In further responses from the tech industry to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week and the country’s continued aggression against its neighbor, Google and Microsoft have both now said they’re pausing sales in Russia.

We understand that Google’s pause — which is focused on its own ad sales — began last night and has been rolling out over subsequent hours. The news was reported earlier by Reuters.

It’s not the first to do this. Snap and Twitter previously announced ad sales suspensions in Russia. But Google’s ad business is of course considerably larger.

Google’s action boils down to a pause on all ads in Russia, including Search, YouTube, and Display ads, effective immediately — meaning people in Russia won’t see ads from Google.

But we also understand that it does not prevent Russian advertisers from using Google’s ads services to serve ads outside Russia if they wish.

This suggests Russian publications could still seek to monetize content by serving ads to people outside the country via Google’s ad network — at a time when independent journalists in the country are facing an unprecedented crackdown. (Earlier today the Russian parliament passed a law that could land reporters in jail for up to 15 years for spreading ‘false’ information about the military.)

Microsoft, meanwhile, has also announced its own sales suspension in Russia — writing in a blog post today that it will “suspend all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia”.

This presumably covers Bing ads, as well as other Microsoft services. (We’ve asked for confirmation.)

“In addition, we are coordinating closely and working in lockstep with the governments of the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, and we are stopping many aspects of our business in Russia in compliance with governmental sanctions decisions,” Microsoft’s president and VP Brad Smith also writes in the blog post.

Google’s more limited move restricting ad sales is an expansion of measures it announced Tuesday — “promoting information quality”, as it put it then — several days after Russia’s invasion began in the early hours of February 24; and after European leaders had spent a day piling pressure on tech platforms to act decisively against Russian disinformation.

Initially, Google said it would geoblock the YouTube channels of the Kremlin-linked media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik in Europe. It soon followed by geoblocking the pair’s apps from its Play Store — also only in Europe, and ahead of a pan-EU sanction on the channels coming into legal force on Wednesday.

Prior to that Google had announced an “indefinite pause of monetization of Russian state-funded media across our platforms” — meaning media outlets such as RT are unable to generate ad revenue or buy advertising via its platforms.

But the tech giant confirmed today it’s taken things further by freezing its ad sales in Russia.

In a statement on the ad sales suspension, a Google spokesperson told us: 

“In light of the extraordinary circumstances, we’re pausing Google ads in Russia. The situation is evolving quickly, and we will continue to share updates when appropriate.”

Google is not suspending sales of other types of services (e.g. paid consumer services, Google Pay, sales of apps etc) at this time. It is also continuing to provide Russians with access to information services (e.g. Google Search, Maps, YouTube etc).

The piecemeal nature of the tech giant’s announcements since Russia invaded Ukraine suggests Google has been scrambling to come up with a coherent response to an unfolding crisis.

Microsoft has looked more decisive — announcing a more rounded package of measures targeted at Russia’s “state-sponsored disinformation” at the start of this week; and further extending that today with a blanket sales ban.

Earlier this week Apple also said it was halting product sales in Russia and restricting some of its services (such as Apple Pay). Plus it pulled RT and Sputnik from the App Store globally this week (with the exception of the Russia market itself).

The picture from Facebook’s parent Meta is fuzzier. Since the invasion began the social media giant been announcing a series of restrictions (such as demoting RT and Sputnik content) — but at the time of writing the adtech giant does not appear to have suspended ad sales in Russia itself. (Again, we’ve reached out with questions.)

Bans by private companies are not the only disruption Russians are facing to accessing digital services, of course: Wider sanctions on Russian banks also appear to have been hitting locals’ access to some tech services.

When Microsoft announced its intent to buy Nuance Communications last year for $20 billion, it marked a hard move into healthcare for the company. But the deal was not a slam dunk by any means in an increasingly tight regulatory environment. After finally clearing all the regulatory hurdles, however, the company announced today that the deal has closed.

In a video statement CEO Satya Nadella called Nuance a pioneer in enterprise AI, and said that he is looking forward to seeing what the two companies can accomplish together. “Together we will usher in a future of outcome-based AI where healthcare professionals can spend more time with patients and less time on documentation. Together we will help move key industry workflows securely to the cloud. And together we will use the power of AI to help organizations across every industry create frictionless, personalized customer experiences,” he said.

Nadella’s statement strongly hinted that the company intends to use the Nuance technology more broadly than its primary healthcare focus, taking advantage of Microsoft’s vast resources to build on the existing solutions and bring them to other verticals like financial services, retail and telecommunications. Time will tell how that all comes together.

It wasn’t always a given that we would get to today’s announcement with a combined Microsoft-Nuance. While the prevailing industry wisdom was that Microsoft was not going to be dominating any markets with this deal, in a regulatory environment in which governments have been looking more closely at the largest tech companies, and more specifically mega deals that could have a negative impact on competition, it wasn’t always clear it would happen.

After the deal was cleared by the U.S. Justice Department last year, and later with the EU, one last hurdle remained while the company awaited approval from the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA).

