Technology

Are the schmooze sessions, after-parties and secret dinners with investors that take place during tech conferences mere distractions, or are these events an opportunity for founders to close a deal?

Which parties should you attend? How do you get in? And above all, what outcome are you working toward?

Some events are small, while others are shows of pomp, power and pizzazz. &For me, this is a time to bring value to my portfolio,& says Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital. FoundationRSA 2020 event is a small gathering of 50 people who fall into one of three categories: buyers from Global 2000 companies, channel partners or portfolio CEOs.

&In particular, I am focused on helping seed-stage companies because they rarely get access to such a buyer universe,& Trivedi says. At the other end of the spectrum, some events will have several hundred attendees, which raises the odds of getting lost in a crowd.

&If the event has a well-curated attendee list, it makes it worthwhile for both sides. Often, I can scan the room in 15 minutes and know if I want to stay here,& said Ariel Tseitlin, a partner at Scale Venture Partners. Some conference events are hosted by top-tier investors and partnership-heavy corporate VCs, while others are driven by consulting groups that share market trends and research content. As one founder bemoaned, &why can&t we just have a Tinder for VC-CEO match-making?&

Bypassing the firewall

If you don&t have an invitation, I don&t advise just showing up at the door; these are well-guarded events. Gate-crashing is a good strategy for a 19-year-old (who has the maturity of a 12-year-old), but not for the rest of us. Some founders use a simple tactic: get an existing portfolio CEO to take you in as their guest. Most VCs love it when they get such an introduction; ita great start and much better than sending a cold email or a LinkedIn to the lead partner.

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who defied prejudice in the &50s and &60s to help NASA send the first men to the moon, has died at the age of 101. Only recently famous after the film &Hidden Figures& was made about her and her colleagues, she maintained until the end that she was &only doing her job.&

For those who don&t know Johnsonstory, it is probably best told by reading the book (by Margot Lee Shetterly) or watching the movie — which although it takes some license with the events and persons depicted, is a fascinating and revealing triple portrait of its three protagonists. NASA has also collected numerous historical accounts and anecdotes at a special memorial page.

Johnson and her colleagues struggled unceasingly against racism and sexism, being three women of color attempting to enter an industry which was, and even half a century later remains, dominated by white men. Although Johnson always said her colleagues at NASA were kind and professional, there were nevertheless systematic and deep-seated biases against her at every step of her journey.

After the filmrelease and acclaim, she treated her sudden fame with bemusement, happy to be recognized but insistent that she had only been doing her job. Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015 was certainly a welcome perk.

But Johnson may have been wary of an over-concentration of credit. She more than anyone would have been aware of the others in similar positions who, while they may not have been quite as instrumental or prominent in the moment — John Glenn famously asked before a flight that a mechanical computercalculations be checked by &the girl,& meaning Johnson — were nonetheless indispensable and quite as hidden.

These women, like Johnsoncolleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, not only challenged the racist and sexist zeitgeist of the time, but very simply helped America achieve what is perhaps its most historically remarkable achievement — the Apollo program — but also to aid in the invention and definition of multiple industries.

Johnson was a remarkable mind and person whose achievements went for too long unnoticed. Had she not been brought into the attention of popular culture, her achievements would likely never have been known outside a few colleagues and historians — and we would all be the poorer for it. Who, and where, are todayhidden figures, and would we recognize them if we saw them?

Netflix is adding a new feature that will rank the 10 most popular programs on its service in your country, the company announced today. Its top 10 Overall list will display the most popular programs from across all Netflix content, including both movies and shows. In addition, separate top 10 lists for just movies and shows will be available when you switch over to either the Movies or TV show tab in the app.

These lists will be updated daily, says Netflix, and are intended to help users find out what titles everyone is watching. Before, Netflix had rows featuring both popular and trending content — but these didn&t rank content in order.

The shows and films making the list will also receive a special &top 10& badge wherever they appear on Netflix. That means if you&re searching for something to watch or browsing through your recommendations, it will be easier to see if a top 10 program is among your search results or personalized suggestions.

Netflix says this is the first time it has ever rolled out a top 10 ranking system. But the company has been experimenting with the top 10 feature before today in markets including the U.K. and Mexico. Users responded well to those additions, which is why the company decided to roll out its top 10 lists worldwide, the company says.

The Top 10 list will appear on your Netflix homescreen, but the listactual position will vary based on how relevant the shows and films are to you. For example, if you only watched documentaries and horror, a top 10 list filled with teen rom-comand comedies may not appear as high on the screen for you as it would for others.

