Nothing announces ear (1) black edition

Nothing today announced a new all-black edition of the ear (1) truly wireless earbuds. The company also announced that the product is now carbon neutral and can be purchased using crypto currency. The new black edition of the ear (1) features a smoky matte black finish for the earbuds along with the usual transparent elements of the standard model. The charging case has also been updated to feature the same matte black finish on the previously white painted elements, with other parts such as the hinge and pairing button also colored to match. Aside from the color, the black...

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Twitch for iOS and iPadOS gains SharePlay functionality

Back in October Apple rolled out its iOS 15.1 and iPadOS 15.1 updates to users which brought several noteworthy features including SharePlay. The feature allows users to watch content from various streaming apps with friends over FaceTime calls and now Twitch is supported too. Want to watch Twitch with all your friends? Now you can on iPhone and iPad devices through SharePlay! 📱 Learn more about how to watch streams together in a FaceTime call here: https://t.co/PIWwZ3OkpO— Twitch Support (@TwitchSupport) November 30, 2021 Users on iOS 15.1 and later and iPadOS 15.1 and up will be able...

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South African talent marketplace OfferZen gets $5.2M to deepen European expansion

South African tech talent marketplace OfferZen is one of the beneficiaries of the growing global demand for tech workers: It confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised €4.5 million ($5.07 million) in Series A funding from South African investment company Base Capital.

This is OfferZen’s first round of funding since Philip Joubert, Malan Joubert and Brett Jones founded the company in 2015.

As a tech talent marketplace, OfferZen allows software developers and engineers to sign up as candidates who are then curated by OfferZen and made available to companies. The developers are live on the marketplace for four weeks, during which OfferZen guarantees that they’ll get contacted by different companies. The developers are only allowed to work permanent roles, the company said.

OfferZen operated solely in South Africa for four and a half years until April 2020, when it expanded to the Netherlands after acquiring an Amsterdam-based recruitment tech startup called TryCatch.

According to OfferZen CEO Philip Joubert, over 1,000 companies and 100,000 software developers use the tech talent marketplace. Most of its customers from both ends of the marketplace are based in South Africa, the Netherlands, and parts of Europe like the U.K. and Germany, which are prominent hubs for global talent.

The expansion to the Netherlands and servicing parts of Europe contributed heavily to OfferZen’s growth in the second half of this year, experiencing a 29% increase in placements between Q3 and Q4 alone.

“Tech hiring came to a near standstill in the first half of 2020 due to COVID. Since then, however, we’ve seen a huge acceleration in the market — companies are now raising far more capital than they were pre-pandemic, investing more in technology and subsequently hiring much faster,” the CEO said in a statement.

“Access to top tech talent has become the bottleneck for many companies and we’re in a position to help companies solve that.”

OfferZen doesn’t employ income-sharing agreements, a revenue model adopted by tech talent companies such as Bloom Institute of Technology (formerly Lambda School), or hourly rate charges, like Andela and Toptal. Instead, the South African tech talent company makes money only off companies via two models.

The first is a pay-per-placement model with a one-off 12.5% fee of the developer’s first salary. So, for instance, if a company hires a developer for $100,000, it pays OfferZen $12,500 as commission.

The second model is an annual subscription offering for companies that recruit lots of developers at once, paying upfront for OfferZen services. OfferZen says this model accounts for 40% of its revenue, while the rest is from the pay-per-hire model.

On competition, Joubert mentioned that what sets OfferZen apart from players such as Honeypot and Talent.io is how well the company focuses on building an engaged developer community through events and various channels as well as its sourcing process.

“We have a solid user base with very high-quality developers in our developer community. So we’re very, very well known [and] we invest a lot in the community,” he said.

“We also simplify the sourcing process. So we obviously have a lot of candidates on our platform, which is a good thing, but then companies also want to find the most relevant candidates. And so we have a sophisticated matching engine that shows the most relevant candidates for the positions that companies are currently hiring for.”

