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Technology
With the globalized world going into partial or complete lock down over the Covid-19 pandemic, startups in the travel sector are facing a huge stress test and immediate disruption to business as usual as public health concern spirals and entire populations are encouraged or even forced not to travel.
The traditional travel hub of Europe has emerged as a secondary hotspot for the virus, after SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in China late last year.
Italy, France and Spain have all reported thousands of cases apiece, with the latter declaring a state of high alert today. Earlier this week Italy — the hardest hit EU country so far — imposed nationwide travel restrictions, with confirmed cases passing 12,000 as of yesterday. Several other EU countries have also implemented varying quarantine measures. More lockdowns are expected in the coming weeks.
In a further development, US President Trump sent shockwaves through EU institutions earlier this week by unilaterally announcing a 30-day ban on travel from most countries in the bloc.
Today the European Commission came out with its own response — laying out a $37BN package of measures intended to mitigate the socio-economic impact of Covid-19, including bringing forward €1BN out of the EU budget to act as a guarantee to the European Investment Fund to encourage banks to lend to SMEs in affected sectors.
&This is expected to mobilise €8BN of working capital financing and support at least 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses and small mid-cap companies in the EU,& the Commission said, suggesting banks will be in a position to act on the liquidity injection from April 2020.
Of course travel startups with investor capital in the bank aren&t waiting around to react to the coronavirus crisis. They&re already ripping up 2020 roadmaps and thinking again — swapping out marketing plans and doubling down on product and engineering, according to three businesses we spoke to.
We asked three European travel startups how they&re being impacted by the coronavirus crisis and what steps they&re taking to manage a demand crunch combined with ongoing — and potentially long term — uncertainty in the sector.
Berlin-based GetYourGuide, which has built a marketplace selling sightseeing tours and other travel experiences, and last year bagged a $484M Series E round; Omio, another Berlin-based startup thatbuilt a multi-modal travel aggregator and booking platform, backed by nearly $300M to-date; and Barcelona-based TravelPerk, a fast-growing business travel booking platform thatpulled in more than $130M in VC funding as it shakes up a legacy space.
&Demand is dropping off a cliff&
All three told us they&ve seen a major drop in bookings combined with a rise in customer service demand as people with existing travel plans seek to get in touch to cancel or reschedule trips.
As of this week GetYourGuide said bookings for new experiences are down nearly 50% globally vs its demand forecasts for the past two weeks. While customer service enquiries have tripled in the past two weeks, and its global cancellation rate has ticked up by 20%.
Those that are still planning trips are doing so closer to home or with less advanced notice than normal — with bookings made within three days of the start time up 15%.
&Itthe biggest nuclear winter I&ve ever seen in online travel,& co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck told TechCrunch. &Everyone goes and prepares for Easter break and that is not at all happening. All of the European countries seem to be in lockdown.
&None of our Italian customers are booking, the German customers have degraded rapidly. France and Spain have recently followed. The UK has been more stable but seems to follow the same course now. And the US since [Trump announced the travel ban] as well… The US travel ban is now sealing it. So this will be a year of extreme turbulence of the travel market.&
For Omio ita similar story — with bookings over the last two weeks down between 30-40% overall across all markets, according to founder and CEO Naren Shaam,and a big spike in demand for customer service as worried customers look to cancel trips.
&The whole company is actually stepping in to help customer service because we&ve seen a spike in cancellations,& he said. &In general the impact is heavy. Demand is dropping off a cliff but itnot as bad as we thought — but it is definitely heavy.&
Itseeing similar changes in booking behavior. &Advanced booking has come down drastically,& he noted. &But we see a spike in short term last minute trips when people feel comfortableon the region — so thatgone up a lot.&
TravelPerk told us itcurrently dealing with a drop in business globally of around 50%. Though co-founder and CEO Avi Meir is braced for further drops if more of the West goes into lockdown forcing more companies to scrap business trips.
&You would expect that it dropped to zero but right now people are still travelling,& he told us. &Everybody who can avoid traveling right now probably should and does but you have many people who just critically have to keep travelling — so we see around 50% drop right now.&
&Regionally of course as expected APACS has been the most affected in terms of our volumes — Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and China down north of 95%. 100% depending on which day you&re looking and what country you&re looking at,& he added. &China is actually starting to open up a little bit but at the peak we looked at 100% — nothing was being booked in terms of destination.
&In terms of the more core markets for us, Italy is 84% down right now… You also see significant impact in Belgium, Netherlands, Holland, Sweden.