This week the CMA also approved the deal, clearing the way for today’s announcement. The CMA said in a statement that it found no evidence that when combined that the two companies would have an adverse impact on competition in the healthcare transcription market where Nuance has primarily operated:

“The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has found that the anticipated acquisition by Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) of Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nuance) does not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial lessening of Competition,” the watchdog group wrote in a summary of its findings.

With that out of the way, Microsoft and Nuance will move forward with one of the biggest acquisitions in the Nadella era, second only to the $26 billion LinkedIn deal in 2016. It’s worth noting that the company has a $69 billion deal pending to acquire Activision/Blizzard it announced in January, but that deal is still working its way through the approval process.

Apple isn’t the only tech behemoth pulling its products from the Russian market in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Microsoft is ‘suspending‘ all new sales of products and services in Russia, and is halting “many aspects” of its business in the country to honor US, UK and EU sanctions. The move comes days after Microsoft restricted Russian state media across its platforms, and after Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister called on the company to block Russian Xbox accounts.

Microsoft saw the withdrawal as virtually necessary. “Concrete steps” like this would have the most impact, according to company president Brad Smith, and there will be “additional steps” as the Ukraine situation develops. The Windows creator was unambiguous in its criticism of Russia, calling the invasion “unjustified, unprovoked and unlawful” and pointing out its efforts to identify and counter Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine.

The initiative could have a significant impact on Russian use of technology. Microsoft products play important roles for computing in Russia like they do in many countries, including Windows, Office and services like Microsoft 365 or Azure. While existing users might not lose access, this could pose problems for anyone needing to buy a new product or renew a subscription. We’ve asked Microsoft how this might impact Russian PC vendors — they’ll need licenses if they intend to sell Windows-based computers.

Whatever the exact damage, the sales freeze follows a string of crackdowns at tech companies like Google, Meta, Reddit and Twitter. Russia won’t necessarily bend in response to these actions, but there’s clearly concerted pressure on the country to act.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

After years of being overlooked, front-line employees and others who do not sit at desks all day are taking center stage in a new wave of workplace productivity apps. In the latest development, Connecteam — an all-in-one app providing HR tools, communications services, and daily operations management (eg scheduling, virtual time cards) — has raised $120 million, funding that it will be using to continue building out the functionality on its platform — recruitment is one area that is currently missing, for example,  — and to bring on more customers.

Stripes and Insight Partners co-led this round, a Series C, with Tiger Global, Qumra Capital, and O.G. Tech also participating. Connecteam is not disclosing its valuation but Amir Nehemia, the startup’s CEO and co-founder, hinted that it was typical for a Series C. A well-placed source tells me that the valuation with this round just over $800 million.

Connecteam — founded in Israel, where it still has offices, but officially based in New York — last raised money, a $37 million Series B, only ten months ago. But in what is a sign of the times — not only are deskless workers, estimated to account for some 80% of all workers globally, getting more attention; but the push for more digital transformation has led companies themselves into investing more into technology to make those teams’ jobs more efficient — the startup has been in the middle of a growth spurt. Revenues and business expanded by 400% last year, and it is on track to do the same again this year, and that caught the eye of investors and led to this growth round.

Building tech for frontline and other unanchored workers has become a more crowded field, including tech to address specific functions (eg EduMe building a training and online learning platform; or Meta’s Workplace honing its focus on one-to-many internal communications and conversations), and those providing platforms or more general purpose approaches that compete more directly with Connecteam. (That list includes Flip, which announced funding just last month after passing 1 million users; Snapshift, Teams from Microsoft, Crew (now owned by Block/Square), Blink, Yoobic, When I Work, Workstream and many more.

But in that context, Connecteam is one of the bigger players, currently with 20,000 business customers, ranging from small businesses with 5 employees through to organizations like SodaStream (part of Pepsi), Nike and McDonalds, and covering what COO Yuval Magid described as 200 different verticals. That customer base works out to around half a million monthly active users across 80 countries, although currently North America accounts for 70% of its business.

And beyond that, the startup is finding success because it’s tapping into another important enterprise trend, which is a current interest in buying products that cover several functions rather than going for point solutions, which makes both the app and IT spend easier to manage.

Connecteam does provide an option for those who need it to integrate third-party tools — something a larger enterprise might choose to use — but it also gives customers the option of importing data from other software if it’s migrating to do everything on Connecteam.

“There is no need to have several apps” when you use Connecteam, Nehemia said. “This is why we include a bunch of features.”

It also has tried to put itself into the mindset of the customer in another regard, by aiming to make the app easy to use.

“You don’t require IT to implement Connecteam. You don’t need any training,” Nehemia said. “Our customers are busy and operational in nature.”

Image Credits: Connecteam (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new window) license.

The company got its start in part from picking up what Nehemia said was a “huge gap” in the market and subsequently pivoting from a previous startup idea to address it.

He and co-founders Daniel and Yonatan Nuriel were building Mobile Lesson, a training platform for both knowledge workers and deskless workers. In the process of meeting with potential and existing customers, Nehemia found that many of them couldn’t answer basic questions about their teams.

