Technology

Apple announced today a multi-year content partnership with Oprah Winfrey to produce programs for the tech companyupcoming video-streaming service. Apple didn&t provide any specific details as to what sort of projects Winfrey would be involved in, but there will be more than one it seems.

Apple shared the news of its deal with Winfrey in a brief statement on its website, which read:

Apple today announced a unique, multi-year content partnership with Oprah Winfrey, the esteemed producer, actress, talk show host, philanthropist and CEO of OWN.

Together, Winfrey and Apple will create original programs that embrace her incomparable ability to connect with audiences around the world.

Winfreyprojects will be released as part of a lineup of original content from Apple.

The deal is a significant high-profile win for Apple, which has been busy filing out its lineup with an array of talent in recent months.

The streaming service also will includea reboot of Steven SpielbergAmazing Stories,a Reese Witherspoon- and Jennifer Aniston-starring series set in the world of morning TV,an adaptation of Isaac AsimovFoundation books,a thriller starring Octavia Spencer,a Kristen Wiig-ledcomedy,a Kevin Durant-inspiredscripted basketball show, aseriesfrom &La La Land&s& director and several other shows.

Winfrey, however, is not just another showrunner or producer. Shea media giant who has worked across film, network and cable TV, print and more as an actress, talk show host, creator and producer.

Shealso a notable philanthropist, having contributed more than $100 million to provide education to academically gifted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and is continually discussed as a potential presidential candidate, though she said thatnot for her.

On television, WinfreyHarpo Productions developed daytime TV shows like&Dr. Phil,& &The Dr. Oz Show& and &Rachael Ray.& Harpo Films producedseveral Academy Award-winning movies, including &Selma,& which featured Winfrey in a starring role. Shealso acted in a variety of productions over the years, like&The Color Purple,& which scored her an Oscar nom, &Lee Daniels& The Butler,& &The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks& and Disney&A Wrinkle in Time.&

Winfrey also founded the cable network OWN in 2011 in partnership with Discovery Communications, and has exec produced series including&Queen Sugar,& &OprahMaster Class& and the Emmy-winning &Super Soul Sunday.&

The latter has a connection with Apple as it debuted as a podcast called &OprahSuperSoul Conversations& and became a No. 1 program on Apple Podcasts.

Winfrey recently extended her contract with OWN through 2025, so itunclear how much time she&ll devote specifically toward her Apple projects.

Apple also didn&t say if Winfrey will star or guest in any of the programs themselves, but thatalways an option on the table with a deal like this. CNN, however, is reporting that Winfrey &is expected to have an on-screen role as a host and interviewer.&

When you spend time with a lot of BMW folks, as I did during a trip to Germany earlier this month, you&ll regularly hear the word &heritage.& Maybe thatno surprise, given that the company is now well over 100 years old. But in a time of rapid transformation thathitting every car manufacturer, engineers and designers have to strike a balance between honoring that history and looking forward. With the latest version of its BMW OS in-car operating system and its accompanying design language, BMW is breaking with some traditions to allow it to look into the future while also sticking to its core principles.

If you&ve driven a recent luxury car, then the instrument cluster in front of you was likely one large screen. But at least in even the most recent BMWs, you&ll still see the standard round gauges that have adorned cars since their invention. Thatwhat drivers expect and thatwhat the company gave them, down to the point where it essentially glued a few plastic strips on the large screen that now makes up the dashboard to give drivers an even more traditional view of their Autobahn speeds.

With BMW OS 7.0, which I got some hands-on time with in the latest BMW 8-series model thatmaking its official debut today (and where the OS update will also make its first appearance), the company stops pretending that the screen is a standard set of gauges. Sure, some of the colors remain the same, but users looking for the classic look of a BMW cockpit are in for a surprise.

&We first broke up the classic round instruments back in 2015 so we could add more digital content to the middle, including advanced driving assistance systems,& one of BMWdesigners told me. &And that was the first break [with tradition]. Now in 2018, we looked at the interior and exterior design of our cars — and took all of those forms — and integrated them into the digital user interface of our cars.&

The overall idea behind the design is to highlight relevant information when itneeded but to let it fade back when itnot, allowing the driver to focus on the task at hand (which, at least for the next few years, is mostly driving).

So when you enter the car, you&ll get the standard BMW welcome screen, which is now integrated with your digital BMW Connected profile in the cloud. When you start driving, the new design comes to life, with all of the critical information you need for driving on the left side of the dashboard, as well as data about the state of your driving assistance systems. Thata set of digital gauges that remains on the screen at all times. On the right side of the screen, though, you&ll see all of the widgets that can be personalized. There are six of those, and they range from G meters for when you&re at a track day to a music player that uses the space to show album art.

The middle of the screen focuses on navigation. But as the BMW team told me, the idea here isn&t to just copy the map thattraditionally on the tablet-like screen in the middle of the dashboard. What you&ll see here is a stripped-down map view that only shows you the navigational data you need at any given time.

And because the digital user interface isn&t meant to be a copy of its analog counterpart from yesteryear, the team also decided that it could play with more colors. That means that as you move from sport to eco mode, for example, the UIprimary color changes from red to blue.

