With the explosive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage — leading to data being siloed across countless different systems. That makes analysis challenging. To wit, according to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics.

Ideally, analysts need something that connects disparate enterprise systems, like business intelligence and analytics tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, leading employees to spend hours each day searching and gathering information. In search of an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he’d previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms.

“Tsai and I had worked on consumer technologies for many years, and we saw a big opportunity to bring consumer-grade experiences to companies,” Loiwal told TechCrunch in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early engineer at location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most data products are designed for the technical user, which results in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity that they expect in their consumer lives.”

To this end, Coefficient — which today closed an $18 million Series A funding round — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users have to complete daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform lays on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel forthcoming), bringing in data from customer relationship management (CRMs) systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools.

Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards and decks and revenue analyses), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts within their spreadsheets.

“Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, yet business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data — requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeat, manual analysis, reducing team efficiency and productivity,” Loiwal said. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling the business to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they’re working: in spreadsheets.”

That’s a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like UIs to organize business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with granular access controls.

Indeed, at first glance, Coefficient sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates for getting started.

But to its credit, Coefficient got off to an auspicious start — Loiwal claims that Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Combined, tens of thousands of people are currently using the platform.

“We are seeing our customers grow their contracts with us despite undergoing layoffs — a testament to the value proposition of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased remote work and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.”

Loiwal says that the proceeds from the Series A will be put toward expanding Coefficient’s product offerings and “scaling global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools.

Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital.

Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added: “It is a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting use of the product throughout the organization … Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed to reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”

Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/coefficient-live-data-excel-google-sheets-spreadsheets/

Twitter’s most senior cybersecurity staffer Lea Kissner has departed the social media giant.

Kissner announced the move in a tweet on Thursday, saying they made the “hard decision” to leave Twitter, but did not say for what reason they resigned. Elon Musk completed a $44 billion takeover of Twitter two weeks ago, resulting in layoffs affecting more than half of the company and the departure of senior executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, general counsel Sean Edgett, and legal policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

News of Kissner’s departure was first reported by Casey Newton. Twitter’s chief compliance officer, Marianne Fogarty, and chief privacy officer, Damien Kieran, reportedly also resigned on Wednesday, Newton said, citing messages shared in Twitter Slack that he’s seeing.

It’s not immediately clear who is responsible for Twitter’s day-to-day security operations following Kissner’s departure. A spokesperson for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We have also reached out to Kissner, Kieran and Fogarty for comment and will update this post as and when we hear more. Anyone reading this who would like to pass on more information about this or other Twitter stories can also contact us via channels here.

Kissner previously served as Twitter’s head of privacy engineering and was appointed Twitter’s chief information security officer (CISO) in January 2022 following the departure of security head Peiter “Mudge” Zatko and then-CISO Rinki Sethi. Mudge went on to blow the whistle to federal regulators claiming security mismanagement and lax access controls that put users’ data at risk.

Twitter is currently under a 2011 agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, which accused Twitter of cybersecurity failings that allowed cybercriminals to access internal systems and user data.

The decree mandates that Twitter “establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program” to be audited every decade. It’s not clear how Twitter maintains that compliance with the FTC without a company security lead in place. One employee said in a company Slack that it was for Twitter engineers to “self-certify” compliance with the FTC.

“All of this is extremely dangerous for our users,” a message quoted by Newton said. “Given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.”

An essay this week in the MIT Technology Review outlined how current staffing at Twitter, which laid off half its staff at the end of last week, would make operating the company and its platform unsustainable, and it feels like the wheels might be coming off even faster than critics thought they would.

Even before this the company had been facing a number of security and data protection issues. In two from earlier this year, Twitter was fined $150 million in May for violating that 2011 consent decree for misusing email addresses and phone numbers provided by users to set up two-factor authentication for targeted advertising. In August, it revealed (and patched) a security vulnerability that allowed threat actors to compile information of 5.4 million Twitter accounts, which were listed for sale on a known cybercrime forum.

Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner departs by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/twitter-lea-kissner-departs/

A startup that wants to democratize data in the enterprise? That may sound awfully familiar, but Directus, which is announcing a $7 million Series A round led by True Ventures today, is taking a different approach to most of its competitors by combining traditional developer tools with a no-code approach to offer a highly flexible open-source data platform for its enterprise users. Using the service’s tools, developers can easily turn any SQL database into an API to power their apps — or use the service’s no-code tools to build apps that way, too.

Even though it only launched in 2020, the New York-based remote-first company has already added enterprises like Bose, Adobe and Tripadvisor to its roster of paying customers. And while the company itself is only a couple of years old now, Directus CEO and cofounder Ben Haynes actually started toying with the ideas that led to launching Directus as early as 2004 after leaving the Air Force and starting a web consultancy business.

“What I identified was that there’s a lot of repetition in the engineering being done — the authentication and authorization, the connectivity, the database, the data access, caching,” Haynes explained. “That’s all for building the deliverable, but once you hand that off, you need a way to manage it.”

At the time, that mostly involved a CMS like WordPress or maybe Drupal and database administration tools for the LAMP stack like phpMyAdmin. But there weren’t any great tools for building out the information architecture for new projects, so Haynes ended up coding the first versions of what would become Directus himself. And while he kept working on it as a side project during stints at SoulCyle and AOL, it only became a full-time job and a startup in 2020 when he and his co-founder Rijk van Zanten started getting more serious inquiries for this tool that they had previously only used in their consultancy business. Today’s Directus is obviously not a PHP app anymore. It’s been completely rewritten and sits on top of a modern Jamstack platform.

Maybe the best way to describe the Directus users experience today is as a mix of a code-centric database management tool and the service’s Airtable-like Directus Studio no-code tool.

As Haynes stressed, the company isn’t in the business of managing the databases themselves. Instead, it can sit on top of any SQL database. “The database is not part of our platform,” he noted. “That is your data. You have authority. We layer on a database administrator administration tool. We try to provide tools and a portal into that database, for your schema, your optimizations, your foreign key constraints — whatever you’ve optimized, that remains completely untouched. We don’t commingle any of our system data. If you delete our software, six months or six years later, it’s completely pristine.”

And while business users can use the service, too, the core audience — even for the no-code/low-code tool, is developers. “We remain exclusively focused on the developer as our ideal customer profile. We are talking and working with developers,” Haynes said. He argued that services like Retool or Airtable are no-code platforms first that then try to backfill the technology. “You end up with a band aid — a stopgap solution that maybe developers aren’t going to be happy with when it needs to scale,” he said. “We are database first, then API, then the connectivity, and then no-code.”

This developer focus is also exemplified by the fact that the service offers REST and GraphQL APIs to connect to its service, on top of a command line interface and a JavaScript SDK.

Image Credits: Directus

For developers, this means they get a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the tool and manipulate their data (no matter whether that’s text, images or geographic data). The tool is available as open-source as well as a freemium fully-managed service with prices for the paid tiers starting at $25/month.

The company now has 25 employees and has raised a total of $8.5 million. In addition to True Ventures leading this Series A round, Handshake Ventures also participated.

“Empowering non-technical users with no-code tools is a massive shift underway in the corporate world,” said True Ventures Co-founder Phil Black, who will join the Directus Board of Directors. “Directus is an open-source project that has been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. Among many benefits, the software helps teams greatly reduce the hours developers might spend creating data-driven projects. What’s more, we like how the founding team spent time deep in this problem prior to starting Directus. Hands-on struggle begets innovation.”

Directus wants to democratize data across the enterprise by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/directus-wants-to-democratize-data-across-the-enterprise/

While the world digests the fact that FTX could be heading to zero, Elon Musk continues to make headlines with changes to Twitter policy — at times seemingly on the fly — and results from the U.S. midterm elections still trickling in, there could be some fair winds blowing for tech companies.

This morning, the United States released new inflation numbers, with CNBC reporting that the consumer price index, or CPI, was up 0.4% in October and up 7.7% from the same month one year ago. Given expectations of 0.6% and 7.9% expansion, respectively, the report counted as an unexpected bit of positive news.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Why? Because if inflation is cooling, then the pace at which the U.S. Federal Reserve will raise interest rates may slow. Slower rate increases would shift the calculus for investors, making assets like stocks — and tech stocks in particular — more attractive, and more conservative investments less so on a relative basis.

