Technology

A small consolation in the growing COVID-19 crisis is that some of our moderate germophobia has begun to feel like a minor super power. As I got settled for a cross-country flight last week, I took out my hand wipes and did a whole number on the screen, tray table and arm rests, and this time no one looked at me funny.

I go to a lot of conferences and trade shows and have to shake a lot of hands (though I&ve taken to the elbow bash in recent weeks) before handling my phone. Years ago, I switched from Purell bottles to hand wipes for two reasons:

1. Hand sanitizer feels like lacquering the dirt on. This is probably another weird quirk, so do with that what you will.
2. I touch my phone — and computer — a lot. I almost never leave the house without a product like Wet Ones in my bag. Hell, I included them in a travel gift guide last year. Merry Christmas, Billy, herethe packet of antibacterial wipes you wanted but were too afraid to ask.

For those concerned about damage to your devices, fear not. Apple, which has never been prone to recklessness for such things, just gave disinfecting wipes a green light on its &How to clean your Apple products& that covers Mac, iPad, iPhone and iPod, among others.

Using a 70 percent isopropyl alcohol wipe or Clorox Disinfecting Wipes, you may gently wipe the hard, nonporous surfaces of your Apple product, such as the display, keyboard, or other exterior surfaces. Don&t use bleach. Avoid getting moisture in any opening, and don&t submerge your Apple product in any cleaning agents. Don&t use on fabric or leather surfaces.

iPhones these days sport IP67 or IP68 ratings. If it detects moisture in the Lightning port, it will throw up a &Charging not Available& warning. Itbest to avoid getting the port wet if you can, but thata nice fall back.

So, wipe, wipe away. Assuming, of course, you can still find them.

The tradition of sitting through a barrage of ads in exchange for being entertained began with radio, flourished with the arrival of television and followed the mass migration online.

As the massive $35 billion in advertising revenue captured by YouTube and Instagram in the last quarter indicated, online advertising around social media, influencers and streamers already represents roughly half of the total amount spent on television advertising at its 2018 peak of $72.4 billion.

Entertainment businesses are under enormous pressure to create new revenue models as linear advertising becomes less relevant to consumers, a potential harbinger for another boom in advertising technology as companies try to keep audiences engaged.

Instagram $20 billion advertising haul, first reported by Bloomberg, comes as Alphabet, Googleparent company, disclosed advertising revenue of $15.1 billion at its YouTube subsidiary for the first time.

Taken together, those figures mean that the market share of advertising commanded by television may shrink to a quarter of all advertising spending sooner than the 2022 prediction from eMarketer, as reported in MarketingLand. While search on Google and Amazon are clear winners — as is Facebook — other technology companies are likely to see a windfall as advertisers chase consumers to new places.

The novel coronavirus is raging across the planet. Millions are quarantined, the stock market is violently gyrating and one of the preeminent VC firms in the Valley is back to saying RIP Good Times. The daily stream of news is terrifying, and we are going to learn even more in the coming weeks.

For founders, the biggest challenge is inoculating their teams from the vagaries of the market so they can do their jobs, continue building momentum against this market adversity and, ultimately, ensure there is enough cash in the bank to avoid layoffs and sustain their company for growth.

I want to talk today about the money details, saving some of those other topics for future posts. What does VC fundraising look like today? Whatgoing to change in the VC market? What might actually get better about fundraising today than just a few months ago? The daily headlines can be traumatizing, but with the right approach, you can navigate these waters safely.

Volatility affects different VCs differently

Facebook latest colonization of Instagram has begun. Facebook is testing the option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just vice-versa. Hopefully, that means the two apps will finally sync up the &already viewed& status of cross-posted Stories so we don&t have to watch re-runs any more, as I harped about in January.

If fully launched, the cross-posting feature could save social media managers and average users time while letting them maximize the views on the content they create. It could also give a little boost to the total Stories available on Instagram so its algorithm has more to choose from when ranking what it shows first.

But the change could also been seen as the most invasive injection of parent company Facebookidentity into Instagram — which has been steadily increasing since Instagramco-founders left the company in late 2018 as their autonomy dwindled. Facebook has already pasted an &Instagram & From Facebook& title screen into the photo-sharing appboot-up phase, and added an Open Facebook button to its settings menu. Instagram added cross-posting of its Stories to Facebook in October 2017, allowing its parent to piggyback on the popularity of its ephemeral content.

Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status all had 500 million daily users as of a year ago, while Snapchat as a whole has just 218 million users.

The screenshot of the Facebook-to-Instagram cross-posting feature was generated from theFacebook for Androidapp code by Jane Manchun Wong. Shethe renowned reverse engineering expert who has furnished TechCrunch with tips on dozens of unreleased features that went on to officially launch. When you&ve shot a Facebook Story and are about to post it, you can tap Privacy to review who you&re sharing with. In addition to the Public, Friends, Custom and Hide From options, Facebook is testing a Share To Instagram toggle that appears to turn on continuous cross-posting of that post and future ones.

A Facebook spokesperson tells me that the company is now formally testing the cross-posting feature to make it easier to share moments with the people who matter to you, as people might have different audiences and followers on Facebook versus Instagram. Facebook will continue to explore options for simplifying and improving how Stories work across its apps. That means itout of the internal-only prototyping phase and is now being tested with users in the wild.

With any luck, Facebook and Instagram will eventually sync up data about which Stories you&ve watched on either app, and avoid showing you exact copies of ones you&ve already seen. I made my case for this to Instagramleadership at a recent press dinner, noting how reruns waste hundreds of millions of peopletime and lead them to close Stories or the app altogether. I asked Facebook about that specifically; they declined to comment.

