SugarCRM moves into marketing automation with Salesfusion acquisition

SugarCRM announced today that it has acquired Atlanta-based Salesfusion to help build out the the marketing automation side of its business. The deal closed last Friday. The companies did not share the purchase price.

CEO Craig Charlton, who joined the company in February, says he recognized that marketing automation was an area of the platform that badly needed enhancing. Faced with a build or buy decision, he decided it would be faster to buy a company and began looking for an acquisition target.

“We spent the last three or four months doing a fairly intensive market scan and dealing with a number of the possible opportunities, and we decided that Salesfusion was head and shoulders above the rest for a variety of reasons,” he told TechCrunch.

Among those was the fact the company was still growing and some of the targets Sugar looked at were actually shrinking in size. The real attraction for him was Salesfusion’s customer focus. “They have a very differentiated on-boarding process, which I hadn’t seen before. I think that’s one of the reasons why they get such a quick time to value for the customers is because they literally hold their hand for 12 weeks until they graduate from the on-boarding process. And when they graduate, they’re actually live with the product,” he said.

Brent Leary, principal at CRM Essentials, who is also based in Atlanta, thinks this firm could help Sugar by giving it a marketing automation story all its own. “Salesfusion gives Sugar a marketing automation piece they can fully bring into their fold and not have to be at the whims of marketing automation vendors, who end up not being the best fit as partners, whether it’s due to acquisition or instability of leadership at chosen partners,” Leary told TechCrunch.

It has been a period of transition for SugarCRM, which has had a hard time keeping up with giants in the industry, particularly Salesforce. The company dipped into the private equity market last summer and took a substantial investment from Accel-KKR, which several reports pegged as a 9 figure deal, and Pitchbook characterized as a leveraged buyout.

As part of that investment, the company replaced long-time CEO Larry Augustin with Charlton and began creating a plan to spend some of that money. In March, it bought email integration firm Collabspot, and Charlton says they aren’t finished yet with possibly two or three more acquisitions on target for this quarter alone.

“We’re looking to make some waves and grow very aggressively and and to drive home some really compelling differentiation that we have, and and that will be building over the next 12 to 24 months,” he said.

Salesfusion, which was founded in 2007 and raised $32 million, will continue to operate out of its offices in Atlanta. The company’s 50 employees are now part of Sugar.

Anchor’s new feature lets listeners leave voice messages for podcast hosts

February’s acquisition of Anchor was a savvy move on Spotify’s behalf. It’s a clever and rapidly growing company that will help the music service get a big leg up in its bid to build podcast operation. For the looks of it, however, the big buy out isn’t making Anchor complacent when it comes to building out its own offerings.

The startup has done a fine job providing tools designed to further lower the bar of entry for podcasting. Anchor’s latest feature is an interesting addition on that front. Voice Messages is designed to offer listeners a way to offer spoken feedback to show hosts.

As the company notes, the feature previous required users to have the Anchor app. The newly revamped feature now lets them record feedback by clicking a link on a show’s Anchor profile and leaving up a minute long note. Once finished, a notification will be sent to the host, with the audio file accessible through either the Anchor app or dashboard. From there, they can be added directly to the show using the Episode Builder.

Notably, listeners need to sign up and log in to leave a message. Anchor says this is an attempt to cut down on anonymity — and, one assumes, lend a little accountability by associating the message with a real person.

The feature’s already been available for select podcasts, including Casey Neistat & Candace Poole’s Couples Therapy and Popular Science’s The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. It’s now available to all Anchor users looking for ways to driver listener engagement. It’s a nice addition for an intimate medium that too often tends to be a one way street.

Instagram adds Stories to Explore tab. Here’s how to get on it

Instagram’s pivot to Stories continues with an overhaul of Explore designed to let users dig deeper into their niche interests. Stories are now eligible to show up in the Explore tab for the first time, giving creators a way to get discovered through their intimate, silly, behind-the-scenes content instead of just their manicured feed posts. Since Stories themselves don’t get Likes, Instagram will personalize which Stories you see on Explore by showing accounts similar to ones you do Like and Follow. We’ve got more tips on how the Explore Stories algorithm works below.

