Technology

Amazon is expanding its program that pays developers directly for their top-performing Alexa skills, by now offering these &developer rewards,& as they&re called, to those based in the U.K. and Germany who publish &kid& skills. This emerging skill category was one of the last to be included in the developer rewards program, which already offered payments for top skills in over half a dozen other categories, including Education - Reference; Food - Drink; Games, Trivia - Accessories; Health - Fitness; Lifestyle; Music - Audio; and Productivity.

The developer rewards program quietly launched just over a year ago, as a way to encourage developers to build voice apps for Alexa before the ecosystem had expanded to include support for other monetization options like the in-app purchases and subscriptions offered today. The program helped to seed Amazonskill store with more content, while also rewarding quality apps that gain traction with consumers.

The initiative has seemingly had an impact & Alexa is now adding 5,000 new skills every 100 days, and reached over 30,000 in the U.S. as of March.

Amazon says today it has since paid out &millions& to developers in 23 countries as a result of this program.

Some individual voice app developers, like game maker Volley, have reported earning in the five-figure range on a monthly basis from Amazonprogram, to give you an idea of the payout potential.

With the expansion to Kids skills in the U.K. and Germany, the hope is now to encourage U.S. developers to roll out their app (or localize it) for other markets.

Making other markets a priority will be important for Amazon, as the smart speaker race heats up outside the U.S. Earlier this month, analysts at Canalys noted that U.S. smart speaker market share fell below 50 percent for the first time. Notably, Google outsold Amazon for the first time as well, with 3.2 million Google Home and Home Minis sold to Amazon2.5 million Echo shipments.

This also comes on the heels of Amazonlaunch of an Echo Dot Kids Edition, which combines Echo Dot hardware with a FreeTiime Unlimited subscription for kid-safe content, including, now, the ability to whitelist voice apps.

In addition to the inclusion of kid skills in the developer rewards, Amazon also announced a new perk for developers: free Echo devices. If the skill gains 100 customers in the first 30 days live, developers earn an Echo Dot. If it has the most unique users that month, they earn an Echo Spot. And just for publishing, they&ll receive an Amazon Alexa backpack. These are limited time promotions, however & more details are here (U.K.) and here (Germany).

Humans still have an edge over computers when it comes to navigating a city. In areas we are familiar with, we know precisely the cadence of traffic, when to avoid the subway, when biking makes sense, and how that all fits with the current weather and our moods. We have transit intuition, which is why we get so frustrated when Google Maps suggests a route that just doesn&t match the available options to get around.

Yet, even humans are starting to break down under the increasing complexity of mobility options. Whether its subways or buses failing or new options like bikeshares, electric scooters, or crowdsourced bus routes becoming available, our intuition on how to get to our destinations can be out-of-date or quite simply wrong. In the patchwork quilt of transit options available in most American cities, people often need to take two or even four different modes of transit just to get to their final destinations.

Thatwhere urban data startup Coord comes in. A spinout of Alphabet-owned urban innovation org Sidewalk Labs, Coord wants to make it easy for developers to build mobility-rich applications using the best data available. Today, the company is announcing a fusion of its Routing API and Bikeshare API, which will allow app developers to perform multi-modal pathfinding — including transit and bike shares — in a snap. The company has released a demo router app to experiment with as well.

As benign as that announcement sounds, routing remains hard for most transit users according to Stephen Smith, the founder and CEO of Coord. If a trip includes multiple types of transit, &You probably still need to run 2-3 apps to make that trip happen,& he explains. &Frankly, in this day and age, it feels like more work than it should be.& We buy complicated airline itineraries using simple online travel agents, so &why can&t we have that in urban transportation&

CoordAPI fuses bikeshare and other data together for more seamless mobility experiences

In order to offer those well-abstracted endpoints to developers though, Coord has had to do painstaking work to collect and normalize transit data from across the country. Itfirst API was for curbs, which sounds about as interesting as watching water boil. However, Smith said &Ithard to come up with something that is more useful but less understood.& Curbs determines street parking, transit flow, and so many other critical variables to getting transit right. Yet, as important as those questions are, most cities in the United States actually have no idea what curbs are used for, which meant that there was no dataset actually available.

So Coord built a surveyor app based on augmented reality so that they could drive up and down streets and automatically collect this data, identifying things like curb paint and hydrants to create a map of potential curb usage. It then normalized all that data and offered it to developers in a slick API so that everyone else can build on top of its platform.

Coord has performed the same painstaking data normalization for toll roads (there are more than 200 of them, and almost all use their own proprietary data format, which required the company to integrate with all of them) as well as bikesharing (dozens of providers across the country). With those datasets in place, the company was able to offer a comprehensive router API that integrates all that data into one clean set of endpoints.

