Cameo now lets you have 10-minute calls with celebs

The dream to find out what actually happened on your favorite show last week, spill the tea with the Real Housewives or learn about your favorite artists’ creative process is now underway as Cameo launches a new feature, Cameo Live. This new 10-minute video calling feature allows users and their friends to have a live conversation with the celebrity of their choosing.  

The feature is Cameo’s latest iteration on connecting fans with their favorite celebs.

In 2020, the company tried the pricey service Cameo Zoom, which also offered 10-minute calls — but only through Zoom. That feature has since been shut down. The following year, Cameo introduced Cameo Calls, which follows a similar premise as Cameo Live, but on a shorter time limit (two minutes). It also only supported one-on-one calls, not groups of friends as the new offering does.

Additionally, the company markets a direct messaging feature —where users buy the opportunity to send a DM like on a social media app — but it cannot guarantee the user will receive a response.

“Need a pep talk before your next job interview or Ironman triathlon?,” read the company’s post. “Want to jam with a guitarist you admire, or host a virtual birthday party or bachelorette celebration that’s not just another Zoom? How about recapping a premiere with the star of your favorite TV show, or even getting an idol to help you propose to the love of your life? Cameo Live beta testers have booked these events and more,” it said. 

Cameo says it’s been testing the service for the past couple of months and claims to have seen positive reactions.

To book a call, users will propose three dates and time slots that work best for them and can invite up to nine other individuals to join them on the call. Bookings can take place on Cameo’s website or on the newly launched Cameo Live application available in the Koji App Store, a link-in-bio app used by influencers.

Some of the celebs a user can select to chat with on Live include musical artist B.o.B, actor Sean Astin and drag queen Brooke Lynn Hytes.   

Users can expect to spend anywhere between $100 and $2,000 for a live call, but pricing is dependent on the stars’ availability. According to Gizmodo, the celeb can decline a call, leave the ongoing call and block users.

The launch of the new “Live” feature is the first big move the company is making since laying off close to 25% of its staff earlier this year and is part of the company’s new chapter. 

Cameo has raised over $165 million since its founding in 2017 and was valued at $1 billion back in March 2021, according to previous TechCrunch reporting

The company cites its celebrity shout-out videos, revenue streams for “stars” and its “Business” brands as just the start of what it hopes to build out as Cameo 2.0, a full-service technology platform. 

“What started as a lightbulb moment with a new digital autograph five years ago led us down the path of reinventing the relationship between talent, fans and brands,” said Steven Galanis, Cameo Co-Founder and CEO, in a news release. “As the nature of celebrity continues to evolve, we’re on a mission to empower all global talent with a suite of products to connect with their fans whenever and however they wish. Cameo Live is an exciting milestone on this mission and we can’t wait to unveil even more new fan experiences in the coming months.” 

Venue raises $4M from Accel and the CEOs of Slack, Remote, and SquareSpace to give team-wide video meetings a new breath of life

Zoom has in many ways “won” the mindshare game when it comes to video conferencing: whether you’re actually using Zoom, or another service that’s wrapped into another platform like Google or Microsoft, and whether it’s for work or fun, the standalone Zoom is the one that people reference, the one that has claimed anthimeric status.

But for those who use Zoom, or Google’s Meet, Microsoft’s Teams, or something else, you’ll know that they still lack in certain scenarios. Today a startup called Venue built to plug one of those gaps — larger team meetings — is setting out its stall to compete, with a video conferencing platform that brings in a host of personalization and other features from consumer communication apps to make it more engaging. These include emoji bursts, the ability to set background music and backgrounds, easy tools to share videos and other media, gifs, and multi-functional control panels that mimic those that appear in streaming platforms like Twitch.

“Our clients have told us that if Slack made video conferencing for team meetings, this is what it might look like,” said Jason Goldlist, who co-founded the company with Frank Poon, in an interview with me (which took place, naturally, on Venue).

