Microsoft announced a series of new features for Outlook across desktop, mobile and web to take a bit of the focus off of Gmail’s massive redesign. Some of the features highlight Outlook’s usefulness in the workplace – like new meeting room suggestion capabilities and RSVP tracking. But others, particularly on mobile, are more innovative – like Quick Reply which turns email replies into chats – or Office Lens, which enhances attached photos.

Office Lens was already available in a standalone mobile app that does things like straighten out photos of paper documents, whiteboards and business cards. But this sort of image correction technology has made its way to other apps, as well – like Microsoft Pix’s camera app, which now lets you scan business cards to find people on LinkedIn.

In Outlook, Office Lens can automatically trim and enhance a photo of a whiteboard, document or photo, then embed it in your message. The feature is arriving first to Android later this month.

Quick Reply, meanwhile, keeps your message in view, but then adds a new reply box at the bottom of the screen. This makes the reply experience feel more like using a chat app. This is also hitting Android this month, and will come to Mac this summer. It’s already live on iOS.

The mobile version of Outlook will also gain a way to flag key contacts (iOS and Android in June); sync draft folders across desktop and mobile (iOS in May. Already live on Windows, Mac and Android); view Office 365 Groups’ events in Outlook and OneNote (Outlook for iOS in June); block email tracking like those from marketers (Android in May): and new features for enterprise customers to protect sensitive data.

Outlook Mail adds a few tweaks like BCC warnings when you’re the blind copy, proxy support, and the ability to view organization information if you’re connected to Azure Active Directory.

Calendar is getting a number of features, including bill pay reminders, suggested event locations and meeting rooms, meeting RSVP tracking and forwarding, and expanded support for multiple time zones for meetings and appointments (so you can set up your travel start in your current zone, and then set up the arrival with the local time at the destination, e.g.).

None of these features, however, are significant upgrades on the scale of the Gmail overhaul, whose focus wasn’t just on business user needs, like Outlook, but on additions that both corporate users and consumers can leverage – like self-destructing messages, snooze buttons, and a handy new sidebar for accessing your calendar, tasks, and notes.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Following Gmail’s makeover, Outlook rolls out new features focused on business users

Facebook wants to prove it can earn businesses money, not just build their social media audience. This morning, just before its big F8 conference, a “Facebook Analytics” app for iOS and Android appeared in the app stores. It touts the ability to “stay on top of your growth, engagement, and conversion efforts on the go. Easily view key metrics and reports, check automated insights, and receive notifications when changes occur.”

As social marketing has matured, companies aren’t content just getting Likes, followers and reach. They want to sell stuff. Between storefronts on Facebook, marketing bots on Messenger, professional accounts and shopping tags on Instagram and the new WhatsApp For Business app, Facebook wants to offer tools to keep them loyal.

We’ll likely hear more about the Analytics app later today during the conference, and we’ve reached out for more info. The app complements Facebook’s Pages Manager and Ad Manger. But rather than just those surfaces, the Analytics app helps businesses track their apps, websites, bots and event source groups.

The Facebook Analytics app lets users create custom mobile views of their most important metrics like revenue, retention, demographics and active users. It ties into Facebook’s web Analytics suite to let you view funnels, cohorts and segments you’ve created there. Some businesses will also see automated insights, such as that you’ve experienced a period of higher sales, or that a certain demographic spends more time or money in your app.

If Facebook can boost confidence in the return on investment businesses get from its social network, it could convince them to invest more in ads, content and managing their presence there. Clients have largely stuck with Facebook through its recent scandals because there’s simply no place with more precise ways to reach customers. But as the app hits saturation in certain markets and user growth plateaus, Facebook must keep finding ways to squeeze more money out of each of them.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Facebook launches commerce ‘Analytics’ app

Hustle 20X’d its annual revenue run rate in 15 months by denying clients that contradict its political views. It’s a curious, controversial, yet successful strategy for the startup whose app lets activists and marketers text thousands of potential supporters or customers one at a time. Compared to generic email blasts and robocalls, Hustle gets much higher conversion rates because people like connecting with a real human who can answer their follow-up questions.