Creating two-way interoperability of Stories is a precursor to Facebookefforts to unify its Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct chat features. That could extend end-to-end encryption across the apps, protecting messages from prying eyes. But therebeen government grumbling about how encryption could hide the activity of criminals, and some see intertwining the chat features as a way to make it harder for regulators to break up Facebook.

Reddit, the popular discussion site visited by more than 430 million people per month, is opening up some of its most valuable screen real estate to advertisers with the launch of its first trending ad product, the Trending Takeover. The new ad unit will allow brands to reach visitors on two of the most heavily visited areas of Redditwebsite: the Search tab and the Popular feed.

The ad format allows the brands& campaigns to run across the largest trends on Redditsite for 24 hours, Reddit says. The trends section is where users can see whatcurrently buzzing and being discussed across the site, similar to the Trends section on Twitter, which can also be targeted by advertisers.

Reddit already offers advertisers the ability to run campaigns across its site in order to raise brand awareness, drive conversions or generate website traffic, app installs or video views, among other things. But the new Trending Takeover ad product will allow brands to reach even more potential eyeballs, as Reddit says the Popular feed alone is used by a third of the sitevisitors daily, and the Search tab also reaches millions every day.

In addition to the increased visibility, the benefit to this sort of ad format is that a campaign can be designed to align with whatbeing talked about in real time during the day it runs. For instance, a brand could run a trending ad on the day their brand became a part of the trending section organically.

According to eMarketer, Reddit was forecast to generate $119 million in net U.S. ad revenues in 2019, giving it a 0.1% of the overall U.S. digital ad market. But the analyst firm believes that figure will more than double, to $261.7 million, by 2021, noting how the company continued to roll out new formats like its autoplay in-stream video, cost-per-click, Top Post Takeover slots and more.

&With millions of searches taking place every day and over one-third of users coming to RedditPopular feed daily, brands can now be part of where cultural trends are born online — Reddit,& said Shariq Rizvi, vice president of Ads Product and Engineering at Reddit, in a statement. &For Reddit, a large focus for 2020 is about maximizing new and premium opportunities for brands to authentically engage with Reddit users,& Rizvi added.

In beta tests of Trending Takeover, Reddit worked with more than 15 partners across entertainment, consumer tech, CPG, automotive and QSR verticals, it says, including Spotify,Method and Adobe.The company claims these early testers saw both an increase in conversions and click-throughout rates that were two times more than industry standards for social.

For example, Method used a combination of hand-picked keywords and its own custom creative on the Trending Takeover landing page and saw click-throughs at over two times industry standards. It also was able to use the format to drive video views with a completion rate of four times that of Redditusual Promoted Posts format. The brand had specifically targeted communities like r/houseplants,r/gardening and r/malelivingspacefor a campaign about its household cleaners.

According to a media buyer cited by AdWeek, Promoted Trends on Twitter can cost around $250,000 per day, although pricing is customized. Redditnew Trending Takeover ad would probably be a minimum of around $100,000, they estimated. Reddit was not confirming pricing.

Reddit says itnow selling Trending Takeovers on a reservation, not programmatic, basis. The ads run on both desktop and mobile.

Two years ago, dormmates Justin Wenig and Nicholas Diao struggled to get into a popular computer science class at Columbia University . The duo eventually got into that class, but after the initial frustration around class scheduling, they decided &it was an obvious problem for a computer to solve.&

Wenig and Diao are the founders of Coursedog, a software startup that wants to create an operating system for universities to better schedule classes, professors and sections based on demand and interest. &Think of it,& Wenig said, &as a Superhuman for class scheduling systems.&

Today, Coursedog announced it has raised $4.2 million from a crop of investors, including First RoundJosh Kopelman. The company did not disclose any other investors, and there were no board seats taken on during the financing round. The Y Combinator graduatetotal known venture capital funding is now $5.7 million. Investors in the company include FoundersX Venture, EFund and Jinal Jhaveri, the former CEO of SchoolMint, a school enrollment startup.

The funding will be used to build out Coursedogproduct line on projecting course demand, the correct number of seats a school should offer per course and student success.

&A lot of people think higher [education] is a slow institution, but institutions are really thinking about how to promote student success,& Wenig said in an interview with TechCrunch. But instead of adopting any technology, universities are careful about sharing protected data, he continued.

Competition-wise, Wenig said that Blackboard, a learning management startup, continues to be one of the two &big software tools within universities.& Coursedog sits on top of the other software tool: the student information system, used by administrators that need to plan student schedules.

After Wenig and Diao cold-called hundreds of colleges, Columbia Law School was the first contract signed. Since then, the startup has landed deals with more than 60 colleges and universities of all sizes.

Coursedogclientele fits a range. The smallest client, per Wenig, is the Laguna School of Art and Design, which has roughly 600 students. Wenig also noted they cater to a mix of public and private schools, with public schools often &being the most innovative.&

&A lot of states offer incentive-based funding,& Wenig said. &In Utah, the amount of funds you might get from the state as a public institution is directly proportional to how well you&re using your space on campus.& He claims that Coursedog helps improve graduation rates by getting more students into the right classes.

&Today, we are just building apps on top of the Student Information System to help schools with scheduling, curriculum planning and catalog publishing and are slowly eating away functionality that schools would normally be doing with spreadsheets and native to the SIS,& he noted.

Coursedog plans to scale to 100 more universities in the next year, and will use the new funding to help &grow up& its production.