A look at all the companies participating in 500 Startups’ 24th accelerator program

Doughbies’ cookie crumbles in a cautionary tale of venture scale

Gigster co-founders (from left): Debo Olaosebikan and Roger Dickey

The brain in sleep state is a fascinating thing.

I have been awake for 30 minutes and the dream is lingering. While it’s not as vivid as when I woke up, the details are still there. Maybe it is a result of the Super Blood Wolf Moon. Or maybe its because I’m traveling today.

I’m in an airport casually talking to someone who has stopped me to ask me a question. I realize it is 6:35am and my flight leaves at 6:30am. I rush to the gate to find that my plane has departed to New York but there is another one leaving at 7:05am. I stand in a short line but people keep getting in front of me. I finally decide to push my way to the front and talk to the gate agent. She says it’s too late to get on the 7:05am but I can get on the next flight to New York, which is at 10:30am.

That won’t work because my meeting starts at 10:30am. I’m meeting Person L and Person F there at Company B to pitch Company B on something. I’m wearing my normal work uniform (jeans and a Robert Graham shirt) but I’m nervous that I should be wearing a suit given Company B’s culture.

I try to figure out a solution with the gate agent. She’s nice, but she doesn’t have a solution for me other than the 10:30am flight. I start to get my bags and try to go to another airline, but both my Filson bag and my laptop bag are missing. My phone was on top of one of the bags so it’s missing also. I start to panic and ask the gate agent to help me find the bags. She points at a bunch of different bags that are just lining the gate area, but none of them are mine. I try to walk out the doors to the plane to find my bags but some burly guy stops me.

I go back to the gate agent to make sure she has my information in case she finds my bags. She says she does but I’ve never given her anything so I try to give her a business card. When I put it on the desk, I see it is for Person E. I try to write my phone number on the card but my writing is illegible. The gate agent isn’t paying attention to me anyway.

I remember that the document that I was working on is stored in Google Docs so it’s automatically backed up. But my suit is in my bag so I can’t wear it to the meeting. And I can’t call Person L to tell him that I can’t make it to the meeting. I decide to punt and go buy another phone.

I wake up feeling very unresolved.

I sometimes wonder what my computer is dreaming about when it’s in sleep state.

Also published on Medium.

Group Nine Media's NowThis video news outlet is the latest publisher to launch an original video programming division.

The division, called NowThis Originals, will develop and produce original shows for distribution across social, streaming and linear platforms. It's separate from Discovery-backed Group Nine Media's own unit, Group Nine Studios, which supports the content teams across its media brands NowThis, The Dodo, Thrillist, and Seeker.

The Originals team consists of 25 people, and will be overseen by executive producer Matt McDonough. NowThis, meanwhile, led by deputy editor Jon Laurence and political director Nico Pitney, will continue to focus on producing daily video stories for social feeds. Both groups report to NowThis editor Sarah Frank.

"This is a strategic move for us to create more focus and clarity around something that we've already been doing," NowThis president Athan Stephanopoulos told Business Insider. "The idea is to create recognizable IP that will attract audiences, which we can then multiply across social, streaming and linear platforms."

NowThis has already produced 16 original shows since 2017. They include "ConTECHtual," which breaks down the origins and evolution of current technology, examining its potential for the future for Facebook Watch; and "MANE," which explores the intersection of culture and hair.

Since it ventured into original programming, NowThis' watch time has increased 36% year-over-year, with its shows having been collectively watched for more than 300 million minutes. The shows have also attracted interest from brands including Boost Mobile, Domain.com, SheaMoisture, and the NHL.

The goal of the new division is to diversify NowThis' distribution, audiences and revenue, particularly branded partnerships, said Stephanopoulos. Last week, parent company Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer told Business Insider that revenue diversification was a huge focus for the company as seeks to dive into e-commerce. The company said it was in talks with several partners for video distribution deals that would be announced later this year.

Read More: Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer's last attempt at e-commerce ended in mass layoffs, but he's trying again with a fresh approach

"A big focus for us is to lean into the type of programming we've been doing and create a whole host of new programs and shows that allow for brands to come and be a part of them," said Stephanopoulos.

To be sure, other big distributed-media companies have tested the original video waters before. BuzzFeed, Vox Media and Refinery29 have all set up divisions to create shows for social and streaming platforms — more so as these platforms have increasingly funded content creation.

It's hard to make money overnight this way, though, because selling video to distributors can be a slow build, video is expensive to do well, and typically yields lower profits than display advertising.

Facebook and Google get beat up a lot by advertisers for not sharing data with them while controlling the bulk of digital ad budgets. Facebook says that not only is it willing to budge, but that a measurement solution that solves some of marketers' concerns is nearly ready to roll.

Advertisers often complain about social platforms' "walled gardens" that limit the amount of data that they're willing to share. Facebook and Google in particular wield powerful targeting and measurement data but keep it within their own walls for privacy and competitive reasons. That means an advertiser that wants to compare how many people saw, clicked on and bought something from a Facebook ad can't easily see how it compares to a similar Google campaign.

Read more: 'It is this phenomenal game of hot potato': Marketers are poring over legal documents to make sure they don't screw up using data on Facebook

Facebook hinted last year that a data-sharing program was possible but only if other digital advertising companies joined in. But there hasn't been much movement since then, nor has it been clear how a joint-platform program would work. To coordinate the program, a neutral third party would have to process and anonymize streams of data, and it's been unclear what company would be up to such a task.

