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Spreadsheet software — led by products like Microsoft’s Excel, Google’s Sheets and Apple’s Numbers — continues to be one of the most-used categories of business apps, with Excel alone clocking up more than a billion users just on its Android version. Now, a startup called Rows that’s built on that ubiquity, with a low-code platform that lets people populate and analyze web apps using just spreadsheet interfaces, is announcing funding and launching a freemium open beta of its expanded service.

The Berlin-based startup — which rebranded from dashdash at the end of last year — closed a Series B round of $16 million, money that it is using to continue investing in its platform as well as in sales and marketing. The platform’s move into an open beta comes with some 50 new integrations with other platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and more, as well as 200 new features (using known spreadsheet shortcuts) to use in them.

The round was led by Lakestar, with past investors Accel (which led its $8 million Series A in 2018) and Cherry Ventures also participating. Christian Reber has also invested in this round. Reber knows a thing or two about software disrupting legacy productivity software — he is the co-founder and CEO of presentation software startup Pitch and the former CEO and founder of Microsoft-acquired Wunderlist — and notably he is joining Rows’ Advisory Board along with the investment.

A little detail about this Series B: CEO Humberto Ayres Pereira, who is based out of Porto, Portugal, where some of the staff is also based, tells us that this round actually was quietly closed over a year ago, in January 2020 — just ahead of the world shutting down amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The startup chose to announce that round today to coincide with adding more features to its product and moving it into an open beta, he said.

That open beta is free in its most basic form — the free tier is limited to 10 users or less and a minimal amount of integration usage. Paid tiers, which cover more team members and up to 100,000 integration tasks (which are measured by how many times a spreadsheet queries another service), start at $59 per month.

One strong sign of interest in this latest iteration of the software is the lasting popularity of spreadsheets. Another is Rows’ traction to date: in invite-only mode, it picked up 10,000 users off its waitlist, and hundreds of companies, as customers. Currently most of those are free, Ayres Pereira said.

“Our goal is to have 1,000 paying companies as customers in the 12 months,” he said. That process has only just started, he added, with paying numbers in the modest “dozens” for now. He emphasized though that the company is very cash efficient and has, even without raising more funding, two years of runway on the money it has in the bank now.

The growing appeal of low-code

No-code and low-code software, which let people create and work with apps and other digital content without delving deep into the lines of code that underpin them, have continued to pick up traction in the market in the last several years.

The reason for this is straightforward: non-technical employees may not code, but they are getting increasingly adept at understanding how services function and what can be achieved within an app.

No-code and low-code platforms let them get more hands-on when it comes to customizing and creating the services that they need to use everyday to get their work done, without the time and effort it might take to get an engineer involved.

“People want to create their own tools,” said Ayres Pereira. “They want to understand and test and iterate.” He said that the majority of Rows’ users so far are based out of North America, and typical use cases include marketing and sales teams, as well as companies using Rows spreadsheets as a dynamic interface to manage logistics and other operations.

Stephen Nundy, the partner at Lakestar who led its investment, describes the army of users taking up no-code tools as “citizen developers.”

Rows is precisely the kind of platform that plays into the low-code trend. For people who are already au fait with the kinds of tools that you find in spreadsheets — and something like Excel has hundreds of functions in it — it presents a way of leaning on those familiar functions to trigger integrations with other apps, and to subsequently use a spreadsheet created in Rows to both analyse data from other apps, as well as update them.

You might ask, why is it more useful, for example, to look at content from Twitter in Rows rather than Twitter itself? A Rows document might let a person search for a set of Tweets using a certain chain of keywords, and then organise those results based on parameters such as how many “likes” those Tweets received.

Or users responding to a call to action for a promotion on Instagram might then be cross referenced with a company’s existing database of customers, to analyze how those respondents overlap or present new leads.

You might also wonder why existing spreadsheet products may not have already build functionality like this.

Interestingly, Microsoft did dabble in building a way of linking up Excel with some rudimentary computing functions, in the form of Visual Basic for Applications. This however reached the dubious distinction of topping developers’ “most dreaded” languages list for two years running, and so as you might imagine it has somewhat died a death.

However, it does point to an opportunity for incumbents to disrupt their disruptors.

Apart from those most obvious, entrenched competitors, there have been a number of other startups building tools that are providing similar no- and low-code approaches.

Gyana is focusing more on data science, Tray.io provides a graphical interface to integrate how apps work together, Zapier and Notion also provide simple interfaces to integrate apps and APIs together, and Airtable has its own take on reinventing the spreadsheet interface. For now, Ayres Pereira sees these more as compatriots than competitors.

“Yes, we overlap with services like Zapier and Notion,” he said. “But I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero sum game for us.”

When we covered Rows’s Series A two years ago, the startup had built a platform to let people who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets to use that interface to create and populate content in web apps. It had a lot of extensibility, but mainly geared at people still willing to do the work to create those links.

Two years on, while the spreadsheet has remained the anchor, the platform has grown. Ayres Pereira, who co-founded the company with Torben Schulz (both pictured above), said that there are some 50 new integrations now, including ways to analyse and update content on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, CrunchBase, Salesforce, Slack, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as some 200 new features in the platform itself.