Additionally, Instagram Explore is getting a redesigned navigation bar up to with shortcuts to Shopping and IGTV first, followed by channels for topics like Travel, Food, and Design. In a nod to how central Instagram sees Shopping and IGTV to its future, those categories will also get big square portals inset within the Explore grid. Tapping these squares or shortcuts for Shopping reveals category filters for specific proucts like Clothing, Beauty, and Home Decor. For IGTV, they pull up an new vertical scrolling IGTV discovery grid to contrast with its old horizontal scrolling carousel.

The goal is that “Explore shows you the full breath of content on Instagram that are relevant to your interests” says Instagram product lead for discovery Will Ruben. The more creators you discover through Explore, the more you have to look at on Instagram, and the more ads you end of seeiing. “These changes also signal the future direction we’ll be taking with Explore. We’re really investing in making IGTV and Shopping a big part of Explore experience. A home for Instagram’s big bets like Shopping and IGTV. We want to provide a more immersive experience so people can actively engage with content and be more specific about what they want to discover.” That should quiet questions about whether Instagram will abandon IGTV after a lackluster first year in the market.

Samsung reportedly readying Galaxy Fold for release after finding ‘fix’

Samsung’s been mostly quiet on the Fold front after recalling review units and indefinitely delaying the phone’s release. Understandably so. It couldn’t have been easy going back to the drawing board with one of buzziest handsets in recent memory. While we’ve been waiting word, the company has been exploring fixes and attempting to determine the magnitude of the issue.

According to reporting from Yonhap News Agency, Samsung is currently testing the handset with mobile carriers in Korea, putting the phone’s official release some time next month. There are a few grains of salt to be taken from these unnamed sources. The release timeframe depends on approval from carriers and will vary country by country.

What is notable, however, is that Samsung has apparently found fixes for the two primary problems. First there’s the issue with the protective laminate, which some reviewers apparently peeled off. I get it. I looks an awful lot like the peel-able screen covers the company’s phones ship with.

The protective cover will remain, but the edges will be tucked away, making it much more difficult to remove. As for the issue with matter falling through cracks in the hinge and getting wedged behind the display, Samsung’s apparently just making the holes in smaller.

Last week, CEO DJ Koh addressed the issue, noting that “news” was coming soon. This isn’t that, but Samsung does appear to still be committed to what could ultimately prove a very pricy mistake. At $1,980, consumers, too, are advised to approach this one with caution.

GetYourGuide picks up $484M, passes 25M tickets sold through its tourism activity app

As we swing into the summer tourist season, a company poised to capitalise on that has raised a huge round of funding. GetYourGuide — a Berlin startup that has built a popular marketplace for people to discover and book sightseeing tours, tickets for attractions and other experiences around the world — is today announcing that it has picked up $484 million, a Series E round of funding that will catapult its valuation above the $1 billion mark.

The funding is a milestone for a couple of reasons. GetYourGuide says it is the highest-ever round of funding for a company in the area of “travel experiences” (tours and other activities) — a market estimated to be worth $150 billion this year and rising to $183 billion in 2020. And this Series E is also one of the biggest-ever growth rounds for any European startup, period.

The company has now sold 25 million tickets for tours, attractions and other experiences with a current catalog of some 50,000 experiences on offer. That’s a sign of strong growth: in 2017 it sold 10 million tickets, and its last reported catalog number was 35,000. It will be using the funding to build more of its own “Originals” tour experiences — which have now passed the 40,000 tickets sold mark — as well as to build up more activities in Asia and the US, two fast-growing markets for the startup.

The funding is being led by Softbank, via its Vision Fund, with Temasek, Lakestar, Heartcore Capital (formerly Sunstone Capital), and Swisscanto Invest among others also participating. (Swisscanto is part of Zürcher Kantonalbank: GetYourGuide was originally founded in Zurich, where the founders had studied, and it still runs some R&D operations there.) The company has now raised well over $600 million.

It’s notable how Softbank — which is on the hunt for interesting opportunities to invest its $100 billion superfund — has been stepping up a gear in Germany to tap into some of bigger tech players that have emerged out of that market, which today is the biggest in Europe. Other big plays have included €460 million into Auto1 and €900 million into payments provider Wirecard. Other companies it has backed, such as hotel company Oyo out of India, is using its funding to break into Europe (and buy German companies in the process).

There had been reports over the last several months that GetYouGuide was in the process of raising anywhere between $300 million and more than $500 million. In late April, we were told by sources that the round hadn’t yet closed, and that numbers published in the media up to then had been inaccurate, even as we nailed down that Softbank was indeed involved in the round.