But according to Brad Smallwood, Facebook's vp of marketing science, the answer to some of those concerns — specifically when it comes to measuring comparable audience and reach stats — already exists.

"I don't think the answer is that we're going to have to build something from scratch in order to make this work," he told Business Insider.

All the major platforms are already on board with Nielsen

Nielsen is one of "several" companies that could potentially power the high-stakes project with its Digital Ad Ratings (or DAR) technology, Smallwood said.

Dozens of digital players including Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snap feed web and mobile data into Nielsen's DAR system. Nielsen then pieces together the data to create audience and demographic stats that show marketers how a campaign run on a specific platform compares to an aggregate digital audience.

Right now, platforms keep their own data close to their chests, but in theory the platforms could share some of their data with each other through DAR so marketers could get a better look at how reach and frequency data performs across Facebook and other digital platforms.

"It's privacy-safe, there's no data that ends up flowing around the system, [and] there's great encryption," Smallwood said.

Nielsen's product is widely used by platforms other than Facebook, and Smallwood suggested that it would be possible to get a data-sharing program up and running without a significant amount of work — as long as all the platforms agree.

A spokeswoman for Nielsen said that it's possible for the platforms to change how they work with each other under the guise of DAR.

Smallwood declined to say to what extent Facebook has talked with Google and others about getting a cross-platform measurement program off the ground, but he said the topic has come up in discussions with industry groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau and that "everyone is interested in solving this problem."

While agencies welcome more data from Facebook, they're also skeptical that Facebook will follow through and give them access to stats that they have asked for, like attribution or conversion data.

"It's great that they're being more open but I think it's just a starting point," said an agency analytics exec who spoke on background. "I don't think they're there yet."

Facebook says the onus is on advertisers to ask for specific metrics

Smallwood said that to get the ball rolling, large industry players — think vocal CMOs like Procter & Gamble's Marc Pritchard, Unilever's Keith Weed, or an industry group like the Association of National Advertisers— need to speak up and make specific measurement asks.

"We need focus," Smallwood said. "When you get a whole bunch of [people] together and say, 'What do you want?' Everybody wants the kitchen sink. If the ask is too broad, then the timing draws on. The specific ask is the key."

Smallwood acknowledged that Nielsen won't address all of marketers' concerns. Marketers want to dump all data from digital campaigns into one database to compare how each platform performs, but privacy concerns make the scenario challenging.

"We need to know what to build, and we also need people to understand that the privacy piece of this is a real concern," he said. "We need a solution that ends up meeting the need while maintaining that privacy element."

Instead, Facebook is wrestling with creating a privacy-friendly "modeled" method that leans on third-party measurement companies.

Agencies, for their part, argue that they've been clear about the metrics they want.

"It's funny because I think the majority of the brands or us as an agency have already asked for that specificity," said the agency source. "I don't believe that they have got to the level of granularity of understanding the differences of verticals and different types of media."

He added: "I think they do a great job trying to sell the products but then it's like, 'Trust us, they're great products.' That's where companies are having the biggest issues, including ourselves."

Google has its own answer to cross-platform measurement

For Google's part, it has offered advertisers its own cross-platform program called Ads Data Hub since May 2017 that allows brands to match up their own data (like first-party CRM stats) with impression data from both Google and non-Google campaigns.

Here's how it works: Ads Data Hub lives within the software programs Google Cloud and BigQuery. Advertisers first upload their data and then Google shares campaign data from any of its services. Advertisers can also upload data from campaigns running on other campaigns to look at metrics like viewability, reach, frequency and attribution.

Google says that it is privacy-secure and compliant with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. The catch, of course, is that it's run by Google, meaning that advertisers can not take user-level data out of the platform and use it elsewhere.

Roughly 9,000 advertisers use Ads Data Hub, up from 4,000 at the end of June, said a Google spokeswoman.

"Google has done quite a lot of work in comparison [to Facebook] to be more transparent and even provide data at the event-level," said the agency source. "Even with GDPR and everything, we still have access to it — that audit perspective is way more available, I would say, from the Google side."

Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei sent an email to staff on Friday predicting trouble ahead for the company, thanks to multiple countries shunning the firm's 5G infrastructure and increased scrutiny of its business.

"In the coming years, the overall situation will probably not be as bright as imagined, we have to prepare for times of hardship," Ren said, according to The Financial Times.

Ren gave an ominous indication that job losses could lie ahead, saying "We also need to give up some mediocre employees and lower labour expenses."

Read more: Huawei's CEO called Trump a 'great president' in an extraordinary plea to end America's war with his company

Huawei's upcoming 5G infrastructure has been banned by a slew of Western countries as the US appealed to its allies to freeze the company out, fearing that Huawei equipment is a way for China's Communist Party to spy on different countries. Germany said last week it was considering a ban on Huawei equipment for its upcoming 5G networks over security concerns.

Huawei said it likely hit $100 billion in revenue in 2018, thanks both its consumer division which produces popular smartphones, and its core telecommunications business. But that explosive growth may slow down, Ren warned.

"Things went too smoothly for us in the last 30 years," he wrote, according to The Financial Times. "We were in a phase of strategic expansion, our organisation expanded in a destructive way. We have to review carefully if all geographical subsidiaries are efficient. […] In order to achieve overall victory, we need to conduct some organisational streamlining."

Ren — a former officer of the People's Liberation Army — recently gave a rare public appearance in which he called Donald Trump a "great president" and tried to assuage national security fears.

Ren's daughter and CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada last month, reportedly charged on suspicion of breaking US sanctions on Iran. Ren recently told reporters that he misses her "very much."