“I would ask how many employees they had, and the response was that they didn’t know,” he said. It turns out that modern scheduling and labor distribution, combined with the growing obsolescence of “clocking in” using a physical machine had led to people resorting to a hacked-together mix of approaches to answer that question daily. Some would “watch CCTV” to see who was where or if they were following up and doing something that they said they would.

It seemed like that was a bigger opportunity for the company to tackle first before hoping to sell training to those teams, and that’s where Connecteam got its start.

The company’s approach for providing a platform to cover any and all functions has so far led it to building some 14 different features, which include some of the training tech it had developed for the previous iteration of the startup; as well as company-wide updates, chat functionality, employee directories and other knowledge libraries essential for doing jobs; and deskless-worker focused operational tools, to manage scheduling, “clocking in” for a job, task management and so on. That mix, plus its ambitions to bring on more features like recruitment — a natural complement to the existing HR onboarding features — gives investors a lot of hope for Connecteam continuing to gain more traction.

“The beauty of the Connecteam product is that it is incredibly powerful and versatile, yet also extremely easy for owners, managers, and employees to adopt and use,” said Saagar Kulkarni, partner at Stripes, in a statement. “After speaking with glowing Connecteam customers who raved about how the product has transformed their businesses, it’s hard to understand how you can manage a business with deskless workers without using Connecteam. We’re proud to back an incredible team that has built such an amazing product.” 

“As more companies adapt to a deskless workplace, Connecteam provides the tools and confidence managers need to be successful. With its best-in-class product and strong leadership, Connecteam has already achieved traction in more than 80 countries and continues to grow,” added Jeff Horing, co-founder and MD at Insight Partners. “We’re confident Connecteam will shape the future of the deskless workforce, and we look forward to our partnership as the company continues to scale up.” 

Google has followed Apple’s lead and removed the apps of Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik from its mobile app Store, Play, per Reuters.

The two Kremlin-lined media outlets have been sanctioned in the European Union following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It’s not immediately clear if the Play Store ban on the Russian state-affiliated media entities’ apps is limited to the EU — where a ban on the two entities is expected to come into force today.

Google had previously banned the RT News app in Ukraine at the request of the government in Kyiv.

We’ve reached out to the company for more details on the Play Store ban and will update this report as we get more.

As we reported earlier, the EU’s legal ban on RT and Sputnik will cover all distribution channels, including online platforms — providing a hard deadline for platform giants to act against RT, Sputnik and their subsidiaries.

Some individual EU Member States have previously banned RT broadcasts in their own territories, such as Germany which banned the German-language version of the Russian state broadcaster earlier this month — but the incoming pan-EU sanction means there will shortly be a far more extensive blanket ban across the region.

Yesterday, ahead of the EU’s sanction coming into force, Google announced blocks on the YouTube channels of RT and Sputnik.

However in that case it is only geoblocking access to their YouTube channels in the EU, where the legal sanction will apply, rather than suspending their accounts globally.

Google has therefore faced some criticism for only implementing a partial block on Russian propaganda.

Google has also appeared a little slower to react to the Ukraine crisis compared to some other platforms.

Yesterday Apple confirmed it will remove the RT and Sputnik News apps from its iOS App Store in all markets outside Russia itself, as it responded to the invasion of Ukraine.

Microsoft, meanwhile, had also already banned RT from its Windows app store and de-ranked both news sources in its search engine Bing — announcing a package of measures Monday.

Other tech firms have also scrambled to put out restrictions on Russian state-affiliated media in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, with Twitter expanding its labelling policy to flag to tweets which contain links to the media outlets’ content earlier this week, as well as reducing the visibility of the content itself.

Twitter has faced some criticism from European leaders for not blocking the accounts themselves. But the company told Reuters yesterday that it will comply with the EU’s sanction when it comes into effect, adding: “The European Union sanctions will likely legally require us to withhold certain content in EU member states.”

In further limited measures announced earlier this week, Facebook said it’s now geoblocking RT and Sputnik in the EU, as did TikTok.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last Thursday, political leaders in Europe and Commission lawmakers have been applying high level pressure to mainstream tech platforms to do more to tackle what the bloc’s president described Sunday as Russia’s “toxic media machine” — trailing what she also couched as “unprecedented” sanctions on RT and Sputnik.

The Commission’s assessment is that the two Kremlin-linked media entities are a key strategic piece of Putin’s war machinery.

The EU’s ban on Kremlin-backed media outlets, Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik (plus any subsidiaries), is expected to cover online platforms and apps as well as traditional broadcast channels, TechCrunch has confirmed.

The “unprecedented” sanction was announced yesterday as the bloc dialled up its response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A spokesman for Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, told us the ban is “expected to cover all means of distribution or transmission, including internet video sharing platforms and applications”.

He also confirmed that the EU’s executive intends to use a sanction legal instrument for the RT ban, rather than trying to amend the existing Audiovisual Media Services Directive — likely so it can move faster.

A separate Commission source suggested the ban could even be in place within a matter of days.

In parallel with the bloc’s move to sanction the two Kremlin mouthpieces, a number of tech platforms have today announced fresh restrictions on Russian state-backed media.