&France, Spain and UK are down year-on-year but not significantly yet. In the Western part of the continent and the UK people are still traveling relatively more than other countries.&
Demand for TravelPerkcustomer support has also never been so busy, he also said.
&We actually are switching some of our sales team to customer support in the coming weeks just to support the volume of tickets,& he noted. &We&re very proud that our metrics are not declining — meaning specifically service level; how fast we solve cases; our ‘C-sats&, customer satisfaction. The metrics we really care about. Are people happy and are we solving their cases fast?
&We&re keeping them although, so far, the past weeks have been the busiest in customer support since we started the company via number of tickets.&
TravelPerk has also seen radical changes to the usual booking window. &Most of the trips we see right now is somebody booking for tomorrow or for two days from now because they for know they can travel or have certainty they can travel,& said Meir. &Which is unusual compared to normal times. In normal times people book 20-21 days ahead on average. So you have a huge decrease in the booking window.&
While of its flagship products is actually seeing high demand in the current crisis situation, per Meir — given itdesigned to offer resilience against unforeseen changes to plans.
&We have this product, FlexiPerk, which allows the users to cancel or change for any reason and if they do they get at least 90% of the money back. FlexiPerk has been really, really on fire over the past few weeks — both in terms of users, those who are already on FlexiPerk and also new sign-ups which is actually driving a lot of our growth in terms of signs ups.
&It gives people the certainty — or it reduces the uncertainty — about the mid- term or long term future. So if you are planning a trip in September or in October itreasonable to expect to be able to travel but you don&t really know. And FlexiPerk really plugs this gap because it allows you to book now for September knowing that if you have to change your plans you can do so without losing the money.&
&Right now most of the airlines have changed their cancelation policies so we are able to get full refunds in many cases,& he added.
All three European businesses said the changes in demand had hit extremely rapidly.
&Up until maybe 2-3 weeks ago we were still growing,& Meir told us. &Because most of our travellers — or at least the headquarters of the travellers — are concentrated in Europe and North America so the impact was kind of delayed.&
&Since we&re more a global business we already started noticing Chinese outbound dropping — because we have an office in China — it hit us already around January, February. So we already saw that in our Chinese outbound dropping by 90+%,& added OmioShaam.
GetYourGuideReck said it was also forewarned of the looming crunch via their Asian business.
&We had already seen a significant decline in our Asian business,& he told us. &That was still so small and the overall growth in Europe and the US was so strong that it was negligible at that point in time — but it gave us a glimpse.&
Two of its investors, Japan-based Softbank and Singapore-based Temasek, also put GetYourGuide on early &red alert& over the novel coronavirus becauseother portfolio companies were suffering heavy impacts.
&We had two weeks to prepare which I guess put us ahead of the curve for most other US and European companies,& said Reck. &Then when corona hit, at the end of February, we&ve seen a very rapid decline and now the current global travel demand is roughly 60% down from where it should be at this point in time so we are massively depressed.&
The change is more marked for being set against &a tremendous start to the year& before the virus hit Europe — Reck dubs it &the best time in history of the company& — with January and February seeing it close to doubling business.
Rerouting resources in a travel crunch
So how are the three founders coping with a sudden revenue crunch combined with spiralling global uncertainty falling over their sector?
All three described being relatively well cushioned — on account of recent financing.
&We are in an incredible position because we&ve raised this massive round last year and we haven&t spent a lot of it,& said GetYourGuideReck. &We&ve been very frugal with it. In the early months after the fund raise SoftBank was very angry with us that we were so disciplined and we weren&t investing more in growth. Now they&re, I think, very, very happy — the new role model for the portfolio.
&The good news is that as we come from a position of strength and we will survive and prevail for sure. Thatthe positive news.&
With plenty of capital still in the bank the team has been able to quickly redirect resources on servicing near-term customer needs during the travel crunch.
&The way we&re seeing this internally is with every major crisis comes major opportunity. At this point in time we believe thereincredible opportunity to make a real different for our customers, our suppliers and our ecosystem broadly,& Reck added. &For instance, for customers we have pushed immediately after we saw the news coming full flexibility on bookings and cancelations.
&Customers can now cancel all of the experiences 24 hours in advance, no questions asked, for a refund. If you go under 24 hours you actually get a gift coupon so you can rebook of the full value in the future. And if you&re affected by a lockdown you will get the full amount back no questions asked.&
&We&ve been doing mass cancellations for Italy. We&re just doing it for France. We&re doing it for the US because of the travel ban now. We refund our customers fully, no questions asked,& he added.
