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Ransomware technique uses your real passwords to trick you | John Biggs | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | A few folks have reported a new ransomware technique that preys upon corporate inability to keep passwords safe. The notes – which are usually aimed at instilling fear – are simple: the hacker says “I know that your password is X. Give me a bitcoin and I won’t blackmail you.” Programmer reported getting the email today. Woah. This is cool. A Bitcoin ransom with using what I think is passwords from a big leak. Pretty neat since people would be legit scared when they see their password. The concealed part is actually an old password I used to use. — can (@can) The email reads: I’m aware that X is your password. You don’t know me and you’re thinking why you received this e mail, right? Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account. What exactly did I do? I made a split-screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you’ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! It’s you doing nasty things!). What should you do? Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don’t know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google). BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72
(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it) Important: You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don’t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with “Yes!” and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don’t waste my time and yours by replying to this email. To be clear there is very little possibility that anyone has video of you cranking it unless, of course, you video yourself cranking it. Further, this is almost always a scam. That said, the fact that the hackers are able to supply your real passwords – most probably gleaned from the multiple corporate break-ins that have happened over the past few years – is a clever change to the traditional cyber-blackmail methodology. Luckily, the hackers don’t have current passwords. “However, all three recipients said the password was close to ten years old, and that none of the passwords cited in the sextortion email they received had been used anytime on their current computers,” wrote researcher . In short, the password files the hackers have are very old and outdated. To keep yourself safe, however, cover your webcam when not in use and change your passwords regularly. While difficult, there is nothing else that can keep you safer than you already are if you use two-factor authentication and secure logins. |
Intel acquires eASIC to take its chipsets deeper into IoT and other future technologies | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | In the wake of Broadcom failing to complete its takeover of Qualcomm, Intel is buying another chip company as it works on adjusting its own its business to fit the next generation of computing. Today, the company is announcing that it is acquiring , a fabless semiconductor company that makes customisable eASIC chips for use in wireless and cloud environments. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, as the price paid will not be material to Intel. eASIC has 120 employees, was founded in 1999 and has counted Khosla, Kleiner Perkins and Seagate among its investors, raising $149 million in total. It had been recapitalised in 2012 and so, in its last round, in November 2017, it was valued at around $110 million post-money, according to , to give you a basic idea of a possible pricing ballpark. eASIC’s technology and team will become a part of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), which Intel created after it for $16.7 billion. Altera is a producer of FPGA chips, and the idea will be to complement those with eASIC’s technology, said Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and GM of the PSG division: “W However, ultimately, owning the company outright made more sense for both sides, he said. “Strategic partnerships are good but a combination much better,” he said, “because it brings the investment capability to the next node. When you are privately held and venture-backed you can be challenged by the investment needed for the next phase of innovation.” He also noted the “key talent” and IP — including multiple patents — that Intel will be getting in the deal. eASIC itself has felt the pinch of being a smaller chip company: it tried to to raise $75 million but its IPO at a time when the public markets were freezing up for listings of startups. Its move to Intel is part of what’s been a long-term consolidation in the chip industry, which gets more value out of economies of scale and selling end-to-end services to larger customers. “The eASIC team has developed and deployed a truly innovative structured ASIC product. The marriage of the eASIC technology with IP and capabilities of Intel will allow the ubiquitous deployment of this proven structured ASIC product into a wide breadth of exciting end applications and markets. This is the perfect time to usher in this new chapter for eASIC,” said Ronnie Vasishta, president and CEO of eASIC, in a statement. While many in the technology and communications industries believe that areas like the Internet of Things and 5G — and the infrastructure, hardware and related services powering them — will be huge businesses, today they remain relatively small. In Intel’s , PSG had revenues of $498 million — up 17 percent on a year ago but still the smallest division within the company’s data-centric business units. As a point of comparison, Intel’s PC-centric Client Computing Division made $8.2 billion. But CCG only grew three percent over a year ago, and that stagnation and slowdown in Intel’s business is one reason why it needs to buy companies like eASIC and focus on future technologies. eASIC’s customers include a number of vendors that work in the communications industry, including Huawei, NEC, Violin Memory, Seagate, Microsoft, Flir Systems and Arm. After it added a to its board several years ago, it was that Apple might also have a tie to the company, although that has never been confirmed. The deal comes at a key time for Intel, which in addition to its over-reliance on revenues from its legacy business, has on the production of 10nm chips, and then unexpectedly lost its CEO Brian Krzanich in June when he resigned over inappropriate behavior. But Robert Swan is in the role now on an interim basis, and McNamara says the company is going full-steam ahead on its previous strategy. “The executive team is fully focused on the execution of our strategy and this is a good example of it,” he said. |
Microsoft Teams gets a free version | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | null |
Microsoft launches new wide-area networking options for Azure | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Microsoft is launching a few new networking features today that will make it easier for businesses to use the company’s Azure cloud to securely connect their own offices and infrastructure using Azure and its global network. The first of these is the service, which allows businesses to connect their various branches to and through Azure. This basically works like an airline model, where Azure becomes the central hub through which all data between branches flows. The advantage of this, Microsoft argues, is that it allows admins to manage their wide-area networks from a central dashboard and, of course, that it makes it easy to bind additional Azure services and appliances to the network. And with that, users also get access to all of the security services that Azure has to offer. One new security service that Microsoft is launching today is the , a new cloud-native security service that is meant to protect a business’s virtual network resources. In addition to these two new networking features, Microsoft also today announced that it is expanding to two new regions its Azure , which is basically Microsoft’s version of the AWS Snowball appliances for moving data into the cloud by loading it onto a shippable appliance: Europe and the United Kingdom (and let’s not argue about the fact that the U.K. is still part of Europe). There is also now a “Data Box Disk” option for those who don’t need to move petabytes of data. Orders with up to five of those disks can hold up to 40 terabytes of data and are currently in preview. |
Microsoft speeds up its Azure SQL Data Warehouse | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Microsoft’s , the company’s cloud-based database service for big data workloads, is getting yet another speed bump today. A few months ago, the company sped up the service with the general availability of its second-generation compute-optimized tier and today it’s doubling its query performance thanks to the launch of its new instant data movement technology. Raghu Ramakrishnan, Microsoft’s CTO for Azure Data, tells me that instant data movement is the result of the company’s decades-long investments in database technology. “Given the fact that we’ve been doing data management for decades now, we can marry data storage and management,” he noted and stressed that I/O bandwidth tends to be a major bottleneck for many of the analytics workloads that Microsoft’s customers use SQL Data Warehouse for. In a distributed system like a data warehouse, moving data becomes a problem — one that is typically managed by yet another layer in the system. “In these systems, when you take simple standard operations like joins, if the tables are not already nicely organized by an attribute, you have to sort on one or the other, so you have to move data across the network at a rapid clip, Ramakrishnan said. To do away with this bottleneck, Microsoft has now integrated the data movement layer right into the SQL Server engine that powers its data warehousing service. Thanks to this, every SQL Server node can now create intermediary results and move the data as necessary. Never shy to compare its services to its competitors, Microsoft also notes that Azure SQL Data Warehouse can support up to 128 concurrent queries now, compared to the 50 that Amazon Redshift is currently limited to. |
Microsoft Whiteboard is available to all on Windows, iOS version coming soon | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | null |
