If there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that Apple is fond of fanfare. They love making huge announcements, and they rightly should – it’s always a good thing when a company is excited about the new platforms and updates they roll out.
Last week’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, put on by Apple, was no exception. They invited individuals from the community to come and learn about the future of iOS and OS X via technical sessions, meetings with Apple engineers, and hands on labs.
Paralleling that were, in typical Apple fashion, a host of announcements. However, despite the advancements Apple is making there are a few startups out there who might be a big nervous.
CB Insights – a company dedicated to helping you track the world’s most promising private companies, their investors, their acquirers, and the industries they compete in – released a report about these startups on their blog. They dig into the companies that might have been a bit miffed about all of Apple’s new announcements at WWDC. As the post reads:
“Apple’s annual WWDC event had quite a few implications for a host of venture backed startups. This is not a new occurrence – in fact, there’s even a word for Apple going after existing products in a systems update: sherlocking. These startups, in aggregate, have rasied $1.8B and so have a lot riding on the success of failure of Apple’s new announcements.”
Here are the startups that, as CB Insights says, are most “wounded” by the announcements:
- Spotify and Rdio: This one is kind of a no brainer, and by far Apple’s biggest WWDC announcement. Their new music streaming feature which will directly compete with Spotify and offer both a $10 per month plan and a $15 per month family plan.
- SoundCloud: Piggybacking Spotify and Rdio, Apple Music’s ‘Connect’ feature will allow artists to share content and post updates – which will compete with SoundCloud’s artists profiles.
- Flipboard: Apple removed its Newsstand feature and instead introduced Apple News, providing a similar interface and publisher partnerships.
- Evernote: Apple’s feature upgrades to Notes, allowing sketches, checklists, photos, and links, will put it more in Evernote’s wheelhouse.
- Moovit: The new Apple Maps Transit feature will support real time transit information and regional transit maps, putting it in the wheelhouse of the well-funded Israeli startup.
- Truecaller: Apple announced a new caller ID feature, which lets you know who is calling you by parsing data from your email contacts – which is central to Truecaller’s existing app.
- Glow, Ovuline, Bellabeat, and Clue: Somewhat offhand, Apple announced that iOS 9 Health would introduce reproductive health tracking, which would complicate things for these four startups focused on women’s fertility health tracking.
- Pebble: Apple announced a host of new Apple Watch features including new watch faces, voice memos, sketch colors, custom mail replies, and a combined developer program. All of these make it difficult for Pebble’s smart watch.
- Speaktoit: Apple’s new ‘Proactive’ feature infers what users may want to do at a given time by gathering data such as calendar events or boarding passes, competing with Google Now but also personal assistant app Speaktoit.
Data credit: CB Insights report
Image Credit: Wikipedia