The whole business is built around those relationships, so campaigns, non-profits, and enterprises have to believe in Hustle’s brand. That’s why CEO Roddy Lindsay tells me “We don’t sell to republican candidates or committees. What it’s allowed us to do is build trust with the Democratic party and progressive organizations. We don’t have to worry about celebrating our clients’ success and offending other clients.”

Hustle execs from left: COO Ysiad Ferreiras, CEO Roddy Lindsay, CTO Tyler Brock

Investors agree. Tempted by Hustle’s remarkable growth to well over a $10 million run rate and 85 million conversations started, Insight Venture Partners has led a $30 million Series B for the startup that’s joined by Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures.

The round comes just 10 months after Hustle’s $8M Series A when it was only doing $3 million in revenue. Lindsay says he was impressed with Insight’s experience with communication utilities like Cvent and non-profit tools like Ministry Brands. Its managing director Hilary Gosher who specializes in growing sales teams will join Hustle’s board, which is a great fit since Hustle is hiring like crazy.

Humanizing The Call To Action

Founded in late 2014, Hustle’s app lets organizers write MadLibs-style text message scripts and import contact lists. Their staffers or volunteers send out the messages one by one, with the blanks automatically filled in to personalize the calls to action. Recipients can respond directly with the sender ready with answers to assuage their fears until they’re ready to donate, buy, attend, or help. Meanwhile, organizers can track their conversions, optimize scripts, and reallocate assignments so they can reach huge audiences with an empathetic touch.

The Hustle admin script editor

The app claims to be 77X faster than making phone calls and 5.5X more engaging than email, which has won Hustle clients like LiveNation’s concert empire, NYU, and the Sierra Club. Clients pay $0.30 per contact uploaded into Hustle, with discounts for bigger operations. Now at $41 million in total funding, Hustle plans to push further beyond its core political and non-profit markets and deeper into driving alumni donations for universities, sales for enterprises, and attendance for event promoters.

Hustle will be doing that without one of its three co-founders, Perry Rosenstein, who left at the end of 2017. [Disclosure: I know Lindsay from college and once worked on a short-lived social meetup app with Rosenstein called Signal.] Lindsay says Rosenstein’s “real excellence was about early stage activities and problems”. Indeed, in my experience he was more attuned to underlying product-market fit than the chores of scaling a business. “It was Perry’s decision, it was a departure we celebrated, and he’s still involved as an informal adviser to me and the company” Lindsay concluded.

Hustle is growing so fast, this recent photo is already missing a third of the team

Hustle has over 100 other employees in SF, NYC, and DC to pick up the torch, though. That’s up from just 12 employees at the start of 2017. And it’s perhaps one of the most diverse larger startups around. Lindsay says his company is 51 percent women, 48 percent people of color, and 21 percent LGBT. This inclusive culture attracts top diverse talent. “We see this as a key differentiator for us. It allows us to hire incredible people” Lindsay says. “It’s something we took seriously from day one and the results show.”

Partisan On Purpose

What started as a favored tool of the Bernie Sanders campaign has blossomed into a new method of communicating at scale. “We’re massively humanizing the way these organizations communicate” Lindsay said. “Humans really matter, no matter if what you care about is getting lots of people to come to events, vote, or renew a season ticket package. Having a relationship with another person can cut through the noise. That’s different than your interactions with bots or email marketing campaigns or things where it’s dehumanized.”

Lindsay felt the frustration of weak relationships when after leaving Facebook where he worked for six years as one of its first data scientists, he volunteered for Mark Zuckerberg’s Fwd.us immigration reform organization. Its email got just a 1 percent conversion rate. He linked up with Obama’s former Nevada new media director Rosenstein and CTO Tyler Brock to fix that with Hustle.

Working with Bernie aligned with the team’s political sentiments, but they were quickly faced with whether they wanted to fuel both sides of the aisle — which would mean delivering fringe conservative campaign messages they couldn’t stomach. Hustle still has no formal policy about declining Republican money, and a spokesperson said they point potential clients to TechCrunch’s previous article mentioning the stance. Meanwhile, Hustle is growing its for-profit client base to make shunning the GOP feel like less of a loss. Having Salesforce as a strategic investor also creates a bridge to a potential exit option.