The company said most of the fresh funding would be plowed into OfferZen’s tech community. In addition, as OfferZen deepens its expansion into Europe into two more countries next year, a chunk of the money will go into growing its operations, product and growth teams.

When the Joubert brothers and Jones first conceived the idea behind OfferZen, they all lived in Silicon Valley, working as software developers. And although they had friends with similar professions in Africa, they realized that opportunity wasn’t democratized. 

“We had a bunch of friends back in South Africa, who were very smart as developers, but they weren’t working at great companies necessarily. And the reason they weren’t doing that was that they, I guess, [had] too many barriers to getting a really great job where they were,” the CEO said.

OfferZen connects developers to various local and global companies such as Luno, ABSA, MMI Holdings, Takealot, WeTransfer, Adyen and Catawiki.

Prior to this raise, OfferZen bootstrapped with the founders’ money. It opted to raise money now because it needed venture capital to expand into more European territories, Joubert said. 

“We had built up a business in such a frugal way, and of course, without raising funding and bootstrapping, you’re really forced to design a really strong business,” he said. “Now we are seeing all these opportunities that we think we could be tackled faster if we raise funding. So we decided, let’s raise some funding, now we can grow the team ahead of revenue, which we haven’t been able to do before. We can do that, take on the European market and expand faster.”

As companies prioritize diversity, startups are trying to productize diverse hiring

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Jobandtalent raises $500M Series E to keep scaling its ‘workforce as a service’ marketplace

Spain’s Jobandtalent, a “workforce marketplace”-cum-digital temping agency which uses AI to match workers to casual labor gigs in sectors like warehousing, ecommerce and logistics, has closed a $500 million Series E round of funding led by Kinnevik and with what it bills as a “significant” follow on by SoftBank VisionFund 2.

Existing investors including Atomico, DN, Infravia, Kibo and Quadrille also participated in the round — which the startup said values its business at $2.35BN (post-money).

Alongside the equity raise, the 2009-founded startup has secured another chunk of debt financing ($75M) from Blackrock.

Jobandtalent says the latest funds will be used to accelerate its expansion in key markets, including the US — its most recent focus. Earlier this year (March), it announced a $120M Series D (as well as $100M in debt financing) which it said it would use to enter the US.

Jobandtalent takes $120M from Softbank to enter the US market

Flush with Series E cash, it plans to “significantly” increase the size of its tech and sales team over the next two years, and also says it will add “key” exec roles — as it seeks to scale in the US and deepen its business in Europe.

Currently it offers a temporary labor service in nine markets globally: Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and the US — matching workers looking for temp roles with employers in need of casual labor in (with a focus on sectors like manufacturing and logistics).

“Jobandtalent is by far the largest job platform in Europe. We are just starting to grow in the US, and this round of funding will help us accelerate those plans and become market leaders there as well,” the startup told us.

Its gig-finding pitch also comes with a promise of “stability” for the temps on its books — via an AI-aided pipeline of “consistent work”; and benefits for temps that it says are more akin to being employed (and can include pensions, sick and holiday pay, health insurance, and training courses).

Temp workers apply for and manage roles, submit paperwork, sign contracts, and get paid via the Jobandtalent app — so it’s streamlining and taking over a range of back office functions for employers dealing with temps (who it directly employs) in addition to helping simplify the process of finding work (and, indeed, being paid for it) for those who rely on seasonal and/or temp gigs to earn a living.

Its UK website includes fairly visible links to a whistleblowing policy and a statement on modern slavery — as well as a link to (multi-lingual) instructions on reporting hidden labor exploitation.

The startup touts an average NPS score for workers on its platform of 56 vs an industry average that it says stands at just 18.

In the first nine months of 2021, Jobandtalent says its platform was used to match more than 100,000 workers to casual roles. (That’s up on since earlier this year, when it said more than 80,000 workers had used its marketplace to find temporary roles at that point.)

