Technology

A new startup called Notivize aims to give product teams direct access to one of their most important tools for increasing user engagement — notifications.

The company has been testing the product with select customers since last year and says it has already sent hundreds of thousands of notifications. And this week, it announced that it has raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Heroic Ventures .

Notivize co-founder Matt Bornski has worked at a number of startups, including AppLovin and Wink, and he said he has &so many stories I can tell you about the time it takes to change a notification thatdeeply embedded in your stack.&

To be clear, Bornski isn&t talking about a simple marketing message thatpart of a scheduled campaign. Instead, he said that the &most valuable& notifications (e.g. the ones that users actually respond to) are usually driven by activity in an app.

For example, it might sound obvious to send an SMS message to a customer once the product they&ve purchased has shipped, but Bornski said that actually creating a notification like that would normally require an engineer to write new code.

&Therethe traditional way that these things are built: The product team specs out that we need to send this email when this happens, or send this SMS or notification when this happens, then the engineering team will go in and find the part of the code where they detect that such a thing has happened,& he said. &What we really want to do is give [the product team] the toolkit, and I think we have.&

So with Notivize, non-coding members of the product and marketing team can write &if-then& rules that will trigger a notification. And this, Bornski said, also makes it easier to &A/B test and optimize your copy and your send times and your channels& to ensure that your notifications are as effective as possible.

He added that companies usually don&t build this for themselves, because when they&re first building an app, it¬ a rational thing to invest your time and effort in when you&re just testing the market or you&re struggling for product market fit.& Later on, however, it can be challenging to &go in and rip out all the old stuff& — so instead, you can just take advantage of what Notivize has already built.

Bornski also emphasized that the company isn&t trying to replace services that provide the &plumbing& for notifications. Indeed, Notivize actually integrates with SendGrid and Twilio to send the notifications.

&The actual sending is not the core value [of what we do],& he said. &We&re improving the quality of what you&re paying for, of what you send.&

Notivize allows customers to send up to 100 messages per month for free. After that, pricing starts at $14.99 per month.

&The steady march of low-code and no-code solutions into the product management and marketing stack continues to unlock market velocity and product innovation,& said Heroic Ventures founder Michael Fertik in a statement. &Having been an early investor in several developer platforms, it is clear that Notivize has cracked the code on how to empower non-technical teams to manage critical yet complex product workflows.&

The &Sent viaSuperhuman iOS& email signature has become one of the strangest flexes in the tech industry, but its influence is enduring, as the $30 per month invite-only email app continues to shape how a wave of personal productivity startups are building their business and product strategies.

I had a chance to chat with Superhuman CEO and founder Rahul Vohra earlier this month during an oddly busy time for him. He had just announced a dedicated $7 million angel fund with his friend Todd Goldberg (which I wrote up here) and we also noted that LinkedIn is killing off Sales Navigator, a feature driven by Rapportive, which Vohra founded and later sold in 2012. All the while, his buzzy email company is plugging along, amassing more interested users. Vohra tells me there are now more than 275,000 people on the waitlist for Superhuman.

Below is a chunk of my conversation with Vohra, which has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: When you go out to raise funding and a chunk of your theoretical user base is sitting on a waitlist, is it a little tougher to determine the total market for your product?

Rahul Vohra: Thata good question. When we were doing our Series B, it was very easily answered because we&re one of a cohort of companies, that includes Notion and Airtable and Figma, where the addressable market — assuming you can build a product thatgood enough — is utterly enormous.

With my last company, Rapportive, there was a lot of conversation around, &oh, whatthe business model? Whatthe market? How many people need this?& This almost never came up in any fundraising conversation. People were more like, &well, if this thing works, obviously the market is basically all of prosumer productivity and that is, no matter how you define it, absolutely huge.&

There are plenty of accelerators aiming to sway young startups to join their ranks rather than apply to Y Combinator, but Pioneer‘s sell is a bit different.

First off, they are fully remote; founders selected to participate in the program chat with advisors via video chat. Second, Pioneer is largely looking at companies that aren&t companies yet, framing themselves as more of a &startup generator& than an accelerator that aims to help entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley zero in on exactly what kind of startup they want to build.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the accelerator, which is helmed by former YC partner Daniel Gross .

My interview with Gross had some interesting longer bouts I didn&t have space to include, so I&m including the salient bits here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: Remote work seems to have its challenges; how have you overcome some of the humps of being a remote accelerator?

Daniel Gross: My overall view is that remote can replace the majority of real-world interaction. But thereless inertia, if that makes sense, and so I think you can build real rapport and real relationships through a group video chat on the internet, but it will require much more thinking and effort around it than if you were just meeting up in the real world.