The valuation in this round is not being disclosed, but CEO Johannes Reck (who co-founded the app with Martin Sieber, Pascal Mathis, Tobias Rein and Tao Tao) said in an interview with TechCrunch that it was definitely “now a unicorn” — meaning that its valuation had passed the $1 billion mark. For additional context, the rumor last month was that GetYourGuide’s valuation is now up to €1.6 billion ($1.78 billion) but I have not been able to get firm confirmation of that number.

From hip replacements to hipsters

GetYourGuide’s growth — and investor interesting in it — has closely followed the rise of new platforms like Airbnb that have changed the face of how we travel, and what we do when we get somewhere. We have moved far beyond the days of visiting a travel agent that books everything, from flight to hotel to all your activities, as you sit on the other side of a desk from her or him. Now with the tap of a finger or the click of a mouse, we have thousands of choices.

Within that, GetYourGuide thinks that it has jumped on an interesting opportunity to rethink the activity aspect of tourism. Tour packages and other highly organized travel experiences are often associated with older people, or those with families — essentially people who need more predictability when they are not at home.

Reck noted that the earliest users of GetYourGuide in 2010 were precisely those people — or at least those who were more inclined to use digital platforms to begin with: the demographic, he said, was 40-50 year olds, most likely travelling with family.

That is one thing that has really started to change, in no small part because of GetYourGuide itself. Making the experience of booking experiences mobile-friendly, GetYourGuide has played into the culture of doing and showing that has propelled the rise of social media.

“They want to do things, to have something to post on Instagram,” he said. The average age of a GetYourGuide user now, he said, is 25-40.

This has even evolved into what GetYourGuide provides to users. “At some point, staff in Asia had the idea of crafting a ‘GetYourGuide Instagram Tour of Bali.’ That really took off, and now this is the number-one tour booked in the region.” It has since expanded the concept to 50 destinations.

That has also led GetYourGuide to conclude it has a ways to go to continue developing its model and scope further, expanding into longer sightseeing excursions, beyond one or two-hour tours into day trips and even overnight exeperiences.

As it continues to play around with some of these offerings, it’s also increasingly taking a more direct role in the branding and the provision of the content. Initially, all tickets and tours were posted on GetYourGuide by third parties. Now, GetYourGuide is building more of what Reck calls “Originals” — which it might develop in partnership with others but ultimately handles as its own first-party content. (That Instagram tour was one of those Originals.)

It’s notable that others are closing in on the same “experiences” model that forms the core of GetYourGuide’s business: Airbnb, to diversify how it makes revenues and to extend its touchpoints with guests beyond basic accommodation bookings, has also started to sell experiences. Meanwhile, daily deals pioneer Groupon has also positioned itself as a destination for purchasing “experiences” as a way of offset declines in other areas of its business. Similarly, travel portals that sell plane tickets regularly default to pushing more activities on you.

Reck pointed out that the area of business where GetYourGuide is active is becoming increasingly attractive to these players as other aspects of the travel industry become increasingly commoditised. Indeed, you can visit dozens of sites to compare pricing on plane tickets, and if you are flexible, pick up even more of a bargain at the last minute. And the rise of multiple Airbnb-style platforms offering private accommodation has made competition among those supplying those platforms — as well as hotels — increasingly fierce.

OpenFin raises $17 million for its OS for finance

OpenFin, the company looking to provide the operating system for the financial services industry, has raised $17 million in funding through a Series C round led by Wells Fargo, with participation from Barclays and existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, J.P. Morgan and Pivot Investment Partners. Previous investors in OpenFin also include DRW Venture Capital, Euclid Opportunities and NYCA Partners.

Likening itself to “the OS of finance”, OpenFin seeks to be the operating layer on which applications used by financial services companies are built and launched, akin to iOS or Android for your smartphone.

OpenFin’s operating system provides three key solutions which, while present on your mobile phone, has previously been absent in the financial services industry: easier deployment of apps to end users, fast security assurances for applications, and interoperability.

Traders, analysts and other financial service employees often find themselves using several separate platforms simultaneously, as they try to source information and quickly execute multiple transactions. Yet historically, the desktop applications used by financial services firms — like trading platforms, data solutions, or risk analytics — haven’t communicated with one another, with functions performed in one application not recognized or reflected in external applications.

