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Calendly revamps its browser extension as it seeks to do more than schedule meetings | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 6:31 PM0


Appointment scheduling service Calendly has redesigned its browser extension in a bid to improve its schedule management features and make scheduling faster.

The new extension, available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Outlook, has a ‘Meetings’ tab that houses your meetings and lets you join, cancel, or reschedule them. However, it only shows meetings booked through Calendly. The company said it will explore expanding the extension’s functionality based on customer feedback.

There’s also a new ‘Contacts’ tab that lets you see your upcoming meetings with the people who’re in them, as well as your meeting history with them.

The extension also lets you share links to different kinds of meetings (longer or shorter meetings, for example), or instantly book a follow-up call with someone in the current meeting.

Image Credits: Calendly

Calendly is also expanding its overall feature set. The service now lets users book multiple meetings in one time slot, and even prioritize one meeting over another. You still need to prioritize your meetings manually, but the company said it is considering adding some kind of intelligence to provide suggestions to help with prioritization.

Calendly is also introducing a feature for teams that lets members of sales or marketing teams book a call on behalf of their teammates. For this, teammates have to give the group permission to edit their calendars.

Image Credits: Calendly

The company said that with this extension, along with integrations to tools like Gmail and LinkedIn, it aims to reduce the amount of time people spend switching between websites and applications.

Looking beyond scheduling

Calendly’s chief product officer, Stephen Hsu, told TechCrunch in an interview that Calendly aims to evolve beyond scheduling and become a product that’s useful throughout the meeting lifecycle. In particular, he noted that the company wants to focus on helping people prepare for meetings, and provide insights during meetings as well as after they’ve ended.

Hsu also said the company wants to get into the meeting transcription space. “We have customers who use tools like Otter or Zoom Assistant, but they are not necessarily easily integrated, and [are] managed separately,” he said.

Hsu said the company wants to give users more information about attendees and the agenda of the meeting by grabbing knowledge via its integrations with platforms like Salesforce and LinkedIn. Plus, Calendly could also carry in knowledge from historical meetings and action items, he added.

Currently, you have to open the web app to take notes with Calendly. The company wants to move this feature to an easily accessible location like the extension, Hsu said.

Tools like Notion Calendar, Vimcal, Akiflow, and Amie have made it easier for users to provide their availability across time zones. Calendly said it is looking to revamp its invitee experience and make it easier to book meetings across time zones.

Using AI to make meeting tools smarter

There are plenty of meeting-related tools from major corporations like Zoom to startups like Limitless (previously Rewind AI) that are aiming to leverage AI to make better sense of the information that was generated during meetings.

Calendly, too, wants to tap AI to improve its product. The company said it wants to create a model that can leverage meeting data along with knowledge from systems like CRM platforms to provide a fuller picture of a meeting.

“If we have a world where we can create a model that allows the user to tap into any type of information across that entire meeting lifecycle from anywhere, whether it’s in Slack or a new conversational interface in Calendly, that’ll be super powerful,” Hsu said.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

With $175M in new funding, Island is putting the browser at the center of enterprise security | TechCrunch

May 1, 2024 1:45 AM0


Island, the secure browser company, may be the most valuable startup that you have never heard of. The company, which is putting the browser at the center of security, announced a $175 million Series D investment on Tuesday at a whopping $3 billion valuation. Island has now raised a total of $487 million.

That’s a ton of money, and it makes us wonder: What is the company doing to warrant this kind of investment at this level of value? Doug Leone, a partner at Sequoia who invested in Island going back to the A round, says that he was attracted to the company’s founding team and unique value proposition.

“The two founders, one of whom was a technical founder out of Israel — Dan Amiga — and one who was a very senior security executive out of the U.S. — Mike Fey — had a vision that if you could produce a browser based on Chromium that looks like a standard browser to the consumer employee in a corporation, but was secure, it would stop bad guys from doing a whole bunch of things,” Leone told TechCrunch.

He says that the end result is that you can lower the overall cost of security by replacing things like a VPN, data loss prevention and mobile device management, all of which can be done right in the browser instead of purchasing separate tools. That could in turn lower the overall cost of securing a network.

Island is defining a category with an enterprise browser, while allowing employees to work in a familiar environment and keeping them more secure, says Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“They are using the security angle to change human computing interactions,” he said. “Think of the browser as your screen into a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game, and based on all the data being captured, it can deliver contextually relevant content, actions and insight, but it does it while delivering on enterprise class security of the data, process and identity.”