Focusing on the left is working for now. Over 25 state Democratic parties are clients. Hustle sent 2.5 million messages and reached over 700,000 voters — 1 in 5 total — during the Alabama special election, helping Democrat Doug Jones win the Senate seat.

“Let’s build this great business for the Democratic party. Let’s let someone else take the Republicans” Lindsay explains. A stealth startup called OpnSesame is doing just that, Lindsay mentions. But he says “we don’t actually see them as competitive. We see them as potential allies that advocate for the power of p2p texting in getting everyone included in our democracy.” Instead, Lindsay sees the potential for Hustle to lose its sense of purpose and drive as it rapidly hires as its biggest threat.

Long-term, Hustle hopes to propel the right side of history by sticking to the left. Lindsay concludes, “You can really just put on your business hat and see this is a good choice.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Hustle rallies M for grassroots texting tool Republicans can’t use

OfferUp, the mobile marketplace for buying and selling locally, is expanding its sights beyond your neighborhood. Today, the company is announcing an expansion of its service that will now allow sellers to ship their items nationwide to interested buyers, potentially netting them a larger audience than if trying to sell only within their local community.

The feature to browse the items outside your area will appear in a separate “shipping” tab in the new version of the OfferUp app for iOS and Android, arriving today.

When sellers list an item, they’ll have the option to toggle on a switch to “sell & ship” nationwide. They then pick the item’s weight from the options that appear (up to 20 lbs). Items must also be under $500, and are shipped via USPS. Buyers are kept up-to-date on the item’s status through the app, as well.

Listing items for nationwide shipping is free. Sellers are paid after the item is sold, less a 7.9 percent fee, which goes to OfferUp. (This is less than eBay’s standard 10%).

The transaction fee represents a new revenue stream for OfferUp, which before had offered paid tools to promote items for sale, but not a cut of transactions.

The company declines to say how much it makes from its existing paid offerings and ads, or if it’s turning a profit. Likely it needs to enter into transactions like this, to grow its revenue and justify its $220 million in VC investment and unicorn valuation. (The Information reported in December it was having trouble raising, so it may have needed this new path to revenue.)

The move will also pit OfferUp in more direct competition with eBay, which it already outranks in the App Store’s Top Charts where it’s No. 3 to eBay’s No. 8 in the Shopping category. While eBay still has a much larger user base – 171 million globally active buyers, as of its most recent earnings for example – OfferUp has managed to grow to over 42 million uniques during the past 12 months, just here in the U.S.

Longer-term, OfferUp aims to go international and including a shipping feature would be the first step.

“We definitely have global ambitions as a company,” says OfferUp co-founder and CEO Nick Huzar. But, he cautions, “we want to feel like, as a company, that we’re in the right spot to do that. So we don’t have a date in mind to do that.”

The company claims to reach buyers and sellers across the country, and not just in urban metros. And it claims its buyers are interested in a range of products, as opposed to favoring those in a single category or two.

“I think that’s why people come back so often,” says Huzar, explaining why users will return to the app, on average, 2 or 3 times per day. While furniture is popular because it’s a local marketplace, he adds, OfferUp users browse all kinds of things – from electronics to clothing to baby needs and even cars.

“It’s not like Amazon where it’s very intent-based – where you know what you want. OfferUp is more discovery-based. You go in there and you kind of look around and you find that thing you didn’t think you wanted that you end up buying,” Huzar says.

The app has also grown in popularity because of its systems to make transactions more trusted than those on Craigslist, which has been one of OfferUp’s bigger competitors to date, along with Facebook’s Buy/Sell Groups. Users on OfferUp can optionally verify their identity with Driver’s License uploads, and/or by confirming their phone number, Facebook or email. Users can also rate transactions, and see sellers’ response rate to questions, among other things.

The shipping feature has been in testing for a few months prior to today’s nationwide launch across the 48 contiguous U.S. states. To gain access to the option, you’ll need to update to the latest version of the OfferUp app on iOS or Android.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Local marketplace OfferUp takes on eBay with launch of nationwide shipping