Category: TECHNOLOGY
Discord is giving voice channels their own text-based chat rooms
Discord is giving its voice channels text-based chat too. The company announced Wednesday that it would roll out text chat for the platform’s voice-based chat rooms, adding a way for anyone hanging out out loud to easily share links and other text without having to channel hop to go find it.
The feature will roll out globally to all Discord servers by June 15. Servers that haven’t enabled community features will see text chat for voice pop up right off the bat, while community servers will need to opt into the new feature.
Image Credits: Discord
Discord tends to be keenly aware of community pain points and the measures its enthusiastic users take to make things work for their communities. Splicing text chat into voice-based chat channels gives those communities some overdue functionality to make their experience of the platform a bit smoother.
In big Discord servers, it’s not uncommon to see voice chat channels with their own dedicated text-based chat channel, a workaround that gets out of hand quickly when you’ve got a ton of different voice chat rooms. The new feature rollout will solve the need for redundant channels that people have to go digging around for if they want to share something they just mentioned via voice.
Like normal text-based channels, text chat in voice channels will allow Discord users to share links, messages, emojis, GIFs and stickers. Mods can customize these permissions on a granular level like they’re able to with existing text chat channels.
Server members who don’t want to voice chat will still be able to check out a channel’s shared text and links by hovering over the channel and selecting the chat icon.
Discord notes that mods and server owners can choose which voice channels will have text chat enabled and who is able to use the text chat feature within voice channels, based on permissions level. The company says that it worked with developers before the launch so many moderation bots are ready to handle text chat in voice channels out of the gate.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/discord-text-chat-for-voice-channels/
Costa Rica’s public health system hit by Hive ransomware following Conti attacks
Costa Rica’s public health service, known as the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS), has been forced to take its systems offline after being hit by Hive ransomware.
In a statement on Twitter, the CCSS said the attack started early on Tuesday morning and that an investigation was being conducted. It added that several payroll and pension databases – including the Unified Digital Health system and the Centralized Tax-Collection System – were not affected by the attack. In an address to local media, the CCSS added that the Hive ransomware was deployed on at least 30 out of 1,500 government servers and that any estimation of time to recovery remains unknown.
Several employees of the CCSS said they were told to shut down their computers after all of their printers began spitting out unintelligible documents. Another employee said that as a result of the attack, COVID-19 results cannot currently be reported.
The attack comes just weeks after Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency in the country in response to cyberattacks from the Conti ransomware group. Costa Rica’s Finance Ministry was the first government body to be hit by the Russia-linked hacking group, and in a statement on May 16, Chaves said the number of institutions impacted had since grown to 27.
In a message posted to its dark web leaks blog at the time, Conti urged the citizens of Costa Rica to pressure their government to pay the ransom, which the group doubled from an initial $10 million to $20 million. In a separate statement, the group warned: “We are determined to overthrow the government by means of a cyber attack, we have already shown you all the strength and power.”
Cybersecurity experts have suggested that the cybercriminals behind this latest Hive ransomware attack could be working with the Conti gang to help the group rebrand and evade international sanctions targeting extortion payouts to cybercriminals operating in Russia.
According to threat intelligence company AdvIntel, Conti “can no longer sufficiently support and obtain extortion” due to its public allegiance to Russia in the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and believes the group is in the process of shutting down. The gang’s official website and negotiations service site has gone dark, while the rest of the infrastructure: from chatrooms to messengers, and from servers to proxy hosts was going through a major reset.
As a result, AdvIntel believes the gang has formed alliances with other ransomware groups, including Hive, a ransomware as a service (RaaS) operation that has been active since at least June 2021.
Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, tells TechCrunch: “The same individual could be an affiliate with both Conti and Hive and potentially other RaaS operations too. It’s also possible that Conti and Hive have established a working relationship, as other researchers have claimed.
“Some negotiating firms have refused to transact with Conti since they sided with Russia and threatened attacks on US critical infrastructure due to the risk …read more
How investors are playing offense right now (their words, our two cents)
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, we’re trying something new. Natasha spent a good chunk of last week at the All Raise VC summit, an annual off-the-record event that brings together some of the best and brightest in the investment community. After the summit, she sat down with Mandela SH Dixon — All Raise’s new CEO — to unpack what happened, and discuss how today’s changing venture capital market will impact diverse founders.