“On my phone, I can be in my calendar app and tap an address, which opens up Google Maps. From Google Maps, maybe I book an Uber . From Uber, I’ll share my real-time location on messages with my friends. That’s four different apps working together on my phone,” OpenFin CEO and co-founder Mazy Dar explained to TechCrunch. That cross-functionality has long been missing in financial services.

As a result, employees can find themselves losing precious time — which in the world of financial services can often mean losing money — as they juggle multiple screens and perform repetitive processes across different applications.

Additionally, major banks, institutional investors and other financial firms have traditionally deployed natively installed applications in lengthy processes that can often take months, going through long vendor packaging and security reviews that ultimately don’t prevent the software from actually accessing the local system.

OpenFin CEO and co-founder Mazy Dar. Image via OpenFin

As former analysts and traders at major financial institutions, Dar and his co-founder Chuck Doerr (now President & COO of OpenFin) recognized these major pain points and decided to build a common platform that would enable cross-functionality and instant deployment. And since apps on OpenFin are unable to access local file systems, banks can better ensure security and avoid prolonged yet ineffective security review processes.

And the value proposition offered by OpenFin seems to be quite compelling. Openfin boasts an impressive roster of customers using its platform, including over 1,500 major financial firms, almost 40 leading vendors, and 15 out of the world’s 20 largest banks.

Over 1,000 applications have been built on the OS, with OpenFin now deployed on more than 200,000 desktops — a noteworthy milestone given that the ever popular Bloomberg Terminal, which is ubiquitously used across financial institutions and investment firms, is deployed on roughly 300,000 desktops.

Since raising their Series B in February 2017, OpenFin’s deployments have more than doubled. The company’s headcount has also doubled and its European presence has tripled. Earlier this year, OpenFin also launched it’s OpenFin Cloud Services platform, which allows financial firms to launch their own private local app stores for employees and customers without writing a single line of code.

To date, OpenFin has raised a total of $40 million in venture funding and plans to use the capital from its latest round for additional hiring and to expand its footprint onto more desktops around the world. In the long run, OpenFin hopes to become the vital operating infrastructure upon which all developers of financial applications are innovating.

Apple and Google’s mobile operating systems and app stores have enabled more than a million apps that have fundamentally changed how we live,” said Dar. “OpenFin OS and our new app store services enable the next generation of desktop apps that are transforming how we work in financial services.”

Openfinance opens up US trading of third-party digital assets

Openfinance, the secondary market for trading digital alternative assets, announced it will be opening up trading of third-party digital securities to US Investors, making it the first trading platform to do so.

The company already supported the trading of third-party digital securities (securities that have been migrated onto the blockchain that are now traded on Openfinance’s blockchain-based platform) in Europe, but was unable to provide the same capability in the US due to minimum holding periods for new tokenized securities required by US regulators.

Now that the holding periods are up for two of the first security token assets traded on Openfinance — Blockchain Capital’s BCAP security token and SPiCE VC’s SPiCE token — both accredited and non-accredited investors in the US will now be able to access and trade both securities through the Openfinance network.

The BCAP and SPiCE tokens are the first of several digital securities that will soon be tradeable through Openfinance, as minimum holding periods conclude for a multitude of other assets that are currently tradable for the platform’s non-US investors.

As a result, Openfinance will be able to relieve significant pain points for those looking to sell digital alternative assets, who often are forced to sell at prices significantly below the asset’s true value due to poor liquidity.

“The ability for US investors to trade these digital assets and access liquidity marks a significant next step in the evolution of the digital securities market,” said Openfinance founder and CEO Juan Hernandez.

The launch is one of several firsts for Openfinance, which was also the first company to facilitate a secondary market for tokenized securities, and was also the first secondary market for digital alternative assets to become regulated by US agencies.

Unlike previous players in the digital securities space that seemed averse to government oversight, Openfinance represents a growing set of new companies that see a regulated future for the sector.

As a registered Alternative Trading System (ATS) regulated by the SEC, one regulatory step below a national exchange like a NASDAQ or NYSE, Openfinance is hoping become the go-to resource for investors looking for safe, stable access to digital securities or those looking to better understand rules related to unregulated securities.

“We’re selling 2 things: liquidity and legitimacy,” Hernandez told TechCrunch.

The company’s regulated position also allows it to play a more influential role in shaping the standards around the digital security asset class. As an ATS, Openfinance can set requirements for assets looking to get listed on its platform, such as potentially requiring audited financials or otherwise.