The Toronto-based startup has been in private beta for the past two years, first as a bootstrapped business and then as part of the Y Combinator Winter 2022 cohort.

In that time, it’s picked up some very interesting traction. Its customers include Yelp, Shopify, and PwC; and it’s so far hosted more than 5 million minutes of meetings and 250,000 participants in aggregate.

And now it’s announcing $4 million in seed funding from an impressive list of backers: led by Accel, the group also incudes Stewart Butterfield, the CEO and co-founder of none other than Slack (he is investing directly, the investment is not coming from the Slack Fund, and this is the video pitch, in Venue, that Goldlist used to pitch him); SquareSpace founder and CEO Anthony Casalena; and the founder and CEO of Remote.com, Job van der Voort.

Venue will be using the funding both for more product development, and also to scale its infrastructure to work with more customers.

Venue’s basic pitch is that it’s not another video conferencing platform. As Goldlist told me the other day, the aim is not to replace Zoom, Meet, Teams or the others, which are perfectly serviceable for one-on-one or small group virtual gatherings.

“We see Zoom as the Craigslist of video conferencing,” he said. “You will always have people who will use it.

“Our role is not to out-Zoom Zoom,” he continued. “It’s to pick our niche and to execute really well. There is a specific set of use cases and venue is the best at and no one focuses the way we do on the all hands, the town halls the AMAs, especially for remote or highly distributed companies.”

Borrowing from the wider world of consumer apps, its aim is to give users more control and thus make video meetings on the platform less abstract. Emoji reactions, background music, dynamic backgrounds, video bubbles, and a wide set of chat tools are among the bells and whistles that Venue believes will keep users interested, and keep organizations on board as customers.

Winning people over with bells and whistles seems to have worked so far. The startup says that there have been over 2 million emoji reactions “blasted to presenters” and that more than 30,000 one-on-one connections have been made between users on Venue to date.

Venue’s emergence from private beta is coming with some momentum for sure, but also — for the video call weary among us — maybe some malaise. Much of the world has inched away from many of the trappings of life in the throes of Covid-19 — local authorities are imposing less rules about face masks, travel and being in groups; offices are opening up again; and some of our e-commerce habits are tailing off in favor of shopping, eating out or doing other things in person.

Video conferencing hasn’t exactly died in recent months, but we are definitely entering a more sober phase after the heady months of 2020 and 2021. Even Zoom has felt the pinch. Although the company met analyst expectations for revenues and beat on earnings in its last financial quarter, it’s been feeling the pinch of a tough market for tech stocks.

Most recently, Citi downgraded Zoom’s stock in the face of growing competition from bigger platforms (Microsoft being especially aggressive with business customers, picking up some interesting partners in the process such as Workplace, the enterprise version of Facebook from Meta), and Zoom itself has been working on a new strategy to double down once more on its bread-and-butter enterprise base after finding that monetizing all those dinner parties and calls among friends was going nowhere fast.

All of that means not just a trickier climate for all video conferencing apps, but also a lot more competition for smaller players among those bigger companies with the resources to build in the tools they lack today.

But although many work practices, including remote working and virtual meetings, definitely opened up in the last couple of years, Goldlist points out that the use case for better, larger team meetings is not something that materialized during / after Covid-19. He points specifically to the costs and clunky nature of traditional video conferencing systems.

“The price of running an all-hands [for a company with employees in more than one place] is extraordinary,” he said. Doing “back of the napkin math”, said Goldlist, the cost for a meeting for 1,000 people for an hour is upwards for $50,000. That is not equipment investments per se. “it’s a huge cost to interrupt people in the middle of the day to have a meeting,” he said. “These are expensive things. You need to make them unique.”

The fact that there are still so many moments when video meetings don’t feel ideal is likely a strong enough reason for investors to place a bet on one in an early stage that has picked up some users, and is seeing some momentum with the wider startup community.

