Developer – Page 109 – Product Management Confabulation

February 5, 2020

How Hoop hit #2 with its Tinder for Snapchat

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to #2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French startup Dazz saw Hoop score 2.5 million downloads.

The fact that such a dumbfoundingly simple and already ubiquitous style of app was able to climb the charts so fast demonstrates the potential of Snap Kit to drive user lock-in for Snapchat. Since the developer platform lets other apps piggyback on its login system and Bitmoji avatars, it creates new reasons for users to set up a Snapchat account and keep using it. It’s the same strategy that made Facebook an entrenched part of the internet, but this time it’s for a younger crowd.

In the first-ever interview about Hoop, Dazz’s 26-year-old co-founders Lucas Gervais and Alexi Pourret reveal that the idea came from watching users patterns in their previous experiment on the Snap Kit platform. They built an app called Dazz in 2018 that let users create polls and get anonymous answers from friends, but they noticed their 250,000 users “always ended up adding each other on Snap. So we decided to create Hoop, the app to make new Snap friends” Gervais tells me.

Gervais and Pourret have been friends since age 2, growing up in small town in France. They met their two developers in high school, and are now marketing students at university. With Hoop, they say the goal was to “meet everyone’s needs, from connecting people from different cultures to helping lonely people to feel better to simply growing your Snapchat community.”

At first, Hoop for iOS or Android looks just like Tinder. You create an account with some photos and bio information, and start swiping through profiles. If you like someone, you tap a Snapchat button to request their Snap username so you can message them.

But then Hoop reveals its savvy virality and monetization strategy. Rather than being able to endlessly ‘swipe right’ and approach people, Hoop limits your asks by making you spend its in-app ‘diamonds’ currency to reach out. After about 10 requests to chat, you’ll have to earn more diamonds. You do that by sharing and getting friends to open your invite link to the app, adding people on Snapchat that you meet on Hoop, logging in each day, taking a survey, watching a video ad, and completing offers by signing up for streaming services or car insurance providers. It also trades diamonds for rating Hoop in the App Store, though that might run afowl of Apple’s rules.

Those tactics helped Hoop climb as high as #2 on the overall iOS chart and #1 on the Social Apps chart on January 24th. It’s now at #83 overall and #7 in social, putting it above apps like Discord, LinkedIn, Skype, and new Vine successor Byte. Hoop had over 3 million installs as of a week ago.

There are certainly some concerns, though. Gervais claims that “We are not a meeting or dating app. We simply offer an easy way to make new Snap friends.” But since Tinder isn’t available for people under 18, they might be looking to Hoop instead. Thankfully, adults can’t see profiles of users under 18 and vice versa, and users only see potential matches in their age group. However, users can edit their age at any time.

Snap Kit keeps startups lean

Tools like Amazon’s AWS have made building a startup with a lean team and little money increasingly easy. Snap Kit’s ability to let developers skip the account creation and management process is another step in that direction. But the power to imbue overnight virality is something even Facebook never accomplished, though it helped build empires for developers like Zynga.

Another Snap Kit app called Yolo for receiving anonymous responses to questions shot up to #1 in May. Seven months later, it’s still at #51. The shows Snap Kit can offer longevity, not just flash-in-the-pan download spikes. Gervais calls the platform “a very powerful tool for developers.”

#1 app YOLO Q&A is the Snapchat platform’s 1st hit

Three years ago I wrote that Snapchat’s anti-developer attitude was a liability. It needed to become a platform with a cadre of allies that could strengthen its role as an identity platform for teens, and insulate it against copycats like Facebook. That’s exactly what it did. By letting other apps launch themselves using its accounts, Stories, and Bitmoji, they wouldn’t need to copy its social graph, sharing format, or avatars and instead would drive attention to the originals.

If Snap can keep building useful developer tools, perhaps by adding real-world object scanning, augmented reality filters, and video calling to its platform, a Snapchat account could become a must-have for anyone who wants to use the next generation of apps. Then could come the crown jewel of a platform: discovery and virality. By building a section for promoting Snap Kit apps into Snapchat Discover, developers looking for shortcuts in both engineering and growth might join Evan Spiegel’s army.

Snap’s anti-developer attitude is an augmented liability

February 4, 2020

Russia’s push back against Big Tech has major consequences for Apple

Josh Nadeau Contributor

Josh Nadeau is a Canadian journalist based in St. Petersburg who covers the intersection of Russia, technology and culture. He has written for The Economist, Atlas Obscura and The Outline.