The first half of this episode is a conversation between Natasha and Mandela, and then we’ll bring on Alex and turn to some on-the-ground clips from the summit. Sound bytes from Freestyle’s Jenny Lefcourt, January Ventures’ Jennifer Neundorfer, Rethink Impact’s Heidi Patel and Union Square Ventures’ Rebecca Kaden will get the classic Equity treatment. Or, put differently, Alex and Natasha will react to top investors talking about their game plans for the next market cycle. It’s fun!
Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Join SOSV’s Climate Tech Meetup on June 13
Global venture firm SOSV is one of the most active investors in climate tech and — as a partner of TechCrunch Sessions: Climate — you’re invited to attend the SOSV Climate Tech Meetup on June 13, from 6-9 pm at the Brower Center in downtown Berkeley. This event will feature teams from SOSV’s HAX (Hard tech: Newark and Shenzhen) and IndieBio (Life sciences: San Francisco and NYC) startup development programs.
Meetup tickets are just $20 for general admission and $5 for students. Register here.
Key players from HAX include Susan Schofer, partner and CSO, and Garrett Winther, partner. Key players from IndieBio include Pae Wu, general partner and CTO; Mohan Iyer, general partner; Alex Kopelyan and Parikshit Sharma, partners. To see SOSV’s top climate investments, check out the SOSV Climate Tech 100.
SOSV accepts deep tech, pre-seed companies into its HAX and IndieBio programs and, in 4-6 month programs, it provides daily, 1:1, in-person, expert assistance to founders on the full technology spectrum including product and company-building challenges, as well as labs and fabrication facilities. SOSV‘s initial investment is $275-500K, and SOSV continues to invest through series seed, A and beyond. It also works closely with founders to bring in new investors long after the program ends.
Join the SOSV, HAX and IndieBio teams at the June 13 meetup for great networking opportunities over beer, wine and snacks.
TC Sessions: Climate 2022 takes place in person on June 14 at UC Berkley’s Zellerbach Hall with an online event on June 16. Literally hundreds of leading climate tech founders, investors and scientists will be in the house. Join them: Buy your pass today and save before prices go up at the door.
Registering for this meetup does not gain admission to the main conference on June 14 nor the online day on June 16.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/join-sosvs-climate-tech-meetup-on-june-13/
WorkOS raises $80M to add enterprise features like SSO to apps
WorkOS, a platform that lets developers add enterprise features like single sign-on (SSO) and directory sync to apps, today announced that it raised $80 million in a Series B funding round led by Greenoaks with participation from Lachy Groom, Lightspeed Ventures, and Abstract Ventures. The closing of the round coincides with the WorkOS’ first acquisition: Modulz, the company behind the user interface (UI) framework Radix. In an email Q&A with TechCrunch, CEO Michael Grinich said that both the cash and purchase would support WorkOS’ hiring and product development initaitives.
Grinich founded WorkOS in 2020, roughly three years after leaving Nylas, the eponymous company behind the open source email client Nylas, after Nylas shuttered the app and pivoted to sales infrastructure. He said he was spurred to launch WorkOS by the challenge of creating enterprise systems and software like SSO, audit logs, access control, and more. One recent survey of enterprise development managers found that 85% have a backlog of between one and 20 mobile apps, illustrating the time-consuming nature of business app development.
“There a lot of fragmentation across services used by IT. In just identity systems alone, you have Okta, Azure AD, ADFS, OneLogin, Ping, Shibboleth, and dozens more,” Grinich said, pointing to a candid blog post by Roberta Arcoverde, the director of engineering at Stack Overflow, who admitted that it took a team of three Stack Overflow engineers working for three months to add SSO to the company’s business and enterprise platforms. “This fragmentation leads to headache for developers wanting to integrate across all systems. And that’s where WorkOS comes in.”
WorkOS offers a set of building blocks for adding enterprise features to apps, like OAuth (to enable sign-in with third-party providers including Google and Microsoft), “magic links” via email for passwordless authentication, and support for SAML-based providers (which allow users to use one set of credentials across different websites). The platform can also help sync an app with enterprise employee directory systems, Grinich claims, with a dashboard that lets customers manage connected identity providers and directories.
Using the WorkOS interface to pilot ‘enterprise’ capabilities.
“WorkOS helps companies become ‘enterprise ready.’ This lets companies quickly grow upmarket and effectively unlocks revenue for them. This is a big deal for post-product market fit startups,” Grinich said.
Grinich claims that WorkOS has over 200 paying customers today including Vercel, Stripe, Scale, and Airtable. While demurring when asked about revenue numbers, he asserted that the latest financing round was “very competitive,” noting that it brings WorkOS’ total raised to about $100 million.
