Technology

Wag!, the petcare company known for connecting pet owners with local dog walkers, has recently undergone a series of sweeping changes.

In late November, after I was named the new CEO, my management team and I began plotting a radically different path to profitability. We began by assessing our relationship with users. First and foremost, we recognized that Wag! needed to improve the way we supported the community, including pet parents, pet caregivers and their pets.

Next, we examined the companyfinancial health and analyzed the competitive climate, investment community and direction in which the tech industry appeared headed. The time has come to share how this influenced our decisions.

Late in 2019, a lot of smart people began to note a philosophical shift taking place in the capital markets. Investors had begun to lose patience with startups that spent massive sums on acquiring market share, but had demonstrated little to no ability at creating lasting businesses.

We concluded that funding in some sectors would quickly dry up. Based on our analysis, we expect a growing number of startups will be forced to hew out self-sustaining business niches to survive. This assessment is partly what led us to conclude that accepting another funding round wouldn&t necessarily benefit the company in the area that matters most: providing value to customers.

A consensus formed after we took control, and found a constant drumbeat of bills coming in and payments going out, notably to Amazon (Web Services), Google (to help extend our brand), Facebook (to reach customers) and for our office space. These costs were growing faster than revenue.

American Airlines today announced that it will fly a handful of cargo-only flights to Europe, using its standard 777-300 passenger planes, over the course of the next few days. The company says these flights will carry medical supplies, mail for active U.S. military, telecommunications equipment and electronics, as well as packages from e-commerce firms.

This marks the first time American is operating cargo-only flights since 1984, when it retired its last 747 freighter (one of those retired planes, by the way, was then modified to carry NASAshuttle on its back).

By default, virtually all airlines carry cargo on their domestic and international flights. American, for example, notes that it shipped more than 400 tons of flowers from Amsterdam to the U.S. in the two weeks around ValentineDay. As airlines started shrinking their operations in light of various travel restrictions and plummeting customer demand during the current COVID-19 outbreak, that cargo capacity shrunk, too, even though there is still plenty of demand for moving cargo between countries. As of now, American and the other major U.S. airlines have suspended the majority of their international long-haul flights.

&We have a critical role to play in keeping essential goods moving during this unprecedented time, and we are proud to do our part and find ways to continue to serve our customers and our communities,& said Rick Elieson, president of Cargo and vice president of International Operations at American. &Challenging times call for creative solutions, and a team of people across the airline has been working nonstop to arrange cargo-only flight options for our customers.&

For now, American only plans to make two round-trips between Dallas and Frankfurt over the course of the next four days. &The flights provide much-needed cargo capacity for many of the airlineregular cargo customers, allowing them to continue operating in this challenging environment,& the company says in its announcement.

Delta, too, recently announced that it would use some of its grounded passenger planes to move cargo. As airlines continue to grapple with the fallout of this pandemic, we&ll likely see more of them do this in the coming weeks.

The dating startup world is notorious for few exits, and a similarly slim number of buyers. ThereMatch Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, and thereSpark Networks, which owns Christian Mingle, JSwipe, Jdate and Zoosk.

Dating.com Group also owns a slew of dating brands, like Dil Mil, a dating app for South Asians. And it just closed a $50 million corporate venture capital fund to invest in more.

Dmitry Volkov, the founder of Dating.com Group, said that helooking for startups beyond swipe mechanics, referring indirectly to companies like Hinge, Tinder and Bumble, in which users can swipe through profiles of eligible individuals.

&The new mainstream product mechanic is yet to be discovered,& he noted. Beyond capital, Volkov thinks startups can use Dating.com Group for technical talent and product advice. He also thinks the strategic investments could lead to acquisitions down the road, which isn&t revolutionary, considering this is a corporate venture capital fund. Volkov claims he is in multiple talks with companies across Asia, the U.S. and Europe. With more talent under its umbrella, he says that Dating.com Group will plan to exit via IPO.

Dating.com Group is launching this fund during a time where people are told to socially isolate, not commiserate over dates and dinners. Volkov thinks that people spending less money in times of crisis could add to some &softness in revenue,& but he finds promise in streaming services.