It also says more than 1,300 companies are now signed up to source workers via its platform, including DHL, FedEx, XPO, Ceva Logistics, eBay, IKEA, Kuehne & Nagel, JD Sports, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Argos and GLS — up from 850+ companies back in March.

Its business growth rate is 130% annually, with Jobandtalent adding that it’s been EBITDA positive since the second half of 2020. It also told us its annual revenue run rate is now more than €1BN.

“Even with the current pressure in the labour market, we are able to find and match workers with roles at a much higher success rate than other,” suggested Juan Urdiales, co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “We are excited to accelerate the expansion of our team and grow our presence in both new and existing markets — helping more workers find the jobs they want, and helping businesses fill the roles they need.”

Also commenting on the funding in a statement, Natalie Tydeman, senior investment director at Kinnevik, added: “Jobandtalent’s workforce-as-a-service platform is disrupting the modern labour market and placing people back at the centre of employment. By offering a personalised service driven by data and proprietary technology, Jobandtalent is simplifying the experience of finding work for thousands of people and transforming it for the better. We’re proud to be working with Juan and the team to accelerate the growth of the business.”

Jobandtalent tops up with $108M for its ‘workforce as a service’ platform

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Oppo Find X4 Pro officially scheduled for Q1 2022 as company confirms the chipset

Qualcomm introduced its new flagship chipset Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and many companies raced to pledge allegiance to the SoC, announcing their flagship will be powered by the chip. One of these companies was Oppo which also officially revealed when to expect the Find X4 Pro - “the first quarter of 2022”. This is the first time we hear anything official, regarding the new Find X series. Last Wednesday a leakster suggested the Find X4 Pro will be a slight upgrade over the already great Find X3 Pro, bringing faster charging (80W, up from 65W), as well as the expected new...

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AWS launches Karpenter, an open source autoscaler for Kubernetes clusters

Today at AWS re:Invent, the company’s customer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, AWS announced a new open source autoscaling tool for Kubernetes clusters called Karpenter.

One of the advantages of cloud computing is the ability to scale automatically to meet your required resource needs —  or at least that’s theory. In reality, admins managing Kubernetes clusters have had to monitor them carefully to make sure that they had the right amount of resources or avoid service breakdowns.

Karpenter is designed to bring that cloud computing ideal into reality. AWS’s Channy Yun writing in a blog post announcing the new tool, described its advantages.

“[Karpenter] helps improve your application availability and cluster efficiency by rapidly launching right-sized compute resources in response to changing application load. Karpenter also provides just-in-time compute resources to meet your application’s needs and will soon automatically optimize a cluster’s compute resource footprint to reduce costs and improve performance,” Yun wrote.

It works by analyzing your Kubernetes workloads to determine what resources you will require by looking at the pods that cannot launch due to a resource limitation. It then sends information to your cloud provider to add or remove compute based on this information.

It’s important to note here that as an open source tool, this is not specifically designed for AWS cloud resources and can be used to send information to any cloud provider about the underlying Kubernetes cluster. Karpenter takes advantage of Helm, the Kubernetes package manager to determine your Kubernetes workloads. It also requires permission to provision compute resources in an automated way.

Karpenter is an open source tool being offered under an Apache 2.0 license and is available today.

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CloudTrucks raised $115M Series B to help truck entrepreneurs manage their business

CloudTrucks wants to use technology to help trucking entrepreneurs operate their business: The California-based startup sells business management software that helps owner-operators manage cash flow and costs, generate revenue, handle insurance, and more, and it just raised a $115 million Series B.

The company will use the funds to increase headcount as it expands its business, which operates in the United States. CloudTrucks is hiring in almost all areas, with a focus on engineers and data scientists to help double down on product, as well as customer service professionals to support truckers on the road. The company also wants to broaden its digital integration with brokers and shippers.

