Technology

Today Snapchat finally gets a true developer platform, confirming TechCrunchscoop from last month about Snap Kit. This set of APIs lets other apps piggyback on Snaplogin for signup, build Bitmoji avatars into their keyboards, display public Our Stories and Snap Map content, and generate branded stickers with referral links users can share back inside Snapchat. Snap Kitbig selling point is privacy — a differentiator from Facebook. It doesn&t even let you share your social graph with apps to prevent a Cambridge Analytica-style scandal.

Launch partners include Tinder bringing Bitmojis to your chats with matches, Patreon letting fans watch creators& Stories from within its app, and Postmates offering order ETA stickers you can share in Snapchat that open the restaurantpage in the delivery app. Developers that want to join the platform can sign up here.

Snap Kit could help the stumbling public company colonize the mobile app ecosystem with its buttons and content, which could inspire Snapchat signups from new users and reengagement from old ones. &Growth is one of our three goals for 2018, so we absolutely hope it can contribute to that, and continue to strengthen engagement, which has always been a key metric for us& SnapVP of product Jacob Andrea tells me. Thatcritical since Snapchat sunk to its lowest user growth rate ever last quarter under the weight of competition from Instagram and WhatsApp.

&There have been areas inside of our products where we&ve really set standards& Andreou explains. &Early, that was seen in examples like Stories, but today with things like how we treat user data, what we collect, what we share when people login and register for our service . . . Snap Kit is a set of developer tools that really allow people to take the best parts of our products and the standards that we&ve set in a few of these areas, and bring them into their apps.&

This focus on privacy manifests as a limit of 90 days of inactivity before your connection with an app is severed. And the login features only requires you bring along your changeable Snapchat display name, and optionally, your Bitmoji. Snap Kit apps can&t even ask for your email, phone number, location, who you follow, or who you&re friends with.

&It really became challenging for us to see our users then use other products throughout their day and have to lower their expectations. . . having to be ok with the fact that all of their information and data would be shared& Andreou gripes. This messaging is a stark turnaround from four years ago when it took 10 days for CEO Evan Spiegel to apologize for security laziness causing the leak of 4 million users& phone numbers. But now with Facebook as everyonefavorite privacy punching bag, Snapchat is seizing the PR opportunity.

&I think one of the parts that [Spiegel] was really excited about with this release is how much better our approach to our users in that way really is — Without relying on things like policy or developerbest intentions or them writing perfect bug free code, but instead by design, not even exposing these things to begin with.&

Yet judging by Facebookcontinued growth and recovered share price, privacy is too abstract of a concept for many people to grasp. Snap Kit will have to win on the merits of what it brings other apps, and the strength of its partnerships team. Done right, Snapchat could gain an army of allies to battle the blue menace.

Snapvengers Assemble

Snapdesire to maintain an iron grip on its ‘cool& brand has kept its work with developers minimal until now. Its first accidental brush with a developer platform was actually a massive security hazard.

Third-party apps promising a way to secretly screenshot messages asked users to login with their Snapchat usernames and passwords, then proceeded to get hacked, exposing some users& risqué photos. Snap later cut off an innocent music video app called Mindie for finding a way to share to users& Stories. Last year I wrote how A year ago I wrote that&Snapanti-developer attitude is an augmented liability&, as it&d need help to populate the physical world with AR.

2017 saw Snap cautiously extend the drawbridge, inviting in ads, analytics, and marketing developer partners to help brands be hip, and letting hacker/designers make their own AR lenses. But the real transition moment was when Spiegel said on the Q4 2017 earnings call that &We feel strongly that Snapchat should not be confined to our mobile application—the amazing Snaps created by our community deserve wider distribution so they can be enjoyed by everyone.&

At the time that meant Snaps on the web, embedded in news sites, and on Jumbotrons. Today it means in other apps. But Snap will avoid one of the key pitfalls of the Facebook platform: over-promising. SnapDeputy General Counsel for PrivacyKatherine Tassitells me &It was also very important to us that there wasn&t going to be the exchange of the friends graph as part of the value proposition to third party developers.&

How Snap Kit Works

Snap Kit breaks down to four core pieces of functionality that will appeal to different apps looking to simplify signup, make communication visual, host eye-catching content, or score referral traffic.Developers that want access to Snap Kit must pass a human review and approval process. Snap will review their functionality to ensure they&re not doing anything shady. Once authorized, they&ll have access to these APIs:

