1. Former Salesforce chief scientist announces You.come — new search engine

It seems that the dominance of the Google search engine haunts many, and the best way to compete is to find the obvious disadvantages of the opponent. The You.com project with its advanced artificial intelligence, will provide better results and promises the following:

• Serving Fairly: Preference is given to real search results over paid content

• Honest Reviews: New Search Engine Promises to Deliver Honest Product Reviews

• Privacy: The creators promise not to sell data and give you the ability to regulate what information about yourself and your search you want to provide to the search engine.

The benefits of the project run counter to Google’s advertising business, its mission is to help users, not use their data for advertising purposes. You.com is trying to harness the new wave of privacy concerns.

Two American billionaires have already invested in the project: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Accel Partner fund partner Jim Breuer.

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2. Beyond Identity removes the familiar password format. The project has already raised $75 million of Series B

Passwords are outdated: they are constantly forgotten, accounts are exposed to attacks, because of which users often lose access to them. Users often duplicate one password for several sites, which is also a risky undertaking. The startup Beyond Identity solves this problem.

Beyond Identity is a B2B solution that replaces passwords with certificates, enabling seamless secure logins with a cloud of related user information. This approach allows employees to migrate between devices without involving other specialists, and the administrator has access to login data, which allows him to analyze the risks of third-party interference.

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3. UserLeap for product analytics raised $16 million of Series A

The quantity and quality of data are two very different concepts. Everyone understands how important it is to use surveys and ask your user about a product, but the whole question is: how exactly do you do this and how long does it take to collect and analyze data?

The UserLeap project provides a very cool tool: you add a line of code to your project — and now users will see micro-surveys embedded in the relevant context into the product itself! The company claims that this format guarantees between 20% and 30% response rates (some surveys can reach 90% user engagement). This is a great result in contrast to the old email poll approach, where the average response rate ranges from 3% to 5%.

Conclusion: the user is ready to provide valuable data in the stream, and not in the moment.

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4. Reddit welcomes Dubmash video platform, which is one of the TikTok competitors to the team

Why did Reddit acquired the Dubsmash social platform? Because interactive video engages users more. Together with a convenient editor that allows you to do everything on the fly, this acquisition will speed up the transformation of Reddit itself (in which native videos have been integrated since 2017, their number on the platform has doubled in 2020), and will also make it more inclusive: Dubsmash used by about 25% of black teens in the US, the majority of users are women.

The short video format is likely to become the main driver of growth in 2021.

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5. Cisco strengthens its WebEx video conferencing app with acquisition of Slidj — service for Q&A sessions, surveys which increase engagement

If you have ever created a conference for tens or hundreds of people, then you probably noticed that the quality of such events can noticeably drop due to the high diversity of people and their aspirations.

Slido allows you to more systematically interact with a large number of people, moderate questions, read reviews in real time, and analyze the audience. A very useful product in a world where conferences go online.