“We sometimes hear developers compare us to Auth0, but they exclusively focus on authentication whereas WorkOS is looking to solve the wider challenge of becoming ‘enterprise ready,’” Grinich said, responding to a question about competitors and addressable market. “We haven’t seen a slowdown here, but we’re also an infrastructure company. Our growth is the aggregate sum of all our customers’ growth.”
The Modulz acquisition telegrams WorkOS’ ambitions. Founded in 2018 by Colm Tuite and Stephen Haney, Dublin-based Modulz, which had …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/workos-raises-80m-to-add-enterprise-features-like-sso-to-apps/
How to attend today’s TechCrunch (virtual) event in Columbus, Ohio
TechCrunch is thrilled to be shining the spotlight on one of my favorite cities, Columbus, Ohio. TechCrunch Live is hosting a special, extended event today, and we hope you can join us. It’s free, it’s (mostly) live, and the event features some of the best startups, business leaders, and investors from the great state of Ohio.
The event streams live on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter Spaces, but if you register for Hopin, you can chat with other participants, and participate directly in the event.
In the meantime, the following articles set the scene and explain the opportunities and challenges facing the growing ecosystem.
Agenda for TechCrunch Live in Columbus!
Columbus Unicorns with Olive and Drive Capital (3:00 pm EDT)
Olive is a homegrown Columbus unicorn; hear from the CEO and lead investor how the company was built and raised $856 million since its founding in 2012.
- Sean Lane, Olive CEO
- Chris Olsen, Drive Capital Founding Partner
Raising startup capital (3:30 pm EDT)
Ohio isn’t Silicon Valley, and yet there are numerous venture capital funds eager to write checks to early-stage founders. Join this session and hear from two investors on which industries are thriving in Columbus, and which sort of founders fit best in this scene.
- Janine Sickmeyer, Overlooked Ventures
- Wolf Starr, CEO Atlas Partners
Work for a startup in Columbus (4:00 pm EDT)
Columbus, like many major American cities, is home to industry giants with hundreds of workers toiling away in cubicles. But startups are hiring! Hear from two local leaders on who’s hiring, and what startups look for in new employees.
- Erika Pryor, Denison University
- Alex “Fro” Frommeyer, CEO Beam Dental
- Ryan Landau, CEO Purpose Jobs
Pitch Competition (4:20 pm EDT)
Judges
- Anna Mason, Managing Partner, Rise of the Rest Seed Fund at Revolution
- Parul Singh, General Partner, Initialized Capital
Found Live with Claire Coder, CEO of Aunt Flow (5:00 pm EDT)
Aunt Flow is an innovative startup from Columbus, Ohio that supplies 23,000 bathrooms with essential feminine products. The company’s clients include Apple, Meta and more. Hear from the company’s CEO Claire Coder about the pains of raising capital in Ohio, and scaling her company to 40 employees during this special Found Live podcast recording.
- Claire Coder, CEO and Founder of Aunt Flow
- Darrell and Jordan
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/how-to-attend-todays-techcrunch-virtual-event-in-columbus-ohio/
Columbus, Ohio is quickly becoming the Midwest’s tech hub
City Spotlight: Columbus
Where the Olentangy and Scioto rivers come together lies the city of Columbus, Ohio, a bedrock town famously known as “Test City, USA,” boasting demographics that mirrored the country’s population, and the home of The Ohio State University. It is steadily becoming an emerging tech scene in the Midwest where startups are finding all the tools needed to develop burgeoning businesses.
Venture capitalists injected over $3 billion into the city over the past 20 years, particularly in healthcare and insurance startups, according to Crunchbase data. Investment into the city startups started picking up around 2017 and really peaked in 2021.
That’s when investment essentially doubled, going from $583 million in 2020 to just over $1 billion, with half of those dollars going into two companies: healthcare technology company Olive and autonomous robotics company Path Robotics. So far in 2022, $110 million has gone into Columbus startups.
Olive is now valued at over $4 billion and is among Columbus success stories like CoverMyMeds, a healthcare software company that was acquired by the McKesson Corp. in 2017 for $1.4 billion, which represents Central Ohio’s first $1 billion exit. Root Insurance, which raised over $800 million since 2015, went public in 2020. Other notable raises include Forge Biologics’ $120 million Series B round, which was thought to be Ohio’s largest Series B to date. Forge plans to add 200 new jobs by 2023.
Attend the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Columbus event on Wednesday, June 1.
Register for the free virtual event here.