Microsoft wants to make you a better team player by nudging you into submission | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Microsoft announced a number of new tools for its tool for Office 365 users today that are geared toward giving employees more data about how they work, as well as ways to improve how teams work together. In today’s businesses, everybody has to be a team player, after all, and if you want to bring technology to bear on this, you first need data — and once you have data, you can go into full-on analytics mode and maybe even throw in a smidge of machine learning, too. So today, Microsoft is launching two new products: Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics nudges. Yes, Office 365 will now nudge you to be a better team player. “Building better teams starts with transparent, data-driven dialog—but no one is perfect and sticking to good collaboration habits can be challenging in a fast-paced job,” Microsoft’s Natalie McCullough and Noelle Beaujon, using language only an MBA could love, write in today’s announcement. I’m not sure what exactly that means or whether I have good collaboration habits or not, but in practice, Office 365 can now nudge you when you need more focus time as your calendar fills up, for example. You can block off those times without leaving your Inbox (or, I guess, you could always ignore this and just set up a standing block of time every day where you don’t accept meetings and just do your job…). MyAnalytics can also now nudge you to delegate meetings to a co-worker when your schedule is busy (because your co-workers aren’t busy and will love you for putting more meetings on your calendar) and tell you to avoid after-hours emails as you draft them to co-workers so they don’t have to work after hours, too (that’s actually smart, but may not work well in every company). With this new feature, Microsoft is also using some machine learning smarts, of course. MyAnalytics was already able to remind you of tasks you promised to co-workers over email, and now it’ll nudge you when you read new emails from those co-workers, too. Because the more you get nudged, the more likely you are to finish that annoying task you never intended to do but promised your co-worker you would do so he’d go away. If you’re whole team needs some nudging, Microsoft will also allow the group to enroll in a change program and provide you with lots of data about how you are changing. And if doesn’t work, you can always set up a few meetings to discuss what’s going wrong. These new features will roll out this summer. Get ready to be nudged. |
Turo files lawsuit against Los Angeles in car-sharing battle at LAX | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace Turo has filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles Airport in a preemptive strike aimed at defending the ability of its users to rent out their personal cars at Los Angeles International Airport. Turo filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. Central District Court of California in Los Angeles. The city is not able to comment on ongoing litigation, Alex Comisar, press secretary for LA Mayor Eric Garcetti said. The Turo lawsuit has not yet been served on Los Angeles World Airports, so we have not been able to review the specifics, a spokesperson from LAX said. Turo contends in its lawsuit that LAX has misclassified its peer-to-peer car-sharing platform as a rental car company. Turo argues that California’s car-sharing law is clear and notes that it doesn’t own or operate a fleet of vehicles or use the airport’s facilities that traditional rental car companies do. “Due to this misclassification, the airport expects Turo to obtain a rental car company permit and expects our community to pay anti-competitive fees whenever they choose to exchange cars at or near LAX,” Turo Chief Legal Officer Michelle Fang told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen firsthand how rental car giants Enterprise Rent-a-Car have prodded airports across the country, including LAX, to attack our community, including our users’ rights to choose transportation options other than rental cars and to share their own cars to supplement their income.” Fang said LAX has repeatedly refused to even come to the table despite efforts to negotiate. But because LAX considers Turo a commercial operation, the company is supposed to have a permit. Turo has operated without a permit for two years, a violation of the city’s ordinance. Turo says in the lawsuit that it has reached out to LAX officials in an effort to develop an appropriate fee structure. The company is open to paying a fee that is in line with how ride-hailing companies are charged. “The fees need to be proportionate for the way that the ground transportation is being used,” Fang said, adding that rental car companies need parking lots and shuttles and other infrastructure at airports. “The use to LAX is much more comparable to TNCs and limos and taxis than it is to rental cars.” The company decided to take action after it viewed email messages between the car rental company Enterprise Holdings and city officials that discussed an impending lawsuit against Turo. Enterprise has yet to respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. The lawsuit against Los Angeles marks further escalation of a battle between Turo and established car rental companies that aim to protect their domains. Earlier this year, San Francisco sued Turo for allegedly ignoring fee requirements and other rules at San Francisco International Airport. The city’s lawsuit argued that Turo’s users have added to airport traffic congestion and that its operation at the airport without paying fees gives it an unfair advantage against competitors. Turo , saying the city was trying to classify it as a traditional rental car company. That lawsuit was thrown out by the court earlier this month. |
You can now trade Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash on Robinhood Crypto | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Fintech startup is expanding its cryptocurrency trading product with two new token listings. Users in selected states can now trade Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash from the app. Robinhood is currently providing one of the easiest ways to get started with cryptocurrencies. You can download the app, upload some money and buy tokens in just a few minutes. But there are a few caveats. First, Robinhood is only available in the U.S. if you want to trade stocks, ETFs and options. And if you’re interesting Robinhood Crypto more specifically, it is only available . Robinhood also claims that there’s no fee on cryptocurrency trading. Given the liquidity of cryptocurrency exchanges, there’s always some spread. It means that if you buy one bitcoin and if you sell one bitcoin, there will be a tiny gap between those two prices because of the tiny order book. Saying that there’s no fee is misleading. The startup doesn’t operate an exchange itself. It acts as a broker with other exchanges. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to say that Robinhood is going to kill Coinbase. Robinhood is most likely partnering with Coinbase behind the scene as one of its exchanges for instance. On a user experience level, Robinhood Crypto competes with Coinbase’s main product and . The company a second company that doesn’t comply with the same regulatory framework because it’s not a broker dealer. You can currently trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash. Unfortunately, Robinhood doesn’t let you manage your wallet addresses. It means that you can’t send or receive tokens from another wallet. You have to convert to fiat currency first. But it’s still a dead simple way to get started on this market. |
FCC looks to revamp children’s media rules, but advocates cry foul | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | One of the FCC’s many jobs as a media regulator is to make sure there is adequate time being dedicated by broadcasters to educational content for kids. As the media landscape changes, however, so too should the regulations — and the FCC is looking to update its “Kid Vid” rules for the 21st century. is half-baked, warn some advocates. This latest move, one of several in the FCC’s so-called “modernizing media regulation” efforts, got its start back in January, when Commissioner Michael O’Rielly explaining why he felt it was high time children’s television regulations were revisited. The chief reason for this was essentially that with the plethora of different avenues by which kids can reach educational media these days, it doesn’t make sense to have regulations requiring broadcasters to have 30-minute shows making up at least 3 hours of content per week. Why not shorter format stuff? Why not let programs on Netflix and Hulu count? Why not allow sub-channels to carry that content instead of main channels? They’re good questions. Following this post, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked O’Rielly to head up a review of the rules and propose changes. And today the FCC votes on whether that proposal should be made official. (To be clear, it would then have to be formalized, opened for comment and voted on again later to take effect.) Does it seem like they skipped a step? Perhaps the step where they those questions listed above? You’re not the only one who thinks so. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, or NPRM, raises all kinds of questions: Some of these questions are in the NPRM itself, such as when it asks whether there are any studies on engagement with short versus full-length shows. Others are the natural result of a little thought on the topic. The problem is not that the answers to these questions are all negative or troubling — it’s that there are no answers at all. The NPRM makes many “tentative” conclusions based on little or no evidence, and when there is evidence it seems to have been provided by broadcasters. Critics proposed an easy solution to this: instead of proposing new rules based on scant data, change this NPRM into an NOI — a “Notice of Inquiry.” An NOI is the appropriate official item for when you have more questions than answers; you get lots of answers, then you use that information to create a more informed NPRM. A coalition of advocates for children’s welfare writes the following in a letter to the FCC: We agree that major changes have taken place in the video marketplace and that it is appropriate for the FCC to take a fresh look at its rules in light of these changes. But the draft NPRM appears to be a wish-list for broadcasters, which does nothing to serve the needs of children. It makes numerous ‘tentative conclusions’ based on no evidence. Finalizing these ‘tentative conclusions’ would effectively eliminate the existing rules, and as a result, many children would lose access to educational programming designed to serve their needs. Children of color and those whose families are of limited means will especially be harmed by adopting these tentative conclusions, because they are less able to afford cable, satellite, or broadband (even if available), tend to watch more television, and may have fewer opportunities to learn in other ways. Changing the draft to a NOI would allow the Commission to obtain the necessary evidence and to craft proposals in light of that evidence. And Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), joined by several colleagues, : In the absence of key information about how American children access educational programming on television and how significant changes to the ‘Kid Vid’ rules would affect this access, the Commission’s proposed rulemaking is