Fey acknowledges that if he showed up at a company with a proprietary browser, and they have 20,000 apps — which would be possible in a Fortune 100 company — then they would have to test all those apps against that browser. But the fact that Island is based on the Chromium standard means that IT can trust the browser without having to put everything through a lengthy testing process. “The browser world standardized on Chromium. This idea couldn’t have come to fruition before that,” Fey said.

In spite of the value proposition and the standardized approach, Fey says it still takes some explaining to get executives to understand that by paying for a security-focused browser, they can actually save money in the long run. “You have to explain where the ROI comes from. What am I getting? Where’s it coming from? And the ROI has to be very understandable and very believable and large,” he said.

How large? Consider that he says one company saved $300 million a year shutting down racks in a data center because they didn’t require nearly the same level of resources anymore to run the same applications.

Browsers are interesting again

Fey says it’s not about replacing these tools, so much as the fact that taking advantage of a standardized browser just makes it so much easier to execute on things like web filtering or even virtual desktops. It sounds simple, but the company has 280 employees, of which 100 are engineers. He says a lot of engineering work went into making this happen.

While he wouldn’t discuss specific revenue numbers, the company has around 200 customers, and has been growing steadily over the past couple of years. Leone referred to it as exponential growth.

Fey thinks that Island can be a substantial public company eventually. “We’re getting into decent ARR at this point, meaningful ARR, and our margins are good,” he said. “So you know what we think is we will make a strong IPO candidate someday, but not next year. Someday.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

The Browser Company releases Arc for Windows | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 8:34 PM0


The Browser Company, makers of the Arc web browser, released its Windows version today. The company started testing the Windows client in December, and it said that more than 150,000 people have been using it.

The startup, which aims to replace your current browser, recently raised $50 million at a $550 million valuation. Today, The Browser Company opened access to its Windows version to all users without any waitlist. Previously, the waitlist had more than 1 million people on it.

The company started with an invite-only Mac-based version in 2022 and opened it to everyone in July 2023.

Image Credits: The Browser Company

The Browser Company decided to build the Windows version in Swift so it could reuse and share the majority of the codebase with the Mac version. Swift is a programming language that Apple originally designed to develop iPhone and Mac apps. Using Swift on Windows will make it easier to maintain feature parity in the future. The company has also written extensively about its experience building in Swift on Windows to help developers looking to port their Mac apps.

Features on the Windows version

Arc on Windows has some core features of the Mac version, including the sidebar with most used webpages pinned up top; Spaces, which are like folders for different sets of tabs for different tasks such as “Work,” “Entertainment,” “Vacation” and “Notetaking”; profiles for separate browsing data and preferences; split view for opening multiple tabs in a single window; and support for picture-in-picture video player so you can look at other tabs while watching a video clip.

Image Credits: The Browser Company

The Windows team has also included the Peek feature, which was missing from the initial version. Peek lets you see a quick link preview from the pinned and favorites tabs without clicking on the link.

This month, it introduced Arc Sync across devices to let users access their sidebar, spaces, folders, and tabs are accessible across devices. This feature will work on the Windows version as well.

One of the primary differentiators between the Windows and Mac versions is that the former supports touchscreens.

However, the newly released Windows versions miss features like Little Arc, which is a floating browser window for temporary uses such as opening a link. The company didn’t specify if the Windows version has AI-powered features such as link preview summaries, renaming downloaded files, instant links to serve websites directly, and automatically updating live folders.

What’s ahead

Currently, Arc for Windows only supports Windows 11, but the startup is working on support for Windows 10.

The company also said that it wants to bring feature parity to both Mac and Windows but didn’t provide a timeline for it.

Earlier this year, The Browser Company released a mobile app for iPhone called Arc Search. With the latest release, the company said it plans to release an Arc Search client for Android.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Playruo lets you try game demos from your web browser | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 1:46 PM0


It’s still unclear whether cloud gaming will ever become the next big thing. The appeal is clear: The game you’re playing runs in a data center near you, and the video output is directly streamed to your local device. When you interact with the game, everything is relayed back to the data center.

When it works, it’s an amazing experience. It’s a flexible, easy way to play games across multiple devices without buying new hardware. That’s why many companies have launched services that let you play games remotely — there’s Nvidia’s GeForce Now service, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Amazon Luna, and Google’s now-defunct Stadia cloud gaming service.

But the vast majority of people still play video games on their own, local devices. A French company called Shadow tried something different by bringing your entire computer to the cloud: It isn’t just cloud gaming, it’s cloud computing. You can access Windows in the cloud and install anything you want. But Shadow hasn’t become a mainstream service either.