Columbus has also caught the eye of enterprises, including Facebook, Amazon and now Intel, which announced earlier this year that it will build two chip factories outside of the city that will provide 3,000 company jobs and many more thousands of indirect jobs. Meanwhile, therapeutics company Amgen announced last November that it is building a new biomanufacturing facility in New Albany, one of Columbus’ suburbs, providing 400 jobs for assembling and packaging medicines.
All of this activity, plus a low cost of living, availability of a young, skilled talent pool and public/private partnerships eager to support entrepreneurs, research and innovation, is why TechCrunch has chosen to spotlight Columbus’ growing startup scene with a special episode of TechCrunch Live.
Register for the live event here!
Image Credits: Shep McAllister (opens in a new window) / Unsplash
Startup Central
Nick Potts, co-founder and CEO of prescription startup GiftHealth, is a veteran of the Columbus startup scene, having joined CoverMyMeds when it was fewer than 50 employees. He went on to co-found medication delivery company ScriptDrop in 2016 and now GiftHealth in 2020.
Potts called the city “an absolute talent hotbed for healthtech” and one where “countless people in Columbus graciously give me their time to ask questions, learn from them and pitch ideas to them” throughout his startup journey.
“Columbus has smart, driven and experienced …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/columbus-ohio-is-quickly-becoming-the-midwests-tech-hub/
Startups in Columbus, Ohio are thriving and hiring
City Spotlight: Columbus
Amid a wave of nationwide tech layoffs, tech hubs like Columbus, Ohio are still seeing growth and hiring for the future.
There’s little doubt Columbus, Ohio is becoming one of the fastest growing tech hubs – not just in the Midwest, but in the country. And with that comes the challenges of finding and hiring a proper workforce. Now in 2022, Columbus is a growing ecosystem of tech talent, startup pros, active venture capital firms, and Silicon Valley expats.
Like its Midwest neighbors, Columbus got its start as a major manufacturing hub in the early 20th century. To this day, Ohio is still home to much of the country’s manufacturing jobs, but over the years the Columbus economy has shifted toward financial institutions, major retailers, and healthcare companies.
Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the population of Columbus closely mirrored the larger U.S. population, and the city became known as a test market for new products. That attitude for trying new things, plus the community’s expertise from major Fortune 1000 companies (like JP Morgan Chase, Nationwide, State Farm, Cardinal Health, and L Brands) has created a fertile environment for startups, especially in fintech and insurtech.
In the 2010s pivotal players stepped into the scene. Established in 2011, JobsOhio (one of the top economic development organizations in the country) was founded to help drive job creation and new capital investment in Ohio. And in 2013, two ex-Sequoia investors moved from Silicon Valley to take a bet on Columbus. Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen founded Drive Capital, a venture firm that recognizes all the opportunities that lie in between the coasts.
Attend the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Columbus event on Wednesday, June 1.
Register for the free virtual event here.
Now, Drive Capital manages $1.2 billion, features twelve partners, has interest from 7,000 startups each year, and has a stake in some of the biggest players in the Midwest startup and tech scene. Olive, Drive’s first investment, is a healthcare AI startup that’s now valued at $4 billion.
Ever since, Columbus has exploded as a startup city, with new funding opportunities, top engineering talent from experienced industries as well as local universities (The Ohio State University being the largest), and a whole lot of excitement from major startup wins. After the acquisition of CoverMyMeds by McKesson Corp. in 2017 for $1.4 billion (Central Ohio’s first $1B+ exit), Columbus was officially on the map as a serious startup ecosystem.
“It’s the beginning of the wave,” Mark Kvamme said of the startup ecosystem during the Purpose Jobs State of the Columbus Startup Community event in 2021.
Funding in Columbus
One of the easiest indicators for spotting a successful startup hub is funding, and in …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/startups-in-columbus-ohio-are-thriving-and-hiring/
Why Intel chose Columbus, Ohio to build chips
There’s little doubt such a massive project will have a profound impact on New Albany that touts itself as “the Number One Suburb in America,” along with its surrounding areas. Ohio governor Mike DeWine happily touted the move as part of a broader push to bring more high-tech jobs to the Buckeye State.
“Today’s announcement is monumental news for the state of Ohio,” he
City Spotlight: Columbus
There are few things politicians love more than a ceremonial groundbreaking. They get to stand there in a hard hat and suit, surrounded by C-level executives, shoveling a pile of symbolic dirt. Pomp and circumstance aside, the true value in such an event are all of the things they’ve come to represent jobs, innovation, domestic production.