Tech companies are getting so large that Russia is fast-tracking laws aimed at developing “digital sovereignty,” and their next target is Apple . How will these regulations affect tech companies looking to do business in the country?

This month, Donald Trump took to Twitter to criticize Apple for not unlocking two iPhones belonging to the Pensacola shooter, another volley in the struggle between big tech and the world’s governing bodies. But even the White House’s censure pales in comparison to the Kremlin’s ongoing plans. Apple, as the timing would have it, also happens to be in Vladimir Putin’s sights.

The company’s long-running policy of not preloading third-party software onto its devices is coming up against a new piece of Russian legislation requiring every smart device to be sold with certain applications already installed, many of which are produced by the government. Inside the country, the policy has even been called the “law against Apple” for how it disproportionately affects the tech giant. While the law was passed last November, the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service released the full list of apps only last week.

These regulations form the latest move in what’s turning out to be one of the largest national campaigns for digital control outside of Asia. These laws have been steadily accumulating since 2014 and are described as a way of consolidating sovereignty over the digital space — threatening to push companies out of the country if they fail to comply. Apple, for instance, will have to choose by July 1 whether maintaining access to the Russian market is worth making a revolutionary change in their policy. The same choice is given to any company wishing to do business in the country.

February 4, 2020

Neo4j 4.0 graph database platform brings unlimited scaling

Neo4j,the premiere graph database development platform, announced the release of version 4.0 today, which features unlimited scaling among other updates.

Graph databases are growing increasingly important as they are used to find connections in data, such as if you bought this, you might like this related item on an e-commerce site; or if you have these friends, you might also know these people on a social site. It’s growing popular in business, and especially among data scientists, who find it useful to find relationships in large collections of data.

Neo4j founder and CEO Emil Eifrem says that the company developed the graph database concept, and it has been growing and developing well. “2019 was a really good year for us, generally speaking, but I think more importantly in the graph space. We’ve chosen the category creation and go- to-market strategy when we put the word graph and database together, and we wanted to evangelize that as a concept,” he explained.

As for the new version, the Eifrem says it’s a broad new release, but there are a few things he wanted to focus on. For starters is the ability to limitlessly scale. He says this is possible because of new sophisticated horizontal scaling in version 4.0. For previous versions, the company replicated data across the database, a common method for processing data, but it can slow down as the amount of data scales. They wanted to change this in the new version.

“What we’re adding now in 4.0 is partitioning. So this is what’s called ‘sharding’ in the database world. It’s this really ultra powerful feature that allows you to scale both reads and writes and size. Basically, you’re only limited by your budget, how many machines you can add,” he explained.

Another piece in the new release is the addition of role-based access. As graph databases spread from the department or team level across the organization, it becomes increasingly important to restrict certain data to only those who have access based on their role and privileges.

“Today, graph databases in Neo4j are being widely deployed across the enterprise, and now all of a sudden there’s multiple teams across the entire enterprise that wants to access the data. And then you get into security and privacy concerns,” he said. That’s where role based access can protect the data.

The new version has many other features including the ability to run multiple databases on a single Neo4j cluster and support for “Reactive” systems, which gives these kinds of developers “full control over how their applications interact with the database, including robust data pipelines, streaming data, machine learning and more,” according to the company.

Neo4j has been around 2007 and has raised over $160 million, according to Crunchbase.

Neo4j nabs $80M Series E as graph database tech flourishes

February 4, 2020

Monday.com 2.0 workflow platform lets companies build custom apps

Monday.com, announced version 2.0 of its flexible workflow platform today, making it easier for customers to build custom apps on top of Monday.

Company co-founder and CEO Roy Mann says his product is a multi-purpose and highly flexible workflow tool, aimed mostly at medium sized businesses. “It’s process management, portfolio management, project management, CRM management, hotel management, R&D management. It’s anything you want because we give you the building blocks to build whatever you want,” he said.

With the release of 2.0, the company is offering a code-free environment to take these building blocks and build custom applications to meet the needs of any organization or team. This can include workflow elements to set up a process inside Monday or integrate with other apps or services.

In fact, the new release includes over a hundred prebuilt automation recipes and code-free custom-automations along with more than 50 integrations with other apps, allowing project managers to build fairly sophisticated workflows without coding.

This example shows a company building a custom app to manage a hotel. Screenshot: Monday.com

The company is also opening up the Monday platform to developers who want to build applications on top of the platform. Mann says this is just the start, and the plan is to eventually add a marketplace for these apps.

“The first step will be we’re opening [the platform to developers] up in beta. [Initially], it will be for their own use and for their customers, and then we will open it up pretty soon for them to offer those apps [in a marketplace]. That’s obviously the direction,” Mann said.