Reck also said itdoing what it can to support suppliers who will also clearly be struggling from the same demand crunch.
&Wherever therean opening where we see demand popping up again we make sure it gets as quickly as possible to our suppliers,& he told us, saying its doubling down on its GetYourGuide Originals in-house short tours product. &We want to be a good partner. We don&t go in now and start to negotiate on commission rates or anything like that.&
Another area itspending on right now is localization — in order that it can support suppliers by being able to cater to demand cropping up off the beaten track.
&We&re translating our offering into more languages,& he noted. &We&re making sure the offering itself has better terms for the customers in terms of cancelation policies and we&re educating the suppliers around that — and that will ultimately drive their bookings. So we are doing quite a bit in order to make sure that they survive and that they get the revenue through our platform that they deserve.&
Zooming out, Reck told us hetaking &a really long term view& on travel.
&The travel landscape through this crisis will inevitably change,& he predicted. &When the corona crisis is over online travel will look very different and just survival is going to be an incredible competitive advantage vs the rest. We believe that a lot of players will go bust. And we see that already as we speak so over the next couple of days you&ll see major layoffs, you&ll see restructurings, you&ll see people scramble.&
&Thatwhat we always said when we raised the SoftBank round. Ironically I never knew that long term view would actually mean that we freeze down for a year… but if you look at online travel over the course of history and you look at the big dips — like 9/11 was a massive dip and the following recession; the financial crisis was a massive dip — you see overall travel is a long term trend. And I think if you look at a ten year timespan even this corona crisis will just be a small dip in a growth curve.
&So I&m very long on travel over a longer period of time. And thatwhere we&re doubling down. So we&re rather taking the opportunity now to really focus on product and engineering — and thatsomething really liberating to me. Of not really having a 2020 budget anymore.
&The conversion gains on the margin won&t matter. So we can really double down on significantly improving the product for our customer and that means giving a better search and discovery experience, more personalized, curating more GetYourGuide Originals with our suppliers… So that when we come out of this crisis we come out with a better technology product and a much better supply base.&
&I think, as I said, just surviving will be a competitive advantage. Surviving with a better product and better supply will be magic — and thatreally what we&re betting on.&
Omio, meanwhile, is also in a position to look beyond the current crisis in demand.
&We are lucky to be well funded and have raised a lot of capital,& said Shaam. &We&re lucky to have very long term investors when you think of Kinnevik and Temasek — both of them…. almost like a mutual fund so basically long term capital.&
Nonetheless, the business has responded to plunging demand by trimming variable costs — while also viewing the demand crunch as an opportunity to rechannel investment into the core product.
&We&re cutting all variable costs, managing the costs better, taking precautions — using the crisis as an opportunity… fixing all the systems we could never invest in in scale because every month therea metric to meet. And really then rearchitecting for scalability,& he told us.
&Because the main thing is if you think of travel, human inherent desire to travel is never going to go down. Right now what we&re doing is bottling that in for 3-4 months but you&ve got to open the lid at some point — I hope — and when that comes out the demand will grow even faster. And we want to be ready for that. So we&re using this, call it, crisis as an opportunity to really build scalability. All the underlying architecture, campaign structures, whatever data flows were not perfect before, product messaging etc.
&The cash position of course is something we have an eye on, as stewards of capital, but itmore so that we&re also using this as an opportunity to really think long term and how we actually benefit.&
Duty of care
As a crisis response, Shaam said Omio has put together three internal task forces to respond to immediate challenges — one focused on supporting its customers; another on its own employees; and a third concentrating on business stability and figuring out where to invest and where to pull back during unusual times.
On the customer support side Omiosuppliers define cancellation policies so thereonly so much it can do but Shaam said itbeen putting out messaging to help users — creating a spreadsheet of cancellation policies listing companies that give refunds and those that don&t, and publishing updates on things like cancelled flights.
On the employee support side therea mix of well-being and practical issues being tackled.
&How can we protect safety regulations? Trigger points. We have clear guidelines… today we triggered that we work from home for 15 days,& he said. &How to protect mental health so nobody goes crazy sitting at home all day? Connectivity, all of that stuff. What if you have school shut down — how do you balance children at home alone with working at the same time? All of this stuff.
&Therea lot of practical questions that come up — like the design team need to take their chunky monitors home so they can actually design. All of these things are being tackled by that task force.&
&As a startup you can actually bring these together very quickly,& Shaam added. &Today we had a small team — that team is now quite large, 10+ people going at all three workstreams. So letsee how we survive.