premature. Given the critical importance of these rules and our concern that several proposals in the Commission’s NPRM have the potential to undermine the rules’ effectiveness, we respectfully request that the FCC revise its item on children’s programming rules as an NOI and go through a rigorous fact finding process. The Commission should not act in haste to revise rules that can negatively impact children in our country. Unfortunately the majority was not interested in this line of action, which would of course have had the effect of delaying the whole operation. The Commission voted 3-1 (on party lines, naturally) to approve the item. Commissioner Rosenworcel, in her remarks on the item, lamented the lack of due diligence: I regret my colleagues refused to convert this effort to a notice of inquiry so that we could include the evidence we need to proceed fairly. I am disappointed that this rulemaking all but announces where we are headed—a future with less quality children’s programming that is also harder for families to locate and watch. Moreover, I regret that dozens of times the text before us cites the need to ease industry of the “burdens” of serving our children with educational programming under the law. It never once cites children, parents, families—or mothers. So take it from this one: This is not the effort our children deserve. Concerned parents and experts in the field should still feel free to comment; this probably won’t be the melee that net neutrality was. That it is an NPRM and not an NOI just means it’s critical to make those comments sooner and more forcefully, as the next time we see this item it will be when it is being proposed as an official order. |
Brexit means blockchains, lots and lots of blockchains | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | Does Brexit mean blockchain? The UK government has published a — some two years in the baking — where it sets out its fuzzy thinking in an attempt to move beyond two years of Brexit fudge by squashing its warring factions behind a compromise customs arrangement to try to live up to its promise of a “future relationship with the European Union”, i.e. without lashings of fudge. Unfortunately though, for citizen sanity, business reality, and, well, anyone not happy gambling everything on fantastically functional systems that don’t exist yet, it’s still leaning heavily on undefined technological solutions to try to make its alternative customs arrangement fly. (Or, more realistically, limp towards another accusation of by the EU.) Instead of the current Customs Union, which the UK is part of as a member of the EU, the government is proposing entering into what it calls a “facilitated customs arrangement” (FCA) with the EU — which it wants to cover goods (services would not be included in this arrangement). It fondly imagines this FCA would Which raises the obvious question of how goods will be effectively tracked in order for tariffs to be correctly calculated and/or remitted. The risk of customs fraud draining EU (and/or indeed UK) coffers via a badly implemented version of this arrangement, or probably just by this arrangement, is clear. “The UK recognises that the rules and processes governing eligibility for repayment, including risk profiling and effectively targeted audit and assurance activity, must be sufficiently robust to ensure the mechanism cannot be used to improperly evade EU or UK tariffs and duties, through methods such as re-exporting of goods from the UK to the EU, or vice versa,” the government itself admits in the whitepaper. Meanwhile, there’s no suggestion that EU negotiators have any intention of accepting its proposal. Even though it took the UK two years to come up with. But here we all still are. (Well, minus a few cabinet ministers.) The UK’s great white hope is that cutting-edge technologies will save the day. Along with it agreeing to abide by a “common rule book” and the Union Customs Code. But of course just you have a rulebook and not those rules isn’t any good at all, . And so technology. The whitepaper specifically mentions the possibility of “exploring how machine learning and artificial intelligence could allow traders to automate the collection and submission of data required for customs declarations” — i.e. to try to streamline the repayment mechanism that this FCA idea demands. It's alright guys, they're going to use artificial intelligence to sort it out. No need to worry. — Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) But the whitepaper’s suggestive techno-solutioneering goes further — describing something that sounds suspiciously like a blockchain. Or, actually, . Implying that, at the very margins of ministerial thought processes, someone, somewhere in Whitehall is dreaming that Brexit means blockchain, all the way down. The buzzword is not explicitly mentioned in the government’s whitepaper. But what else could a secure, shareable “chain of transactions” be referring to… It writes: This could also include exploring how allowing data sharing across borders, including potentially the storing of the entire chain of transactions for each goods consignment, while enabling that data to be shared securely between traders and across relevant government departments, could reduce the need for repeated input of the same data, and help to combat import and export fraud. So there you have it. Brexit could mean blockchains at the border, immutably ledgering every little thing that passes into and out of the UK, forever and ever, until crypto amen. Assuming, that is, the goverment’s FCA idea doesn’t get slung back towards the English Channel stat by an immutable EU. But as we wait for probable rejection of the latest Brexit hash, are there any crypto startups out there who reckon they have what it takes to put Brexit on the blockchain? We’re all ears. Ideas in the comments pls. We’ll fwd anything that sounds even a satoshi baked straight to — because they’re clearly in need of every little bit and byte of help they can get to try and make something — — stick. Alternatively, perhaps this is a job for Elon Musk? We hear he’s that can pass through incredibly bounded and contorted spaces. And Brexit most definitely means that. |
Announcing the TC Top Picks for Disrupt SF 2018 | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | When we for early-stage startups to apply to be a TC Top Pick at , which takes place September 5-7, we knew we were in for something good. But crikey! The competition was fierce, and narrowing the field was no easy task. Fortunately, we love a challenge, and our work here is done. Read on to find the list of winners and what they receive. TC Top Picks is our latest way to shine a spotlight on amazing pre-Series A startup founders. We carefully reviewed and vetted each application and chose only five startups from each of these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech/Healthtech, Fintech, Gaming, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics/IoT/Hardware. These TC Top Pick founders have won a free , which includes a one-day exhibit space in , three Founder passes (good for all three days of the show), use of — our investor-to-startup matching platform — and access to the Disrupt SF 2018 press list. They also will receive a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms. Without further ado, here are our TC Top Picks for . If you missed out on applying to be a TC Top Pick and exhibiting for free, it’s not too late to and showcase your startup alongside 1,200+ companies and sponsors in Startup Alley. Exhibiting makes sense for early-stage founders, but don’t just take our word for it. Luke Heron, the CEO of , had this to say following his Startup Alley experience: If you’re a startup or an entrepreneur, exhibiting at Disrupt is a no-brainer. takes place September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Come join us and discover new opportunities. We can’t wait to see you there! |
Disney tech smooths out bad CG hair days | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Disney is unequivocally the world’s leader in 3D simulations of hair — something of a niche talent in a way, but useful if you make movies like , where hair is basically the main character. from the company makes it easier for animators to have hair follow their artistic intent while also moving realistically. The problem Disney Research aimed to solve was a compromise that animators have had to make when making the hair on characters do what the scene requires. While the hair will ultimately be rendered in glorious high-definition and with detailed physics, it’s too computationally expensive to do that while composing the scene. Should a young warrior in her tent be wearing her hair up or down? Should it fly out when she turns her head quickly to draw attention to the movement, or stay weighed down so the audience isn’t distracted? Trying various combinations of these things can eat up hours of rendering time. So, like any smart artist, they rough it out first: “Artists typically resort to lower-resolution simulations, where iterations are faster and manual edits possible,” reads the paper describing the new system. “But unfortunately, the parameter values determined in this way can only serve as an initial guess for the full-resolution simulation, which often behaves very different from its coarse counterpart when the same parameters are used.” The solution proposed by the researchers is basically to use that “initial guess” to inform a high-resolution simulation of just a handful of hairs. These “guide” hairs act as feedback for the original simulation, bringing a much better idea of how the rest will act when fully rendered. The guide hairs will cause hair to clump as in the upper right, while faded affinities or an outline-based guide (below, left and right) would allow for more natural motion if desired. And because there are only a couple of them, their finer simulated characteristics can be tweaked and re-tweaked with minimal time. So an artist can fine-tune a flick of the ponytail or a puff of air on the bangs to create the desired effect, and not have to trust to chance that it’ll look like that in the final product. This isn’t a trivial thing to engineer, of course, and much of the paper describes the schemes the team created to make sure that no weirdness occurs because of the interactions of the high-def and low-def hair systems. It’s still very early: it isn’t meant to simulate more complex hair motions like twisting, and they want to add better ways of spreading out the affinity of the bulk hair with the special guide hairs (as seen at right). But no doubt there are animators out there who can’t wait to get their hands on this once it gets where it’s going. |