As liquidity for digital securities improves and as regulatory agencies continue to provide more guidance around the rules that govern them, Openfinance believes more institutional players will begin to get involved in the asset class as well.

Longer-term, the company is hoping to support much more than just token securities on its platform. “We look at security token offerings (STOs) as proof of concepts of our technology,” Hernandez told TechCrunch. “Can you compliantly list it on-chain? Can you trade it on-chain? We think yes because we’ve proved it out – we’ve accomplished proof of concept.”

Down the road, Openfinance has its eyes set on the broader alternative asset class, including anything from digital securities issued by pre-IPO companies to those of VC firms and hedge funds. Openfinance believes that every investor should be able to access these traditionally exclusive assets, rather than just a small set of insiders or those backed by significant amounts of wealth or capital.

“Openfinance is democratizing the space and making these opportunities available to a broader universe,” said Hernandez.

“We’re bringing access, transparency and liquidity to this market and that’s what we want to do longer-term.”

Daimler and BMW-backed Kapten rides into London with anti-Uber ad campaign

Kapten, the French ride-hailing app backed by Daimler and BMW, has today launched in London, coupled with a feisty ad campaign taking a swipe at Uber’s tax arrangements.

It follows Kapten (formerly called “Chauffeur Prive”) obtaining a license from TfL, London’s transport regulator, to operate its private-hire vehicle (PHV) service in the U.K. capital city. The company first launched in France in 2012, growing quickly in Paris, and has since expanded to Lisbon and Geneva.

Specifically, Kapten’s new billboard ad campaign calls out Uber for avoiding local sales tax. “Others avoid paying VAT in the UK, that’s not uber coo,” reads the copy. In contrast, Kapten says it pay taxes locally in every market that it operates in. The ad then goes on to tell Londoners that using Kapten “might just be your best decision today”.

In a press release driving home the point, Kapten notes that Uber has faced criticism in the U.K. for paying little tax to the U.K. government and avoiding VAT on top of its service fee due to the U.S. company’s Dutch tax location.

“Uber had an estimated £1bn of ride bookings in the U.K. in 2018. If 20 percent VAT was added to its 25 percent commission, the U.K. Exchequer would get an additional £50m per year,” says Kapten.

Meanwhile, Kapten’s newly launched London service should be available in zones 1 to 5 as of today. The ride-hailing app is also launching with a 50 percent-off offer on rides. After launch, Kapten claims that its low pricing will still mean fares are on average 20 percent cheaper than competitors.

“Trips in the congestion charge zone will be at least £2 cheaper than Uber due to congestion and clean-air fees,” says the French company, promising to cover the congestion charge on behalf of its drivers for the rest of 2019.

Adds Mariusz Zabrocki, London General Manager of Kapten, in a statement: “There has been one dominant, over-confident ride-hailing player in London and it’s time to shake things up. We believe London’s private-hire drivers, commuters and residents deserve better. Each time a Londoner takes an Uber ride, 60p is lost that could finance the NHS, schools and other parts of the U.K.” economy.

Europol, DOJ announce the takedown of the GozNym banking malware

Europol and the U.S. Justice Department, with the help from six other countries, have disrupted and dismantled the GozNym malware, which they say stole more than $100 million from bank accounts since it first emerged.

In a press conference in The Hague, prosecutors said 10 defendants in five countries are accused of using the malware to steal money from more than 41,000 victims, mostly businesses and financial institutions.

Five defendants were arrested in Moldova, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia. The leader of the criminal network and his technical assistant are being prosecuted in Georgia.

Five defendants remain on the run, said prosecutors.

The takedown was described as an “unprecedented international effort” by Scott Brady, U.S. attorney for Western Philadelphia — where a grand jury indicted the defendants — at the press conference announcing the charges.

GozNym is a powerful banking malware that spread across the U.S., Canada, Germany and Poland, and made up from two existing malware families, both of which had their source code leaked years earlier: Nymaim, a two-stage malware dropper that infects computers through exploit kits from malicious links or emails; and Gozi, a web injection module used to hook into the web browser, allowing the attacker to steal login credentials and passwords.

The banking malware hit dozens of banks and credit unions since it first emerged in 2016.