As inflation slows, did we just see the bottom for tech stocks? by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/as-inflation-slows-did-we-just-see-the-bottom-for-tech-stocks/

Roku announced today that the home screen menu will now include a new “Sports” tab that gives sports fans instant access to sports events, upcoming events and on-demand sports-related content. The feature on the Roku Home Screen has already begun to roll out to some users and will be gradually added to all Roku devices in the coming weeks, a Roku spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Within the Sports tab, users will see an array of dedicated rows, including a row with games that are currently live, upcoming sports events, as well as leagues, conferences, and the option to browse by sport, whether that be pro basketball, college basketball, soccer, hockey, and so forth. There will also be rows for free sports content, sports-related shows, as well as sports documentaries and movies.

Once the user makes a selection, they’ll see several viewing options, such as Apple TV, DIRECTV, FOX Sports, FuboTV, Paramount+, Peacock, Prime Video, Sling, The Roku Channel, TNT, TBS, and truTV. The company noted that more streaming apps would be added in the coming months.

The purpose of Roku’s sports hub is to simplify sports discovery by giving users a better way to find sports content across various platforms. Previously, if Roku users wanted to watch a specific live event, they had to click through multiple streaming apps or channels to find it. Rival Amazon made a similar announcement last month when it launched a new dedicated “Sports News & Highlights” row on the home screen of Fire TVs.

Roku wrote in its official blog that a “centralized location” for sports was requested by 61% of users, according to a poll. There were 1,400 active Roku users who responded to the poll, which was conducted via the online survey tool Qualtrics in September 2021, said the Roku spokesperson.

“We know that keeping track of where sports are being streamed has only become more fragmented over the past few years,” said Alex Hill, Director of Live & Sports, Roku, in a statement. “Watching your favorite teams should be simple, so we’ve made it a priority to build out a more seamless and streamlined way to discover and watch sports on our platform.”

While sports content on The Roku Channel is slim, the company can’t help but promote its streaming service as well. The Roku Channel’s newest exclusive series “The Rich Eisen Show,” will get its own dedicated row within the Sports tab for users to stream all the latest episodes of the sports and entertainment talk show.

The company also highlights the new Roku Original series “Emeril Tailgates” in its announcement, which features celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse creating new recipes for game day.

Roku’s home screen gains a new ‘Sports’ tab for users to access live and on-demand sports content by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/rokus-home-screen-gains-a-new-sports-tab-for-users-to-access-live-and-on-demand-sports-content/

Mental health problems – and the tech products which aim at them – come in all shapes and sizes. There are ‘mental wellness’ products like Calm and Headspace. On the more severe side of things there is Cerebral, Betterhelp, and, of course, marketplaces for actual, card-carrying therapists. If you have more moderate mental health problems there are players such as Noom (raised $657.3M) with NoomMood, NASDAQ-listed Talkspace with Lasting, and Youper (raised $3.5M) which offers self-guided CBT therapy.

Also in the CBT field there are chatbots like Woebot (raised $123.3M) and Journals like Alan Mind that leverage CBT.

In this ‘moderate mental health’ problems space is also Bloom, a New York-based digital mental health “self-therapy” startup that claims it can help with mild to moderate mental health problems.

The startup says its users become “their own therapist” by using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) via video self-therapy sessions, to address stress, anxiety, and sleep issues. All the sessions are devised by Dr. Seth Gillihan, author on CBT and Bloom’s Head of Therapy and CBT.

It’s now secured a $8m seed round, led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. Also participating was Elysian Park Ventures, Angelpad and Sequoia Scout, plus founders as Scott Chacon (Github), Dominik Richter (HelloFresh), Niklas Jansen (Blinkist), Roland Grenke (Dubsmash), Joshua Cornelius & Mehmet Yilmaz (Freeletics), Ryan Bubinski (Codecademy),  Mariya Nurislamova (Scentbird). So a pretty European-band line-up of Angels.

