensors referred to as lidar. The long-range lidar was developed in-house after its acquisition of Blackmore. (Aurora has since acquired a second lidar company, OURS Technology. The medium-range lidar sensors are from an undisclosed supplier.
A massive computer with cooling units sits in the rear of the cabin. Other displays, including one that shows the vehicle in motion, its intended path and image classifications made along the way, are also in the cabin. Two safety operators are in the vehicle. The so-called pilot holds a commercial truck driver’s license, or CDL, and the co-pilot is there watching and calling out the intended path as well as acting as a spotter for other vehicles, pedestrians or objects in the road.
Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec
“We don’t just see them as testers; they give us a ton of really good guidance and advice not just in the technology and how they’re feeling it, but also the rules of the road” Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli, Aurora’s VP of partners and programs, said during a safety briefing prior to entering the truck. “For example, a truck driver wouldn’t do that, you take a wide turn, this is how you do it, this is how you operate, this is what other drivers are going to expect. They also have a really good understanding of customer expectations.”
All operators, which are employees of Aurora and not contract workers, go through weeks of training on vehicle controls, defensive driving and putting them through scenarios on a closed track. Twelve “pilots” have gone through the training, which takes between six and eight weeks, and are in trucks today. Others are in the pipeline.
Both test rides began with the truck driving autonomously from the terminal lot to a frontage road, where it then took an on-ramp onto Interstate 45. The truck traveled along 45 about 13 miles before exiting, turning left to travel under the freeway. After a stop sign, the truck took one more left to enter the interstate once more and head back to the terminal. The round trip was about 28 miles.
Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec
While it’s difficult to provide a thorough assessment of AV tech in these kinds of demonstrations, it does provide a snapshot of the system and, importantly, what kind of “driver” a company is trying to develop.
In Aurora’s case, the company is taking a cautious approach. The truck will not exceed 65 miles per hour on the highway, even when the posted speed limit is 75 mph. The truck also stays in the far right lane except to provide space for a merging vehicle or to overtake slower ones. It also always moves to the other lane if a vehicle is stopped on the shoulder, per state law.
Aurora has also directed its safety operators to “disengage,” meaning to take over manual control, in active construction zones where workers are present, instances when emergency vehicles approach with lights activated, and amid any “crazy actors,” as Theodosiou-Pisanelli describes it.
“Anytime we have a disengagement, it’s an experience we learn from,” she said. “We tell them to be proactive about disengaging; it doesn’t impact our ability to learn from that experience because we can put it through the simulator and see what the system would have done.”
The company says it has already driven more than 4.5 million on-road miles, as well as billions of miles in its virtual testing suite.
During my ride, the safety operator took control once on a section along the frontage road as a pickup truck sitting in a driveway inched forward and appeared to be about to turn in front of the semi. For the remainder of the two rides, the truck did operate autonomously and smoothly, with one slightly more aggressive braking event when a slower vehicle moved in front of it.
What they showed
Underneath a temporary structure outfitted with slick lighting, carpet, seating and decor reminiscent of a Tesla reveal event, the company laid out its strategy and showed off prototypes and educational explainers of its technology, including its lidar and simulation. The aim was to indicate what is behind its plan to deploy an autonomous trucking business by late 2023 and ride-hailing in late 2024.
The company displayed two different vehicle prototypes that it says will ultimately deliver vehicles that move goods and people autonomously through the world. They showed the Volvo VNL truck, a design prototype of Volvo’s first autonomous truck, intended for commercial production. On-road testing of the VNL will begin in 2022.
Aurora also displayed its AV-ready Toyota Sienna prototype that is intended for mass production. Aurora is integrating its AV system into the vehicle and will have a testing fleet of about a dozen vehicles out for testing and validation in Pittsburgh, the San Francisco Bay Area and Texas, the company said.
The road ahead
Aurora was not ready to talk about future partners. But strategically speaking, Anderson noted that the market is huge, that “there are a lot of players, and we’re talking to many of them.”