Facebook reportedly hires AI chip head from Google | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Facebook is continuing to devote more resources to the development of AI-focused chips, bringing aboard a senior director of engineering from Google who worked on chips for Google’s products to lead its efforts, reports. We’ve reached out to Google and Facebook for confirmation. Shahriar Rabii spent nearly seven years at Google before joining Facebook this month as its VP and Head of Silicon according to his . Facebook’s work on AI-focused custom silicon has been the topic of rumors and reports over the past several months. It’s undoubtedly a bold direction for the company, though it’s unclear how interested Facebook is in creating custom silicon for consumer devices or if they’re more focused on building for their server business as they also look to accelerate their own research efforts. Rabii’s work at Google seemed to encompass a good deal of work on chips for consumer devices, specifically work on the Pixel 2’s Visual Core chip, which brought machine learning intelligence to the device’s camera. Facebook has long held hardware ambitions, but its Building 8 hardware division appears to be closer than ever to shipping its first products as the company’s rumored work on an Echo Show competitor touchscreen smart speaker continues. Meanwhile, Facebook has also continued building virtual reality hardware built on Qualcomm’s mobile chipsets. As Silicon Valley’s top tech companies continue to compete aggressively for talent amongst artificial intelligence experts, this marks another departure from Google. Earlier this year, . |
Yes, open office plans are the worst | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | If you’re endlessly distracted by your co-workers in the gaping open office space you all share, you’re not alone. Compared to traditional office spaces, face-to-face interaction in open office spaces is down 70 percent with resulting slips in productivity, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B this month. In the study, researchers followed two anonymous Fortune 500 companies during their transitions between a traditional office space to an open plan environment and used a sensor called a “sociometric badge” (think company ID on a lanyard) to record detailed information about the kind of interactions employees had in both spaces. The study collected information in two stages; first for several weeks before the renovation and the second for several weeks after. While the concept behind open office spaces is to drive informal interaction and collaboration among employees, the study found that for both groups of employees monitored (52 for one company and 100 for the other company) face-to-face interactions dropped, the number of emails sent increased between 20 and 50 percent and company executives reported a qualitative drop in productivity. “[Organizations] transform their office architectures into open spaces with the intention of creating more [face-to-face] interaction and thus a more vibrant work environment,” the study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, wrote. “[But] what they often get—as captured by a steady stream of news articles professing the death of the open office is an open expanse of proximal employees choosing to isolate themselves as best they can (e.g. by wearing large headphones) while appearing to be as busy as possible (since everyone can see them).” While this study at open office space designs, the researchers claim this is the first study of its kind to collect qualitative data on this shift in working environment instead of relying primarily on employee surveys. From their results, the researchers provide three cautionary tales: Seems like it might be time to (first, find a quiet room) and go back to the drawing board with the open office design. |
Coinbase teases new cryptocurrency assets for which it’s ‘exploring’ support | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Coinbase is taking a look at some new cryptocurrencies to add to its exchange. The list is kind of a pre-announcement, with the startup saying that it’s “exploring” adding the assets and is working with local banks and regulators to make them happen. On the list are… Coinbase is one of the most popular exchange companies and holds quite a bit of sway in directing attention and enthusiasm within the broader blockchain/cryptocurrency space, so the exploration announcement is sure to bring some added interest to these particular assets. Last month, the site announced to the exchange, though in a published today, Coinbase notes that while adding that asset was relatively straightforward, it’s going to take some regulatory work to add any of these new tokens, further noting that they “cannot guarantee they will be listed for trading.” Coinbase got some flack with the debacle surrounding the rollout of Bitcoin Cash after several users accused the site’s employees of after the token’s value swelled preceding the announcement. Announcing this might be a way for Coinbase to just hedge some of that by informing the whole community in an earlier stage of the process in which direction it is looking, even if every asset doesn’t necessarily end up landing on one of the startup’s exchanges. |
Russian hackers used bitcoin to fund election interference, so prepare for FUD | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | The against 12 Russians accused of, among other things, hacking the DNC and undermining Hillary Clinton’s campaign also notes that the alleged hackers paid for their nefarious deeds with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. This unsavory application of one of tech’s current darlings will almost certainly be wielded against it by opportunists of all stripes. It is perhaps the most popular and realistic argument against cryptocurrency that it enables anonymous transactions globally and at scale, no exception made for Russian intelligence or ISIS. So the news that a prominent and controversial technology was used to fund state-sponsored cyber attacks will not be passed over by its critics. You can expect bluster on cable news and some sharp words from lawmakers, who will also probably issue some kind of public denouncement of cryptocurrencies and call for more stringent regulation. It’s only natural: their constituencies will hear that Russians are using bitcoin to hack the election systems and take it at face value. They have to say . But this knee-jerk criticism is misguided and hypocritical for several reasons. First is that it’s not as anonymous and mysterious as critics make out. The details in the indictment actually provide an interesting example (far from the first) of the limits of cryptocurrency’s ability to obscure its users’ activities. The painstaking research of the special investigator’s team revealed the approximate amounts and methods involved, and although there is a veneer of anonymity in that addresses are not inherently tied to identities, it is far from impossible to establish ownership. Not that they didn’t try, as the indictment shows: The Defendants conspired to launder the equivalent of more than $95,000 through a web of transactions structured to capitalize on the perceived anonymity of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. They also enlisted the assistance of one or more third-party exchangers who facilitated layers transactions through digital currency exchange platforms providing heightened anonymity. But the process of laundering, after all, becomes rather difficult when there is an immutable, peer-maintained record of every penny being pushed around. Small slip-ups in the team’s operational security allowed investigators to tie, for example, an email address used to access a given bitcoin wallet with the one used to pay for a VPN. [U]sing funds in a bitcoin address, the Conspirators purchased a VPN account, which they later used to log into the @Guccifer_2 Twitter account. The remaining funds from that bitcoin address were then used […] to lease a Malaysian server that hosted the dcleaks.com website. It’s likely that the very same distributed ledger technology that allows for anonymous international payments in the first place also creates an invaluable investigative tool for those savvy enough to take advantage of it. So although bitcoin has its shady side, it’s far from perfect secrecy, especially when exposed to the privileges of a federal investigative team. The second reason the criticism will be hollow is that it doesn’t provide much in the way of new capabilities for those who wish to keep secret their activities online. There are established methods used by nation-states and garden-variety hackers and criminals alike that minimize or eliminate the possibility of tracking. Money laundering is performed at huge volumes worldwide and there are shady banks, loopholes and puppet organizations peppered across the globe. Cryptocurrencies are convenient for paying for things online because there are a number of vendors (dwindling, but they exist) that accept it straight, or if one is not available it is reasonably liquid and can be shifted easily. I feel sure that our own intelligence services are making good use of it. On that note is the third reason this FUD will be risible: If we are going to address the problem of dark money influencing politics, using bitcoin for hacking activities doesn’t even amount to a rounding error and it is cynical prestidigitation that makes it appear more than such. I won’t belabor the point, because it is surely topmost in many an American’s mind that cash funneled through Super PACs and offshore accounts, backroom deals and stock trades, favors for lobbyists and corporate “donators” and 20 other forms of pay-for-play in Washington are more of a clear and present danger than a handful of Russian operatives ineffectually obscuring peanuts payments for hosting fees and bribes. If anything these indictments are evidence only that cryptocurrency is here to stay, usable by you, or me, or an rival nation-state, or our own — just like any other financial instrument. |
How much quieter are the new MacBook Pro keyboards? Hear for yourself | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Specs? We’ll Right now we’re focused on something far more important: . It’s been a common complaint among MacBook users since the company shifted to the butterfly switch. Some of that can no doubt be chalked up to the fact that people really hate change when it comes to something as fundamental as a keyboard. Even so, there’s no mistaking the fact that, in the right hands, this thing can cause a ruckus. Turns out those right hands were here in front of our face all along.You probably know Anthony Ha from such websites as TechCrunch.com and conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt. I know him from sitting right next to me in TechCrunch’s New York City headquarters. What you may not know, however, is that Anthony is a loud typist. Like ridiculously so. If the computer keyboard was an instrument, Anthony would be Glenn Gould. But, like, young Glenn Gould. Not end-of-life, the-weight-of-the-world-is-on-my-shoulders Glenn Gould. He makes the computer keys sing. Naturally, he was the first person myself and the rest of the TechCrunch staff thought of when we heard about the updated keyboard. “I’ll type on any keyboard you put under me.” Challenge accepted. Here are the results: |