Twitter said it would reduce the visibility of Russian state media-linked outlets on its platform and label tweets that contain links to them, as we reported earlier — expanding its prior policy of labelling the media outlets themselves.

The social media platform said the changes would be deployed immediately — and trailed more to come, suggesting it would add similar labels for other “state-affiliated media accounts” in the next few weeks.

Also today Facebook’s parent, Meta, promoted fresh measures.

Policy president, Nick Clegg, said it will be “restricting access to RT and Sputnik across the EU at this time”. Although it was not immediately clear whether or not the company is fully banning the Russian state media firms or just geoblocking access to them.

We’ve asked Meta for more details.

Microsoft has also announced fresh measures to tackle Russia disinformation in the last few hours.

Writing in a blog post the company said: “We are moving swiftly to take new steps to reduce the exposure of Russian state propaganda, as well to ensure our own platforms do not inadvertently fund these operations.

“In accordance with the EU’s recent decision, the Microsoft Start platform (including MSN.com) will not display any state-sponsored RT and Sputnik content. We are removing RT news apps from our Windows app store and further de-ranking these sites’ search results on Bing so that it will only return RT and Sputnik links when a user clearly intends to navigate to those pages. Finally, we are banning all advertisements from RT and Sputnik across our ad network and will not place any ads from our ad network on these sites.”

NPR also just reported that TikTok will geoblock RT and Sputnik throughout the EU.

European governments have been pressing for US tech platforms to take tougher action on Kremlin-affiliated media outlets throughout the day as Russia’s armed forces have continued their aggression in Ukraine — conducting a brutal bombardment of the country’s second largest city, Kharkiv, which destroyed residential buildings and left scores of civilians dead.

Earlier today, Politico reported on a letter from the leaders of three Baltic states and Poland pressing platforms to do more to snuff out what they dubbed Russia’s “massive disinformation campaign”.

France’s digital minister also tweeted earlier today about a meeting with social network firms and search engines — “to discuss operationalizing the fight against Russian propaganda online” and to talk about the EU’s new sanctions against Kremlin-backed media.

Breton himself also personally pushed the CEOs of Google and YouTube to take tougher action against “Russian war propaganda” in a video call, as we reported earlier today.

The EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the bloc’s incoming ban on Kremlin-backed media outlets yesterday as part of a package of fresh sanctions targeting Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. “The state-owned Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to saw division in our Union,” she said, trailing what she billed as an “unprecedented” move.

The pace of the EU’s action on this front may look surprising but the bloc has spent years establishing channels of communication with mainstream tech platforms specifically for tackling online disinformation — via a voluntary Code of Practice which a number of major platforms have been signed up to since 2018.

While that Code is not legally binding the mechanism generates an expectation of action, as well as establishing fast track channels for the Commission to reach and be heard by mainstream (US) tech platforms. It has previously used these channels to press for more to be done in relation to the coronavirus ‘infodemic’, as it dubbed the wave of disinformation targeting COVID-19 crisis in summer 2020.

War is clearly another pressing cause.

“A continuous coordination is also taking place at technical level with representative of the platforms,” an EU spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Platforms agreed to keep adapting and updating platforms’ policies in light of the current situation.

“Regarding the next steps, we are exploring various options to best coordinate with platforms. Intense work and coordination is taking place.”

The total ban on the Russian media mouthpieces’ content distribution channels (including all things digital) is a huge step for the EU to take.

The bloc’s lawmakers are typically extremely wary about measures that might risk accusations of speech policing. However Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed the context of its propaganda — recasting trolling media outlets as no longer just something that’s perennially chaffing at the margins of democratic Europe but an inexorable part of Putin’s “war propaganda” machine as his armed force attack a sovereign nation.

Von der Leyen’s remarks yesterday were also noteworthy — as she said the bloc is “developing tools to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe” — hinting at yet more action to come.

It remains to be seen exactly what the Commission is intending to expand its approach to cutting off the Kremlin’s “toxic media machine” beyond the incoming ban on RT and Sputnik — but further online content restrictions are unlikely to escape controversy.

The reference to “developing tools” suggests the EU could be hoping to lean on tech platforms to proactively chase down Russian propaganda that’s being spread via non-official outlets — perhaps by applying AI or other filtering technologies.

Although there are legal prohibitions in EU law that prevent general monitoring mandates being applied to digital platforms.

Emergency mandates to pre-filter content would also be a very blunt tool — risking removing genuinely critical speech — which could inadvertently feed the Kremlin’s propaganda machine by sewing division within Western societies by lending credence to the notion that truth is the first casualty of war. 

Netflix helped change the game for microservices when it developed and the outsourced a tool called Conductor, initially built to handle its own extensive, multi-channel on-demand video traffic (and correspondingly complex codebase) globally, and later adopted by companies like Tesla, American Express, Github, Deutsche Telekom, VMware and some 150 other large organizations and others to manage their own services. Now the team behind creating Conductor are launching Orkes, a cloud-hosted version of the tool based on Conductor; and along with this, they’re announcing $9.3 million in funding to fuel the mission, as well as to support the continued growth of the open-source Conductor community.

Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures are co-leading the funding, with angel investors in the round including Mahendra Ramsinghani and Gokul Rajaram and unnamed executives from different tech companies, including Amazon and Facebook.

Orkes (pronounced “or-kes”, a shorted form of “orchestration”) was co-founded by CEO Jeu George, co-CTOs Viren Baraiya and Boney Sekhbut, and CPO Dilip Lukose. The first three all worked together to build Conductor at Netflix, but then went their separate ways: George worked as a senior engineer at Uber; Baraiya led engineering for Firebase at Google; and Sekh headed up the payments for Robinhood. In 2021, the three reunited and were joined by Lukose (an alum of Microsoft Azure, where he’d worked with George), to start Orkes.

The reason for returning to Conductor and building a set of tools to sit on top of it was down to what George said were very clear market signals.

“We built Conductor as a general purpose engine and we could see many companies starting to use it. The space is now at an inflection point and organizations are moving to a microservices architecture,” George said in an interview. “But the wider idea now is to help operationalize that, and help with the management of the scale on top of this.” Since organizations often work in hybrid cloud environments, and across multiple coding languages, the idea with Orkes is to provide a set of tools to help manage that “out of the box,” he added.

Indeed, a discussion on the pro’s and con’s of Conductor on Hacker News, before Orkes came into being, highlighted some of the difficulties in implementing it in some environments, also pointing to the opportunity to fix that.

“When companies build microservices, they build them in their languages of choice, and typically might use multiple languages,” George said, typically with at least three languages in use, but sometimes more. “What is unique about Conductor and Orkes is that it’s fully language agnostic.”

The closed alpha, which has focused on cloud services, has been seeing positive responses, so the investment now will be used to continue building out Orkes’ engineering and go-to-market teams.

The rise of Orkes underscores a very common route these days for open source tools. Developers and engineers put a substantial amount of effort into building groundbreaking tools either inside existing organizations or as projects to solve very direct needs based on their own first-hand experiences, and in keeping with the ethos of how developers operate, and to build wider communities to support those tools in the longer term, they make them open source.

Those same developers often eventually return to those to build some of the most obvious and useful customizations to make them easier to use by a wider set of organizations that might not have the resources or people to implement the open source versions in such a user-friendly way. Of course, anyone can come along and create commercialized versions of open source tools (and for very mature tech it does happen that you might have competing commercial products built on top of them) but typically the founders of these startups are often the same people who helped build the open source tools in the first place: they’ve put more time and focus than anyone else and know the tool’s potential and pitfalls better than anyone else.

And investors like to back them for the same reason. (Another recent example following that same theme: Superconductive, from the creators of Great Expectations, recently raised $40 million.)

In the case of Conductor, the open source tool has a ripe body of existing users who are natural customers for Orkes, but the rise of the startup will open the door to a potential new set of users, too, or so the thinking goes.

LinkedIn — the social network for people looking to connect with others in their professional fields and find work with upwards of 810 million users — has a long-standing business in marketing and advertising on its own platform; today it is announcing an acquisition that could points to its ambitions to provide more analytics and insights across the wider internet. The Microsoft-owned networking platform has acquired Oribi, a Tel Aviv startup that specializes in marketing attribution technology. The deal will see LinkedIn establish its first office in Israel.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the blog post announcing the acquisition but we have contacted LinkedIn to ask for that detail and will update this post as and when we learn more. As a startup, Oribi had raised just under $28 million in funding, according to PitchBook data, from investors that included Sequoia, TLV Parnters, Ibex and others (including taking a bit of funding from Google as part of a local accelerator run by the search giant).

The deal is interesting on two levels. First, it’s signal of LinkedIn continuing to invest in its marketing and advertising services, an area that is growing at a fast clip for the company. Chief product officer Tomer Cohen noted in the blog post today that marketing services revenues have grown 43% year-over-year. But with some 57 million businesses “building their brands on Pages” and over 24,000 virtual events being created weekly on LinkedIn, there is clearly lot more growth that can be tapped here if those businesses are given more functionality, and tools to realize that.

Second, the acquisition of Oribi specifically points to a sea change in what LinkedIn is setting out to do in marketing. Oribi’s mission — as we have described previously — has been to democratize web analytics. In other words, it wants to make it easier for smaller companies to build and run customized analytics to measure the impact of their marketing strategies, something that larger companies might have teams to execute but smaller organizations typically have to forego because they lack the resources.

“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Iris Shoor told TechCrunch previously. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”

Notably, Oribi competes with the likes of Google Analytics, which means that now LinkedIn (and by association Microsoft) is also squaring up against one aspect of the formidable Google digital advertising and marketing machine.

“Through the integration of Oribi’s technology into our marketing solutions platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI of their advertising strategies,” Cohen wrote today. “This means that our customers will be able to more easily measure website conversions with automated tags and code-free technology, as well as build more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy-first by design.”