While people can import into Rows data from Google Sheets, he noted that the big daddy of them all, Excel, is not supported right now. The reason, he said, is because the vast majority of users of the product use the desktop version, which does not have APIs.

Meanwhile, Rows also has a number of templates available for people to guide them through simple tasks, such as looking up LinkedIn profiles or emails for a list of people; tracking social media counts and so on.

One of the most common aspects of spreadsheets, however, has yet to be built. The interface is still banked around rows and columns, but with no graphical tools to visualize data in different ways such as pie charts or graphs as you might have in a typical spreadsheet program.

It’s for this reason that Rows has yet to exit beta. The feature is one that is requested a lot, Pereira admitted, describing it as “the final frontier.” When Rows is ready to ship with that functionality, likely by Q3 of this year, it will tick over to general “1.0” release, he added.

“Humberto and Torben have really impressed us with their ambition to disrupt the market with a new spreadsheet paradigm that tackles the significant shortcomings of today’s solutions,” said Nundy at Lakestar. “Data integrations are native, the collaboration experience is first class and the ability to share and publish your work as an application is unique and will create more ‘Citizen developers’ to emerge. This is essential to the growing needs of today’s technology literate workforce. The level of interest they’ve received in their private beta is proof of the desirability of platforms like Rows, and we’re excited to be supporting them through their public beta launch and beyond with this investment.” Nundy is also joining Rows’ board with this round.

Gurman: No Apple Event Happening on March 16

Apple does not have plans to hold an event on Tuesday, March 16, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman confirmed on Twitter this evening. Earlier this week, a report from Taiwanese site Economic Daily News suggested there would be a March 16 event, with the initial rumor picked up and circulated by a few other sites. Economic Daily News cited unverified and unsubstantiated content from Twitter accounts…

Google has finally added Apple App Store privacy labels to its Gmail app, almost a month after we ran an article wondering what was taking so long (via MacRumors). The app is the second major Google app to get the labels, after they were added to YouTube when it was updated earlier this month.

So how does it look? Well, that’s up for you to decide. The app apparently shares your coarse location and user ID with advertisers, as well as information about your interaction with advertisements. According to the privacy label, though, it doesn’t collect your name, physical address, or phone number (though as an email client, Gmail obviously collects your email address). Location data is also used for analytics and there are some features of the app that will request it as well. If you want to see the full label, there’s a video below that scrolls through.

For contrast, here’s the app privacy information for another email app, Hey.

Screenshot: The Verge

It is worth noting that Apple’s app privacy labels are meant to show all the things that the app might access, not what information that app will access. For example, an app may only use location data when it needs to show you a map, but the privacy labels don’t make that clear — it’s just a binary used/not used. Also, the information in the labels is submitted by the company itself, and Apple doesn’t make promises about its accuracy.

Strangely, Google added the labels without actually updating the Gmail app, even though it was literally crying out for an update (because of a fun bug). The last time Google updated the iOS app was two months ago.

So far, Google’s other large apps like Maps, Photos, Docs, and Chrome haven’t gotten the labels yet. But the fact that both YouTube and Gmail have had them added indicates that Google is starting to roll them out to its bigger apps.

During a playthrough stream earlier this month, Doom Eternal director Hugo Martin was asked if the team had ever considered developing a female Doom Slayer for the game. His answer was surprisingly thorough.

“I’ve thought about it, actually,” Martin told Bethesda community manager Joshua Boyle following a viewer question. “I think if we did it, I’d want it to be lethal. I think it’s interesting how it would impact the glory kills, the kind of weapons that she would have, the fighting style. All aggression, absolutely, but a different type of aggression. I would really strive to allow it to impact the gameplay in a way that was meaningful. I’ve definitely put a lot of thought into that.”

The folks behind 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal have referred to their main character as a Ferrari, in that playing as the Doom Slayer is fun at any speed. Martin said they would want to figure out similar kinds of references for any character they develop, including a hypothetical female Doom Slayer.

“How would that affect things?” Martin added. “What sort of analogies could you draw from that and allow that to influence the experience? It definitely would be cool.”

The identity of Doom’s protagonist—formerly known as Doomguy before being reinvented as the Doom Slayer alongside the modern, story-oriented reboot—has never had much bearing on the first-person shooter’s action. He’s simply a vessel for the player’s own desire to destroy a bunch of demons as brutally as possible. That said, the fact that Martin has put serious thought into developing a female counterpart is pretty neat, and it should be interesting to see if those ideas make their way into future Doom projects.

When Pokémon launched 25 years ago, it did so twice simultaneously.

Pokémon Red and Green (later made Blue for its Western release) are almost identical, but each has a few exclusive monsters. The fire puppy Growlithe is only available in Red, for example, while those searching for a Venus flytrap-like Bellsprout will need to pick up Green. Players can also trade with a friend who has the opposing version. What began as a fairly cheap trick to encourage invested fans to purchase the game twice or to pressure their friends into picking it up, has since become a cornerstone of the entire Pokémon franchise: it’s meant to be shared.