ACLU calls for a moratorium on government use of facial recognition technologies | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Technology executives are pleading with the government to give them guidance on how to use facial recognition technologies, and now the American Civil Liberties Union is weighing in. On the heels of a Microsoft statement asking for the federal government to weigh in on the technology, the ACLU has called for a moratorium on the use of the technology by government agencies. “Congress should take immediate action to put the brakes on this technology with a moratorium on its use, given that it has not been fully debated and its use has never been explicitly authorized,” said Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU legislative counsel, . “And companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and others should be heeding the calls from the public, employees, and shareholders to stop selling face surveillance technology to governments.” In May the ACLU on Amazon’s sale of facial recognition technology to different law enforcement agencies. And in June the civil liberties group One contract, with the Orlando Police Department, after the uproar. Meanwhile, Google employees revolted over their company’s work with the government on facial recognition tech… and Microsoft had problems of its own after reports surfaced of the work that the company was doing with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. Some organizations are already working to regulate how facial recognition technologies are used. At MIT, Joy Buolamwini has created the , which is pushing a pledge that companies working with the technology can agree to as they work on the tech. That pledge includes commitments to value human life and dignity, including the refusal to help develop lethal autonomous vehicles or equipping law enforcement with facial analysis products. |
YouTube TV subscribers get a free week after World Cup meltdown | Greg Kumparak | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | When one of the main selling points for your service is the ability to stream live sports, the last thing you want is a full-on service meltdown during a huge game. Alas, that’s exactly what happened on Wednesday to YouTube TV. Just as the World Cup semi-finals game between Croatia and England started heating up, . As something of a mea culpa, YouTube has sent out an email to subscribers promising a free week of YouTube TV service. With most users paying ~$40 a month for the service, that works out to about $10 off their next bill. Curiously, user reports suggest the refund is going out to most, if not all, YouTube TV users — not just those who were watching (or, you know, to watch) the game in question. Meanwhile, have noted that reaching out directly to customer service lead to them getting a full month for free — so if you’re still feeling a bit burned by the whole thing, that might be something worth pursuing. If you’re a subscriber but aren’t seeing the notice, check your spam box — some users in are mentioning finding the notice hiding in there, or tucked away in the “social” tab in Gmail’s split view. |
Moment Pro Camera app brings big camera controls to your phone | Gregory Manalo | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | |
There’s now just one Blockbuster remaining in the US | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | And then there was one. With the impending closures of Blockbuster locations in Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, just one single store will remain in the country, . The two locations in Alaska will officially close their respective doors on July 16, leaving just one location in Bend, Ore. “…it is sad to say goodbye to our dedicated customers,” Blockbuster Alaska General Manager Kevin Daymude . “Both [the district manager] and I have been with the company since 1991 and have had great memories throughout our career. Thank you for sticking by us throughout all these years. I can’t tell you how much it means to us.” Following the initial closures on the 16th, the locations will reopen on the 17th through the end of August for an inventory sale. But, as for the earlier this summer, Daymude told Anchorage Daily News that it is likely to return to its original owner. . But, with the introduction of streaming services and a general change in consumers’ viewing habits, the company has been closing locations in the last decade and It’s hard to say with certainty why Blockbuster has persisted in Alaska over the years despite its relative extinction in the rest of the United States, Or maybe it’s just the nostalgia. District Manager Kelli Vey told Anchorage Daily News that the stores saw a lot of selfies — but not nearly as many sales. “I wish they would come in and buy something,” Vey told the paper. “All day long, I joke that I need to put a picture of somebody in the window to photobomb them.” For those still wishing to pay homage to the late ’90s and early 2000s giant, is open Friday and Saturday from 10:30 am – 10 pm and Sunday – Thursday from 10:30 am – 9 pm. But maybe this time think about renting a movie after you’ve snapped your picture. *Updated 2:50 PM ET to correct the date the first Blockbuster opened |
Chowly is raising $5.8 million to help restaurants manage on-demand delivery orders | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | , a piece of software that integrates with point-of-sale system for restaurants, has raised nearly $4.7 million, . The company is targeting a total raise of $5.8 million.* The round is led by MATH Venture Partners with participation from Valor Equity, Chicago Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and others. Chowly had previously raised just $700,000 from MATH Venture Partners, Domenick Montanile and others. Chowly aims to help restaurants better manage the influx of delivery orders they receive from a variety of services, such as Grubhub, Delivery.com and Chownow. In May, a point-of-sale system for restaurants that integrates on-demand delivery platform Caviar. Down the road, Square said it envisions third-party applications from companies like Postmates, UberEats and DoorDash. Chowly has since raised the full $5.8 million in funding. |
As facial recognition technology becomes pervasive, Microsoft (yes, Microsoft) issues a call for regulation | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Technology companies have a privacy problem. They’re terribly good at invading ours and terribly negligent at protecting their own. And with the push by technologists to map, identify and index our physical as well as virtual presence with biometrics like face and fingerprint scanning, the increasing digital surveillance of our physical world is causing some of the companies that stand to benefit the most to call out to government to provide some guidelines on how they can use the incredibly powerful tools they’ve created. That’s what’s behind for government to start thinking about how to oversee the facial recognition technology that’s now at the disposal of companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple and government security and surveillance services across the country and around the world. In what companies have framed as a quest to create “better,” more efficient and more targeted services for consumers, they have tried to solve the problem of user access by moving to increasingly passive (for the user) and intrusive (by the company) forms of identification — culminating in features like Apple’s Face ID and the frivolous filters that Snap overlays over users’ selfies. Those same technologies are also being used by security and police forces in ways that have gotten technology companies into trouble with consumers or their own staff. Amazon has been called to task for its work with law enforcement, Microsoft’s own technologies have been used to help identify immigrants at the border (indirectly aiding in the separation of families and the virtual and physical lockdown of America against most forms of immigration) and Google faced an internal company revolt over the facial recognition work it was doing for the Pentagon. Smith posits this nightmare scenario: Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge. Imagine a database of everyone who attended a political rally that constitutes the very essence of free speech. Imagine the stores of a shopping mall using facial recognition to share information with each other about each shelf that you browse and product you buy, without asking you first. This has long been the stuff of science fiction and popular movies – like “Minority Report,” “Enemy of the State” and even “1984” – but now it’s on the verge of becoming possible. What’s impressive about this is the intimation that it isn’t already happening (and that Microsoft isn’t enabling it). Across the world, governments are deploying these tools right now as ways to control their populations (the ubiquitous surveillance state that China has assembled, and is investing billions of dollars to upgrade, is just the most obvious example). In this moment when corporate innovation and state power are merging in ways that consumers are only just beginning to fathom, executives who have to answer to a buying public are now pleading for government to set up some rails. Late capitalism is weird. But Smith’s advice is prescient. Companies do need to get ahead of the havoc their innovations can wreak on the world, and they can look good while doing nothing by hiding their own abdication of responsibility on the issue behind the government’s. “In a democratic republic, there is no substitute for decision making by our elected representatives regarding the issues that require the balancing of public safety with the essence of our democratic freedoms. Facial recognition will require the public and private sectors alike to step up – and to act,” Smith writes. The fact is, something does, indeed, need to be done. As Smith writes, “The more powerful the tool, the greater the benefit or damage it can cause. The last few months have brought this into stark relief when it comes to computer-assisted facial recognition – the ability of a computer to recognize people’s faces from a photo or through a camera. This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike.” All of this takes on faith that the technology actually works as advertised. And the problem is, right now, it doesn’t. , Brian Brackeen, the chief executive of a startup working on facial recognition technologies, pulled back the curtains on the industry’s not-so-secret huge problem. Facial recognition technologies, used in the identification of suspects, negatively affects people of color. To deny this fact would be a lie. And clearly, facial recognition-powered government surveillance is an extraordinary invasion of