“Too often all hands and large meetings are inefficient and costly. Historically, it’s been hard to produce highly engaging meetings for large groups – the tools and technology hasn’t supported it. But Venue is now making top-tier production value simple and accessible,” said Sara Ittelson, a partner at Accel, in a statement.

Amazon’s Fire TV Cube now supports Zoom calls on your TV

Late last year, Amazon launched support for two-way calling that worked with its Fire TV Cube devices. The feature allowed consumers to make and receive calls from their connected TV to any other Alexa device with a screen. Today, the company is expanding this system to enable support for two-way calling with Zoom.

Starting today, Fire TV Cube owners (2nd gen) will be able to join Zoom work meetings or virtual hangouts via their Fire TV Cube.

To take advantage of the new feature, you’ll need Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, its hands-free streaming device and smart speaker that has Alexa built-in, as well as a webcam that supports USB Video Class (UVC) with at least 720p resolution and 30fps. But for a better experience, Amazon recommends a webcam with 1080p resolution and a 60-90 degree field of view from six to 10 feet away from the TV. It doesn’t recommend 4K webcams, however.

Amazon suggests webcams like the Logitech C920, C922x, C310 or the Wansview 101JD, for example.

You’ll then connect your webcam to your Fire TV Cube using a Micro USB to USB adapter.

For best results, you’ll want to attach the webcam above the TV screen, Amazon notes.

Once everything is set up and connected, you’ll need to download and install the Zoom app from the Fire TV Appstore. When joining meetings, you can either sign in as a guest or use an existing Zoom account, per the on-screen instructions.

Thanks to the Alexa integration, you can join your meetings hands-free, if you prefer, by way of a voice command like “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting.” Alexa will respond by prompting you for the meeting ID and passcode. Alternately, you can choose to use the remote control to enter in this information.

An optional feature also lets you sync your calendar to Alexa to allow the smart assistant to remind you about the upcoming meetings it finds on your calendar. If you go this route, Alexa will suggest the meeting to join and you’ll just have to say “yes” to be automatically dialed in.

Amazon first announced it was bringing video calling support to its Fire TV platform last fall — a significant update in the new era of remote work and schooling, driven by the pandemic. However, it’s not the only option on the market. Google also last year brought group video calls to its Hub Max devices, and later added support for Zoom calls. Meanwhile Facebook Portal devices have offered video calling of a more personal nature and last year updated to support Zoom, too.

In other words, Amazon is playing a bit of catch-up here. And its solution is a little more unwieldy as it requires consumers to buy their own webcam, while something like Portal TV offers a TV with a smart camera included.

To use the new feature, you’ll need the latest Fire TV Cube software update to get started, Amazon notes.

Apple’s new iMac finally gets an actually good webcam

Apple introduced new iMacs at its event on Tuesday, outfitted with its M1 processor and redesigned inside and out from the ground up. The hardware is impressive, but one of the biggest improvements for everyone’s Zoom-heavy life might be the webcam. Apple said it’s the “best camera ever in a Mac,” which honestly wouldn’t take much, but its specs suggest it actually is a big upgrade.

The camera finally achieves 1080p video capabilities, and Apple has also equipped it with a larger sensor that should provide greatly-improved low light performance. The M1 chip has better image signal processing capabilities, and uses computational video powers to correct and improve the image on the fly, which has brought benefits to the image quality even on existing MacBook Air and MacBook Pro hardware with the same old, bad webcam equipment.

That should mean this iMac actually has really good image quality — or at least not image quality you need to be embarrassed about. The on-board machine learning processor in the M1, which Apple calls the Neural Engine, will be working in real-time to optimize lighting and do noise reduction, too.

On top of the camera, Apple touts new beam forming mics in a three-mic array that will optimize audio, focusing on your voice and eliminating background noise. All told, this should finally be a Mac that provides a videoconferencing experience that doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in the early 2000s.