&People will spend more time online, in social networks and dating apps, so I expect a spike in user activity in video dating and chatting online,& he said. &Younger generations are more native with video-first content. New niche players will always appear. But sooner or later there will be a mainstream disruptor, like Tinder was some time ago.&

To pull on the video thread a bit more, Volkov said that streaming services have gotten interest in Asia and across Europe and the USA. Itthe idea of video broadcasting from one individual to a big group, and he pointed to Meet Group for developing these services in the dating industry, too.

It was the first time I&ve heard of video dating, and since we&re seeing new use cases for literally everything during this time of social isolation, I decided to dig a little deeper. Sure enough, The League, which matches you with people you have on LinkedIn or Facebook, offers video speed dating.

According to a press kit from The League [PDF], the speed dating option lets users go on three two-minute speed dates every Sunday night. People can also video chat their matches — an option that The League touted was both &safe and cost effective.&

We&ll see if virtual dating catches on as it moves from a cost-effective option to the only opportunity some people have right now. We know at least for now, at least one company has an appetite for it.

If thereone face of scientific authority in the U.S. in the throes of COVID-19 chaos, itDr. Anthony Fauci. One of the worldtop HIV/AIDS researchers, Dr. Fauci has served in his post as director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, helping steer the federal response to viral diseases like SARS, MERS, Ebola — and now COVID-19.

Today at 4PM Pacific, Mark Zuckerberg is speaking live with Dr. Fauci to discuss steps that everyday people can take to help fight the spread of COVID-19. To watch the conversation, head over to ZuckerbergFacebook page.

The conversation is part of Facebookrecent thrust to put COVID-19 information from established health authorities front and center on the platform in an effort to get good information into the hands of users while mitigating potentially dangerous misinformation that could worsen outcomes as the novel coronavirus spreads worldwide.

Instagram is finally preparing to copy Snapchatmost popular feature, and one of the few it hasn&t already cloned. Instagram has prototyped an unreleased ephemeral text messaging feature that clears the chat thread whenever you leave it, a Facebook spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch. That could make users more comfortable with having rapid-fire, silly, vulnerable, or risque chats, thereby driving up the reply notifications that keep people opening Instagram all day long.

Instagram already has disappearing photo and video messaging which it launched in February 2018 to let users choose if chat partners can &view once&, &allow replay& multiple times for a limited period, or &keep in chat& permanently. Technically you could use the Create mode for overlaying words on a colored background to send an ephemeral text, but otherwise you have to use the &Unsend& feature which notifies other people in the thread.

But today, reverse engineering specialist and TechCrunchfavorite tipster Jane Manchun Wong unearthed something new. Buried in the code of the Android app is the a new & & mode, labeled in the code with the ‘speak-no-evil& monkey emoji.

How Instagram Disappearing Messages Work

When users enter this mode by swiping up from Instagram Direct message thread, they&re brought to a dark mode messaging window that starts as an empty message thread. When users close this window, any messages from them or their chat partners disappear.The feature works similarly to Snapchat, which clears a chat after all members of a thread have viewed it and closed the chat window.

Herehow Instagram disappearing messages work

The ephemeral messaging feature is not currently not publicly available but a Facebook spokesperson confirms to me that they are working on it internally. &We&re always exploring new features to improve your messaging experience. This feature is still in early development and not testing externally.& The company later tweeted the confirmation. They gave no indication of a timeline for if or when this might officially launch. Some features never make it out of the prototype phase, but others including many spotted by Wong end up being rolled out several months later.

Instagram has seen great success using Snapchat as a product R-D lab. Instagramversion of Stories rocketed to 500 million daily users compared to just 218 million users on Snapchat as a whole.

But ephemeral messaging has kept Snapchat relevant. Back in late 2017, just 51 million of Snapchat178 million users were posting Stories per day, and that was when Instagram Stories was still in its first year on the market. According to Statista, Snapchattop use case is staying in touch with friends and family, not entertainment.

Instagram Stories caused Snapchat to start shrinking at one point, but now itgrowing healthily again. That may signaled that Instagram still had more work to do to steal Snapthunder. But Instagramexisting version of ephemeral messaging that is clunkier, Facebook scrapped a trial of a similar feature, and WhatsApptake that started testing in October hasn&t rolled out yet.

Thatleft teens to stick with Snapchat for fast-paced communication they don&t have to worry about coming back to haunt them. If Instagram successfully copies this feature too, it could reduce the need for people to stay on Snapchat while making Instagram Direct more appealing to a critical audience. Every reply and subsequent alert draws users deeper into Facebookweb.