Not every groundbreaking works as intended. President Trump — who seemed to genuinely revel in any opportunity to don a hard hat — once touted a forthcoming Wisconsin Foxconn factory as the “the eighth wonder of the world.” The $10 billion project eventually became a $627 million one, as projected jobs dropped from 13,000 to 1,454.
Attend the TechCrunch City Spotlight: Columbus event on Wednesday, June 1.
Register for the free virtual event here.
On the other hand, when President Biden invited Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to his March 1 State of the Union, the president had plenty of reason to celebrate. The silicon giant announced a $20 billion investment set to bring a pair of manufacturing plants just outside of Columbus, Ohio — and with them, 7,000 construction jobs and an eventual 3,000 permanent roles. The timing couldn’t have been better, as the nation faces down a perfect storm of unemployment concerns and chip shortages, on top of the decades-old trend of offshoring manufacturing
The administration celebrated the news as “another sign of the strength of the American economy.” In his speech, Biden waxed poetic about what a project represented, noting, “If you travel 20 miles east of Columbus, Ohio, you’ll find a thousand empty acres of land. It won’t look like much. But if you stop and look closely, you’ll see a ‘field of dreams’ — the ground on which America’s future will be built.”
Intel tells TechCrunch that several cities were in contention for the manufacturing site, though it won’t disclose the specifics of those conversations, citing nondisclosure agreements. There are, undoubtedly, various reasons the Ohio capital ultimately made sense. For starters, there’s the very pragmatic concern of finding an area with enough space to accommodate a planned 1,000-acre campus with minimal impact on existing structures.
Beyond the basic land required, two other key factors came into play: local/state regulations and people. Speaking with TechCrunch, Keyvan Esfarjani, Intel’s executive vice president, chief global operations officer and general manager of Manufacturing, Supply Chain and Operations, explains, “You can have the best kind of regulatory environment and the best land for use, but you need to have a pipeline of talent. Columbus, Ohio, is a great place for diverse talent. It’s also around schools and has a population of folks that are very tied to the Midwest. They want to be there, they want to solve problems.”
The news arrives at a time when Columbus has entered the national spotlight as a high-tech …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/01/how-intel-landed-in-columbus/
Entertainment site Fandom adds long-requested creator features, ‘Interactive Wiki Maps’ and ‘Fandom Trivia’
Fandom, a wiki hosting service and fan platform with over 300 million monthly active users and 250,000 wiki communities, has just announced its newest features and tools, Interactive Wiki Maps and Fandom Trivia.
Creators on Fandom have known about Interactive Wiki Maps and Fandom Trivia via the community blog for over a year as the features have been tested and perfected. Today is the first time the platform is announcing the features to the public.
Interactive Wiki Maps introduces a customizable mapping tool that has been long-requested by the creator community. Fandom Trivia, meanwhile, is a built-in wiki feature that enables creators to enhance a fan’s experience and test their knowledge of every detail of the imagined worlds they can’t get enough of. Now, creators across all Fandom communities can design their own maps and quizzes to further immerse fans into imagined worlds that provide them with information about their favorite games, TV shows, and movies.
The features finally rolled out last month after a period of testing, bug fixes, and receiving feedback from creators. The team is still working on evolving the maps tools and implementing new features such as custom map markers and more.
Some examples of published maps include the world of “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and the planet Batuu from “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge.”
Image Credits: Fandom
The Interactive Wiki Maps feature was created using the open-source Leaflet JavaScript library and is defined using JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It can be built as a wiki page in the Map namespace and is embeddable in other pages with template transclusion. Transclusion is the use of the template functionality of MediaWiki to incorporate identical content in many documents without the need to edit those documents separately. The JSON file is the source editor and the underlying code. The team also built a much more intuitive editor on top of that.
Then, to make the creation of Interactive Maps available to everyone, Fandom created a visual editor tool that would simplify the building experience. This tool is similar to the current Theme Designer and allows users to comfortably upload a map image, place custom markers on the map, add descriptions, and more without needing to work with the JSON source code. Users who are familiar with JSON can still edit the code in the source editor.
This isn’t the first time Fandom has tried to implement maps. There was an older Wikia Maps feature attempted back in 2014; however, there were fewer resources in Fandom’s arsenal to pull off something that had the right tools and would garner enough user adoption.
Gamepedia, which was a separate wiki platform that Fandom acquired in 2018, had IP-specific solutions for interactive maps but was never centralized into one tool. The development team was smaller than Fandom’s current team as well. This new unified, customizable mapping tool is fulfilling a promise to creators that took years to perfect.
Fandom Trivia has also gone through a series of tests, especially the location of quizzes on …read more