Alongside trading, players could also set up battles between the pokémon they caught and trained in their games. These two features transformed the otherwise single-player roleplaying games in ways that would be constantly iterated on as the core games received sequel after sequel. But even before the release of the second set, Pokémon Gold and Silver, spinoffs were increasingly focusing on multiplayer aspects. For example, Pokémon Stadium, released just two years after Red and Green, brought battles to the forefront. It allowed players to “rent” pokémon from an in-game library, letting friends fight friends without having to first catch and train them alone.

Stadium also added a handful of competitive mini-games. Where battling and trading required some understanding of the franchise’s core mechanics, these applied cute and easily recognizable pokémon as a decorative skin for already familiar concepts. Players might have to race Rattata through obstacle courses or play quoit with Ekans, for instance. Released in the same year as Mario Party, Nintendo was beginning to marry its existing properties with something approachable and family-focused, opening them up to much wider audiences.

Alongside this expansion into casual play came other forms of media, and before long, the franchise was getting its hooks into an entire generation. Kids would reenact the anime on the playground, reinforcing its themes of friendship and teamwork (and rivalry). The trading card game was necessarily communal, if in a way that got it banned from numerous schools. Spinoff games continued to cross genres, bringing in different kinds of fans, from the match-3 Pokémon Puzzle League released in 2000 down to the upcoming MOBA Pokémon Unite. A positive feedback loop had begun. Pokémon was meant to be shared — and, increasingly, everyone was someone you could share it with.

No matter how much it became a global phenomenon, selling double copies of the core games remained a habit that Nintendo refused to shake. But though this may have begun as a relatively transparent cash grab, as technology improved, it became less important to buy both games or to recruit a friend to get the opposing version. (Having said that, every friendship group that I’ve been in when a new set is announced has had careful discussions about who would get which; it’s an ingrained behavior.) By the franchise’s 10th anniversary, purely online trading was possible. Diamond and Pearl introduced the Global Trade Station, which allowed players to browse, search, and offer exchanges with strangers from across the world. They could also take part in battles, mini-games, and voice chat.

And while initially surely driven by a desire for profit, Red and Green had predicted (or perhaps hoped for) this kind of free and easy bartering. In-universe, it’s always been possible to upload your pokémon to a PC, and from there, send them all over the world. Nonplayable characters encourage trading as a cooperative, collaborative act. And as technology improved, Nintendo followed suit, making it increasingly easy to complete the pokédex or at least get the companions you like most. (Though its online efforts have not always run smoothly, and since 2018, it has also required a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription.)

Even once easy online trading was established, Nintendo continued to play with the formula. Pokémon X and Y brought the Wonder Trade, allowing players to upload a random pokémon and receive one in return. Naturally, a lot of trades are bargain bin Pidgey and Bidoof, but there are always stories of exceptional generosity, with legendary pokémon, battle monsters with perfect stats, and specially colored shinies all making their way to an unsuspecting recipient. Community coordinated events have also seen experienced players releasing waves of pokémon holding expensive items on Christmas Day to surprise kids playing for the first time. The latest entries, Sword and Shield, introduced Max Raid pokémon, giant monsters that required cooperation with others to take down, and campsites that friends could visit to hang out in.

And where Wonder Trade and Max Raid features leaned into the collaboration encouraged from the earliest days of the franchise, Pokémon Go sold it as a core concept. Its original announcement trailer showed families playing together, solo players meeting to trade, and huge group battles. Many of these features weren’t even in the game’s initial release or were so bare-bones as to be nonexistent — but it didn’t matter. Reviews consistently agreed: the game wasn’t objectively especially good, but everyone was having a great time. The mechanics ended up being unnecessary for creating an astounding social experience. Before the pandemic, in-person festivals saw tens or even hundreds of thousands of players coming together to catch and trade.

Over time, it became clear that this was not simply because Pokémon was a phenomenon among an entire generation. The Harry Potter game Wizards Unite, released three years later by the same developers, had the same if not more cultural weight. But it never took off. According to mobile analytics company Sensor Tower, in 2019, it netted just $23 million, compared to Pokémon Go’s almost $900 million in the same year. In fact, this was an increase over Pokémon Go’s launch in 2016, indicating its longevity.

The key thing that Pokémon has that Harry Potter doesn’t is two and a half decades of community building. Harry Potter certainly has a fandom, a group of the most dedicated enthusiasts, but the book and movie formats are solo activities. To engage with Pokémon is to share. From the trading enforced by Red and Green to the family-friendly mini-games of Stadium to the swapping with strangers via Wonder Trade, it has consistently encouraged cooperation and bonding.

Twenty-five years later, that’s still what makes it a phenomenon.

Sadly, even months after the launch we’re still searching where to buy the Xbox Series X restock and Xbox Series S. Not only is Xbox Series X inventory low, but Xbox Series X restocks have been slow this month so far. 

But, we’re still constantly checking all major U.S. retailers for Xbox Series X and Series S restocks daily. And we’ll flag any new inventory as we see it. So make sure to check out the links below and keep this page bookmarked and refreshed to have the best chance at finding where to buy the Xbox Series X. 

Where to buy Xbox Series X: Restock links and updates