• Login Kit is the foundation of Snap Kit. Ita OAuth-style alternative to Facebook Login that lets users skip creating a proprietary username and password by instead using their Snapchat credential. But all the app gets is their changeable, pseudonym-allowed Snapchat display name, and optionally, their Bitmoji avatar to use as a profile pic if the user approves. Getting that login button in lots of apps could remind people Snapchat exists, and turn it into a fundamental identity utility people will be loathe to abandon.
• Creative Kit is how apps will get a chance to create stickers and filters for use back in the Snapchat camera. Similar to AprilF8 launch of the abilitu to share from other apps to Instagram and Facebook Stories, developers can turn content like high scores, workout stats and more into stickers that users can overlay on their Snaps to drive awareness of the source app. Developers can also set a deep link where those stickers send people to generate referral traffic, which could be appealing to those looking to tap Snap191 million teens.
• Bitmoji Kitlets developers integrate Snapchatpersonalized avatars directly into their appkeyboard. Itan easy way to make chat more visually expressive without having to reinvent the wheel. This follows the expansion of Friendmoji that feature avatars of you and a pal rolling out to the iOS keyboard. But Bitmoji Kit means developers do the integration work instead of having to rely on users installing anything extra.
• Story Kitallows developers to embed Snapchat Stories into their apps and websites. Beyond specific Stories, apps can also search through public Stories submitted to Our Story or Snap Map by location, time, or captions. That way, a journalism app could surface first-hand reports from the scene of breaking news or a meme app could pull in puppy Snaps. Snap will add extra reminders to the Our Story submission process to ensure users know their Stories could appear outside of Snapchatown app.

One thing thatnot in Snap Kit, at least yet, is the ability to embed Snapchatwhole software camera into other apps which TechCrunch erroneously reported. Our sources mistakenly confused Creative Kitability to generate stickers as opposed a way to share whole stories, which Andreou called &an interesting first step& for making Snapchat the broadcast channel for other apps.

When asked why Snapchat was building Snap Kit, Andreou explained that &We think that giving people more tools to be able to express themselves freely, have fun and be creative, both on Snapchat and other apps is a good thing.We also think that helping more people outside of Snapchat learn about our platform and our features is a good thing.&

Snap needs all the help it can get right now. If other apps are willing to be a billboard for it in exchange for some of its teen-approved functionality, Snapchat could find new growth channels amidst stiff competition.

While Salesforce and Microsoft have a dominant position in the world of sales software today, there are a number of startups nipping at their heels, and today one of the more promising of them has announced a growth round to help them in the effort. Pipedrive, a startup co-headquartered in Estonia and New York that offers tools to salespeople to help them close deals that are still in their pipeline, has picked up $50 million to expand its product, develop its business globally and potentially make acquisitions in the CRM space.

The Series C round was co-led by new investor Insight Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation also fromRembrandt Venture Partners and Atomico (which itself has Estonian roots: Atomicofounder, Niklas Zennstrom, was the co-founder of Skype, which developed and built the core IP voice and messaging product in the country). It brings the total raised by Pipedrive to $80 million.

Timo Rein, Pipedriveco-founder and CEO (and a former salesman himself), would not disclose the companyvaluation, saying only that it was &a pretty good round.& For some more context, Pitchbook writes that Pipedrivelast funding, in 2016, valued the company at $188 million. Sources very close to the company tell us that the valuation now is $300 million+. (We&re asking around and will update this as and when we learn more.)

The CRM market is currently estimated to be worth over $40 billion, according to Gartner, and so unsurprisingly there are a number of startups in the fray, from those that are infusing the process with AI (such as Clari) through to other startups that help organise leads to act on them better (such as Zoho and Hubspot), through to those focusing on specific verticals like software companies (Paddle out of the UK).

Rein said that there was some skepticism when the company first launched that it would be possible to make a dent in landscape dominatedby the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft.

&When we entered the market in 2010,people asked us, ‘Why build a product in an area where Salesforce is already strong& But having been in sales for more than a decade ourselves, we realized that itnot just the sheer number of features you offer users. The difference is finding the right spot on the spectrum where you are getting what you need out of a product that you can use,& Reim said. &We have proven that users are migrating from Salesforce and others and are coming to Pipedrive. We definitely have less functionality, but professional salespeople know that performance is largely about your personality.&

In the case of Pipedrive, this translates to a software platform whose aim is to cut down on busywork to focus you on selling: all of your activity across emails and phone calls gets and other actions (it integrates some 100 other apps used in business, for exampleGoogle Apps, Trello, Zapier, MailChimp, Yesware and PandaDoc) is tracked without you needing to update the system, with the aim of making it easier for you to see what you might tackle next (and that gets tracked, too).

This is not about finding sales leads, Reim said: that may be something the company would consider down the line, but for now itlooking at what happens when you already have a lead and need to make it as easy as possible to close that deal.