the privacy of all citizens — and a slippery slope to losing control of our identities altogether. There’s really no “nice” way to acknowledge these things. Smith, himself admits that the technology has a long way to go before it’s perfect. But the implications of applying imperfect technologies are vast — and in the case of law enforcement, not academic. Designating an innocent bystander or civilian as a criminal suspect influences how police approach an individual. Those instances, even if they amount to only a handful, would lead me to argue that these technologies have no business being deployed in security situations. As Smith himself notes, “Even if biases are addressed and facial recognition systems operate in a manner deemed fair for all people, we will still face challenges with potential failures. Facial recognition, like many AI technologies, typically have some rate of error even when they operate in an unbiased way.” While Smith lays out the problem effectively, he’s less clear on the solution. He’s called for a government “expert commission” to be empaneled as a first step on the road to eventual federal regulation. That we’ve gotten here is an indication of how bad things actually are. It’s rare that a tech company has pleaded so nakedly for government intervention into an aspect of its business. But here’s Smith writing, “We live in a nation of laws, and the government needs to play an important role in regulating facial recognition technology. As a general principle, it seems more sensible to ask an elected government to regulate companies than to ask unelected companies to regulate such a government.” Given the current state of affairs in Washington, Smith may be asking too much. Which is why perhaps the most interesting — and admirable — call from Smith in his post is for technology companies to slow their roll. We recognize the importance of going more slowly when it comes to the deployment of the full range of facial recognition technology,” writes Smith. “Many information technologies, unlike something like pharmaceutical products, are distributed quickly and broadly to accelerate the pace of innovation and usage. ‘Move fast and break things’ became something of a mantra in Silicon Valley earlier this decade. But if we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken.” |
Chad Rigetti to talk quantum computing at Disrupt SF | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Even for the long-standing giants of the tech industry, quantum computing is one of the most complicated subjects to tackle. So how does a five-year old startup compete? Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at to help us break it all down. Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing is two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, . Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date , with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead. What’s the current state of quantum computing? How do we separate hype from reality? Which fields might quantum computing impact first — and how can those interested in quantum technology make an impact? We’ll talk all this and more at Disrupt SF 2018. Passes to Disrupt SF are available at the Early Bird rate until Aug 1 |
Department of Justice indicts 12 Russian intelligence officers for Clinton email hacks | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Just days before President Trump is set to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Department of Justice has leveled new charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers who allegedly hacked the Democratic National Committee and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The charges were released by Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who’s leading the investigation into Russian election tampering from the investigation. In January of last year, the intelligence community issued a joint statement affirming that Russia had indeed tampered with the U.S. presidential elections in 2016. Now the investigation is beginning to release indictments. Three former campaign aides for the president’s campaign have already pleaded guilty, and the president himself is under investigation by Special Investigator Robert Mueller for potential obstruction of justice. According to the indictment, the Russians used spearphishing attacks to gain access to the network of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Rosenstein also said that Russia’s military intelligence service was behind the leaks that distributed the information online under the aliases Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks. Read the full indictment below. |
Amazon’s share of the US e-commerce market is now 49%, or 5% of all retail spend | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Amazon has already been in the crosshairs of the White House when it comes to of antitrust investigations, and while some say this is simply Trumpian bluster that has a of going anywhere, some new numbers out from the researchers at could prove to be a fan to the flames. Amazon is set to clear $258.22 billion in US retail sales in 2018, according to eMarketer’s figures, which will work out to 49.1 percent of online retail spend in the country, and 5 percent of all retail sales. It started as an online bookstore, but today Amazon is a behemoth in all areas of e-commerce, fuelled by a strong Marketplace network of third-party sellers, an ever-expanding range of goods from groceries to fashion, and a very popular loyalty program in the form of Prime. Now, it is fast approaching a tipping point where more people will be spending money online with Amazon, than with all other retailers — combined. Amazon’s next-closest competitor, eBay, a very, very distant second at 6.6 percent, and Apple in third at 3.9 percent. Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer when counting physical stores, has yet to really hit the right note in e-commerce and comes in behind Apple with 3.7 percent of online sales in the US. The figures — which eMarketer says are estimates “based on an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from research firms, government agencies, media firms and public companies, plus interviews with top executives at publishers, ad buyers and agencies” — are also remarkable not because of their size, but because of Amazon’s pace has not slowed down. Its sales are up 29.2 percent versus a year ago, when it commanded 43 percent of all e-commerce retail sales. The rocket ship for Amazon’s growth at the moment is its Marketplace — the platform where Amazon allows third-party sellers to use its retail and (if they choose) logistics infrastructure to sell and deliver items to Amazon shoppers. It’s currently accounting for 68 percent of all retail sales, working out to nearly $176 billion, versus 32 percent for Amazon’s direct sales, and eMarketer projects that by the end of this year, Marketplace’s share will be more than double that of Amazon’s own sales (it’s already about double). It’s no wonder that so many other online commerce businesses are chasing the marketplace model, which essentially creates transactions on two fronts for the platform operator, thereby improving margins that might be cut by not selling items directly. “The continued growth of Amazon’s Marketplace makes sense on a number of levels,” eMarketer principal analyst Andrew Lipsman notes in the eMarketer report. “More buyers transacting more often on Amazon will naturally attract third-party sellers. But because third-party transactions are also more profitable, Amazon has every incentive to make the process as seamless as possible for those selling on the platform.” In terms of popular categories, consumer electronics and tech continue to be the leading product category: eMarketer projects sales of $65.82 billion, around one-fourth of all turnover. Second will be apparel and accessories, which will pull in $39.88 billion of sales. Third in 2018 are health, personal care and beauty with $16 billion. Fourth is food and beverage at a distant $4.75 billion. All of these are already up by 38 percent or more over a year ago (see the full table below), but what’s perhaps most notable is how Amazon has been investing in being a direct player in each of the categories as well. In tech, it has its Kindles and Fire tablets, Fire TV, and of course its huge hit Alexa-powered Echo devices, among many other products. Apparel is being pushed heavily in the company’s private-label efforts. Amazon just the other week announced that it was acquiring online drug seller PillPack for $1 billion, which will be a major lever in its wider health products and services strategy. And lastly, there is Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and its much wider play around meal kits and its server-free physical shops. The physical aspect, eMarketer believes, will play a strong role in Amazon’s growth in this category. “Amazon’s strategy for food and beverage is no different, in some respects, than it was for books—dominate the category,” eMarketer senior analyst Patricia Orsini notes in the report. “However, e-commerce in the grocery sector is a challenge. Share of online sales in this category is low because most people, for a host of reasons, prefer to buy food in brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon has an advantage because its shopper base is comfortable with shopping online. Along with insights gathered about Whole Foods shoppers, Amazon probably has the best chance of converting in-store grocery buyers to online grocery buyers.” All of these will not just boost Amazon’s own direct sales but help create an environment for people to come to Amazon to buy either these at price-busting rates, or other-brand alternatives. So far, people think that it is unlikely that Amazon would stand an antitrust investigation because e-commerce is still a small part of all commerce (as evidenced by the five percent of all retail sales figure), and Amazon would argue that in the world of “omnicommerce” it’s still just a bit player. However, Amazon’s dominance is clear when considering e-commerce alone. |
null | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 12 | null |
Apple announces clean energy fund in China | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Apple has announced a new investment fund to foster clean energy usage in China. The company isn’t just trying to switch its own offices and facilities. Apple is also working with its suppliers to expand the use of clean energy across the board. For this fund in particular, Apple and 10 suppliers will invest $300 million over the next four years. Overall, the company expects to finance multiple clean energy projects to produce 1 gigawatt of renewable energy in China. Apple isn’t going to manage the fund itself. The company is partnering with , a division of Deutsche Bank. DWS will also participate in the fund. The company started working on renewable energy projects a few years ago. Earlier this year, Apple that 100 percent of its offices, retail stores, data centers and Apple-owned facilities are now powered by renewable energy. Apple is not there yet when it comes to suppliers. The company has launched the Supplier Clean Energy Program back in 2015 with 23 manufacturing partners, and regularly shares — Foxconn seems to be missing so far. By 2020, Apple and its suppliers hope to generate 4 gigawatts of clean energy. And let’s be honest, this is great news for the planet. |
