Silicon Valley could be Biden’s funding lifeline post South Carolina

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is likely to throw a fundraising lifeline to Silicon Valley donors after his commanding South Carolina victory and heading into the next wave of primaries.

A pro-Biden super Pac, Unite the Country — whose past backers include senior tech figures — is picking up efforts to tap wealthy donors, Treasurer Larry Rasky told CNBC, after the group made several ad-buys in Super-Tuesday states (per a February 28 Federal Election Committee filing).

Past Unite the Country’s benefactors include LinkedIn founder and Greylock Partners VC Reid Hoffman (who contributed $500,000) and Angel Investor Ronald Conway ($250,000), according to FEC data.

Source: FEC filing

Biden revived his presidential-bid from life-support with a resounding 29 point win over Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

But after flailing in the first three contests — Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada — the former Vice-President’s campaign has reportedly been running on financial fumes.

The last Federal Election Campaign disclosures before South Carolina’s democratic primary showed Biden with $7.1 million cash on hand, compared to Sanders’ nearly $17 million.

The race to become the Democratic-nominee for president is consolidating, post South Carolina, to a Sanders-Biden match-up — after Mayor Pete Buttigieg and billionaire Tom Steyer dropped out. Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who entered the race late, will be on the ballot for the first-time on Super Tuesday, though its not clear if he’ll shift dynamics between the front-runners.

To capture Sanders, who now leads Biden in the delegate count, Biden will need to close the fundraising gap between himself and the Vermont Senator, who doesn’t accept super Pac funds and has raised a large portion of his total $126 million presidential fundraising haul from small contributions by individual donors.

Source: NBC News

For Democrats, fundraising is a big focus of campaign efforts in uncontested states (like New York and California) where they are nearly certain to win in the general-election. Areas with affluent residents, such as the Bay Area and Manhattan, have served as piggy-banks for tapping wealthy donors.

But a fundraising push by Biden and surrogates in Silicon Valley could further expose a political rift within big tech: that of founders and senior executives favoring a moderate candidate, while rank-and file workers “feel the Bern” on campaign donations.

FEC data and analysis by and the LA Times and the Center for Responsive Politics indicate Bernie Sanders has substantially outperformed all candidates in raising small-donations from workers in tech companies. By Times reporting, Sanders has raised, $1 million, or nearly four-times as much as Biden, in small donations from employees at Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook.

This preference divide within big-tech could align with the differences in each candidate’s policy platforms. Biden’s positions are generally milder on initiatives to police and potentially split up big-tech companies, such as Facebook.

Sanders has been vocal about driving policies that address the pay gap across major tech companies and has called for breaking up Facebook and Amazon.

Founders and tech-workers in California will have a non-monetary option to express their preferences in voting booths tomorrow — as the Golden State is one of 13 in the super Tuesday primary contest. Those results will roll into more primaries, more fundraising and a decision on the 2020 presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this July.

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India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he is thinking about quitting social media

Another major figure could soon join the list of a growing number of people who are done with social media: The leader of the world’s largest democracy.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted Monday evening that he was thinking about giving up on his Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube accounts.

Modi, whose 53 million followers on Twitter make him one of most popular figures on the microblogging social network, did not offer any rationale for his thinking.

On his Facebook page, he has over 44 million followers; on Instagram, 35.2 million; and 4.5 million on Google’s video platform.

This Sunday, thinking of giving up my social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & YouTube. Will keep you all posted.

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 2, 2020

The closure of the accounts, which Modi says he might do over the weekend, may further distance the leader from wide swathes of issues — growing unemployment in the nation, slowing economy, riots in national capital New Delhi, protests against his recent policies, to name a few — that some critics say his ruling party refuses to acknowledge — let alone fix.

And it would be a stark departure from how he has used his social media accounts over the years. Modi, and his political party Bharatiya Janata Party, have used Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, and several other internet services very efficiently to promote their messages and agendas, something that played a key role in his re-election last year.

Modi’s office also maintains an app, called NaMo, to share his thinking with the people. It’s one of the most downloaded apps on Google Play Store in India. No word on whether NaMo app would also be axed.

For Modi, quitting social media may at least bring some peace. The people he has chosen to follow have been found inciting violence and spreading false information on numerous occasions, according to multiple analysis.

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How to turn climate anxiety into action | Renée Lertzman

How to turn climate anxiety into action | Renée Lertzman

It's normal to feel anxious or overwhelmed by climate change, says psychologist Renée Lertzman. Can we turn those feelings into something productive? In an affirming talk, Lertzman discusses the emotional effects of climate change and offers insights on how psychology can help us discover both the creativity and resilience needed to act on environmental issues.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

mParticle raises $45M to help marketers unify customer data

mParticle, which helps companies like Spotify, Paypal and Starbucks umanage their customer data, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz told me that the company has benefited from broader shifts — like new privacy regulation and the shift away from cookie-based browser tracking — that increase brands’ needs for a platform like mParticle that uses “modern data infrastructure” to deliver a personalized experience for customers without running afoul of any regulations.