Ironically, Reim said that Pipedrive hasn&t been using its own tools in the majority of its own sales efforts. &In areas where we can use Pipedrive, we do,& he said, &but the service we offer is almost the opposite of what we built.& Pipedrivetarget customer is a larger business, which by their nature are fewer in number. They, in turn, are often focused on selling to a wider array of smaller customers. Itpriced on a monthly, SaaS basis ranging from $12.50 per user per month to $62.50 depending on number of users and features.

One way to think of Pipedriveapproach is akin to something like Razer for the gaming world, which touts its ethos as &For Gamers. By Gamers.&

&Pipedrive is built primarily for salespeople, not just their managers,& said Teddie Wardi, a partner at Insight who also led the companySeries B when he was still at Atomico. &This principle has helped them to create a product loved by users around the world, differentiate from competitors and propel the company to stellar growth.&

And that growth has come: today the company has75,000 customers in 170 countries, with triple digital revenue growth each year since it first opened for business in 2010.

The plethora of startups in the market focusing on different aspects of the sales cycle and the CRM that surrounds that creates a ripe landscape not just for what Pipedrive might choose to tackle next, but how it might go about that.

&Post-sales, when you already have a customer and now need to help manage it, is an opportunity,& Reim said. &But our main effort and focus has been a product to help sales people deal with their pressure, and their own need to stay focused on the steady flow of sales, from the beginning to the actual close.&

The wizards in lidar tech at Luminar are doubling down on the practical side of autonomous car deployment with a partnership with and investment from Volvo, as well as a new &perception development platform& that helps squeeze every last drop out of its laser-based imagery.

Volvo Cars has been one of the big investors in autonomous vehicles, and while they have produced some cars equipped for driverless operation, the company seems to understand that this is a very long game itplaying. Theremore to it than just slapping some sensors on a production vehicle and sending it on its way.

Part of that long game is picking winners in the industry, as well, and Volvo seems to be confident that Luminar, whose lidar tech is in many ways leaps and bounds beyond the competition, will be among them. Volvorecently established Tech Fund has made an investment in Luminar — its first, and of an undisclosed size.

That doesn&t mean they get a seat on the board or anything — itpurely a financial play, Luminarfounder and CEO Austin Russell told me.

The two are also doubling down on their partnership as far as the actual lidar tech being used. Luminar today announced its &perception development platform,& for which Volvo is the first customer. Essentially Luminar itself is taking over some of the duties of spotting and identifying common objects its lidar units see, rather than leaving that entirely to the carsystems. Russell told me that it was a matter of making sure that its data was being used effectively.

&A lot of times we see 2D algorithms applied to true 3D data, and it just doesn&t make the most of it,& he said. He said that his team often sees partners (not necessarily Volvo) applying dated 2D analysis to rich 3D data. That might have been fine a couple years ago, he said, but with advances in lidar tech the point clouds and 3D data have improved by orders of magnitude — itbecome &almost camera-like.& So Luminar is making its own algorithms for detection and labeling of what its hardware sees.

&We&re providing data that you can rely on to understand a given situation — the data you need to make a decision,& he said, though in response to my questions he emphasized that Luminarplatform was not making any decisions on its own.

As an example (illustrated in the gif above), imagine a car traveling down the road at 65 MPH. Luminarlidar unit, constantly bathing the area in front of it with lasers and analyzing the reflected signal, spots a stopped car blocking the shoulder about 700 feet ahead using its own smarts. Closer up it detects that therea person there and a spare tire on the ground.

The lidar doesn&t have any idea what to do with that data — it just knows that it90 percent sure what it sees. So it passes that information on to the car&brain,& perhaps before that brain has done its own analysis and spotted the car for itself. The brain can then decide whether to slow down, change lanes, or maybe even confer with other nearby autonomous vehicles.

Russell said that Volvo, rather wisely, decided to constrain the application of this system strictly to highway driving. That makes it a much smaller problem space, but also a risky one. &Operating at higher speeds puts pressure on you to get a lot more range,& Russell said. &250 meters is still just like 7 and a half seconds ahead.& But every little bit counts.

Volvo is the one of four major OEMs that Luminar has partnered with, and the second to be announced publicly — therethe Toyota Research Institute, but the other two are still a mystery. Chances are, however, they&ll be getting something like this as well, though it will be different for everyone.

&Ita standardized platform,& Russell said. &The implementation is specific, but the software itself isn&t. We&re not just throwing it out there. And thatalso a reason why we&re working with 4 OEMs and not everyone under the sun. This will only be available to partners.&

Luminartech puts it in the lead in many ways, but competitors aren&t standing still. Strong partnerships, however, may prove to be more important than technological superiority — though of course it can&t hurt to have both.