&Again, therea lot of uncertainty but I feel that the best thing I can do is bring stability, bring confidence into the organization.&
TravelPerkMeir said the business is also most focused on responding to immediate challenges and needs — including keeping up with the demand itseeing.
Even though bookings are down new sign ups are up, he told us.
&The focus right now as an organization is really on the day by day — we need to make sure we keep providing the service,& he said. &We keep actually selling and a lot of companies are signing up. Sign ups are actually dramatically up. People are signing up they&re just obviously not travelling so we have a lot of short term priorities that are extremely important.
&Maybe if we hadn&t raised a C round last year — $100+ million — we would be in a different situation but right now we are fortunate to be in this position so we have to focus on short term priorities without knowing where itgoing to end.&
The company is also using a moment of plunging sales to direct attention on product. And is hiring more engineers to be able to accelerate product dev — including to build crisis response features.
&I&m sure we&re not unique in the tech world but we&re actually investing more in the product. So we keep hiring — we actually increased our hiring plan for product and engineering. And so far we&re not reducing our burn letsay but we&re shifting that towards really what matters for our customers.
&We&re already ahead of the curve in product but this is a really good opportunity to keep pushing on our strengths and another one we&re doing is adjusting the business and the business model as well.&
Meir gave the example of a premium concierge service which itjust decided to provide for free for all its users for the next three months. &Although itgoing to increase dramatically our costs in customer care itthe right thing to do for our customers,& he said of that particular coronavirus triggered business adjustment.
&You&ll see some really cool stuff coming out,& he added. &The product team, together with the commercial team is changing roadmaps. In a way we threw the roadmap of 2020 to the bin and we started working on a weekly basis.&
Another example he gave is a new feature itlaunched in partnership with medical and travel security company, International SoS, to help companies not only track where in the world their employees are but ensure they have the medical or other crisis expertise support available should the worst happen off-site.
&Itthe best company in the world for duty of care,& said Meir. &Itone of those topics that in normal times people don&t really like to think about it — but this is probably the highest request we were getting in the past 2-3 weeks from customers.&
&We went from idea to releasing it in less than 5 days of work,& he added. &So again reducing the risk, reducing the uncertainty piece. This is a thing that we&re going to do more and more as this situation evolves. If we have a request for a feature like ‘duty of care& — which makes tonnes of sense right now — we&re going to shift the roadmap and do more of these kind of things.&
&This is a moment to be decisive and adaptable but also courageous and to invest in what makes TravelPerk stronger this year, next year and ten years,& he added. &This doesn&t change — we have great investors. We have a good cash position, great team. So we should keep hiring, we should keep investing in the product, we should keep investing in our service — so my biggest worry is that we [don&t] act out of panic or out of confusion — and thatsomething we should be aware of and not do. But I&m happy to say that thatnot the case.&
As part of its own pro-active crisis response, TravelPerk has this week switched to 100% remote working — a radical change for Meir, who has deliberately required presence from his staff up to now for workplace culture reasons.
&We don&t do remote work. Itsomething thatone of these trendy things that we decided not to do yet for various reasons. We just think our culture is much stronger when people are physically in the same space and we switched from nobody does remote work to 100% remote,& he told us.
&We thought that the government — especially in Spain where most of our team is — is not reacting fast enough and aggressively enough [to Covid-19]. This is really unfair for the elderly and those who have previous health conditions…So we decided to take action… And I was just amazed how fast we transitioned from a company that doesn&t do remote to full on remote.&
GetYourGuide has also gone fully remote.&We did that on Monday,& said Reck. &Everyone called me crazy and now on Friday everyone wants to have our best practices playbook.&
&The health and safety of our employees and most importantly of the community around us [is our biggest concern],& he added. &We are in constant contact with everyone — to make sure people feel safe.
&They are now at home, they follow the news all the time. Therehuge psychological pressure — the travel marketgoing down, the stock marketgoing down — so for me by biggest role is to keep that strong engagement and morale and that people don&t feel threatened by the situation around them.&
As it happens, Reck is a biochemist by education — so likely one of relatively few founders in the travel space with hands-on lab experience of viruses. Healso braced for the longest ‘nuclear winter& of business disruption of the three startups we spoke to.