The list itself is also designed in a way that makes it stand out from the other rows of recommendations. Instead of just displaying image thumbnails of the titles, it includes big numerals to show how those titles are ranking.

&When you watch a great movie or TV show, you share it with family and friends, or talk about it at work, so other people can enjoy it too. We hope these top 10 lists will help create more of these shared moments, while also helping all of us find something to watch more quickly and easily,& explained Netflix in a statement about the launch.

The feature arrives at a time when Netflix is feeling the pressure from increased streaming competition. User growth in the U.S. has been falling short, at the same time that rights holders pull back their content for their own rival streaming services, like NBCUPeacock and AT-T/WarnerMediaHBO Max, for example. Netflix is producing more originals than ever, but many of these are now of middling quality or are cheaper-to-produce reality programs. It hasn&t yet won a series race at the Emmyand its big bet on Scorsese&The Irishman& was one of the bigger snubs from this yearOscars.

The company has never been fully transparent about viewership metrics. It only releases numbers when a show or film breaks a milestone of some sort — like &The Witcher& and the 76 million households who &chose to watch& the series (meaning they watched for at least two minutes, indicating an intentional choice). The company also dismisses third-party estimates, like those from Nielsen, as undercounting its true viewer numbers.

The top 10 list doesn&t offer any hard metrics, but can at least help point to popular programming and other breakout successes Netflix may have in the future.

The top 10 lists are rolling out now to users worldwide, so you may not see your list just yet. The above photos are only samples, not the current top 10 in a specific market, Netflix notes.

Deviceplane, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 class, is developing an open-source toolset to manage, monitor and update Linux devices running at the edge.

&We solve the hard infrastructure problems that all these companies face, including network conductivity, SSH access, orchestrating and deployment of remote updates, hosting, application monitoring and access and security controls. It100% open source, available under an Apache License. You can either host it yourself or you can run on the hosted version,& company founder and CEO Josh Curl told TechCrunch.

He could see this working with a variety of hardware, including robotics, consumer appliances, drones, autonomous vehicles and medical devices.

Curl, who has a background in software engineering, was drawn to this problem and found that most companies were going with home-grown solutions. He said once he studied the issue, he found that the set of infrastructure resources required to manage, monitor and update these devices didn&t change that much across industries.

The over-the-air updates are a big part of keeping these devices secure, a major concern with edge devices. &Security is challenging, and one of the core tenets of security is just the ability to update things. So if you as a company are hesitant to update because you&re afraid that things are going to break, or you don&t have a proper infrastructure to do those upgrades, that makes you more hesitant to do upgrades, and it slows down development velocity,& Curl said.

Customers can connect to the Deviceplane API via Wi-Fi, cellular or ethernet. If you&re worried about someone tapping into that, Curl says the software assigns the device a unique identity that is difficult to spoof.

&Devices are assigned an identity in Deviceplane and this identity is what authorizes it to make API calls to Deviceplane. The access key for this identity is stored only on the device, which makes it impossible for someone else to spoof this device without physical access to it.

&Even if someone were able to spoof this identity, they would not be able to deploy malicious code to the spoofed device. Devices never have access to control what software they&re running — this is something that can be done only by the developer pushing out updates to devices,& Curl explained.

The company intends to offer both the hosted version and installed versions of the software as open source, something that he considers key. He hopes to make money supporting companies with more complex installations, but he believes that by offering the software as open source, it will drive developer interest and help build a community around the project.

As for joining YC, Curl said he has friends that had been through the program in the past, and had recommended he join as well. Curl sees being part of the cohort as a way to build his business. &We were excited to be tapping into the YC network — and then being able to tap into that network in the future. I think that YC has funded many companies in the past that can be Deviceplane customers, and that can accelerate going forward.&

Curl wasn&t ready to share download numbers just yet, but itstill an early-stage startup looking to build the company. Itusing an open-source model to drive interest, while helping solve a sticky problem.

David Renteln, the Los Angeles-based co-founder of Soylent and the co-founder and chief executive of new nicotine gum manufacturer Lucy Goods, thinks there should be a better-tasting, less-medicinal offering for people looking to quit smoking.

Thatwhy he founded Lucy Goods, and thatwhy investors, including RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures and FundRX joined previous investors YCombinator and Greycroft in backing the company with $10 million in new funding.