LinkedIn doesn’t specify how many people from Oribi are joining except to note that “several members of the Oribi team, including founder and veteran entrepreneur, Iris Shoor,” are expected to join the bigger company and work out of the new LinkedIn Tel Aviv office. 

Okteto, a startup that makes it easier for developers to quickly spin up Kubernetes-based development environments in order to speed up their development process, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round.

The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures, with existing investors Haystack, Root Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participating, as well as a number of individual investors, including LaunchDarkly founder and CTO John Kodumal, Replicated founders Grant Miller and Marc Campbell, FingerprintJS founder and CEO Dan Pinto, Bitnami founder Erica Brescia, and Mesosphere founder Florian Leibert.

The company, which participated in Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 class, already counts companies like Monday.com, LaunchDarkly and Replicated among its customers.

Image Credits: Okteto

As Okteto co-founder and CEO Ramiro Berrelleza told me, the idea for the service came from his experience at companies like Microsoft and Atlassian. There, he noticed that Kubernetes and microservices made life easier for operations teams, but not necessarily for developers.

“You have all of these really cool tools for production, deployment, containers, Kubernetes, microservices — but what I saw from my side as a developer was, ‘hey, all this is great, I see why it’s super useful for production — it all makes a lot of sense — but it makes my life as a developer harder,” he said, comparing today’s development practices with tools like Ruby on Rails or the kinds of server applications he built at Atlassian. When Berrelleza met with his co-founders Pablo Chico de Guzman (CTO), who was previously at Docker, and Ramon Lamana (CPO), who previously worked at Atlassian, they realized that they all faced the exact same problems. As is so often that case, that’s what gave the team the impetus to try to solve this issue once and for all.

Image Credits: Okteto

The core idea behind Okteto is that the development environment should look exactly like the production environment. “The first key was that we need to give developers access to something that is as close to production as possible — without the complexities of having to wait for things to be deployed and having to go through all this build process,” he said.

With Okteto, developers get remote dev environments running on Kubernetes clusters with all of the microservices, databases and other services that would run in their production environment — and once they are done with their work, they can shut down the environment just as easily.

Berrelleza noted that part of the company’s philosophy is to ensure that its service integrates with a developer’s existing workflow. So if there is already a Docker Compose file that codifies the production environment, Okteto can take that to set up the dev environment, too, for example (or developers can write their own okteto.yml manifests, too).

The team is looking to expand its feature set to go beyond setting up dev environments to also include tools for writing tests, but also to extend its ephemeral environments to more use cases. Last year, it shipped what the company calls ‘preview environments,’ for example, which its customers can use to show off the current state of a project to their own customers, designers or other stakeholders who wouldn’t typically be part of the software development process. “The software development process is not just writing code. The more you can bring in these people early on in the cycle, the better it is for everyone,” Berrelleza said.

Okteto isn’t the only company tackling this issue. Just yesterday, Signadot launched its service into public beta and it, too, promises to provide developers with faster feedback loops thanks to its ability to quickly spin up production-like environments for testing. Both companies take slightly different approaches to this from a technical perspective, but their goals are very similar.

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, not just because of its size but because of how it uses that to amass large amounts information that it in turn uses to continue feeding the machine with sophisticated product recommendations, relevant advertising, and more to keep people finding things to buy, and buying them. Today, a Stockholm-based startup called Depict.ai that has also built a product recommendation tool — which it believes can help any retailer sell like Amazon — is announcing funding of $17 million to feed its own growth in the U.S. an Europe, after picking up 60 customers including Office Depot and Staples.

The Series A is being led by Tiger Global, with Initialized Capital, EQT Ventures, Y Combinator, and a longish-list of high-profile angels. It follows a seed funding round of $2.8 million that the company raised last year from Initialized, EQT Ventures, Northzone and Y Combinator, where Depict.ai was part of the first cohort to go through the program during a Covid-19 lockdown.

As CEO Oliver Edholm  (who co-founded the company with CTO Anton Osika) describes it, Depit.ai’s basic premise is that Amazon’s algorithms work so well because they have so much data on their platform about what you, and people similar to you, are buying. On a platform with millions of products, it gives Amazon the power to figure out what to show you, and also what to stock and develop as product categories, and how to price those products. That’s a paradigm that most other retailers have adopted too, he said.

“This is the same system that everyone else has adopted, but they are usually only looking at their own historical data,” Endholm said, which will never be as extensive as the dataset that Amazon has, and also doesn’t provide information about active purchases.

Depict.ai’s solution has been to amass a much bigger trove of information by aggregating data from across the internet; building its own deep learning-based platform to “read” it in relevant ways (for example in a search for recommendations after someone searches for a dress, identifying data that relates to other dresses, rather than to models that look like the model in the initial search a customer made); and then ordering it to fit searches made on its customers’ sites, to produce relevant recommendations.

It amasses the data initially by scraping a wide array of sites across the web, Edholm tells me. Scraping has had its share of controversy — a number of sites go to great lengths to make it hard or outright prohibit it, and some have gone so far as to take legal action against those who scrape — but Edholm notes that it’s not illegal and is actually quite standard practice in the world of commerce.