Google Area 120’s ThreadIt is bite-size video for team collaborations

The team at Google’s Area 120 in-house incubator says the idea for ThreadIt came well before COVID-19 made remote work a necessity for large swaths of the globe. Of course, the pandemic certainly accelerated interest in the product among the team behind it.

“It’s adjusted the lens through which everyone sees it,” Keller Smith, general manager and founder, ThreadIt, tells TechCrunch. “It was a trend that was growing even before COVID-19, but, of course, the whole world changed overnight.”

ThreadIt, which launches today as a browser-accessible service and Chrome plug-in, is an attempt to address a perceived hole in the market. The system, which allows users to record short video messages, is positioned to sit somewhere between long-form, live- video teleconferencing and short texts and emails.

The steps for getting started are pretty straightforward. You:

  1. Record yourself speaking (you can rerecord if you mess up the first time)
  2. Shoot the video off to selected colleagues.

The interface borrows some key features from other Google offerings, including a drop-down that lets you determine how recipients can interact with the video, be it just viewing or adding their own clip. The app threads together short videos, organizing things chronologically into a single video conversation. The team behind the app notes that it’s been dogfooding ThreadIt, having never actually met in person.

Certainly the zeitgeist is right. Remote work is going to continue to be a reality for many, even well after the pandemic has mercifully faded. And, of course, short-form video clips are once again having a moment. TikTok or Vine, for work, perhaps, only with more straightforward approach to making and watching short, informational video.

“We found that by adding a little bit of structure and allowing you to break it up and show little pieces of your work, that actually creates a much shorter message that’s much more on-point,” says Smith. “That was actually one gap we saw in what was out there today.”

The app, which is available to access starting today, is in kind of a public beta mode, as is Area 120’s custom. Essentially the team will gauge interest and collect feedback to see if the project is worth continuing to pursue. Services that have graduated include code education tool Grasshopper and travel app Touring Bird.

That means, among other things, that its still in early stage. As such, there are no doubt going to be a number of desired features that aren’t present. Having dealt with some health issues earlier this year that made speaking difficult, for instance, I would love to see a straight text-reply feature for those who can’t — or otherwise would prefer not to — appear on camera.

Deeper Google productivity app integration would make sense as well, though I suspect part of growing the app is deciding how much of a standalone to make it. Gmail integration would be good, for example, but you don’t want to have to rely on that platform if the new app is designed to augment it.

The service can be accessed on smartphones via the mobile Chrome browser, but a standalone app would probably make sense down the road, as well. “That’s something that we would look at going forward,” says Smith. “That’s a great example of looking for the interest and response and then being able to go deeper with that.”

 

Cosmos Video – a ‘Club Penguin for adults’ to socialise and work – raises $2.6M from LocalGlobe

All over the world startups are piling into the space marked “virtual interaction and collaboration”. What if a startup created a sort of ‘Club Penguin for adults’?

Step forward Cosmos Video, which has a virtual venues platform that allows people to work, hang out and socialize together. It has now raised $2.6m in seed funding LocalGlobe with participation from Entrepreneur First, Andy Chung and Phillip Moehring (AngelList), and Omid Ashtari (former President of Citymapper).

Founders Rahul Goyal and Karan Baweja previously led product teams at Citymapper and TransferWise respectively.

Cosmos allows users to create virtual venues by combining game mechanics with video chat. The idea is to bring back the kinds of serendipitous interactions we used to have in the real world. You choose an avatar, then meet up with their colleagues or friends inside a browser-based game. As you move your avatars closer to one another person you can video chat with them, as you might in real life.

The competition is the incumbent video conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but calls on these platforms have a set agenda, and are timeboxed – they’re rigid and repetitive. On Cosmos you sit on the screen and consume one video call after another as you move around the space, so it is mimicking serendipity, after a fashion.

As well as having a social application, office colleagues can work collaboratively on tools such as whiteboards, Google documents and Figma; play virtual board games or gather around a table to chat.