&Ultimately, we are building a platform for the mobility market, which we define as buying and selling mobility services,& Smith says of Coord. His mission is to make transit data as open and easily accessible as possible so that developers can integrate transit options into their apps, and also be responsive to new mobility options as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs invent them.

Coord wants to be a neutral data broker, which means that it doesn&t attempt to advocate for a particular mode of transit to users and urban planners alike. Instead, it wants to provide an objective look at what options are available and how they work together so that apps and ultimately end users can make their own decisions. Smith said, &I used to be in the edtech space, and what I learned from that experience is that data, and insights from data, is what gives public officials and elected officials the confidence to make policy changes.&

As the scooter wars heat up, and autonomous vehicles increasingly ply the roads, itthe data platforms like Coord that will undergird those mobility experiences. Humans may have had the upper hand in knowing how to get from there to here, but computers are quickly gaining that native intuition and providing the right advice on how to realistically navigate complex cities.

Salesforce just keeps on growing revenue. In another remarkable quarter, the company announced 3.01 billion in revenuefor Q1 2019 with no signs of slowing down. That puts the CRM giant on a run rate of over $12 billion with the companymost optimistic projections suggesting it could go even higher. Italso the first time they have surpassed $3 billion in revenue for a quarter.

As you might expect Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was over the moon about the results in the earnings call with analyst yesterday afternoon. &Revenue for the quarter rose to more than $3 billion, up 25%, putting us on $12 billion revenue run rate that was just amazing. And we now have $20.4 billion of future revenues under contract, which is the remaining transaction price, thatup 36% from a year ago. Based on these strong results, we&re raising our full year top line revenue guidance to $13.125 billion at the high end of our range, 25% growth for this year,& Benioff told analysts.

Brent Leary, an analyst who has been watching the CRM industry for many years, says CRM in general is a hot area and Salesforce has been able to take advantage. &With CRM becoming the biggest and fastest growing business software category last year according to Gartner, iteasy to see with these number that Salesforce is leading the way forward. And they are in position to keep moving themselves and the category forward for years to come as their acquisitions should continue to pay off for them,& Leary told TechCrunch.

Bringing Mulesoft into the fold

Further Benioff rightly boasted that the company would be the fastest software company ever to $13 billion and it continued on the road towards its previously stated $20 billion goal. The $6.5 billion acquisition of Mulesoft earlier this year should help fuel that growth. &And this month, we closed our acquisition of MuleSoft, giving us the industryleading integration platform as well. Well, integration has never been more strategic,& Benioff stated.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Photo: TechCrunch

Bret Taylor, the companypresident and chief product officer, says the integration really ties in nicely with another of the companystrategic initiatives, artificial intelligence, which they call Einstein. &[Customers] know that their AI is only as powerful as data it has access to. And so when you think of MuleSoft, think unlocking data. The data is trapped in all these isolated systems on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and MuleSoft, they can unlock this data and make it available to Einstein and make a smarter customer facing system,& Taylor explained.

Leary thinks thereone other reason the company has done so well, one thathard to quantify in pure dollars, but perhaps an approach other companies should be paying attention to. &One of the more undercovered aspects of what Salesforce is doing is how their social responsibility and corporate culture is attracting a lot of positive attention,& he said. &That may be hard to boil down into revenue and profit numbers, but it has to be part of the reason why Salesforce continues to grow at the pace they have,& he added.

Keep on rolling

All of this has been adding up to incredible numbers. Iteasy to take revenue like this for granted because the company has been on such a sustained growth rate for such a long period of time, but just becoming a billion dollar company has been a challenge for most Software as a Service providers up until now. A $13 billion run rate is in an entirely different stratosphere and it could be lifting the entire category says Jason Lemkin, founder at SaasStr, a firm that invests in SaaS startups.

&SaaS companies crossing $1B in ARR will soon become commonplace, as shocking as that might have sounded in say 2011. Atlassian, Box, Hubspot, and Zendesk are all well on their way there. The best SaaS companies are growing faster after $100m ARR, which is propelling them there,& Lemkin explained.

Salesforce is leading the way. Perhaps thatbecause it has the same first-to-market advantage that Amazon has had in the cloud infrastructure market. It has gained such substantial momentum by being early, starting way back in 1999 before Software as a Service was seen as a viable business. In fact, Benioff told a story earlier this year that when he first started, he did the rounds of the venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and every single one turned him down.

You can bet that those companies have some deep regrets now, as the companyrevenue and stock price continues to soar. As of publication this morning, the stock was sitting at $130.90, up over 3 percent. All this company does is consistently make money, and thatpretty much all you can ask from any organization. As Leary aptly put it, &Yea, they&re really killing it.&