The instrument cluster is only part of the companyredesign. It also took a look at what it calls the &Control Display& in the center console. Thattraditionally where the company has displayed everything from your music player to its built-in GPS maps (and Apple CarPlay, if thatyour thing). Here, BMW has simplified the menu structure by making it much flatter and also made some tweaks to the overall design. What you&ll see is that it also went for a design language here thatstill occasionally playful but that does away with many of the 3D effects, and instead opted for something thatmore akin to GoogleMaterial Design or MicrosoftFluent Design System. This is a subtle change, but the team told me that it very deliberately tried to go with a more modern and flatter look.

This display now also offers more tools for personalization, with the ability to change the layout to show more widgets, if the driver doesn&t mind a more cluttered display, for example.

Thanks to its integration with BMW Connect, the companycloud-based toolsand services for saving and syncing data, managing in-car apps and more, the updated operating system also lays the foundation for the companyupcoming e-commerce play. Dieter May, BMWVP for digital products and services, has talked about this quite a bit in the past, and the updated software and fully digital cockpit is what will enable the companynext moves in this direction. Because the new operating system puts a new emphasis on the userdigital account, which is encoded in your key fob, the car becomes part of the overall BMW ecosystem, which includes other mobility services like ReachNow, for example (though you obviously don&t need to have a BMW Connect account just to drive the car).

Unsurprisingly, the new operating system will launch with a couple of the companymore high-end vehicles like the 8-series car that is launching today, but it will slowly trickle down to other models, as well.

The CRM industry is now estimated to be worth some $4 billion annually, and today a startup has announced a round of funding that it hopes will help it take on one aspect of that lucrative pie, customer support. Kustomer, a startup out of New York that integrates a number of sources to give support staff a complete picture of a customer when he or she contacts the company, has raised $26 million.

The funding, a series B, was led by Redpoint Ventures (notably, an early investor in Zendesk, which Kustomer cites as a key competitor), with existing investors Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, and Social Leverage also participating.

Cisco Investments was also a part of this round as a strategic investor: Cisco (along with Avaya) is one of the worldbiggest PBX equipment vendors, and customer support is one of the biggest users of this equipment, but the segment is also under pressure as more companies move these services to the cloud (and consider alternative options). Potentially, you could see how Cisco might want to partner with Kustomer to provide more services on top of its existing equipment, and potentially as a standalone service — although for now the two have yet to announce any actual partnerships.

Given that Kustomer has been approached already for potential acquisitions, you could see how the Ciscos of the world might be one possible category of buyers.

Kustomer is not discussing valuation but it has raised a total of $38.5 million. Kustomercustomers include brands in fashion, e-commerce and other sectors that provide customer support on products on a regular basis, such as Ring, Modsy, Glossier, Smug Mug and more.

When we last wrote about Kustomer, when it raised $12.5 millionin 2016, the companymission was to effectively turn anyone at a company into a customer service rep — the idea being that some issues are better answered by specific people, and a CRM platform for all employees to engage could help them fill that need.

Today, Brad Birnbaum, the co-founder and CEO, says that this concept has evolved. He said that &half of its business model still involves the idea of everyone being on the platform.& For example, an internal sales rep can collaborate with someone in a companyshipping department — &but the only person who can communicate with the customer is the full-fledged agent,& he said. &That is what the customers wanted so that they could better control the messaging.&

The collaboration, meanwhile, has taken an interesting turn: itnot just related to employees communicating better to develop a more complete picture of a customer and his/her history with the company; but itabout a companysystems integrating better to give a more complete view to the reps. Integrations include data from e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Magento; voice and messaging platforms like Twilio, TalkDesk, Twitter and Facebook Messenger; feedback tools like Nicereply; analytics services like Looker, Snowflake, Jira and Redshift; and Slack.

Birnbaum previously founded and sold Assistly to Salesforce, which turned it into Desk.com — (his co-founder in Kustomer, Jeremy Suriel, was Assistlychief architect), and between that and Kustomer he also had a go at building out Airtime, Sean Parkersocial startup. Kustomer, he says, is not only competing against Salesforce but perhaps even more specifically Zendesk, in offering a new take on customer support.

Zendesk, he said, had really figured out how to make customer support ticketing work efficiently, &but they don&t understand the customer at all.&

&We are a much more modern solution in how we see the world,& he continued. &No one does omni-channel customer service properly, where you can see a single threaded conversation speaking to all of a customerpoints.&

Going forward, Kustomer will be using the funding to expand its platform with more capabilities, and some of its own automations and insights (rather than those provided by way of integrations). This will also see the company expand into other kinds of services adjacent to taking inbound customer requests, such as reaching out to the customers, potentially to seel to them. &We plan to go broadly with engagement as an example,& Birnbaum said. &We already know everything about you so if we see you on a website, we can proactively reach out to you and engage you.&

&It is time for disruption in customer support industry, andKustomeris leading the way,& said Tomasz Tunguz, partner at Redpoint Ventures, in a statement. &Kustomerhas had impressive traction to date, and we are confident the worldbest B2C and B2B companies will be able to utilize the platform in order to develop meaningful relationships, experiences, and lifetime value for their customers. This is an exciting and forward-thinking platform for companies as well as their customers.&