“We train on scraped quantities of data from the web, but a lot of models that do that,” he said. “You can learn pretty good abstractions.”

And, in any case, Depict.ai is scraping such a wide range of sites that even if one or two or 10 blocked it, there would still be a huge trove to tap, and Depict.ai already has amassed a huge amount of data.

“We’re not dependent on any specific site like LInkedIn or Craigslist,” he said, referring to two platforms that have been extensively scraped over the years for primary data that gets repurposed by others. “We generally want to find a lot of e-commerce product information and there are a lot of ways to do that, so I’m not worried about blocks. And we’ve already trained our models and can do it again and can drastically change the data set if we need to.”

The recommendation engine then can be integrated into its customers’ backends by way of an API. It claims that its tech can increase customers’ e-commerce revenue by between 4% and 6% “without needing any sales data at all.”

Catch Edholm if you can

Edholm’s resourcefulness and willingness to quickly change up the means to achieve Depict’s ends is a trait that is actually part and parcel of the person himself.

A computer whizkid, Edholm is a self-taught programmer who first got interested in coding after building customized Minecraft experiences as a 12 year-old. He then moved on to building mobile apps after realizing that they, like Minecraft, also used java.

After finishing middle school, Edholm left formal education and turned to home schooling (he credited his parents multiple times for being “super open minded” during our interview; boy, are they). He first came up with the idea for Depict.ai when he was working as a data scientist at Klarna, the buy now, pay later e-commerce powerhouse also based out of Stockholm, where he first started working when he was only 15. (Klarna had to pull a lot of strings to get him working there, he said, and he describes his work there perhaps because of that as “consulting.”)

While there, he became obsessed with artificial intelligence.

“What was super clear was that modern machine learning needs tons of data to function properly,” he said. “When you think you have enough, even more is better. That’s how modern machine learning works. But in e-commerce Amazon has a monopoly on data. The rest of the e-commerce industry doesn’t have the same alternatives. They u lack the quantity of data of an Amazon.”

But between noticing and figuring out (using AI) how to fix that gap between Amazon and the rest of the commerce world when it came to product data, and actually starting Depict.ai to turn that into a business, Edholm had another detour.

When he was 16 he’d saved up enough money from his Klarna work and selling apps in the app store, and he up and bought a ticket to Singapore, where he decided he needed to live to build a different startup: an AI-based accessibility platform for the web, to help those with visual impairments experience the internet.

Singapore was in his sights, he said, because he’d read a few research papers about accessibility that were published by academics in the country on the subject, so he thought that it would be best to be on the ground there to build out his ideas.

“I was very naive. I was inspired by the film Catch Me If You Can,” he said. “I understand that it was dramatic for my parents. I guess I have a track record of booking spontaneous flights.” (In fact, my interview with him was conducted while he was not in Stockholm, but Antwerp, Belgium — where he’d spontaneously flown that morning to try to woo a potential hire that he really wanted to join the team.)

He stayed in Singapore for six months on a short-term visa working on the idea, financing his time there by doing more consultancy work. Eventually he realized that it would be a huge challenge to build this out as a business. (Indeed, I think such products probably do have currency, but perhaps more as platform plays than accessibility-as-a-service for end users.)

So, for a Plan B, he also applied to join Y Combinator, now to work on Depict.ai, which had yet to launch. By the time he got a slot to interview, he’d moved back to Stockholm, but hadn’t told YC, so in fact had to fly back to Asia, to Bangalore, for the actual in-person meeting before eventually getting accepted, only to eventually go through the program remotely because of Covid-19.

Since starting Depict.ai, Edholm’s own star as an individual and founder of renown has only gone up: no surprise here, but he’s also now a Thiel Fellow.

Edholm is now only 19, and reading through what he’s done so far, it’s hard to imagine him sitting still for too long, but with Depict.ai still in the building phase, there is a lot of potential still to tap. For starters, it can pick up more customers. It can also diversify what it uses its data for, both to serve e-commerce companies but also in applying that same framework to other verticals.

In that regard, it’s interesting to see an investor like Tiger leading this round. The VC has increasingly been appearing in smaller, earlier stages of funding — in contrast to its early days and perhaps highest-profile investments where it sinks hundreds of millions into already-scaled businesses. The idea here is that Tiger itself is also learning more and wanting to get in on the ground level to make better returns on bets that it thinks might be good ones. In this case, that could just as easily apply to backing Depict.ai as it could to backing Edholm himself.

“Depict.ai’s AI-based product recommendation platform, is completely novel because it does not require historical sales data, enables online retailers of any size to deliver high-quality recommendations, a key driver of increased revenues,” said John Curtius, Partner, Tiger Global, in a statement. “We believe Depict.ai’s technology is poised to be a leader in this space, and we are excited to partner with Oliver and his team as they continue to expand into new markets.”