With $120 million ARR and 100,000 customers, the company has quietly gone about its business. It has 370 employees, mostly based in Israel, and has raised $273 million, according to Mann. It’s most recent investment came last July — $150 million on a lofty $1.9 billion valuation.

Monday.com raises $150M more, now at $1.9B valuation, for workplace collaboration tools

February 3, 2020

HPE acquires cloud native security startup Scytale

HPE announced today that it has acquired Scytale, a cloud native security startup that is built on the open source Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) protocol. The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Specifically, Scytale looks at application-to-application identity and access management, something that is increasingly important as more transactions take place between applications without any human intervention. It’s imperative that the application knows it’s OK to share information with the other application.

This is an area that HPE wants to expand into, Dave Husak, HPE fellow and GM of cloudless initiative wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “As HPE progresses into this next chapter, delivering on our differentiated, edge to cloud platform as-a-service strategy, security will continue to play a fundamental role. We recognize that every organization that operates in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment requires 100% secure, zero trust systems, that can dynamically identify and authenticate data and applications in real-time,” Husak wrote.

He was also careful to stress that HPE would continue to be good stewards of the SPIFFE and SPIRE (the SPIFFE Runtime Environment) projects, both of which are under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Scytale co-founder Sunil James, writing in a blog post about the deal, indicated that this was important to the founders that HPE respect the startup’s open source roots. “Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us. We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform,” he wrote.

Scytale was founded in 2017 and has raised $8 million to-date, according to PitchBook data. The bulk of that was in a $5 million Series A last March led by Bessemer.

Scytale grabs $5M Series A for application-to-application identity management

January 31, 2020

Customer feedback is a development opportunity

Kyle Lomeli Contributor

Kyle Lomeli is the CTO and a founding engineer at CarGurus.com.

Online commerce accounted for nearly $518 billion in revenue in the United States alone last year. The growing number of online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay will command 40% of the global retail market in 2020. As the number of digital offerings — not only marketplaces but also online storefronts and company websites — available to consumers continues to grow, the primary challenge for any online platform lies in setting itself apart.

The central question for how to accomplish this: Where does differentiation matter most?

A customer’s ability to easily (and accurately) find a specific product or service with minimal barriers helps ensure they feel satisfied and confident with their choice of purchase. This ultimately becomes the differentiator that sets an online platform apart. It’s about coupling a stellar product with an exceptional experience. Often, that takes the form of simple, searchable access to a wide variety of products and services. Sometimes, it’s about surfacing a brand that meets an individual consumer’s needs or price point. In both cases, platforms are in a position to help customers avoid having to chase down a product or service through multiple clicks while offering a better way of comparing apples to apples.

To be successful, a company should adopt a consumer-first philosophy that informs its product ideation and development process. A successful consumer-first development resides in a company’s ability to expediently deliver fresh features that customers actually respond to, rather than prioritize the update that seems most profitable. The best way to inform both elements is to consistently collect and learn from customer feedback in a timely way — and sometimes, this will mean making decisions for the benefit of consumers versus what is in the best interest of companies.

January 23, 2020

Cortex Labs helps data scientists deploy machine learning models in the cloud

It’s one thing to develop a working machine learning model, it’s another to put it to work in an application. Cortex Labs is an early stage startup with some open source tooling designed to help data scientists take that last step.

The company’s founders were students at Berkeley when they observed that one of the problems around creating machine learning models was finding a way to deploy them. While there was a lot of open source tooling available, data scientists are not experts in infrastructure.

CEO Omer Spillinger says that infrastructure was something the four members of the founding team — himself, CTO David Eliahu, head of engineering Vishal Bollu and head of growth Caleb Kaiser — understood well.

What the four founders did was take a set of open source tools and combine them with AWS services to provide a way to deploy models more easily. “We take open source tools like TensorFlow, Kubernetes and Docker and we combine them with AWS services like CloudWatch, EKS (Amazon’s flavor of Kubernetes) and S3 to basically give one API for developers to deploy their models,” Spillinger explained.

He says that a data scientist starts by uploading an exported model file to S3 cloud storage. “Then we pull it, containerize it and deploy it on Kubernetes behind the scenes. We automatically scale the workload and automatically switch you to GPUs if it’s compute intensive. We stream logs and expose [the model] to the web. We help you manage security around that, stuff like that,” he said

While he acknowledges this not unlike Amazon SageMaker, the company’s long-term goal is to support all of the major cloud platforms. SageMaker of course only works on the Amazon cloud, while Cortex will eventually work on any cloud. In fact, Spillinger says that the biggest feature request they’ve gotten to this point, is to support Google Cloud. He says that and support for Microsoft Azure are on the road map.