The pair did weigh in on teleassistance technology, which is when humans in an off-site location monitor and then can send path planning instructions to the autonomous vehicle if needed, that they haven’t discussed in detail before.
“From day one, we’ve thought teleassist would be part of the technology,” Urmson said.
“We’ve modeled at a pretty fine granularity what happens in and around terminals,” Anderson said of its progress to date, noting that it has every step charted out. “So we have a pretty strong understanding of what the end-to-end support requirement is. What we don’t have quite yet is how frequently we’re going to require a teleassistance event or roadside assistance when we don’t have a driver in the truck.”
Urmson and Anderson confirmed that the company is testing a teleassist technology on a closed track and public roads and will be working with its partners to determine the best approach for commercial operations.
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Review: In ‘Never Let Go,’ a Solo Performer’s Heart Goes On
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New Paramount chairman continues to clean house, showing another executive the door.
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An Artist’s Portraits, Stitched Together on the Subway
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This Is Why Your Toaster Will Break
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TikTok starts flirting with NFTs
The NFT space has had quite the year, and while it can be difficult to separate the billions of dollars in crypto speculation from the potential infrastructure shifts, plenty of mainstream tech companies are dipping their toes into the space and signaling future interest.
This time it’s TikTok’s turn. The fast-growing social media platform which just crossed 1 billion monthly users worldwide has lined up its own NFT drop, leveraging content from some of its top creators, including Lil Nas X, Grimes, Bella Poarch, Rudy Willingham and Gary Vaynerchuk. The release of one-of-one and limited edition NFTs seems to be focused on generating buzz among the existing NFT community rather than exposing users inside the app to non-fungible tokens.
The company is side-stepping blockchain energy concerns by placing their NFTs on a dedicated site powered by Immutable X, a Layer-2 scaling solution for Ethereum which says that NFTs traded using it are “100% carbon neutral.” The drop starts October 6 with a collection from Lil Nas X and will continue on through the end of the month.
Why is TikTok getting into the world of NFTs to begin with? TikTok has a fairly precise answer for that on its drop site:
Inspired by the creativity and innovation of the TikTok creator community, TikTok is exploring the world of NFTs as a new creator empowerment tool. NFTs are a new way for creators to be recognized and rewarded for their content and for fans to own culturally-significant moments on TikTok.
The creation that happens on TikTok helps drive culture and start trends that impact society. TikTok will bring something unique and groundbreaking to the NFT landscape by curating some of these cultural milestones and pairing them with prominent NFT artists.
It’s clearly a niche early experiment for the company, which hasn’t previously indicated the same level of NFT interest that platforms like Twitter and Facebook have shown, but it also showcases that they think NFTs are a space worth paying some attention to.
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Clubhouse adds clips, replays for asynchronous listening, better search, and spatial audio for Android
Clubhouse announced today that it is unveiling four new features: Clips, Replay, Universal Search, and spatial audio for Android (which already exists on iOS). All of these features will launch today, except for Replay, which will roll out in October. These additions will help expand Clubhouse’s reach by making content available even after a live conversation has ended, allowing for asynchronous engagement.
Clips will allow live listeners in public rooms to snip the most recent 30 seconds of audio and share it anywhere — so, if you’re listening to a speaker who says something particularly wise (or not), you can create a clip, which generates a shareable moment with a link to join the room. These can be shared on other social media platforms. Hosts can decide whether or not they want listeners to be able to make clips in their room — if clips are turned on, users will be able to tap a scissor icon to make one.
Clubhouse already acknowledges that there’s a danger in letting people share 30 second audio clips out of context. A bad actor could potentially clip audio to obscure what someone really meant (you might say “the museum is always free on Friday,” but the clip could stop at “the museum is always free” — of course, Clubhouse is concerned about more sinister examples than this). So, to begin, Clubhouse is rolling out clips in beta to a small group of creators. Clubhouse has struggled with content moderation in its short history, and recently, doctors have been reportedly forced off the app due to harassment from anti-vaxxers. In light of these challenges, it makes sense that Clubhouse is more slowly unveiling this feature.
