World Of News

Startup life, especially in the early innings, is nothing short of hectic. Who wouldn’t love a clone or two to help get everything done? Well, we can’t clone you, but we can give you more time to sign up and save on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9. We’re extending the early bird deadline to Friday, June 4 at 11:59 pm (PT) . Sweet! That should help calm the cray-cray and save you $100 on admission to our virtual two-day bootcamp experience. Of course, you don’t need to wait. Buy your pass now while it’s top-of-mind and feel the joy of having one less task on your to-do list. Not familiar with TC Early Stage? It’s specifically designed to help new startup founders learn essential entrepreneurial skills to build a successful startup. We tap the very best experts in the startup ecosystem, and they deliver actionable insights you can put in place now, when you need them most. At TC Early Stage 2021, top-tier investors, veteran founders and respecte...

TechCrunch recently caught up with recent Y Combinator graduate Uiflow , a startup that is building a no-code enterprise app creation service. If you are thinking  wait, don’t a number of companies already do that? , the answer is yes. But what Quickbase , Smartsheet and others are working on isn’t quite the same thing, at least from the startup’s perspective. Uiflow, a Bay Area-based concern that has been alive for far less than a year, has built an app creation tool that works with whatever backend a large company currently employs, and helps its development team build apps collaboratively. As the startup explained in a public posting , customer developers can import Figma files while their engineers can use existing UI libraries, and product managers can quickly vet an app’s logic. The service is akin to a “cross between Unity and Figma,” Uiflow says . Here’s what its own user interface looks like, per a screenshot the company provided to TechCrunch after an interview: Pe...

TechCrunch is known for its pitch-offs. We’ve had them in cities all over the world, and heard from hundreds of startups who have shared the story of their company on our stages. We’re excited to be bringing the pitch-off to Extra Crunch Live. Anyone in the audience on an episode of Extra Crunch Live can virtually “raise their hand” to be selected to pitch in front of the audience and get feedback from our all-star guests. On ECL, pitch-off startups will have two minutes to tell us about their company. This is the equivalent of an elevator pitch — imagine running into a VC or potential customer at a tech conference like Disrupt or bumping into them at a park. As such, no visual aids are allowed, including decks, videos, demoes, etc. Essentially, what can you convey with your words, in a short time frame, to get people to both understand your startup and be excited about it? This is a critical skill, and we’re creating the space for founders to practice and improve. I’m amped to ...

Eight months after former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer quit in the midst of a full-court press from the Trump administration against the Chinese-owned social media giant, TikTok finally has a new permanent leader. ByteDance’s recently-hired CFO Shouzi Chew will be assuming the role as TikTok CEO while still holding the CFO role at its parent organization, the company announced Friday morning. It’s a bold move likely signaling that the company believes that the worst of its tussles with the US Executive branch are over as President Biden has seemed uninterested in picking up former President Trump’s pet project. Vanessa Pappas, who was serving as interim CEO, will take the role of COO going forward. “The leadership team of Shou and Vanessa sets the stage for sustained growth,” ByteDance CEO Yiming Zhang said in a press release. “Shou brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having led a team that was among our earliest investors, and having worked in the technology sector for a...

Anyone who has played a video game with voice chat in the past decade knows that there is some risk involved. You might be greeted by friendly teammates, but you may also hear some of the most toxic language you’ve ever heard in your life. Riot Games , the game developer behind ultra popular titles like League of Legends and Valorant, is thinking hard about this. And taking action. The developer is today announcing changes to its Privacy Notice that allow for it to capture and evaluate voice comms when a report is submitted around disruptive behavior. The changes to the policy are Riot-wide, meaning that all players across all games will need to accept those changes. However, the only game that is scheduled to utilize these new abilities is VALORANT, as it is the most voice chat-heavy game from Riot. The plan here is to store relevant audio data in the account’s registered region and evaluate it to see if the behavior agreement was violated. This process is triggered by a report be...

Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow , has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud , a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee and gain access to a gaming PC in a data center. You can connect to this PC from your computer, a smartphone, a tablet or a smart TV. You can see a video stream of what’s happening on the screen and your actions are relayed to the server. Unlike Google Stadia, Amazon Luna or even Nvidia GeForce Now, you can install whatever you want on your server. You get a full Windows 10 instance so it supports anything from Steam to Photoshop and Excel. While the French startup has raised over $100 million across multiple funding rounds, the company couldn’t keep up with pre-orders, didn’t ge...

TC Early Stage is back in July and we have a fantastic lineup in store that’s laser-focused on marketing and fundraising. That includes, but is not limited to, Sequoia’s Mike Vernal, whose portfolio companies include Citizen, PicsArt, Whisper, Threads, Houseparty and more. Vernal will be leading a discussion on tempo and product-market fit. The chat stems from Vernal’s experience as an investor, sharing the lesser-known keys to success to not only secure early investment, but to use it to secure a later-stage investment. In essence, tempo is everything. At the earliest stage, investors are looking more at the team than the product, knowing that the likelihood of the product changing and evolving is high. That means that the ability to adapt — including the systems in place to collect feedback and willingness to continue iterating — are incredibly important factors. Vernal will not only stress the importance of tempo and product iteration (and how it relates to fundraising success)...