Described as malware “as a service,” the leader of the network obtained the code for the two malware families and built GozNym, then recruited accomplices and advertised the new malware on Russian speaking forums. The malware used encryption and other obfuscation techniques to avoid detection by antivirus tools. Then, spammers sent hundreds of thousands of phishing emails to infect staff at businesses and banks. After the malware infected its victim computers, the malware would steal the passwords control of bank accounts, which the criminals would later log in and cash out.

Prosecutors said the malware network was hosted and operated through a bulletproof service, a domain and web hosting known for lax attitudes towards cybercrime and favored by criminals. Europol said the 2016 takedown of Avalanche, an infrastructure platform used by hundreds of criminals to host and run their malware campaigns.

More soon…

Instagram is killing Direct, its standalone Snapchat clone app, in the next several weeks

As Facebook pushes ahead with its strategy to consolidate more of the backend of its various apps on to a single platform, it’s also doing a little simplifying and housekeeping. In the coming month, it will shut down Direct, the standalone Instagram direct messaging app that it was testing to rival Snapchat, on iOS and Android. Instead, Facebook and its Instagram team will channel all developments and activity into the direct messaging feature of the main Instagram app.

We first saw a message about the app closing down by way of a tweet from Direct user Matt Navarra: “In the coming month, we’ll no longer be supporting the Direct app,” Instagram notes in the app itself. “Your conversations will automatically move over to Instagram, so you don’t need to do anything.”

The details were then confirmed to us by Instagram itself:

“We’re rolling back the test of the standalone Direct app,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We’re focused on continuing to make Instagram Direct the best place for fun conversations with your friends.”

From what we understand, Instagram will continue developing Direct features — they just won’t live in a standalone app. (Tests and rollouts of new features that we’ve reported before include encryption in direct messaging, the ability to watch videos with other people, a web version of the direct messaging feature,

Instagram didn’t give any reason for the decision, but in many ways, the writing was on the wall with this one.

The app first appeared December 2017, when Instagram confirmed it had rolled it out in a select number of markets — Uruguay, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Portugal and Israel — as a test. (Instagram first launched direct messaging within the main app in 2013.)

“We want Instagram to be a place for all of your moments, and private sharing with close friends is a big part of that,” it said at the time. “To make it easier and more fun for people to connect in this way, we are beginning to test Direct – a camera-first app that connects seamlessly back to Instagram.”

But it’s not clear how many markets beyond ultimately have had access to the app, although Instagram did expand it to more. The iOS version currently notes that it is available in a much wider range of languages than Spanish, Turkish, Italian and Portuguese. It also includes English, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

But with Instagram doing little to actively promote the app or its expansion to more markets, Direct never really found a lot of traction in the markets where it was active.

The only countries that make it on to AppAnnie’s app rankings for Direct are Uruguay for Android, where it was most recently at number 55 among social networking apps (with no figures for overall rankings, meaning it was too low down to be counted); and Portugal on iOS, where it was number 24 among social apps and a paltry 448 overall.

The Direct app hadn’t been updated on iOS since the end of December, although the Android version was updated as recently as the end of April.

At the time of its original launch as a test, however, Direct looked like an interesting move from Instagram.

The company had already been releasing various other features that cloned popular ones in Snapchat. The explosive growth and traction of one of them, Stories, could have felt like a sign to Facebook that there was more ground to break on creating more Snapchat-like experiences for its audience. More generally, the rise of Snapchat and direct messaging apps like WhatsApp has shown that there is a market demand for more apps based around private conversations among smaller groups, if not one-to-one.

On top of that, building a standalone messaging app takes a page out of Facebook’s own app development book, in which it launched and began to really accelerate development of a standalone Messenger app separate from the Facebook experience on mobile.

The company has not revealed any recent numbers for usage of Direct since 2017, when it said there were 375 million users of the service as it brought together permanent and ephemeral (disappearing) messages within the service.

More recently, Instagram and Facebook itself have been part of the wider scrutiny we have seen over how social platforms police and moderate harmful or offensive content. Facebook itself has faced an additional wave of criticism from some over its plans to bring together its disparate app ecosystem in terms of how they function together, with the issue being that Facebook is not giving apps like WhatsApp and Instagram enough autonomy and becoming an even bigger data monster in the process.

It may have been the depressingly low usage that ultimately killed off Direct, but I’d argue that the optics for promoting an expansion of its app real estate on to another platform weren’t particularly strong, either.