&What we know about this virus is there is no immunity in the population — meaning that this will continue to spread,& he said. &Every potential person is a host. And itvery infectious and it seems to stick around quite a bit. And it puts a lot of stress on public health systems. So I personally anticipate there will be a very long lockdown in a lot of countries. And there will be only a very slow recovery. If you&d ask me we might see some reopening of the travel landscape in summer but I think that will be far diminished from a typical season. We&ll only see a full recovery towards May, June, July 2021. I don&t think it will be earlier than that.&
&It will get worse,& he added. &We know now itvery likely there will be a lockdown [across the West]. My biggest wish for the next couple of weeks will be that employees continue to be healthy, safe and continue to be able to work and contribute like they&ve done.&
OmioShaam is expecting at least several months of disruption to business as usual — pointing to the lack of a swift and coordinated response from governments to implement quarantine measures.
&We need a system-wide [response] like China or Singapore has done beautifully to really prevent it and I don&t believe thatgoing to happen so we&re bracing for 3-4 months impact,& he told us.
&I just went out last night in Berlin with my wife for dinner and the restaurants are full, itcrowded, the subways are full — full! Like not even 20% lower. Completely full. We had to make a reservation to get a table etc. So unless governments, in a very coordinated way, shut down borders for a period of 4-6 weeks so everybody goes into isolation in one go and everybody comes out — itgoing to drip feed for a long time because people are acting in different points of time on their own means.&
On the question of whether there will be a lasting impact on the travel market as the pandemic undoes global supply chains and routines, Shaam said again thatlikely to depend on how co-ordinated or otherwise the response is.
&Therea lot of fixed costs part of travel. So I think the answer to that largely depends on how co-ordinated and how quickly we can contain. If we all actually manage to come back in 3-4 months I think we&re in a good place because it&ll bounce back quite strongly. If itdrip feeding, and it takes the wind out for a very long time, then there will be a different situation but I hope not.&
In the meanwhile, with so many businesses getting au fait with virtual meetings and videoconferencing tools, the coronavirus crisis could also have a long term impact on demand for business travel —if lots of companies realize quite how much can be done remotely.
On this element of the crisis, TravelPerkMeir isn&t concerned.
&Itan interesting theory,& he said, deferring from hazarding a guess on whether it will come to pass or not. &It doesn&t really matter for us as a company. Because companies spend $1.6TR a year on business travel. And ita market that is growing. Before this crisis predicted growth of 6 or 7% in 2020 — which is huge compared to the size of the market. So even if we&re talking about 10-20%, letsay, at the edges this doesn&t change the picture. You still will have a tonne of business travel when we come back out of it.&
&If we zoom out a bit from this situation — there is a trend for more sustainable approach to travel,& Meir added. &So if so many things can turn into a Zoom call I don&t think ita bad idea for the planet. And we will do well. We&re not worried about a scenario like this.&
Here TravelPerk isn&t worried because the startup has another product for that: GreenPerk — a carbon offset offering it launched earlier this month. Itbeen developed in partnership with non-profit Atmosfair, which works on decarbonization via UN-endorsed carbon mitigation projects.
&Many companies asked us to help them offset and reduce the impact that their travel generates and we thought that just reporting on what harm you do is not good enough. We wanted actually to make a difference,& said Meir. &One of the projects that we chose is efficient cooking stoves in Rwanda.&
GreenPerk uses an algorithm to calculate the carbon footprint of a given trip and then applies a per booking fee proportional to the pollution created — with the fee going to fund the carbon offset project.
GreenPerk is an opt in product — and Meir says italready had &amazing traction&, with more than 50 companies already signed up and using it.
&Itunfair for us — people who live in very comfortable counties — to ask people in Rwanda to stop cooking their food but if we can help them transition to efficient and also faster ways of cooking then we should definitely do that… so the project funds efficient cooking stoves to replace the polluting ones.&
&If the world after this crisis looks like we are conscious about how we travel — when we do travel we try not to have an impact — and if, sometimes, making Zoom calls are better than face to face I think itnot a bad scenario for the world. And we as a travel company will adapt like we always have,& he added. &Itmore interesting to look at the long term implication — rather than ‘is it good for our quarter or not&.&
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Write comment (93 Comments)Itamazing that in this day and age, the best way to search for new clothes is to click a few check boxes and then scroll through endless pictures. Why can&t you search for &green patterned scoop neck dress& and see one? Glisten is a new startup enabling just that by using computer vision to understand and list the most important aspects of the products in any photo.
Now, you may think this already exists. In a way, it does — but not a way thathelpful. Co-founder Sarah Wooders encountered this while working on a fashion search project of her own while going to MIT.