Emptor looks to help companies more easily find contractors in the area | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | For any company looking to spin up some kind of operation in a new region, one of the first steps may be finding contractors in the area that can actually get the work started — but, especially as companies drift farther from cities, that can increasingly become a nightmare that’s quite familiar to Matt Velker. That led to he and his co-founder Vignesh Venkataraman starting , a network to connect companies with local contractors in order to get those local projects off the ground effectively. That can range from actual construction to janitorial work or landscaping. A platform like Emptor seeks to take a lot of the ambiguity or guesswork out of finding a set of local companies to work with in order to get construction projects off the ground. It also adds a robust audit trail — ratings or otherwise — to ensure that the best contractors surface and that everyone knows which ones they should skip. The company is coming out of Y Combinator. “Every time you’re building [projects in new regions you have to find an entirely new set of suppliers,” Velker said. “Often in rural areas when there isn’t a saturation of contractors like there is in a large metro, that discovery process within a reasonable time frame was the biggest challenge. Especially within the construction industry, there’s a huge deviation in terms of the quality of the companies you work with. We definitely had a lot of pains with unreliable contractors who weren’t getting the job done to spec or on time, or things that came close to fraud. It comes with the territory when you work with that volume of companies in a short period of time.” Companies first go to Emptor and describe the projects they want and what kinds of pricing structure they are offering. Then, kind of like Thumbtack or other marketplaces, Emptor matches those projects with qualified contractors and then compares those bids in order to select the best offer. It aims to be a replacement for the time spent searching around Yelp or Google, where there may be listings and pages but not a high volume of ratings — or ones that are even accurate to begin. Even after the search, getting the whole process started can take weeks, another period Emptor hopes to shrink by streamlining that process. Right now Emptor mainly focuses on facilities and maintenance, though should something like this take off it could add other elements of contract work that companies need. The approach also aims to be more granular, giving companies more ways to identify the needs of the project that might not necessarily just be quantitative. After all, better data about a company’s actual needs that flows into some algorithm can produce better matching, and that can also go down to the actual way compensation would work on that project. “Having just one number for what a project will cost is convenient from the supplier and buyer perspective, but it’s missing out on the ability to build structured data that you can analyze,” Velker said. “The companies are deciding, ‘what do I need to know, how many years have you done in business.’ You want to be explicit about how are we going to make this decision. If price is a factor, how much of a factor is it, so they can spec things out and there’s transparency to the buyers.” But while it’s an attempt to try to bridge that gap between the company and a service provider, it’s one that many companies have tried to fill before. There are tools like Angie’s List and others for finding contractors, though Velker says those are primarily geared toward consumers — and some end up bending the apps in order to fill the needs they have for contractors without some kind of formal platform to use. Velker acknowledges the theory behind all these tools is pretty similar, though he hopes Emptor will be able to tackle the specific needs companies might have that he’s experienced himself. |
Sales of PCs just grew for the first time in six years | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Don’t look now, but the PC might not be dead. , collector of marketshare and industry metrics, worldwide shipments of personal computers just experienced the first year-over-year growth since 2012. Shipments totaled 62.1 million units, which is a 1.4 percent increase from the same time period in 2017. The report states “experienced some growth compared with a year ago” but goes on to caution declaring the PC industry as in recovery just yet. The top five PC vendors all experienced growth with Lenovo seeing the largest gains of 10.5% — though that could be from Lenovo completing a joint venture with Fujitsu. HP grew 6.1%, Dell 9.5%, Apple 3% and Acer 3.1%. All good signs for an industry long thought stagnate. This report excludes Chromebooks from its data. PC vendors experienced growth without the help of Chromebooks, which are the latest challenger to the notebook computer. Gartner points to the business market as the source of the increased demand. The consumer market, it states, is still decreasing as consumers increasing use mobile devices. Yet growth in the business sector will not last, it says. “In the business segment, PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes.” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner said in the report. “PC vendors should look for ways to maintain growth in the business market as the Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off.” Consumers will likely continue, for the most part, to keep a computer around but since the web is the new desktop, the upgrade cycle for a causal user will keep getting longer. As long as a home has a computer that can run Chrome, that’s likely good enough for most people. |
MallforAfrica and DHL launch MarketPlace Africa global e-commerce site | Jake Bright | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | Jake Bright is a writer, author and advisor with a focus on global business, politics, and technology. From 2017 to 2020, he was a contributing writer and advisor at TechCrunch where he published on Africa, mobility and politics. Bright helped spearhead consistent Africa coverage and co-produce the first Startup Battlefield competitions in Africa and Africa focused programming on the Disrupt San Francisco mainstage. Bright’s first book, (Macmillan 2015), forecast the rise of Africa’s venture backed startup scene. Prior to this he worked in international finance and as a speechwriter in Washington, DC. Bright continues to contribute occasional guest pieces at TechCrunch. and DHL are giving African merchants a global stage. This week the online retailer and delivery giant launch : an e-commerce site for select African artisans to sell wares to buyers in any of DHL’s 220 delivery countries. The site will prioritize fashion items — clothing, bags, jewelry, footwear and personal care — and crafts, such as pictures and carvings. MallforAfrica is vetting sellers for MarketPlace Africa and through the association (AMPS), to verify made-in-Africa status and merchandise quality. “We’re starting off in Nigeria and then we’ll open in Kenya, Rwanda and the rest of Africa, utilizing DHL’s massive network,” MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan told TechCrunch about where the goods will be sourced. “People all around the world can buy from African artisans online, that’s the goal,” said Folayan. Current listed designer products include handbags from and Tash women’s outfits by Tasha Goodwin. In addition to DHL for shipping, MarketPlace Africa will utilize MallforAfrica’s e-commerce infrastructure. The startup was founded in 2011 to solve challenges global consumer goods companies face when entering Africa. MallforAfrica’s payment and delivery system serves as a digital broker and logistics manager for U.S. retailers that partner with MFA to sell their goods online to African consumers. The venture has backing from U.K. private equity firm and alliances with companies such as consumer electronics chain Best Buy and department store Macy’s. In 2016, MallforAfrica partnered with eBay to launch the platform allowing U.S. vendors to sell in Africa. In 2017, eBay to select sales from African vendors through MallforAfrica’s website. Africa’s e-commerce space — expected to exceed — has been one of the continent’s most active, with a number of well-funded startups focused on mastering mega-market Nigeria before expanding outward. E-commerce minted the continent’s first unicorn in 2016, when Rocket Internet-backed after a $326 million funding round that included Goldman Sachs. Africa’s digital retail race produced one of the continent’s notable tech exits when . E-commerce shops in Africa have also struggled to reach profitability — though after years of losses, Jumia’s apparently . And digital retail on the continent has seen some big fails, namely the folding of South Africa’s Khalahari.com in 2015 and the earlier this year. MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan said his company does not release financial performance figures, but noted it now ships to 17 countries, averages a ton a day of goods shipped to Africa, and plans to grow by 3-4 times this year over 2017. With MarketPlace Africa, Folayan sees an opportunity to open the sales channels both ways. “Our MallforAfrica platform is really about helping people in Africa buy products from places like the U.S., this is the return ticket for Africa’s products,” he said. |
Amazon Prime Day’s best tech deals | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | null |