Image Credits: Clubhouse
Universal Search improves discoverability on Clubhouse, so that when users type a keyword or name into the search bar, they can find relevant rooms (both live and scheduled), people, clubs, and bios. And Clubhouse says it’s bringing Spatial Audio to Android after positive feedback from iOS users. But even amid these feature updates, Clubhouse still has made itself inaccessible to Deaf and hard of hearing users by failing to add live captioning.
Of these new features, Replay could be the biggest game-changer for the app — it will allow creators to record a room, save it to their profile and club, or download the audio to share it externally, like on a podcast feed. Hosts and moderators can choose whether or not they want the room to be recorded.
Earlier this month, former PayPal COO David Sacks launched Callin, a “social podcasting” app that functions like a Clubhouse live audio room, but allows users to save and edit recordings into podcasts through the app. Then, Twitter said it would add recorded Spaces too. Now, Clubhouse’s Replay feature will make it more competitive.
Though Clubhouse has tried to appeal to live audio creators through its “Creator First” program, reports suggest that the endeavor fell short of expectations. But if Clubhouse wants to appeal to creators, this easier way of saving and sharing audio can help keep hosts on the platform. Though the appeal of apps like Clubhouse is the ability to have a shared, live experience, allowing for asynchronous listening can help people grow their audience.
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South Korean ISP SK Broadband counterclaims against Netflix for bandwidth usage fees
South Korean internet service provider SK Broadband, a subsidiary of South Korean telco company SK Telecom, has filed a counterclaim against Netflix to demand payment for the bandwidth the streaming platform has used for the last three years.
This case comes in the wake of the South Korean court siding against Netflix in June in the case. Now SK Broadband is empowered to levy network usage fees on streaming platforms for consuming an excessive amount of bandwidth and causing heavy traffic on its network.
“We will review the claim that SK Broadband has filed against us. In the meantime, we continue to seek open dialogue and explore ways of working with SK Broadband in order to ensure a seamless streaming experience for our shared customers,” a Netflix spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The U.S. streaming giant lodged an appeal to a higher court against the court decision in July after it lost the first court case that the company filed in 2020. That case alleged that SK Broadband, which is responsible for managing its networks, has no right to demand fees for the bandwidth. Netflix has claimed that the ISP was trying to “double bill” — its subscribers already pay for broadband use, and now want to charge the streaming company for it, too.
SK Broadband plans to charge about $23 million per year for network use, as per local media reports.
Back in 2019, SK Broadband requested the Korea Communication Commission come to a settlement, but the two companies couldn’t find an agreement.
SK Broadband claims that Netflix’s traffic on the ISP network has exponentially increased about 24 times, from 50 Gigabits per second in May 2018 to 1,200 Gigabits in September 2021.
Netflix says on 28 September that its investment in content production in South Korea has brought socio-economic impact worth $4.7 billion, covering everything from publishing to consumer goods. It claims to have led to the creation of 16,000 jobs in the country since it opened in 2016, using figures from a Deloitte Consulting report. Netflix Korea has 3.8 million paid subscriptions in South Korea as of the end of 2020, while its global paid memberships were estimated at 200 million, as per the report by Deloitte Consulting.
The Netflix spokesperson said on a separate note that the Korean show “Squid Game” is now on track to be Netflix’s biggest show ever and it’s the first Korean show to ever be No. 1 on Netflix U.S.
Meanwhile, another global streaming giant, Disney Plus, is set to launch in South Korea in November. Disney Plus reportedly plans to use third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) instead of using ISP’s networks to avoid the bandwidth usage fees.
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Facebook grilled in Senate hearing over teen mental health
Last night, Facebook published two annotated slide decks in an attempt to contextualize the documents that the Wall Street Journal published this month, which reported evidence that the company is aware of its negative impact on teen mental health. These documents were released in anticipation of today’s Senate hearing on the mental health harms of Facebook and Instagram.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation questioned Facebook Global Head of Security Antigone Davis over two and a half hours, but lawmakers grew frustrated with Davis’ reticence to answer their questions directly, or provide much information that hasn’t been written in Facebook blog posts rebuking the WSJ reports.