&I was procrastinating by shopping online, and I searched for v-neck crop shirt, and only like two things came up. But when I scrolled through there were 20 or so,& she said. &I realized things were tagged in very inconsistent ways — and if the data is that gross when consumers see it, itprobably even worse in the backend.&
As it turns out, computer vision systems have been trained to identify, really quite effectively, features of all kinds of images, from identifying dog breeds to recognizing facial expressions. When it comes to fashion and other relatively complex products, they do the same sort of thing: Look at the image and generate a list of features with corresponding confidence levels.
So for a given image, it would produce a sort of tag list, like this:
As you can imagine, thatactually pretty useful. But it also leaves a lot to be desired. The system doesn&t really understand what &maroon& and &sleeve& really mean, except that they&re present in this image. If you asked the system what color the shirt is, it would be stumped unless you manually sorted through the list and said, these two things are colors, these are styles, these are variations of styles, and so on.
Thatnot hard to do for one image, but a clothing retailer might have thousands of products, each with a dozen pictures, and new ones coming in weekly. Do you want to be the intern assigned to copying and pasting tags into sorted fields? No, and neither does anyone else. Thatthe problem Glisten solves, by making the computer vision engine considerably more context-aware and its outputs much more useful.
Herethe same image as it might be processed by Glistensystem:
Better, right?
&Our API response will be actually, the neckline is this, the color is this, the pattern is this,& Wooders said.
That kind of structured data can be plugged far more easily into a database and queried with confidence. Users (not necessarily consumers, as Wooders explained later) can mix and match, knowing that when they say &long sleeves& the system has actually looked at the sleeves of the garment and determined that they are long.
The system was trained on a growing library of around 11 million product images and corresponding descriptions, which the system parses using natural language processing to figure out whatreferring to what. That gives important contextual clues that prevent the model from thinking &formal& is a color or &cute& is an occasion. But you&d be right in thinking that itnot quite as easy as just plugging in the data and letting the network figure it out.
Herea sort of idealized version of how it looks:
&Therea lot of ambiguity in fashion terms and thatdefinitely a problem,& Wooders admitted, but far from an insurmountable one. &When we provide the output for our customers we sort of give each attribute a score. So if itambiguous, whether ita crew neck or a scoop neck, if the algorithm is working correctly it&ll put a lot of weight on both. If itnot sure, it&ll give a lower confidence score. Our models are trained on the aggregate of how people labeled things, so you get an average of what peopleopinion is.&
The model was initially aimed at fashion and clothing in general, but with the right training data it can apply to plenty of other categories as well — the same algorithms could find the defining characteristics of cars, beauty products and so on. Herehow it might look for a shampoo bottle — instead of sleeves, cut and occasion you have volume, hair type and paraben content.
Although shoppers will likely see the benefits of Glistentech in time, the company has found that its customers are actually two steps removed from the point of sale.
&What we realized over time was that the right customer is the customer who feels the pain point of having messy unreliable product data,& Wooders explained. &Thatmainly tech companies that work with retailers. Our first customer was actually a pricing optimization company, another was a digital marketing company. Those are pretty outside what we thought the applications would be.&
It makes sense if you think about it. The more you know about the product, the more data you have to correlate with consumer behaviors, trends and such. Knowing summer dresses are coming back, but knowing blue and green floral designs with 3/4 sleeves are coming back is better.

Glisten co-founders Sarah Wooders (left) and Alice Deng
Competition is mainly internal tagging teams (the manual review we established none of us would like to do) and general-purpose computer vision algorithms, which don&t produce the kind of structured data Glisten does.
Even ahead of Y Combinator demo day next week the company is already seeing five figures of monthly recurring revenue, with their sales process limited to individual outreach to people they thought would find it useful. &Therebeen a crazy amount of sales these past few weeks,& Wooders said.
Soon Glisten may be powering many a product search engine online, though ideally you won&t even notice — with luck you&ll just find what you&re looking for that much easier.
(This article originally had Alice Deng quoted throughout when in fact it was Wooders the whole time — a mistake in my notes. It has also been updated to better reflect that the system is applicable to products beyond fashion.)
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Write comment (93 Comments)
ZTEstruggles with the U.S. government generally haven&t been as high-profile as fellow Chinese mobile giant Huawei, but the company has still had its share of issues in recent years. The latest wrinkle, first reported by NBC and later confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, finds it under investigation over bribery charges.
