Tag Archives: rooms

Snowflake makes a big move into data clean rooms with acquisition of Samooha

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snowflake is buying Samuhaa startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration suite; company announced This morning it was added to the list of big tech acquisitions for the holiday season.

The transaction, which is expected to close by the end of this month and is subject to customary closing conditions, will enable Snowflake to securely share, collaborate on, and gain insights from their own and partners’ data, a well-established data clean technology. Acquire the “Room” platform. Regardless of the underlying data stack.

Samooha, in turn, will receive an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock, along with support for Snowflake’s extensive technology and engineering infrastructure. All 19 Samooha employees, including CEO Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and co-founder Abhishek Bhowmik, will be joining Snowflake in some capacity.

“This acquisition further strengthens our mission to leverage the world’s data by accelerating the built-in capabilities of the Snowflake platform for our customers,” Carl Perry, director of product management at Snowflake, said in an email. told TechCrunch. “Samooha customers will benefit from Snowflake’s many built-in platform features and the powerful network of the Snowflake Data Cloud. Meanwhile, Snowflake customers will be able to use the data clean room where their data already resides within Snowflake. It’s now faster and easier to build, connect, and use directly with .

Los Altos-based Samuha, co-founded by Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmik in 2022, competes in the increasingly crowded data cleanroom space. AWS has a data clean room product, and so do startups like Herb. However, Samooha differentiates itself by relying heavily on his Snowflake ecosystem. Naturally, Snowflake was an early investor.

Samooha, a Snowflake native app, provides a no-code UI that customers can use to access and build clean room apps.The company went The company specifically targets industries considered to be potentially underserved, including healthcare, financial services, advertising, retail, and entertainment, and its customer base includes several Fortune 500 brands. He claimed that

Buoyed by its customer acquisition momentum, Samooha raised $12.5 million from investors including Altimeter Capital prior to the acquisition. The startup was valued at about $40 million post-money.

“SaMooha’s founding hypothesis was that the latest frontiers in data and AI would be built on a foundation of secure data sharing and collaboration,” Sivaramakrishnan said in an emailed statement. “Samooha joining Snowflake strengthens Snowflake’s ability to enable enterprises to collaborate in a seamless manner, with data governance, privacy, and security at its core. Companies and businesses such as media platforms can now build a powerful edge of value exchange and connectivity across their ecosystems of partners and customers.”

Investing in data clean room technology could be a beneficial decision for Snowflake. Continue to exceed Investor expectations, as a side note, in the long term. according to According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers spending more than $1 billion annually on media will use data clean rooms by the end of the year for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results, and facilitating data integration. Probably.another poll published In early 2023, 29% of U.S. marketers suggested they would place more emphasis on data clean rooms this year compared to 2022, but given Snowflake’s interest, this prediction is certainly not impossible. there is no.

Source: techcrunch.com

Rooms: Interactive 3D Space Designer and Cozy Game Available on the App Store

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Interactive 3D space builder

Interactive 3D space builder

Known as a cozy game, an interior decoration app, an introduction to learning to code, or something in between. Now available on the App Store.

The startup, which previously raised $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, offers a way to design 3D spaces, or “rooms,” filled with furniture, decorations, pets, and tiny avatars. You can turn those rooms into mini-games if you want. Rooms is all about creating and exploring designs that help people relax. But as the company describes it, this “digital version of Lego” also has an educational aspect.

The project, which first launched on the web earlier this year, was co-founded by Jason Toff, co-founder of Google’s AR/VR division, which includes the now-shuttered VR and AR app-building service Poly and the 3D modeling tool Blocks for VR. Inspired by the work of his co-founder Bruno Oliveira. While co-founder Nick Kluge’s background includes time at Smule, Uber, and Google’s YouTube.

The idea of ​​Rooms is to provide free play, where people use their designs as a form of self-expression. But in addition to interacting with objects in a visual format, you can also click to view the code and further customize items using Lua, the coding language also used in Roblox. This helped introduce coding concepts to young users.

I want to decorate a room that has a calming effect just by placing things there and editing them. What I learned is this whole movement… cozy game,” Toph explains.

In the iOS app released today, Rooms offers a TikTok-style vertical scrolling feed where you can check out different rooms created by the community. There are multiple feeds to choose from, including the “For You” feed (which will be algorithmic in the future, but is currently more curated), the Editor’s Picks feed, and the Recent feed.

As you decorate your space, you can enter an edit mode where you can customize everything from item size, shape, color, shine, opacity, pattern, behavior, and more.

Since the beta version of Rooms was launched on the web, the company has signed up over 40,000 users and created over 50,000 rooms since then. He also has thousands of daily active users.

“Surprisingly…there was some interesting backlash,” Toph says. “I don’t know if it was the audience’s fault, age, or something else, but there were more people than I expected who felt against the existence of AI…However, in reality, the room design is more It should be easier and I think it would be foolish not to use AI to help create the room,” he added.

For now, the company is focused on launching its mobile app and expanding its user base. Toff says the app is actually in beta and they will continue to iterate the experience over time based on user feedback. “We want to learn from and with our users. We brought it out a little earlier than it was perfect,” he admits.


Source: techcrunch.com