The FCC has officially and finally determined that the major wireless carriers in the U.S. broke the law by secretly selling subscribers& location data for years with almost no constraints or disclosure. But its Commissioners decry the $208 million penalty proposed to be paid by these enormously rich corporations, calling it ¬ properly proportioned to the consumer harms suffered.&

Under the proposed fines, T-Mobile would pay $91M; AT-T, $57M; Verizon, $48M; and Sprint, $12M. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media. This does not affect our coverage in the slightest.)

The case has stretched on for more than a year and a half after initial reports that private companies were accessing and selling real-time subscriber location data to anyone willing to pay. Such a blatant abuse of consumers& privacy caused an immediate outcry, and carriers responded with apparent chagrin — but often failed to terminate or even evaluate these programs in a timely fashion. It turns out they were run with almost no oversight at all, with responsibility delegated to the third party companies to ensure compliance.

Meanwhile the FCC was called on to investigate the nature of these offenses, and spent more than a year doing so in near-total silence, with even its own Commissioners calling out the agencylack of communication on such a serious issue.

Finally, in January, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai — who, it really must be noted here, formerly worked for one of the main companies implicated, Securus — announced that the investigation had found the carriers had indeed violated federal law and would soon be punished.

Today brings the official documentation of the fines, as well as commentary from the Commission. In the documents, the carriers are described as not only doing something bad, but doing it poorly — and especially in T-Mobilecase, continuing to do it well after they said they&d stop:

We find that T-Mobile apparently disclosed its customers& location information, without their consent, to third parties who were not authorized to receive it. In addition, even after highly publicized incidents put the Company on notice that its safeguards for protecting customer location information were inadequate, T-Mobile apparently continued to sell access to its customers& location information for the better part of a year without putting in place reasonable safeguards—leaving its customers& data at unreasonable risk of unauthorized disclosure

The general feeling seems to be that while itcommendable to recognize this violation and propose what could be considered substantial fines, the whole thing is, as Commissioner Rosenworcel put it, &a day late and a dollar short.&

The scale of the fines, they say, has little to do with the scale of the offenses — and thatbecause the investigation did not adequately investigate or attempt to investigate the scale of those offenses. As Commissioner Starks writes in a lengthy statement:

After all these months of investigation, the Commission still has no idea how many consumers& data was mishandled by each of the carriers.

We had the power—and, given the length of this investigation, the time—to compel disclosures that would help us understand the true scope of the harm done to consumers. Instead, the Notices calculate the forfeiture based on the number of contracts between the carriers and location aggregators, as well as the number of contracts between those aggregators and third-party location-based service providers. That is a poor and unnecessary proxy for the privacy harm caused by each carrier, each of which has tens of millions of customers that likely had their personal data abused.

Essentially, the FCC didn&t even look at the number or nature of actual harm — it just asked the carriers to provide the number of contracts entered into. As Starks points out, one such contract can and did sometimes represent thousands of individual privacy invasions.

We know there are many—perhaps millions—of additional victims, each with their own harms. Unfortunately, based on the investigation the FCC conducted, we don&t even know how many there were, and the penalties we propose today do not reflect that impact.

And why not go after the individual companies? Securus, Starks says, &behaved outrageously.& But they&re not being fined at all. Even if the FCC lacked the authority to do so, it could have handed off the case to Justice or local authorities that could determine whether these companies violated other laws.

As Rosenworcel notes in her own statement, the fines are also extraordinarily generous even beyond this minimal method of calculating harm:

The agency proposes a $40,000 fine for the violation of our rules—but only on the first day. For every day after that, it reduces to $2,500 per violation. The FCC heavily discounts the fines the carriers potentially owe under the law and disregards the scope of the problem. On top of that, the agency gives each carrier a thirty-day pass from this calculation. This thirty day &get-out-of-jail-free& card is plucked from thin air.

Given that this investigation took place over such a long period, itstrange that it did not seek to hear from the public or subpoena further details from the companies facilitating the violations. Meanwhile the carriers sought to declare a huge proportion of their responses to the FCCquestions confidential, including publicly available information, and the agency didn&t question these assertions until Starks and Rosenworcel intervened.

$200M sounds like a lot, but divided among several billion-dollar communications organizations itpeanuts, especially when you consider that these location-selling agreements may have netted far more than that in the years they were active. Only the carriers know exactly how many times their subscribers& privacy was violated, and how much money they made from that abuse. And because the investigation has ended without the authority over these matters asking about it, we likely never will know.

The proposed fines, called a Notice of Apparent Liability, are only a tentative finding, and the carriers have 30 days to respond or ask for an extension — the latter of which is the more likely. Once they respond (perhaps challenging the amount or something else) the FCC can take as long as it wants to come up with a final fine amount. And once that is issued, there is no requirement that the fine actually be collected — and the FCC has in fact declined to collect before once the heat died down, though not with a penalty of this scale.