The Cortex founders have been keeping their head above water while they wait for a commercial product with the help of an $888,888 seed round from Engineering Capital in 2018. If you’re wondering about that oddly specific number, it’s partly an inside joke — Spillinger’s birthday is August 8th — and partly a number arrived at to make the valuation work, he said.

For now, the company is offering the open source tools, and building a community of developers and data scientists. Eventually, it wants to monetize by building a cloud service for companies who don’t want to manage clusters — but that is down the road, Spillinger said.

January 22, 2020

Google Cloud gets a Secret Manager

Google Cloud today announced Secret Manager, a new tool that helps its users securely store their API keys, passwords, certificates and other data. With this, Google Cloud is giving its users a single tool to manage this kind of data and a centralized source of truth, something that even sophisticated enterprise organizations often lack.

“Many applications require credentials to connect to a database, API keys to invoke a service, or certificates for authentication,” Google developer advocate Sath Vargo and product manager Matt Driscoll not in today’s announcement. “Managing and securing access to these secrets is often complicated by secret sprawl, poor visibility, or lack of integrations.”

With Berglas, Google already offered an open-source command-line tool for managing secrets. Secret Manager and Berglas will play well together and users will be able to move their secrets from the open-source tool into Secret Manager and use Berglas to create and access secrets from the cloud-based tool as well.

With KMS, Google also offers a fully managed key management system (as do Google Cloud’s competitors). The two tools are very much complementary. As Google notes, KMS does not actually store the secrets — it encrypts the secrets you store elsewhere. The secret Manager provides a way to easily store (and manage) these secrets in Google Cloud.

Secret Manager includes the necessary tools for managing secret versions and audit logging, for example. Secrets in Secret Manager are also project-based global resources, the company stresses, while competing tools often feature manage secrets on a regional basis.

The new tool is now in beta and available to all Google Cloud customers.

January 22, 2020

Octarine releases open source security scanning tools for Kubernetes

Octarine, a startup that helps automate security of Kubernetes workloads, released an open source scanning tool today. The tool, which is called KubeScan, is designed to help developers understand the level of security risk in their Kubernetes clusters.

The company is also open sourcing a second tool called KCSS, which is the underlying configuration framework used in KubeScan.

As Ocatrine’s head of product Julien Sobrier points out, there are 30 security settings in Kubernetes and KubeScan can help you see where you might be vulnerable on any one of them, measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being extremely vulnerable.

“Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility and a lot of power to developers. There are over 30 security settings, and understanding how they interact with each other, which settings make security worse, which one make it better, and the impact of each selection is not something that’s easy to measure or explain,” Sobrier told TechCrunch.

Octarine wants to help with these two open source tools. It started by building KCSS, a vulnerability model based on the industry standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), to provide a risk assessment framework for KubeScan.

“We’ve taken this model of CVSS and applied into Kubernetes. This helps explain to users, what are the security settings that are causing risk? What is the danger to the workload in terms of availability of the cluster, integrity of the cluster and confidentiality of the cluster,” Sobrier explained. This gives developers and operations a common system for understanding of the security posture of the cluster, and makes it easier for them to decide whether the risk is acceptable or not.

KubeScan result. Screenshot: Octarine (cropped)

They have then taken the KCSS framework and built KubeScan. This takes the settings as defined in KCSS and applies a score, which measure the level of risk for each setting in the Kubernetes cluster you run it on. “KubeScan is basically an implementation of the KCSS framework. So it’s software, a container, that will run on your cluster and show you the risk of all the [settings] on a scale from zero, not risky to 10, highly risky, and then give you all the details about what the grade is and the possible remediation that you that you can put in place,” he said.

While it obviously could work hand-in-glove with Octarine’s own security tools, Rafael Feitelberg, VP of commercialization, says the project has been more about helping companies see their Kubernetes cluster risk level, and giving them information to fix the problems it finds.”A lot of these things can be remediated by adjusting the Kubernetes configuration, and you can explicitly see see how you can remediate [the problem] in KubeScan,” he said.

Feitelberg says that Octarine is something separate, designed to help you automate your security settings. “Our commercial product is more about the automation of the process, of doing this continuously, so it’s part of your CI/CD [pipeline] and your DevOps process,” he said.

Both of the open source tools are available today on GitHub.

Making sense of a multi-cloud, hybrid world at KubeCon