“I congratulate you on a perfectly curated background,” Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn chided Davis. “It looks beautiful coming across the screen. I wish the messages that you were giving us were equally as attractive.”
Davis insisted that research from Facebook and Instagram has shown 8 out of 10 young people say they have a neutral positive experience on the app, and that her team wants 10 out of 10 young users to have a good experience. But Senators pushed back with other findings from Facebook’s own data, like the fact that among teenagers with suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users said they could trace those thoughts to Instagram. Senator Richard Blumenthal (who serves as Chair of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security) said that his office did their own research by creating an account pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl. Senator Blumenthal said they followed “easily findable accounts associated with extreme dieting and eating disorders.” Within a day, he said, the account’s recommendations were solely composed of accounts promoting self-harm and disordered eating.
“That is the perfect storm that Instagram has fostered and created. Facebook has asked us to trust it. But after these evasions and these revelations, why should we?” Senator Blumenthal asked.
But in the midst of filibustering tactics that fit right in on the Senate floor (“We’re pretty good at filibustering in the Senate, too,” Senator Klobuchar told Davis), the Facebook Global Head of Safety did elaborate on some of the company’s plans to improve young users’ experience, which Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri previously mentioned on Twitter.
“Young people indicated that when they saw uplifting content or inspiring content, that could move them away from some other issues that they’re struggling with,” Davis said at the hearing. “So one of the things that we’re actually looking at is called ‘nudges,’ where we would actually nudge someone who we saw potentially rabbit holing down content towards more uplifting or inspiring content.”
In addition to a “nudges” feature, Davis said that the company is looking at a “take a break” feature, which would encourage users to stop looking at the app if they’ve been browsing certain content for too long. In 2018, Instagram introduced a “you’re all caught up” notice, which would appear when the user had scrolled through all posts from the last two days. This feature was introduced alongside “do not disturb” toggles, which helped users control when they wanted to receive notifications. These updates were part of “Time Well Spent” initiatives, designed to curb screen time and encourage healthier social media habits. But by 2020, the space beneath the “caught up” notice was turned into a feed of suggested posts and ads.
At the hearing, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey (a social media star in his own right) announced that he would reintroduce legislation with Senator Blumenthal called the KIDS (Kids Internet Design and Safety) Act, which seeks to create new protections for online users under 16. The bill would prohibit platforms directed at children from leveraging follower and like counts, push alerts that encourage users to use the app more, auto-play settings, badges that award elevated levels of engagement, or any design feature that unfairly encourages a user (“due to their age or inexperience,” the bill specifies) to make purchases, submit content, or spend more time on a platform.
Previously introduced in March 2020, Facebook has known about the proposed legislation for almost a year and a half.
“I think our company has made its position really well known that we believe it’s time for the update of internet regulations, and we’d be happy to talk to and work with you on that,” Davis told Senator Markey.
But when Markey directly asked if Facebook would support the KIDS Act, Davis said that Facebook would follow up on the question later.
“Well, your company has had this legislation in your possession for months. And you’re testifying here today before the committee that would have to pass this legislation,” said Senator Markey. “I just feel that delay and obfuscation is the legislative strategy of Facebook, especially since Facebook has spent billions of dollars on a marketing campaign calling on Congress to pass internet regulations, and Facebook purports to be committed to children’s well being.”
At the end of the hearing, Davis said that she hopes the Senate will have hearings with companies that have kid-focused apps, like TikTok and YouTube. Currently, Facebook has a Messenger Kids app, but the company but its Instagram for kids product on hold in light of WSJ’s reporting. Though WSJ has published six leaked documents from Facebook, the company itself only annotated and re-published two of them.
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With Big, Bold Art, Sarah Cain Redefines Seriousness in Painting
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Supreme Court to Hear Ted Cruz’s Campaign Finance Challenge
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The Senate passes a short-term spending bill to keep the government open. It heads to the House next.