Fergus Leleu, Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Yannis Weinbach — three former employees at Shadow — decided to leave the company and try something different with their new startup, Playruo. Instead of letting you play your games in the cloud, their new company lets you play game demos in the cloud.

Click on a link to launch a game demo

In many ways, Playruo delivers on the original promise of Google’s Stadia: It lets you launch and play a video game from your web browser without having to install anything. Just like people share Google Docs links to share a document, game publishers can turn a game demo into a shareable link.

Behind the scenes, Playruo’s streaming technology is based on Kyber, a bi-directional streaming technology created by Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CTO of Playruo. Kempf is also better known as the president of VideoLAN, the organization behind the popular open-source video player, VLC. He has also worked on various video encoders and decoders used by some of the largest video platforms, including Netflix and YouTube.

Playruo relies heavily on open-source software components, such as FFmpeg to encode the audio and video streams, and libVLC to decode the stream on your local device. The company uses QUIC for the transport layer network protocol.

I tried a couple of demos in Google Chrome on macOS, and the service worked as expected. You can start playing just a few seconds after clicking on the demo link, and on a solid fiber connection via Wi-Fi, it felt like I was playing a game locally.

How to make a viral game

There are thousands of games released on PC and game consoles every year. Unless you have a gigantic marketing budget, it’s hard to stand out.

Even worse, game publishers are also competing with old games. Some of the most played games of 2023 have been around for more than a decade — think Minecraft, DOTA 2, GTA V, or League of Legends. It’s arguably one of the reasons why there have been so many rounds of layoffs in the game industry recently.

Playruo’s pitch is that it can be used by game publishers as part of a launch campaign to maximize their chances of success. For instance, at the end of a video trailer, a publisher could embed thumbnail on YouTube with a link to the demo so you can try out the game easily.

Playruo links can also be integrated in game launchers. Imagine a popular Twitch streamer sharing a link to a multiplayer game demo so that viewers can team up with their favorite Twitch content creator.

Unlike traditional cloud gaming services, Playruo’s client here is the game’s publisher, and they pay the startup to offer a demo. Chances are that a demo that becomes viral will lead to increased game sales. Playruo is already working with Old Skull Games to promote Cryptical Path.

“We know the cloud gaming business model pretty well from our past experience. The big pitfall is that the various platforms do everything they can to prevent you from using the service too much,” Playruo’s co-founder and head of product, Weinbach, told me.

“It’s a bit ridiculous and counterintuitive. So we thought about a business model where it’s interesting for us that people stay for a long time,” he said. In other words, a viral demo could be considered as a success for a game publisher.

Playruo will have to make sure that it can quickly scale its fleet of servers (up and down) based on demand. The company relies on public cloud companies that offer virtual machines with GPUs, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Scaleway.

This will be a critical part of Playruo’s model. If the startup has too many servers running without anyone launching demos, it’ll lead to an expensive hosting bill at the end of the month. If the startup doesn’t have enough servers, many gamers will receive an error when they try to launch a demo.

But if it works well, Playruo can act as the top of the funnel for game purchases. After a 15-minute demo, players can get a link to add a game to their Steam wishlist, join a Discord server, or enter their email address to get more information. And they may not even realize that they played a game that wasn’t installed on their system.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Ecosia launches a cross-platform browser, starts an affiliate link program | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 12:45 PM0


Tree planting search engine Ecosia launched a new cross-platform browser today to increase its online footprint.

The new browser, available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, is built on top of Chromium. That’s why there aren’t many feature differences from Chrome. The company sees that as a good thing as people might be tempted to switch over without letting go of their web browsing routine. However, you can customize the landing page and remove sections — such as top sites or climate impact — that are not to your liking.

Image Credits: Ecosia

Michael Metcalf, Ecosia’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch over a call that the company built a browser to expand its sustainable presence.

“The main reason we are building a browser is because we want to go where our users are and start to expand the footprint of where they can be sustainable. Right now, our main use case is around search, but we want to expand into parts of browsing experiences,” Metcalf said.

Ecosia is also starting an affiliate shopping program with the launch of this new browser. Users will see links to shopping sites like Amazon, eBay, and Decathlon under the sponsored links section.

The company said all the money earned through affiliate revenues will go towards planting trees and backing other green projects. Through this kind of investment, Ecosia has committed to generating 25Wh of clean energy per user each day they browse.