Leon Mueller, Bloom’s CEO and co-founder says “Bloom is doing for therapy what Calm and Headspace have done for meditation – making it affordable, accessible, mainstream and everyday” (he said in a statement).

He and cofounder Daniel Lohse say they got the idea for Bloom after moving to New York last year and each trying to find therapists.

“Self-therapy” startups are blooming in the ‘moderate mental health’ space by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/self-therapy-startups-are-blooming-in-the-moderate-mental-health-space/

More than 10 days after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk addressed the company’s employees for the first time in a series of emails. He talked about ending remote work and making the fight against spam a priority.

According to a report from Bloomberg, the new CEO asked workers to be ready for “difficult times ahead.” At the same time, he asked them to mandatorily work from the office unless an employee received a personal exemption. The report also said that the employees will have to put in at least 40 hours per week working from the office and these policies are effective immediately.

This is not really surprising as, during a Q&A with Twitter staff in June, Musk said only “exceptional” employees would be able to work remotely. Around the same time, he ended the remote work policy for Tesla employees and asked them to spend at least 40 hours a week in the office.

During the first few days after taking control of Twitter, Musk fired top executives, tweeted about introducing new verification and subscription plans, and laid off half of the staff. But he just got time to address the remaining employees. All this while, the staff was living in uncertainty about the direction of the company and how their roles would change.

The billionaire has set aggressive product deadlines after promising to bring a ton of features through a bunch of tweets. Now deleted tweets from employees suggested that they had to sleep at the office to meet some of these new product deadlines.

Earlier this month, Musk also eliminated company-wide rest days that were introduced during the pandemic. In 2020, Twitter was one of the first companies to allow employees to work remotely forever.

The Bloomberg report also noted that, in a separate email, Musk asked Twitter staff to make it a priority to battle verified spam, bots and impersonation. After he announced the plans to introduce new verification through a paid program, a bunch of legacy verified accounts changed their profile to imitate Musk. In response, he said that any verified account indulging in impersonation will be banned.

On Thursday, the social network debuted its new Twitter Blue program for $8 a month allowing people to buy out verified check marks. Soon after the roll-out, a bunch of accounts started impersonating brands, athletes and officials across the world. In the terms of the new subscription plan, Twitter has specified that new accounts can’t sign up for this offering yet. The company has taken this step to possibly reduce spam. It is also preventing existing verified accounts from changing their display names.

“Twitter Blue subscribers will be unable to change their display name after receiving a blue checkmark. We will be implementing a new process soon for any display name changes,” the terms read. 

So overall, the company has had a messy start to the Musk era with an extremely rough rollout to an ambitious subscription program.

In his first emails to Twitter staff, Musk talks about ending remote work and battling verified spam by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/in-his-first-emails-to-twitter-staff-musk-talks-about-ending-remote-work-and-battling-verified-spam/

Reddit is rolling out a new “community muting” feature to give users more control over what they do and don’t want to see on the platform. The new feature is launching on Reddit’s mobile apps over the next few weeks. Reddit plans to expand the feature to the desktop version of its platform in the coming months.

You can use the new feature to mute an entire community, after which posts from that specific community will be removed from your notifications, Home feed and Popular feed. Users have to ability to mute up to 1,000 communities. Reddit notes that muting a community doesn’t restrict you from visiting or taking part in it, as you will still be able to view, post and comment in communities you have muted. If you change your mind, you can unmute a community at any time in your Settings, where you can also manage community notifications and other preferences.

Reddit says it plans to incorporate muting into other feeds after bringing the feature to desktop in the future, such as the All and Discover pages. The company says it sees muting as part of a larger effort to give users more control over their Reddit experience.

There are three ways you can go about muting a community. You can do so through your settings, via the three dots menu in the top right of a community page or through the three dots menu on the top right corner of your Popular and Home feeds.

The company says that although muting allows users to create a more curated experience, it’s not a replacement for reporting content that breaks its policies.

The new feature is a welcome addition to the platform, as it will help users filter out content they don’t want to see on their popular and home feeds. The launch of the new feature isn’t exactly a surprise, given that Reddit

Reddit app revamp adds a Discover Tab for finding communities, new navigation