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Wednesday, 29 September 2021
My Fellow Americans, Let’s Be Better Tourists
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Stephanie Grisham, the Latest White House Memoirist, Offers Apologies and Payback
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The death of identity: Knowing your customer in the age of data privacy
“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.
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Warby Parker makes it clear that direct listings are unicorn-friendly
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.
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It's Time To Fire Louis DeJoy
Defenders of the U.S. Postal Service are urgently renewing their calls for the ouster of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy as his 10-year plan to overhaul the cherished government institution is set to take effect Friday, ushering in permanently slower mail delivery while hiking prices for consumers.
"DeJoy calls his plan 'Delivering for America,' but it will do the exact opposite—slowing many First Class Mail deliveries down, taking their standard from three to five days," Porter McConnell of Take on Wall Street, a co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, warns in a video posted online late Tuesday.
"Slower ground transportation will also now be prioritized over air transportation," McConnell added. "These new service standards won't improve the Postal Service—they will make it harder for people all across the country to receive their medications, their bills, their paychecks, and more."
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A Historic Night as the Metropolitan Opera Tries to Ensure Its Future
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TikTok Shopping expands with more partnerships, LIVE Shopping, new ads and more
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.
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General Motors’ new software platform Ultifi is coming to vehicles starting in 2023
General Motors is rolling out a new end-to-end software platform in vehicles starting in 2023 that executives say will usher in a sweeping set of capabilities including giving drivers access to in-car subscription and using over-the-air updates to offer new apps and services.
The software platform can be used to give owners greater access to all the functions of a vehicle right down to the sensors. For instance, a driver would be able to automatically set child locks if the car cameras detect children in the backseat. Ultifi will also give drivers access to subscription services, including Super Cruise, the company’s hands-free advanced driver assistance system.
“It’s a big next step in our software strategy,” Scott Miller, GM’s VP of software-defined vehicles said in a press briefing. “Today cars are enabled by software. With Ultifi, they’re going to be defined by it.”
The platform will be built on top of the company’s vehicle intelligence platform, or VIP, which is the underlying hardware architecture that provides greater data processing power. Ultifi will be integrated alongside Android Automotive, the OS embedded in some GM infotainment systems. (Android Automotive OS is separate from Android Auto, which is a secondary interface that lies on top of the operating system.) The difference between the two comes down to capability and availability: “Android Automotive is a certain subset of functionality in the car,” Miller explained. “Ultifi is more of an umbrella overall strategy.”
Like Android, Ultifi will be Linux-based, a widely used developer platform. Miller said GM chose Linux because “at some point we really want to open this up” to authorize third-party developers to launch in-car apps, Miller said.
Ultifi will start rolling out in 2023 and will be available exclusively to those vehicles and beyond, due to the computing demands of the system. Customers can either purchase the vehicle or purchase different access plans, like how consumers purchase different plans for their smartphone, Miller said. That means varying prices and varying plans, though GM didn’t go into any specifics. Nor did it disclose how much revenue it expects the new platform to generate.
This is just the latest move by major automakers to make new vehicles more connected than ever before. Both General Motors and Ford have discussed the revenue-generating opportunities in software and subscription services, and Ultifi is another step toward building out those businesses.
“We’re not transitioning away from vehicles,” Miller said. “We’re expanding our business. Opportunities to generate new lines of business to expand and leverage technology for other applications, isn’t in lieu of our core, it’s in addition to [it].”
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Investible launches $100M AUD fund for early-stage climate tech startups
Investible, the Sydney-based early-stage venture firm known for investments in Canva and other top Australian startups, announced today it is raising a $100 million AUD (about $72.3 million USD) Climate Tech Fund. This is the first time Investible has launched a sector-focused fund. It’s first two funds, including a $50 million AUD one closed earlier this year, were both sector-agnostic.
Last month, Investible also said it will launch Greenhouse, a growth and innovation hub for climate tech startups, in partnership with the City of Sydney. Once it opens next year, Greenhouse will bring together startups, researchers, academics and corporations, including climate tech companies outside of Investible’s portfolio.
