Week in Review - Google's platforms prove easy targets for startups

Saturday, July 18, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hey friends, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about fears of a TikTok ban. This week, I’m talking about the places startups are looking to take down Google.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The Big Story

Google’s suite of workplace products has been getting chopped up by productivity startups for years, but ambitions are expanding as investors look for new opportunities in software.

Productivity has been an especially hot for investment in the past year or two. Take a look at Notion and you’ll see a highly-valued company with a big vision structured around shaping how users thing about docs and wikis. The reality is if you look at the long list of features offered by G Suite, you’ll see the template for success for an increasingly lengthy list of venture-backed competitors that are tackling a specific bullet point in its list of offerings, revamping that service and charging a premium for startups desperate for fine-tuned products.

Lately the interest seems to have moved beyond the low-hanging fruit, with startups now looking to build products that can replace or augment Gmail, Google Calendar, and perhaps most ambitiously, Google Chrome.

This week in a piece for Extra Crunch, I dove into the commodification of web browsers and how new startups are aiming to find niches inside Chrome’s one-size-fits-all approach. I talked to several entrants in the browser world, some of whom had raised tens of millions in venture capital, some hundreds of thousands, and some who wouldn’t say. Here’s a look into one of the startups I chatted with, you can read the rest by signing up for an Extra Crunch subscription.

Investors are browsing for Chromium startups

Mighty

As front-end developers have gotten more ambitious and web applications have gotten more complex, Chrome has earned the reputation of being quite the RAM hog.

Mighty is building a $20/month version of Google Chrome that is completely remote-rendered, streaming the app from a server farm, offloading a user’s memory-intensive and battery-consuming network of browser tabs in the process, allowing users to run 100 tabs without bogging down their CPUs. Doshi tells TechCrunch that the startup’s browser can decrease Chrome’s CPU usage by 10 times.

“This is a new kind of technology entirely and it’s really hard to build. It’s not a simple reskin of a browser or a couple new UI/UX flourishes that anyone can copy,” Doshi said in a text conversation. “Our focus is making a few users really happy and we’re getting very close to something we’ll start deploying widely. Probably within the next 6 months.”

Image Credits: 07_av / Getty Images

Trends of the Week

Twitter get hacked
The week’s biggest news was likely the hack of numerous high-profile Twitter accounts including those belonging to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Coinbase and Apple, all for a simple Bitcoin scam. The infiltration came Wednesday afternoon as a hacker ran amok accessing Twitter’s own internal tools. In the end, the hacker walked away with $180,000 worth of Bitcoin. Read more about the deal here.

China cracks down on App Store games
More than 2,500 games were removed from the Chinese version of the Apple App Store in early July, the result of a planned crackdown on “unlicensed” mobile games. Read more about it here.

Google invests billions in Indian telecom
Reliance Jio has been raking in Silicon Valley tech money at a rate that feels pretty unprecedented. The Indian telecommunications company already received a massive Facebook investment, now Google is buying in, acquiring a 7.73% stake in the company for $4.5 billion. Read more here.

TechCrunch Disrupt

The ongoing pandemic has drastically shaped how we maintain existing relationships but it’s also transformed how we get those relationships started, pushing more first encounters online and adding social distance into the dating process. It’s been uncharted waters for the dating app market to weather, as well.

For Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, the massive shift comes months after big changes in her own role. After Badoo founder Andrey Andreev sold off his stake in the dating apps conglomerate he created, Wolfe Herd stepped into the CEO role of MagicLab (which has been newly rebranded to Bumble), taking charge of its digital dating empire which includes the Badoo, Bumble, Lumen and Chappy dating apps. We’re excited to announce that Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd will be joining us at Disrupt this September to discuss the future of the dating app market.