software News of 12/09/19

To Measure Sales Efficiency, SaaS Startups Should Use The 4×2

Brian Ascher Contributor Share on Twitter Brian Ascher is a partner at Venrock , where he invests broadly across enterprise and fintech and serves on the boards of several companies, including ...

Mozilla Launches The Next Phase Of Its Firefox Private Network VPN Beta

Mozilla today announced that its Firefox Private Network (FPN), which lets you encrypt your Firefox connections, is now in an extended beta after a few months of relatively limited testing in the Firefox Test Pilot program. This beta, however, ...

CircleCI Launches Improved AWS Support

For about a year now, continuous integration and delivery service CircleCI has offered Orbs , a way to easily reuse commands and integrations with third-party services. Unsurprisingly, some of the most popular Orbs focus on AWS, as that’s ...

Vinted, The Second-Hand Clothes Marketplace, Raises $141m At A $1b+ Valuation

The market for second-hand clothes — the “circular economy” as it’s sometimes called — has been on the rise in the last several years, fuelled by economic crunches, a desire to make more responsible and less wasteful ...

Twitter To Add A Way To ‘Memorialize’ Accounts For Deceased Users Before Removing Inactive Ones

Twitter has changed its tune regarding inactive accounts after receiving a lot of user feedback: It will now be developing a way to “memorialize” user accounts for those who have passed away, before proceeding with a plan it confirmed ...

Vivun Snags $3m Seed Round To Bring Order To Pre-Sales

Vivun , a startup that wants to help companies keep better track of pre-sales data announced a $3 million seed round today led by Unusual Ventures, the venture firm run by Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal. Vivun founder and CEO Matt Darrow says that ...

The Herd Sours On Unprofitable Unicorns Again

David Friend Contributor Share on Twitter David Friend is the CEO of cloud storage company Wasab i, and co-founder of cyber security company Carbonite, recently bought for $1.4 billion. Wasabi is his ...

Engineer.Ai Launches Its Builder Now Platform For Rapid App Prototyping And Building

Engineer.ai combines AI with crowdsourced teams of designers and developers to build bespoke digital products faster that it would take to create a team.At least that’s what they say. Last year it raised one of Europe’s largest Series A ...

Dating.Com Acquires Dil Mil App For South Asian Expats As Dating Apps Consolidate

Following the recent news about the  Badoo and Bumble and Badoo exit there is more consolidation in the dating app space. It seems many dating apps are running for the exits ahead of the launch of dating on Facebook. The  Dating.com Group ...

Direct Mail Still Works If You Avoid Common Mistakes

Julian Shapiro Contributor Share on Twitter Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com , the growth marketing team that trains startups in advanced growth, helps you hire senior growth marketers, ...

Equity Dive: Poshmark’S Origin Story With Co-Founder & CEO Manish Chandra

Hello and welcome back to  Equity , TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We have something a bit different for you this week. Equity co-host Kate Clark recently sat down with Manish ...

MIT Researchers Develop A Much Better Way To Optimize The Control Of Soft Robots

MIT researchers have developed a new way to optimize how soft robots perform specific tasks – a huge challenge when it comes to soft robotics in particular, because robots with flexible bodies can basically move in an infinite number of ways at ...

Adobe Details Feature Roadmap For Photoshop On The IPad, Subject Selection Coming In 2019

Adobe has taken quite a bit of heat for its release of Photoshop on the iPad, mostly because it’s not as feature-complete as a lot of users were hoping, given that this is meant to be a full version of Photoshop on par with the desktop ...

G Suite Users Get More AI Writing Help, Google Assistant Calendar Integration And More

Google is launching a number of updates to its G Suite tools today that, among other things, brings to Google Docs an AI grammar checker, smarter spellchecking and, soon, spelling autocorrect. The company is also launching the ability for G Suite ...

Uber Reports A Sharp Rise In Government Demands For User Data

Uber says the number of legal demands for riders’ data made by U.S. and Canadian authorities has risen sharply in the past year. The ride-hailing company said the number of law enforcement demands for user data during 2018 are up 27% on the ...

Cybersecurity Firm Sonatype Acquired By Vista Equity

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open source automation company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Sonatype said the acquisition will help to build out its Nexus platform, an ...

VoltServer Adds A Data Layer To Electricity Distribution In A Move That Could Help Smart Grid Rollout

Stephen Eaves, the chief executive of a new startup which promises to overlay data on electricity distribution has spent years developing data management technologies. Eaves’ first company, the eponymous Eaves Devices focused on energy systems ...

Moveworks Snags $75m Series B To Resolve Help Desk Tickets With AI

Moveworks , a startup using AI to help resolve Help Desk tickets in an automated fashion, announced a $75 million Series B investment today. The round was led by Iconiq Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors Lightspeed ...

Eigen Nabs $37m To Help Banks And Others Parse Huge Documents Using Natural Language And ‘Small Data’

One of the bigger trends in enterprise software has been the emergence of startups building tools to make the benefits of artificial intelligence technology more accessible to non-tech companies. Today, one that has built a platform to apply power of ...

Brave Launches Version 1.0 Of Its Privacy-Focused Browser

Brave , the company co-founded by ex-Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich after his ouster from the organization in 2014 , today launched version 1.0 of its browser for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS . In a browser market where users are spoiled for ...