“It’s about helping them go from startup to scale, and so some of that will be additional research to improve their technology or engaging corporates to understand what exactly they are looking for and also finding their next customers,” said Tom Kline, one of the heads of the Climate Tech Fund.
The fund will invest in seed rounds, but reserve half of its capital for follow-on funding. It will primarily back Australian companies, but also plans to devote up to 30% of the fund to international companies. It is focused on the six sectors identified by the United Nations Environment Programme as the most important for reducing climate change and global warming: energy, transport, industry, buildings and cities, food and agriculture, and forests and land use.
The fund will be led by Kline, former chief executive officer of renewable energy manager New Energy Solar, and Patrick Sieb, who has invested in tech companies since 2014 and focused specifically on climate tech startups since 2019.
“With each passing year, we’re noticing that we need to do more in the space, and coming from the other end, Investible sees deal flow of between 1,500 to 2,000 a year, and an increasing amount of those have been climate focused,” Kline told TechCrunch about the firm’s decision to launch a climate-focused fund after being sector-agnostic.
He added that more people are paying attention to climate change and it’s driving consumer choices and prompting corporations to become more transparent. More governments are also setting targets that will require significant technology—and capital—to achieve.
Investible’s climate fund will typically participate in seed rounds starting from about $1.5 million AUD, contributing up to 30%, so about $500,000 AUD. Follow-on checks could be up to several million dollars.
The fund will use the same investment process as Investible’s sector-agnostic funds, but with climate-focused criteria. For example, it may look at much emissions it can reduce, the founding team, opportunity size and how long it will take to develop and monetize its tech.
“Scientists have been talking about climate change for decades and there’s been a lot of debate, but I think we’re finally at the stage where the debate is over and people are acknowledging that this is human-caused and we really must take action this decade,” said Kline.
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MLB Network's Pedro Martinez Drops A Sh*t Bomb On Live TV
Pedro Martinez is one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Since his retirement, he's been a very good analyst for the MLB Network.
The MLB Network is the place to be, when there are playoff races in both leagues. They fly into different games and give you live feeds.
Last night a pitcher for Arizona, Luke Weaver, had a weird delivery. It looked like his movements on the mound should be called a balk by the umpires, but that didn't happen.
Analyst Harold Reynolds wondered why Luke wasn't being called for a balk, and as they discussed it. Pedro brought down the house when he said,"Well, the umpires don’t know shit about what they’re doing.”
Harold Reynolds and Greg Amsinger burst into laughter off-camera and Reynolds finally said, "Pedro! Four minutes in.”
Martinez replied, “I’m sorry, I apologize about that. What can I say?”
I watched it in real-time and it was very funny. Pedro "Who's your daddy" didn't sugarcoat it!
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Clive Sinclair, Inventive Computer Pioneer, Dies at 81
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The new era of education is high-tech and high-touch
We’ve heard a lot about the role of technology in pandemic education, and for good reason: Digital solutions enabled school communities to maintain learning through uncertainty and interruption none of us could have imagined.
However, the triumphs of edtech have been paired with critical challenges. Since the pandemic closed schools in March 2020, school districts have invested in getting students access to computing devices and the internet.
Technology-hesitant teachers became technology-proficient as they learned to navigate remote teaching and learning in impromptu virtual classrooms. Still, with all of the progress we made in digital learning, the interruption of the face-to-face social aspects of the classroom experience resulted in the students finishing the 2020-2021 school year four to five months behind in reading and math on average, according to a recent study from McKinsey & Company.
We’re starting to see the promise of digital learning take hold; teachers can use software to differentiate and personalize instruction. But we can’t stop here. Over the last 18 months, “technology” has been a synonym for “virtual,” where many kids felt isolated, sitting behind a device and craving connection with their peers and teachers.
We now have the opportunity to take what we have learned and use it to usher in a new era of education — one that is powered to a meaningful degree by technology yet centered on human connection, and one where we reject the false choice between engaging software and an incredible teacher. As we return to school this fall, we can blend the best of technology with the best of the classroom experience.