The issues stem from a 2017 settlement with the U.S. government, which found ZTE pleading guilty of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. The company was hit with a hefty $892 million fine over accusations of shipping millions of dollars& worth of equipment to the country over the course of around six years.
TechCrunch reached out to the Justice Department, which ultimately declined to comment. We&re still waiting for an official response from ZTE on this one. The company did, however issue a pretty generic statement to NBC, noting:
ZTE is fully committed to meeting its legal and compliance obligations. The top priority of the companyleadership team is making ZTE a trusted and reliable business partner in the global marketplace, and the company is proud of the enormous progress it has made. Beyond this, it would not be appropriate for ZTE to comment.
Fair enough, I guess. The details of the deals being investigated are not yet clear, nor is the timeline. Though ZTEfine does not preclude the manufacturer from further investigation by the U.S. government, regardless of whether the actions took place before or after.
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Write comment (90 Comments)Womenpioneeredthe field of computer technology. Yet, in 2020, the sector is still dominated by men. Though the industry has made efforts toward achieving diversity and inclusion, progress has been slow, with only 26% of women — and even fewer Hispanic (2%) and African American (3%) women — currently in the tech workforce.
While it may be relatively easy for women to enter the industry, they often stall in lower-level positions, leaving women feeling stagnated in their careers. Companies can, however, improve their gender-diversity efforts and accelerate the number of women not only entering, but advancing and succeeding in, the tech industry by implementing sponsorship programs.
Sponsors include those in leadership positions who go beyond merely offering guidance and advice to more junior colleagues and instead act as advocates by using their leadership skills, power and influence to proactively help build and advance the careers of their &sponsorees.& In fact, a study by the Center for Talent Innovation found that respondents working in STEM careers ranked sponsorship programs among the top five most effective initiatives in retaining and advancing women in STEM roles and careers.
For women who want a career in tech, a sponsor can help eliminate bureaucratic red tape and other hurdles by putting the focus on an employeeskills and accomplishments, recommending her for coveted assignments and identifying and helping female employees secure opportunities to expedite advancement within a company. When a female employee is sponsored by a senior- or executive-level employee, it can give her more of a voice within her company and specific department, improving the likelihood that she will contribute proactively to the team, help promote a positive company culture and improve the overall business.
The problem is that many tech companies aren&t taking the best approach to promoting gender diversity. According to a report by AnitaB.org, eight in 10 tech companies offer formal gender diversity training programs to reduce gender bias at work. While the aim of these programs is to help every employee understand the value of gender diversity and address the barriers to creating a diverse and inclusive team, research has shown that these programs don&t actually increase workforce diversity.
One study found that after five years of instituting required diversity training programs for managers, companies showed no change in the number of women in management positions, and actually experienced a decrease in the proportion of Asian American and African American women in managerial roles.
Although it is laudable that companies are making more conscious efforts to tackle gender biases, initiatives such as re-skilling and career development programs do more to help women advance in the workplace and drive forward their careers. To correct the gender imbalance, employers should place a bigger emphasis on providing career progression offerings, like sponsorships.
Developing and encouraging the use of sponsorship programs that offer women support and recognition can be vital to attracting and retaining top female talent. In 2017, Accenture, a professional services company, publicly committed to reaching a gender-balanced workforce by 2025. To drive this initiative, the firm developed a sponsorship program in which senior female employees are paired with C-suite executives who assist them in driving their careers forward, and the results have been promising. Forty-seven percent of Accenturenew hires are women, and women comprise 44% of its global workforce. The company maintains that 100% of its female employees participate in programs intended to mentor, sponsor and develop their careers.
IBM has also established programs to advance women in technical leadership roles. Through its Technical WomenPipeline Program, the company aligns mid-career women with both a sponsor and an executive coach to help them navigate opportunities that would not be accessible otherwise. Women currently hold a quarter of management positions worldwide and comprise 29%of the total workforce.
Deloitte has also seen the positive results from its implementation of a sponsorship program. In the 2019 fiscal year, women accounted for44%of the companyworkforce and almost aquarterof its Global Board is made up of women.
With a sponsor by their side, women are more likely to be promoted to leadership positions than their peers who don&t have a sponsor. Sandy Carter, VP of enterprise workloads at Amazon Web Services, has said that &sponsorship is one of the most important elements for success of all aspiring leaders.& In fact, Catalyst research found that when women are partnered with sponsors, they are just as likely as men to receive a promotion. And according to a recent report byPayScale, as professionals scale up the corporate ladder, the more likely they are to have had a sponsor. The report found that 59.2% of managers reported having a sponsor, and, at the executive level, 65.5% of individuals have a workplace sponsor.