“At EQT Ventures we generally observe two trends in e-commerce innovation. Entrepreneurs either build tools to “arm the rebels” or create services for incumbents to keep up with the speed of more nimble players. When meeting with Oliver and his team we immediately bought his vision of providing top-tier product recommendation for the masses. Multiple members on our team have experienced the problem first-hand as founders, the Depict.ai technology is both a direct enabler of revenue growth and a time-saver from a development capacity standpoint. We’re excited to continue backing them on their journey from seed to Series A and beyond as they build one of the future giants in the e-commerce infrastructure space,” added Rania Belkahia, a partner at EQT Ventures.

(The angel list includes Fredrik Hjelm, CEO & Co-founder of Voi, Johannes Schildt, CEO & Co-founder of Kry, Carl Rivera, CEO & Co-founder of Tictail, Erik Bernhardsson, creator of the Spotify recommendation engine, Northzone, Nicolas Dessaigne, CEO & Co-founder of Algolia, Vidit Aatrey, CEO & Co-founder of Meesho, Joshua Browder, CEO & Founder of DoNotPay, Finbarr Taylor, CEO & Co-founder of Shogun.)

The Windows 11 operating system is growing in popularity among businesses. However, just like its predecessor, it can have some intrusive privacy settings enabled by default. Luckily, you can easily turn these settings off to protect your privacy.

Turn off personalized advertising

Windows 11 features targeted ads as suggestions, recommendations, and tips on your device’s user interface. The operating system personalizes the ads a user sees based on computer activity and browser history. While personalized ads may direct users to helpful content, they can also be a hindrance to their productivity. To remove these distracting ads, here’s what you should do:

• Click Start > Settings > Privacy & security.
• Go to Diagnostics and feedback.
• Find the Tailored experiences menu, and toggle it off.
• Then, go back to Privacy & security and select General.
• From there, turn off the “Let apps show me personalized ads by using my advertising ID” option.

You can also remove ads in Windows 11 notifications by doing the following:

• Go to Start > Settings > System.
• Select Notifications.
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and disable the “Get tips and suggestions when it uses Windows” and “Offer suggestions on how I can set up my device options”.

Disable Cortana

Cortana is a personal assistant that allows users to set reminders, schedule events, and send emails, among other tasks. Every time you use Cortana, it collects information about your computer activity — “learning” it, so to speak — to improve user experience. But if you find this feature intrusive, you can disable Cortana completely with these steps:

• Go to Settings > Apps > Apps and Features.
• Find Cortana and open Advanced options by clicking on the three-dot icon.
• Turn off the Run at log-in option.

Change Microsoft’s Edge settings

The Microsoft Edge web browser is chock full of features, such as web experience personalization and typing prediction. Such features may make you uncomfortable since they all send back data to Microsoft. Here’s how to turn them off:

• Open Edge and click on the menu icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner.
• Next, click on Settings > Privacy and services. Scroll down and switch on the “Send ‘Do Not Track’ requests” option.

There’s also a bunch of Privacy and Services settings that you may want to disable, such as tracking services, navigation error resolution, blocking potentially unwanted apps, and more.

For more tips on how to safeguard your security and privacy, drop us a line today. Our experts will be more than happy to help!

Windows 11 helps users by giving useful suggestions as they type and by displaying ads based on their online searches. But these can feel invasive, especially if you don’t want anyone prying into your online activity. To ensure your privacy and keep Microsoft’s watchful eye off your computer activity, follow these tips.

Turn off personalized advertising

Windows 11 features targeted ads as suggestions, recommendations, and tips on your device’s user interface. The operating system personalizes the ads a user sees based on computer activity and browser history. While personalized ads may direct users to helpful content, they can also be a hindrance to their productivity. To remove these distracting ads, here’s what you should do:

• Click Start > Settings > Privacy & security.
• Go to Diagnostics and feedback.
• Find the Tailored experiences menu, and toggle it off.
• Then, go back to Privacy & security and select General.
• From there, turn off the “Let apps show me personalized ads by using my advertising ID” option.

You can also remove ads in Windows 11 notifications by doing the following:

• Go to Start > Settings > System.
• Select Notifications.
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and disable the “Get tips and suggestions when it uses Windows” and “Offer suggestions on how I can set up my device options”.

Disable Cortana

Cortana is a personal assistant that allows users to set reminders, schedule events, and send emails, among other tasks. Every time you use Cortana, it collects information about your computer activity — “learning” it, so to speak — to improve user experience. But if you find this feature intrusive, you can disable Cortana completely with these steps:

• Go to Settings > Apps > Apps and Features.
• Find Cortana and open Advanced options by clicking on the three-dot icon.
• Turn off the Run at log-in option.

Change Microsoft’s Edge settings

The Microsoft Edge web browser is chock full of features, such as web experience personalization and typing prediction. Such features may make you uncomfortable since they all send back data to Microsoft. Here’s how to turn them off:

• Open Edge and click on the menu icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner.
• Next, click on Settings > Privacy and services. Scroll down and switch on the “Send ‘Do Not Track’ requests” option.

There’s also a bunch of Privacy and Services settings that you may want to disable, such as tracking services, navigation error resolution, blocking potentially unwanted apps, and more.

For more tips on how to safeguard your security and privacy, drop us a line today. Our experts will be more than happy to help!