Cosmos is currently being used in private beta by a select group of companies to host their offices and for social events such as Christmas parties. Others are using it to host events, meetup groups and family gatherings.

Co-founder Rahul Goyal said in a statement: “Once the pandemic hit, we both saw productivity surge in our respective teams but at the same time, people were missing the in-office culture. Video conferencing platforms provide a great service when it comes to meetings, but they lack spontaneity. Cosmos is a way to bring back that human connection we lack when we spend all day online, by providing a virtual world where you can play a game of trivia or pong after work with colleagues or gather round a table to celebrate a friend’s birthday.”

George Henry, partner, LocalGlobe: “We were really impressed with the vision and potential of Cosmos. Scaling live experiences online is one of the big internet frontiers where there are still so many opportunities. Now that the video infrastructure is in place, we believe products like Cosmos will enable new forms of live online experiences.”

Zoom launches end-to-end encryption for free meetings — with a catch

Zoom, the video calling company that millions turned to during the pandemic, has finally launched end-to-end encrypted video calls for free accounts.

The company said last week that it was readying the feature, months after it drew criticism for denying end-to-end encrypted calls to free users, effectively drawing a line between paid users whose conversations could not be accessed by Zoom and those with free accounts whose conversations weren’t as private.

Zoom said the new end-to-end encryption feature, which makes it much harder for anyone outside of the video call — including Zoom — access to the conversation, will roll out as a technical preview starting in Zoom 5.4.0 for desktop and mobile apps.

Zoom acquired Keybase in May in part to bring its encryption technology to Zoom calls.

But there’s a catch — or a handful.

Because end-to-end encryption has to be enabled for every user joining the call, some other features will not be available. Users on an encrypted call won’t be able to use Zoom’s cloud recording, live transcription, and meeting reactions features, and participants won’t be able to join the call by phone or use one-to-one private chat. And, all participants have to use a Zoom app that supports end-to-end encryption, as the browser version will not work.

Any free account wanting to use end-to-end encryption will have to verify a phone number and add billing information — which Zoom says is necessary to prevent abuse.

Zoom’s chief information security officer Jason Lee said end-to-end encryption was a “highly requested feature from our customers, and we’re excited to make this a reality.” It’s better late than never.

Zoom launches end-to-end encryption for free meetings — with a catch

Zoom, the video calling company that millions turned to during the pandemic, has finally launched end-to-end encrypted video calls for free accounts.

The company said last week that it was readying the feature, months after it drew criticism for denying end-to-end encrypted calls to free users, effectively drawing a line between paid users whose conversations could not be accessed by Zoom and those with free accounts whose conversations weren’t as private.

Zoom said the new end-to-end encryption feature, which makes it much harder for anyone outside of the video call — including Zoom — access to the conversation, will roll out as a technical preview starting in Zoom 5.4.0 for desktop and mobile apps.

Zoom acquired Keybase in May in part to bring its encryption technology to Zoom calls.

But there’s a catch — or a handful.

Because end-to-end encryption has to be enabled for every user joining the call, some other features will not be available. Users on an encrypted call won’t be able to use Zoom’s cloud recording, live transcription, and meeting reactions features, and participants won’t be able to join the call by phone or use one-to-one private chat. And, all participants have to use a Zoom app that supports end-to-end encryption, as the browser version will not work.

Any free account wanting to use end-to-end encryption will have to verify a phone number and add billing information — which Zoom says is necessary to prevent abuse.

Zoom’s chief information security officer Jason Lee said end-to-end encryption was a “highly requested feature from our customers, and we’re excited to make this a reality.” It’s better late than never.

Woven adds to its calendar app’s $20/mo premium plan

Productivity software has had a huge couple of years, yet for all of the great note-taking apps that have launched, consumers haven’t gotten a lot of quality options for Google Calendar replacements.