“We cater to owner-operators and truck drivers who have one or more trucks and are managing their business while also doing the job of moving goods from point A to point B,” Tobenna Arodiogbu, co-founder and CEO of CloudTrucks, told TechCrunch. “The job of being a trucking entrepreneur is getting harder and harder. Lots of tools are being built for brokers and shippers, but not nearly enough is being done for the truck driver who’s actually doing the really hard work.”

Freight movement is expected to rise from 17.4 billion tons in 2015 to 25.5 billion tons by 2045, an increase that coincides with a decrease in truck drivers. Since the 1980s, the industry has experienced high turnover rates, in large part due to low wages and the poor health effects associated with the job. Without significant changes to the business model and talent pool, the truck driver shortage is estimated to hit 160,000 drivers by 2028, according to Deloitte.

The autonomous trucking space promises to one day alleviate these labor issues, but that shift will take place over decades and likely include integration between humans handling first- and last-mile deliveries and self-driving systems managing highway transport, according to Deloitte. Waymo Via’s transfer hub model is a perfect example of this.

Despite future projections of a driverless world, Arodiogbu sees a market need now. There are around 350,000 owner-operator truckers in the United States, according to the nonprofit Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, but Arodiogbu reckons the target market is actually as large as a million truck drivers. Owner-operators usually own one truck and either lease onto a carrier or operate under their own authority, but CloudTrucks also targets entrepreneurs who have up to five trucks, as well as truckers who are contractors.

Before founding CloudTrucks, Arodiogbu started Scotty Labs, a startup focused on building remote operations and autonomous driving solutions for the trucking industry, which was later acquired by DoorDash. While running the company, Arodiogbu gained insights into the problems truck drivers had with managing their businesses and why the industry has been attracting fewer drivers, resulting in today’s truck driver shortage. These issues include things like trouble making revenue-generating decisions, the rising costs of insurance and compliance, and how long it takes to get paid.

“It’s not just a job of driving, but it’s everything else that people have to manage,” said Arodiogbu. “An increasing number of truck drivers just don’t want to be company employees anymore, right? They want to take control of their time. They want to determine when they’re home and when they’re on the road. They want to determine when they get to spend time with their families.”

CloudTrucks launched three products over the past year to help solve trucking business challenges. CT Cash helps drivers get paid faster and alleviate cash flow constraints with instant pay and cash card options, as well as cash advances, so drivers don’t have to worry about not having enough funds for fuel or maintenance.

Flex, which is designed for small trucking businesses that are already managing their own insurance and compliance, helps with back office support. This product came from an existing product line called Virtual Carrier, which essentially puts drivers under CloudTrucks’ authority. Included in this is a package deal where CloudTrucks manages everything for the driver, including compliance and insurance.

Included in both Flex and the Virtual Carrier is a “schedule optimizer” feature, which Arodiogbu described as a dispatcher in your pocket. CloudTrucks has the schedule and preferences for every driver in its system, so it’s able to send suggestions for available loads that can help maximize revenue given preferences and the states they’re willing to drive to. Drivers can book those loads within the platform, which helps simplify the whole process.

Then there’s Business Intelligence, a dashboard that gives drivers a breakdown of their performance, personal expenses and revenue.

“You can’t really improve something that you don’t track, so with that in mind, we wanted to have a product that was very simple for a trucking entrepreneur to just look at the CloudTrucks app and, at a glance, see exactly how their business is performing,” said Arodiogbu.

As far as how CloudTrucks’ business is performing, the company said its revenue has increased 9.5x since it raised its $20.5 million Series A in December 2020. The startup also said it’s seen the number of loads completed on its platform grow 8x since last year, but declined to provide a base for either of those increases. Arodiogbu did say that the company completes thousands of loads around the country per month.

CloudTrucks’ Series B was led by Tiger Global with participation from Menlo Ventures, as well as investment from Flexport and angel investors Michael Ovitz and Opendoor CEO Eric Wu, and brought the startup’s total funding amount to $141.6 million.

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