And while these programs are essential in helping women advance in their companies and careers, sponsorships are also crucial to helping women move closer to bridging the gender pay gap, which is currently at 3%within the industry. A Ripple Match report found that women entering the job market make just 76% of what their male counterparts make. But with a sponsor, individuals tend to make 11.6%more than those who don&t have a sponsor.
Sponsorships can also make a real difference in helping the industry meet and exceed its diversity goals. If women feel supported and represented within a company, they are more likely to remain and contribute to the advancement of other professional women around them, creating a long-lasting positive impact. Business leaders who have participated in sponsoring relationships have reported feeling an increase in job satisfaction and a greater sense of commitment to their organization, resulting in a longer tenure.
If tech companies want to ignite real change within the industry, they must bolster their dedication to empowering female talent. Offering sponsorship programs shows women that employers are committed to aligning them with advocates who will ensure that sexism will not play a role in hindering their career growth in the tech industry they helped create.
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Bill Gates has stepped down from the board of Microsoft to spend more time on his philanthropic endeavors, the company announced Friday afternoon. Though he will remain technology advisor to CEO Satya Nadella, this move reduces his involvement with the company to the lowest level it has ever been.
Gates led Microsoft from the &80s all the way through 2008, when he left to dedicate himself more fully to the Bill - Melinda Gates Foundation, through which he has channeled a great deal of his immense wealth toward global health concerns.
He remained on the board, however, and in fact chaired it until 2014. But starting today he will only be there as, presumably, something like a lucky charm and occasional auxiliary brain to Nadella and his crew.
&Itbeen a tremendous honor and privilege to have worked with and learned from Bill over the years,& said Nadella in a Microsoft press release. &I am grateful for Billfriendship and look forward to continuing to work alongside him to realize our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.&
While I shall not attempt a complete Gates/Microsoft retrospective at this time, itbeen an interesting journey to witness, to say the least. Microsoft has embodied the best and the worst of technology, sometimes simultaneously (it contains multitudes), and much of that was due to Gatesindelible influence.
The Gates Foundation has been extremely influential as well, though in a quieter and more humane fashion. It may be that Gatessecond legacy will ultimately outshine his first.
The updated lineup on Microsoftboard is as follows:
John W. Thompson, Microsoft independent chair; Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock Partners; Hugh Johnston, vice chairman and chief financial officer of PepsiCo; Teri L. List-Stoll, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Gap, Inc.; Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft; Sandra E. Peterson, operating partner, Clayton, Dubilier - Rice; Penny Pritzker, founder and chairman, PSP Partners; Charles W. Scharf, chief executive officer and president of Wells Fargo - Co.; Arne Sorenson, president and CEO, Marriott International Inc.; John W. Stanton, chairman of Trilogy Equity Partners; Emma Walmsley, CEO of GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK); and Padmasree Warrior, founder, CEO and president, Fable Group Inc.
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Just like you, we at TechCrunch have been keeping a close eye on the developing situation around the novel coronavirus outbreak. This is indeed a challenging time for families and businesses across the globe.
TechCrunch is not immune. Our events, big and small, have always been designed to bring the tech startup community together, to make connections and grow alongside one another.
Right now, our top goal is to ensure the health and safety of our team, our audience and the broader community. Based on guidance from California Governor Gavin Newsom and other officials, TechCrunch has decided to postpone TC Early Stage in San Francisco and TC Sessions: Mobility in San Jose.
- Early Stage SF will now take place on July 21 at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco.
- Sessions: Mobility will now take place on October 6 at California Theater in San Jose.
If you&ve purchased a ticket for either of these events, or have sponsored one of these events, you will be contacted via email about your cancellation options. If you have any other questions or if you can&t find that email, don&t hesitate to reach out to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
We&re working hard to ensure that we offer at these rescheduled events the same fantastic programming for which TechCrunch is known. We&ll keep you in the loop on that front.
If any of our other events are affected by the coronavirus or other developments, we&ll update you right away. You can always check for the latest updates here.
Itimpossible to predict how all this will shake out, or how long that will take. TechCrunch has already experimented with virtual events and experiences in a variety of ways, from virtual hackathons to remote interviews. So, no matter what happens, we&re committed to finding interesting and creative ways to bring together entrepreneurs, investors, students and builders to learn from and guide one another.
We&re all in this together.
We hope to see you this summer!
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