This week, Woven, a calendar startup founded by former Facebook CIO Tim Campos is shaking up the premium tier of their scheduling software, hoping that productivity-focused users will pay to further optimize the calendar experience just as they have paid up for subscription email services like Superhuman and note-taking apps like Notion.

There’s been a pretty huge influx of investor dollars into the productivity space which has shown a lot of promise in bottoms-up scaling inside enterprises by first aiming to sell their products to individuals. Woven has raised about $5 million to date with investments from Battery Ventures, Felicis Ventures and Tiny Capital, among others.

“Time is the most valuable asset that we have,” Campos told TechCrunch. “We think there’s a real opportunity to do much more with the calendar.”

Their new product will help determine just how much demand there is for a pro-tier calendar that aims to make life easier for professionals than Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar cares to. The new product, which is $20 per month ($10 during an early access period if you pay for a year), builds on the company’s free tier product giving users a handful of new features. There’s still quite a bit of functionality in the free tier still, which is sticking around, but the lack of multi-account support is one of the big limitations there. 

Image credit: via Woven.

The core of Woven’s value is likely its Calendly-like scheduling links which allow single users to quickly show when they’re free, or give teams the ability to eliminate back-in-forth entirely when scheduling meetings by scanning everyone’s availability and suggesting times that are uniformly available. In this latest update, the startup has also launched a new feature called Open Invite which allows users to blast out links to join webinars that recipients can quickly register for.

One of Woven’s top features is probably Smart Templates which aims to learn from your habits and strip down the amount of time it takes to organize a meeting. Selecting the template can automatically set you up with a one-time Zoom link, ping participants for their availability with Woven’s scheduling links and take care of mundane details. Now, the titles automatically update depending on participants, location or company information as well. While plenty of productivity happens on the desktop, the startup is trying to push the envelope on mobile as well. They’ve added an iMessage integration to quickly allow people to share their availability and schedule meetings inside chat.

The product updates arrive soon after the announcement of the company’s Zoom “Zapp,” which shoves the app’s functionality inside Zoom and will likely be a bit sell to new users.

 

Dialpad raises $100M Series E at a $1.2B valuation

Dialpad, the business-centric voice, video and contact-center service, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Work-Bench also participated. The company says its valuation is over $1.2 billion after it has now raised a total of $245 million.

The funding news comes only a few weeks after the company also announced its acquisition of video conferencing service Highfive, a move that brought deeper expertise in mobile video and conferencing room devices to the company.

Recently, Dialpad has put a lot of emphasis on its AI solutions. Back in 2018, it launched its VoiceAI service, for example, and it now offers a number of AI solutions as part of its Voice Intelligence service (or Vi, as the company calls it). This includes a note-taking service, for example, as well as call transcripts and sentiment analysis, among other features.

“We have seen a huge increase in demand for cloud communications tools, and we are raising additional capital to meet this demand,” said Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad. “Users want a single platform to handle voice, video and messaging. They also want that platform to be smart; to do things like automate note taking and provide real-time insights and answers in response to what’s happening on a call or meeting. We have invested in real-time speech recognition, natural language processing and voice analytics on a system that works anywhere, on any device. Our goal has always been to empower the future of work, and we are thrilled to join the OMERS Growth Equity portfolio and to continue to innovate.”

The company says it now has an annual run rate of over $100 million and its customers include the likes of Uber, Motorola Solutions, Domo and Xero. In total, the 500-employee company says it now has more than 70,000 customers.

“We are excited to become an investor in Dialpad. Craig and his team have built an impressive company, offering a leading product in a market with a long growth runway. We believe cloud-based software and artificial intelligence are in the early stages of widespread adoption, and Dialpad is playing a leading role in this change,” said Mark Shulgan, Managing Director and Head of OMERS Growth Equity, who will join the company’s board. We are proud to join Dialpad’s impressive roster of existing investors, and look forward to taking this journey with the company.”