As result, he said mParticle has nearly quintupled its revenue since it raised a $35 million Series C in 2017. (The company has raised more than $120 million total.)

“The challenges that we solve are universal,” Katz said. “It doesn’t matter if there’s a small company or big company. Data fragmentation, data quality, consistent change in the privacy landscape, consistent change in the technology ecosystem, these are universal challenges.”

Perhaps for that very reason, a whole industry of customer data platforms has sprung up since mParticle was founded back in 2013, all offering tools to help marketers create a single view of their customers by unifying data from various sources. Even big players like Adobe and Salesforce have announced their own CDPs as part of their larger marketing clouds.

When asked about the competition, Katz said, “The market has responded overwhelmingly by saying, ‘I don’t want one vendor to rule everything for me.’ Why be beholden to one suite of tools that’s just an amalgamation of products that were built in the early 2000s?”

Instead, he argued that mParticle customers want “a best-in-breed combination of independent solutions that can be integrated seamlessly.”

Getting back to the new funding — Arrowroot Capital led the round, with the firm’s managing partner Matthew Safaii joining mParticle’s board of directors. Existing investors also participated.

Katz said the funding will be spent in three broad areas: building new products, scaling its global data infrastructure and finding new partners. In fact, the company is also announcing a partnership with LiveRamp, through which mParticle customers can combine their first-party data with the third-party party data from Liveramp.

“We see this partnership with Liveramp as an opportunity to extend the surface area by which our customers can deliver highly personalized, privacy-friendly experiences,” Katz said.

Amperity acquires Custora to improve its customer data platform

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How to Get the Quiz Score in Google Forms with Apps Script

Teachers can use Google Forms to create an online quiz and students can view their test scores immediately after form submission. With Apps Script, you can set up automatic email notifications and send quiz scores to parents after a student has taken the quiz.

Here’s a sample Google Script that will iterate through every answer in the most recent Google Form response and log the max score (points) of a gradable question and the score for the respondent’s submitted answer.

function getGoogleFormQuizScore() {

  // Returns the form to which the script is container-bound.
  var form = FormApp.getActiveForm();

  // Get the most recently submitted form response
  var response = form.getResponses().reverse()[0];

  // Gets an array of all items in the form.
  var items = form.getItems();

  for (var i=0; i<items.length; i++) {

    var question = items[i];

    // Get the item's title text
    var qTitle = question.getTitle();

    // Get the item's type like Checkbox, Multiple Choice, Grid, etc.
    var qType = question.getType();

    // Gets the item response contained in this form response for a given item.
    var responseForItem = response.getResponseForItem(question)

    //Gets the answer that the respondent submitted.
    var answer = responseForItem ? responseForItem.getResponse() : null;

    var item = castQuizItem_(question, qType);

    // Quiz Score and Maximum Points are not available
    // for Checkbox Grid and Multiple Choice Grid questions
    // through they are gradable in the Google Form

    if (item && typeof item.getPoints === "function") {

      var maxScore = item.getPoints();
      var gradableResponseForItem = response.getGradableResponseForItem(question);
      var score = gradableResponseForItem.getScore();

      Logger.log(String(qType), qTitle, answer, maxScore, score);

    }
  }
}

The Google Forms API can only return scores for Multiple Choice, Dropdown and Checkbox style questions. It cannot provide scores for the grid type of questions where the item is presented as a grid of rows and columns.

1. Checkbox Grid - A question item that allows the respondent to select multiple choices per row from a sequence of checkboxes.
2. Choice Grid - A question item that allows the respondent to select one choice per row from a sequence of radio buttons.

function castQuizItem_(item, itemType) {
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.CHECKBOX) {
    return item.asCheckboxItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.DATE) {
    return item.asDateItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.DATETIME) {
    return item.asDateTimeItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.DURATION) {
    return item.asDurationItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.LIST) {
    return item.asListItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.MULTIPLE_CHOICE) {
    return item.asMultipleChoiceItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.PARAGRAPH_TEXT) {
    return item.asParagraphTextItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.SCALE) {
    return item.asScaleItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.TEXT) {
    return item.asTextItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.TIME) {
    return item.asTimeItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.GRID) {
    return item.asGridItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.CHECKBOX_GRID) {
    return item.asCheckboxGridItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.PAGE_BREAK) {
    return item.asPageBreakItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.SECTION_HEADER) {
    return item.asSectionHeaderItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.VIDEO) {
    return item.asVideoItem();
  }
  if (itemType === FormApp.ItemType.IMAGE) {
    return item.asImageItem();
  }
  return null;
}

Quiz in Google Forms with Score