HMH recently shared results of our annual Educator Confidence Report, and the findings provide critical insights into the characteristics that should define the post-pandemic classroom.
Over 1,200 front-line educators from across the U.S. responded, and while optimism has fallen (only 38% of educators reported a somewhat positive or positive view of the state of their profession), confidence in the mastery and benefit of learning technologies is on the rise.
We’re moving from digital promise to digital proof.
Despite a tumultuous year, teachers’ current views on technology provide a bright spot, paving the way for more purposeful use of digital solutions.
Educator confidence in using edtech is at an all-time high since we began this survey seven years ago, with 66% of teachers very or extremely confident in their abilities. Many credit their experience of being thrown into the deep end in March 2020. Today, a nearly unanimous 95% of teachers have experienced the benefits of edtech, and 77% believe tech will help them be more effective teachers post-pandemic.
Of critical importance is the type of benefit teachers are experiencing. 81% report at least one of the following top three benefits, all of which are highly student-centric: improved student engagement; differentiated, individualized instruction; and flexible access to instructional content.
Despite technology playing a larger and more effective role, educators report that there are still critical barriers to access and efficacy that must be addressed, including lack of devices and internet access. 57% of educators also indicated that lack of student engagement with tech is a major barrier. More than half told us that the lack of time to plan for integrating digital resources into instruction was a top challenge.
Students’ emotional well-being is educators’ top concern
We all recognize that at the center of teaching and learning is the strong connection built and nurtured between teacher and student, which serves as the foundation for academic and social-emotional growth and drives engagement. We cannot let technology that breaks that connection and isolates students obscure that critical relationship, and data from this year’s survey is an important harbinger.
Among educators, 58% are concerned that students will demonstrate increased social-emotional needs after the pandemic, and social-emotional needs broadly remained the top concern this year (ahead of teachers’ own salaries and concerns about students falling behind). In addition, 82% of educators believe a well-crafted, fully integrated social-emotional learning (SEL) program will have an impact.
Ultimately, to begin to recover and transition into our “post-pandemic instructional model,” we can benefit from a best-of-both-worlds approach that fuses the power of technology with the tried-and-true social gathering of the classroom — “high-tech” working in a mutually reinforcing way with “high-touch.”
Educators’ unique experiences shed light on what the classroom of the future will look like
Technology alone will not usher in education’s new era. It is critical that we leverage digital solutions with a community-oriented, connected and human mindset.
At HMH, we strive for an edtech ecosystem that drives engagement, not isolation; for solutions that offer actionable data and insights that allow teachers to differentiate instruction, not simply “a page under glass”; for innovations that do not add to educators’ full plates, but rather extend their capabilities and give them time to focus on the social-emotional needs of their students.
We heard loud and clear that educators believe in the potential of technology to accomplish these goals — 82% of educators believe customized learning for every student will transform learning and teaching in the future, and 75% believe technology solutions that connect instruction and assessment on one platform will be essential to this transformation.
Edtech’s potential has been unlocked at an exponential rate over the past year, but the future of the classroom is not merely high-tech. It is high-touch, too.
When we asked educators what they are most looking forward to post-pandemic, the answer was clear — being together with their student community: 80% cited interacting face-to-face with students, 74% said more student engagement and 63% noted student collaboration opportunities.
The passionate discussion around in-person versus digital learning is too often shortsighted in its creation of a strict binary — digital or analog. But our greatest success will come from embracing the fact that these are not opposing forces; they are complementary force multipliers.
We’ve lost a great deal over the last year, but we’ve also gained important ground — and we can continue that momentum. As a society, we will continue to assess the health risks before us and navigate an increasingly hybrid world that includes our workplaces, neighborhoods and, of course, our schools.
I believe that as we do ultimately return to our school buildings, we’ll be ready to usher in a new era of learning, one powered by tech and innovation but forever defined by the community of teachers and students at its heart.
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