&We reformulated nicotine gum and the improvements that we made were to the taste, the texture and the nicotine release speed,& said Renteln.

These days, any startup thatworking on smoking cessation or working with tobacco products can&t avoid comparisons to Juul — the multi-billion-dollar startup thatat the center of the surge in teen nicotine consumption.

&The Juul comparison is something thatobviously top of peopleminds,& Renteln said. &Itimportant to note that therea huge difference in nicotine products.&

Renteln points to statements from former Food and Drug Administration chief, Scott Gottlieb (whonow a partner at the venture firm New Enterprise Associates), which drew a distinction between combustible tobacco products on one end and nicotine gums and patches on the other.

&Nicotine isn&t the principle agent of harm associated with these tobacco products,& said Rentlen. &Itaddictive but not inherently bad for you.&

Lucy Goods also doesn&t release its nicotine dosage in a concentrated burst like vapes, which are designed to replicate the head rush associated with smoking a cigarette, said Renteln.

&It is a stimulant and they will get a sensation, but itnot as intense as taking a very deep drag of a cigarette,& Renteln said.

The companywebsite also doesn&t skew to young, lifestyle marketing images. Instead, there are testimonials from older, ex-smokers hawking the Lucy gum.

&I don&t want anyone underage using any nicotine product or any drug in general… [and] the flavors have been around for a long time.&

Joining Renteln in the quest to create a better nicotine gum is Samy Hamdouche, a former business development executive at several Southern California biotech startups and the previous vice president of research at Soylent.

For both men, the idea is to get a new product to market that can help people quit smoking — without a social stigma — Renteln said.

&Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States claiming over 480,000 lives every year and costing the U.S. an estimated $300 billion in direct health costs and lost productivity. Lucy is committed to bringing innovative nicotine products to the market to eliminate tobacco related harm and we&re proud to be part of their journey,& said RRE investor, Jason Black in a statement.

FacebookCreator Studio has added a mobile companion. The insights dashboard for creators and publishers, which debuted globally in August 2018, is now available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android. Similar to the desktop hub, the Creator Studio app allows users to track how their content is performing across Facebook Pages, as well as publish, schedule and make adjustments to posts, respond to fan messages and more.

Facebook Director of Entertainment for Northern Europe Anna Higgs took the stage at last weekVidCon London, along with creator Ladbaby, who has more than 4 million Facebook followers, to share the news of the new applaunch.

There are a few key areas where the app can be of use to creators and publishers, starting with its metrics and insights section. Here, users can analyze both Page and post-level insights, retention and distribution metrics in order to adjust their strategies accordingly. For example, they&ll find content performance metrics like &1-minute views,& &3-second views& and &avg. minutes viewed,& plus engagement metrics like comments and shares, and follower counts, earnings and more.

The app also serves as a mobile companion for viewing both published and scheduled posts, allowing creators to make quick adjustments like editing the video titles or descriptions. And they can use the app for deleting or expiring posts, rescheduling posts or publishing drafts.

From the inbox section, users can respond to incoming messages and comments while on the go.

Creators can toggle between their different accounts during the same session, instead of having to log out and back in as a different user. This could be helpful for those who have a large social media presence, as well as those whose business involves supporting multiple creator pages.

The Creator Studio app will also send out immediate notifications for key milestones and other important events.

This isn&t the first time Facebook has offered a dedicated app for its creator community. The company in 2017 debuted a Creator app that had also offered a unified inbox and analytics, among other things. But that app was shut down early last year, and creators were pointed toward the Pages Manager app or desktop version of Creator Studio instead. Before that, Facebook had offered a Mentions app that was only available for verified public figures and Pages.

The new Creator Studio app isn&t a direct replacement for the shuttered Creator app, as it sports a similar, though not identical feature set and a new user interface. It also notably lacks Instagram integration and the ability to upload and post new content — the latter which is contributing to poor user reviews, following the applaunch. Many complain theretoo much overlap with the Pages Monitor app, as well. But the missing features are something Facebook will likely address in the future, as it rolls out more functionality to the app.

Itworth noting that Facebookdesktop hub and app sport a name similar to YouTubeservice for creators — YouTube Studio, rebranded from YouTube Creator Studio in 2017. By including both &studio& and &creator& in the new appname, it will perform better in App Store search results — including those that appear when someone searches for the YouTube Studio app for creators. That reflects the competitive nature between the two companies, both hungry to woo video creator talent.

Facebooknew app is a free download on iOS and Android.