Metcalf said that while the company promotes lower consumption, it is aware that people shop frequently, and with the affiliate program, they have an opportunity to give back.

In the future, the company wants to improve the affiliate shopping interface, integrate its AI chatbot, and add more customization to the browser.

It’s tough to ask people to change their browsers, so the company aims to target its current user base of 20 million initially, along with marketing targeted towards casual green users. The company said that it was happy with the retention rate in its early beta testing. However, it doesn’t have any data on whether there was any impact on the amount of Ecosia searches when a user switches to the company’s browser.

Ecosia made a few structural changes to its search engine last year. After years of using Bing as a sole search provider, the company started experimenting with Google search in markets like Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and the Philippines. The company uses System1, which syndicates search results from Microsoft Bing, Startpage, and Info.com in other geographies.

Earlier this year, Ecosia also crossed the mark of planting more than 200 million trees across 95,000 locations worldwide.

Ecosia adds a train travel search tool powered by Omio


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Arc browser launches Live Folders to auto-update tabs for you | TechCrunch

April 20, 2024 7:00 PM0


Fresh off the heels of raising $50 million at a $550 million valuation in March, The Browser Company continues to bring in more features to its Arc browser, set up to provide a genuine alternative to Chrome and other dominant players in the internet browser market. Today it is introducing a new feature called Live Folders, which will automatically create and update tabs in a folder based on events like someone adding a file to a shared folder.

Live Folders comes as the company also builds out more AI-powered features to create more dynamic and automated user experiences. One plan has been to build an AI agent that browses the web on your behalf, although this has yet to launch.

The company is launching Live Folders initially with GitHub pull request support. When a user creates a GitHub pull request, Arc automatically creates a Live Folder in the sidebar.

The folder will automatically update tabs based on pull requests you have created, assigned to, requested a review for or mentioned. The folder will automatically clear out tabs with completed requests and tasks.

If there is a new pull request when your Live Folder is collapsed, the browser will peek it out to highlight the new request to you.

Image Credits: Arc Browser (screen capture)

Arc is aiming to build a new kind of tracking system with this feature to help users with their daily work. The company teased this feature in February. When it asked users about support for types of systems for the Live Folders feature, GitHub was the top requested service.

The company said it is focused on integrating services to Live Folders that are treated toward collaboration, such as Google Calendar, Google Drive and Figma. It added that the tech behind Live Folders is flexible, so it could also adopt things like updates from RSS feeds.

Earlier this month, the startup’s CEO, Josh Miller, announced that the company had hired former Safari designer Charlie Deets and former WhatsApp designer Christine Rode to build different interface designs.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Chrome Enterprise goes Premium with new security and management features | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 1:13 AM0


At its Google Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas, Google on Tuesday extended its Chrome Enterprise product suite with the launch of Chrome Enterprise Premium.

Google has long offered an enterprise-centric version of its Chrome browser. With Chrome Enterprise, IT departments get the ability to manage employees’ browser settings, the extensions they install and web apps they use, for example. More importantly, though, they also get a number of new security controls around data loss prevention, malware protection, phishing prevention and the Zero Trust access to SaaS apps.

Chrome Enterprise Premium, which will cost $6/user/month, mostly extends the security capabilities of the existing service, based on the insight that browsers are now the endpoints where most of the high-value work inside a company is done.

“Authentication, access, communication and collaboration, administration, and even coding are all browser-based activities in the modern enterprise,” Parisa Tabriz, Google’s VP for Chrome, wrote in Tuesday’s announcement. “Endpoint security is growing more challenging due to remote work, reliance on an extended workforce, and the proliferation of new devices that aren’t part of an organization’s managed fleet. As these trends continue to accelerate and converge, it’s clear that the browser is a natural enforcement point for endpoint security in the modern enterprise.”

These new features include additional enterprise controls to enforce policies and manage software updates and extensions, as well as new security reporting features and forensic capabilities that can be integrated with third-party security tools. Chrome Enterprise Premium takes Zero Trust a step further with context-aware access controls that can also mitigate the risk of data leaks. This includes approved applications and those that were not sanctioned by the IT department.

“With Chrome Enterprise Premium, we have confidence in Google’s security expertise, including Project Zero’s cutting-edge security research and fast security patches. We set up data loss prevention restrictions and warnings for sharing sensitive information in applications like generative AI platforms and noticed a noteworthy 50% reduction in content transfers,” said Nick Reva, head of corporate security engineering at Snap.

The new service is now generally available.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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