&While I am glad the FCC is finally proposing fines for this egregious behavior, it represents little more than the cost of doing business for these carriers,& Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said in a statement. &Further, the Commission is still a long way from collecting these fines and holding the companies fully accountable.&

The only thing that led to this case being investigated at all was public attention, and apparently public attention is necessary to ensure the federal government follows through on its duties.

(This article has been substantially updated with new information, plus comments from Commissioner Starks and Rep. Pallone.)

SpaceX has won the launch contract for NASA2022 mission to explore the mineral-rich asteroid known as Psyche, the space agency announced today, including launch services and other mission-related costs valued at $117 million — remarkably low for a mission of this scale.

The Psyche mission will use a Falcon Heavy rocket, which will launch from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Located between Mars and Jupiter, the Psyche asteroid is made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet and represents a fragment of one of the earliest building blocks of our solar system.

NASA is hoping that the exploration of Psyche will yield clues about the history of the evolution of terrestrial planets through the examination of Psycheown proto-planetary material.

The space agencyPsyche mission includes two secondary payloads: The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, which will study the atmosphere on Mars, and the Janus mission, which will study binary asteroids.

NASA said its Launch Services Program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida will manage the SpaceX launch service and that the mission is led by Arizona State University .

&With the transition into this new mission phase, we are one big step closer to uncovering the secrets of Psyche, a giant mysterious metallic asteroid, and that means the world to us,& said principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe, in a statement when NASA announced that it was approving the mission.

Pasadena, Calif.Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be the overall manager for the mission, including system engineering, integration, testing and mission operations. The spacecraftpropulsion chassis is a high-power solar electric rig provided by Maxar Space Solutions.

This announcement clears the way for Phases D, E, and F of the Psyche mission — the final official phases before launch.

As we wrote last year:

Phase D will begin in early 2021, and includes the final manufacturing and testing of the spacecraft along with the planned launch in early 2022.

Phase E will happen as soon as Psycheexploratory craft hits the vacuum of space, NASA said. It&ll cover the deep space operations of the mission and the collection of data for science. NASA expects Psyche will arrive at its eponymous asteroid on January 31, 2026 after buzzing Mars in 2023 (two years beforeElon Muskpredicted the first human astronauts would arrive).

Instruments on the Psyche craft will include a magnetometer designed to detect and measure the remnant magnetic field of the asteroid. A multi-spectral imager will be on board to provide high-resolution images to determine the composition of the asteroid (how much is metal versus how much is a silicate). The craft will also include a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer to detect, measure and map the asteroidelemental composition, and a new laser technology thatdesigned for deep space communications.

An iPhone app built by controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI has been blocked by Apple, effectively banning the app from use.

Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup &violated& the terms of its enterprise developer program.

The app allows its users — which the company claims it serves only law enforcement officers — to use their phone camera or upload a photo to search its database of 3 billion photos. But BuzzFeed News revealed that the company — which claims to only cater to law enforcement users — also includes many private-sector users, including Macy&s, Walmart and Wells Fargo.

Clearview AI has been at the middle of a media — and legal — storm since its public debut in The New York Times last month. The company scrapes public photos from social media sites, drawing ire from the big tech giants that claim Clearview AI misused their services. But italso gained attention from hackers. On Wednesday, Clearview AI confirmed a data breachin which its client list was stolen.

The public Amazon S3 page containing the iPhone app (Image: TechCrunch)

TechCrunch found Clearview AIiPhone app on an public Amazon S3 storage bucket on Thursday, despite a warning on the page that the app is ¬ to be shared with the public.&

The page asks users to &open this page on your iPhone& to install and approve the companyenterprise certificate, allowing the app to run.

But this, according to Applepolicies, is prohibited if the appusers are outside of Clearview AIorganization.

Clearview AIuse of an enterprise certificate on an iPhone (Image: TechCrunch)

Enterprise certificates are issued by Apple to allow companies to build and approve iPhone and iPad apps designed for internal company use only. Itcommon for these certificates to be used to test apps internally before they are pushed out to the App Store. Apple maintains a strict set of rules on use of enterprise certificates, and says they cannot be used by consumers. But there have been cases of abuse.

Last year, TechCrunch exclusively reported that both Facebook and Google were using their enterprise certificates for consumer-facing apps in an effort to bypass AppleApp Store. Apple revoked the tech giants& enterprise certificates, disabling the infracting app but also any other app that relied on the certificate, including their catering and lunch menu apps.

The app was labeled as &beta& — typically a pre-release or a test version of the app. Besides this claim, there is no evidence to suggest this app was not used by Clearview AI customers.

Clearview AI chief executive Hoan Ton-That told TechCrunch: &We are in contact with Apple and working on complying with their terms and conditions.&

A brief analysis of the app through network traffic tools and disassembly tools shows it works largely in the same way as Clearview AIAndroid app, which was discovered by Gizmodo on Thursday.

Like the Android app, a user needs a Clearview AI-approved username and password to use the app.