3D printed guns are now legal… What’s next? | Jon Stokes | 2,018 | 7 | 14 | On Tuesday, July 10, the DOJ announced a landmark settlement with Austin-based , a controversial startup led by a young, charismatic anarchist whom one of the 15 most dangerous people in the world. Hyper-loquacious and media-savvy, is fond of telling any reporter who’ll listen that Defense Distributed’s main product, a gun fabricator called the Ghost Gunner, represents the endgame for gun control, not just in the US but everywhere in the world. With nothing but the Ghost Gunner, an internet connection, and some raw materials, anyone, anywhere can make an unmarked, untraceable gun in their home or garage. Even if Wilson is wrong that the gun control wars are effectively over (and I believe he is), Tuesday’s ruling has fundamentally changed them. At about the time the settlement announcement was going out over the wires, I was pulling into the parking lot of LMT Defense in Milan, IL. LMT Defense, formerly known as Lewis Machine & Tool, is as much the opposite of Defense Distributed as its quiet, publicity-shy founder, Karl Lewis, is the opposite of Cody Wilson. But LMT Defense’s story can be usefully placed alongside that of Defense Distributed, because together they can reveal much about the past, present, and future of the tools and technologies that we humans use for the age-old practice of making war. Karl Lewis got started in gunmaking back in the 1970’s at Springfield Armory in Geneseo, IL, just a few exits up I-80 from the current LMT Defense headquarters. Lewis, who has a high school education but who now knows as much about the engineering behind firearms manufacturing as almost anyone alive, was working on the Springfield Armory shop floor when he hit upon a better way to make a critical and failure-prone part of the AR-15, the bolt. He first took his idea to Springfield Armory management, but they took a pass, so he rented out a small corner in a local auto repair ship in Milan, bought some equipment, and began making the bolts, himself. Lewis worked in his rented space on nights and weekends, bringing the newly fabricated bolts home for heat treatment in his kitchen oven. Not long after he made his first batch, he landed a small contract with the US military to supply some of the bolts for the M4 carbine. On the back of this initial success with M4 bolts, Lewis Machine & Tool expanded its offerings to include complete guns. Over the course of the next three decades, LMT grew into one of the world’s top makers of AR-15-pattern rifles for the world’s militaries, and it’s now in a very small club of gunmakers, alongside a few old-world arms powerhouses like Germany’s Heckler & Koch and Belgium’s FN Herstal, that supplies rifles to US SOCOM’s most elite units. The offices of LMT Defense, in Milan, Ill. (Image courtesy Jon Stokes) LMT’s gun business is built on high-profile relationships, hard-to-win government contracts, and deep, almost monk-like know-how. The company lives or dies by the skill of its machinists and by the stuff of process engineering — tolerances and measurements and paper trails. Political connections are also key, as the largest weapons contracts require congressional approval and months of waiting for political winds to blow in this or that direction, as countries to fall in and out of favor with each other, and paperwork that was delayed due to a political spat over some unrelated point of trade or security finally gets put through so that funds can be transfered and production can begin. Selling these guns is as old-school a process as making them is. Success in LMT’s world isn’t about media buys and PR hits, but about dinners in foreign capitals, range sessions with the world’s top special forces units, booths at trade shows most of us have never heard of, and secret delegations of high-ranking officials to a machine shop in a small town surrounded by corn fields on the western border of Illinois. The civilian gun market, with all of its politics- and event-driven gyrations of supply and demand, is woven into this stable core of the global military small arms market the way vines weave through a trellis. Innovations in gunmaking flow in both directions, though nowadays they more often flow from the civilian market into the military and law enforcement markets than vice versa. For the most part, civilians buy guns that come off the same production lines that feed the government and law enforcement markets. All of this is how small arms get made and sold in the present world, and anyone who lived through the heyday of IBM and Oracle, before the PC, the cloud, and the smartphone tore through and upended everything, will recognize every detail of the above picture, down to the clean-cut guys in polos with the company logo and fat purchase orders bearing signatures and stamps and big numbers. The author with LMT Defense hardware. This is the part of the story where I build on the IBM PC analogy I hinted at above, and tell you that Defense Distributed’s Ghost Gunner, along with its inevitable clones and successors, will kill dinosaurs like LMT Defense the way the PC and the cloud laid waste to the mainframe and microcomputer businesses of yesteryear. Except this isn’t what will happen. Defense Distributed isn’t going to destroy gun control, and it’s certainly not going to decimate the gun industry. All of the legacy gun industry apparatus described above will still be there in the decades to come, mainly because governments will still buy their arms from established makers like LMT. But surrounding the government and civilian arms markets will be a brand new, homebrew, underground gun market where enthusiasts swap files on the dark web and test new firearms in their back yards. The homebrew gun revolution won’t create a million untraceable guns so much as it’ll create a hundreds of thousands of Karl Lewises — solitary geniuses who had a good idea, prototyped it, began making it and selling it in small batches, and ended up supplying a global arms market with new technology and products. In this respect, the future of guns looks a lot like the present of drugs. The dark web hasn’t hurt Big Pharma, much less destroyed it. Rather, it has expanded the reach of hobbyist drugmakers and small labs, and enabled a shadow world of pharmaceutical R&D that feeds transnational black and gray markets for everything from penis enlargement pills to synthetic opioids. Gun control efforts in this new reality will initially focus more on ammunition. Background checks for ammo purchases will move to more states, as policy makers try to limit civilian access to weapons in a world where controlling the guns themselves is impossible. Ammunition has long been the crack in the rampart that Wilson is building. Bullets and casings are easy to fabricate and will always be easy to obtain or manufacture in bulk, but powder and primers are another story. Gunpowder and primers are the explosive chemical components of modern ammo, and they are difficult and dangerous to make at home. So gun controllers will seize on this and attempt to pivot to “bullet control” in the near-term. Ammunition control is unlikely to work, mainly because rounds of ammunition are , and there are untold billions of rounds already in civilian hands. In addition to controls on ammunition, some governments will also make an effort at trying to force the manufacturers of 3D printers and desktop (the Ghost Gunner is the latter) to refuse to print files for gun parts. This will be impossible to enforce, for two reasons. First, it will be hard for these machines to reliably tell what’s a gun-related file and what isn’t, especially if distributors of these files keep changing them to defeat any sort of detection. But the bigger problem will be that open-source firmware will quickly become available for the most popular printing and milling machines, so that determined users can “jailbreak” them and use them however they like. This already happens with products like routers and even cars, so it will definitely happen with home fabrication machines should the need arise. Ammo control and fabrication device restrictions having failed, governments will over the longer term employ a two-pronged approach that consists of possession permits and digital censorship. Photo courtesy of Getty Images: Jeremy Saltzer / EyeEm First, governments will look to gun control schemes that treat guns like controlled substances (i.e. drugs and alchohol). The focus will shift to vetting and permits for simple possession, much like the I outlined in Politico. We’ll give up on trying to trace guns and ammunition, and focus more on authorizing people to possess guns, and on catching and prosecuting unauthorized possession. You’ll get the firearm equivalent of a marijuana card from the state, and then it won’t matter if you bought your gun from an authorized dealer or made it yourself at home. The second component of future gun control regimes will be online suppression, of the type that’s already taking place on most major tech platforms across the developed world. I don’t think DefCad.com is long for the open web, and it will ultimately have as hard a time staying online as extremist sites like stormfront.org. Gun CAD files will join child porn and pirated movies on the list of content it’s nearly impossible to find on big tech platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. If you want to trade these files, you’ll find yourself on sites with really intrusive advertising, where you worry a lot about viruses. Or, you’ll end up on the dark web, where you may end up paying for a hot new gun design with a cryptocurrency. This may be an ancap dream, but won’t be mainstream or user-friendly in any respect. As for what comes after that, this is the same question as the question of what comes next for politically disfavored speech online. The gun control wars have now become a subset of the online free speech wars, so whatever happens with online speech in places like the US, UK, or China will happen with guns. |
Furniture startups skip the showroom and go straight to your door | Holden Page | 2,018 | 7 | 14 | Startups making delivery and transport easier than ever are a hit with venture capitalists, so it’s not a surprise that young tech companies delivering home staples — living room sets, dining room tables, couches and more — are raising big dollars. From 2010 through 2017, venture investors have U.S.-based furniture startups with a little over $1.1 billion in funding across 96 known rounds. But that funding has not been spread equally over time, as the following chart shows: Total dollars funneled into U.S.-based furniture startups, according to Crunchbase, hit an all-time high of $432.7 million across 12 rounds in 2011. , an e-commerce site dedicated to selling furniture, raised a significant $165 million that year, accounting for more than a third of the total deal volume. But while funding hasn’t surpassed 2011 levels, from that year through 2015, round counts steadily climbed. During this period, investments into seed and early-stage startups made up more than 70 percent of known deals. Whether or not this cohort of seed and early-stage startups will act as fodder for late-stage investors is not yet clear. Before that happens, Stephen Kuhl thinks that there’s more work to be done. Kuhl, the CEO of , a company that sells furniture over the internet, told Crunchbase News that “selling traditional furniture made in China or Mexico isn’t innovative, and as such we wouldn’t expect to see a lot of venture funding.” But that doesn’t mean that venture interest in the sector is doomed. Kuhl added that “a new company has to offer a unique product, experience and brand that is altogether [10 times] better than traditional offerings. Expect the money to follow the new brands that truly shake up the status quo.” That may bear out. The funding data we examined tells one particular story: venture money has shown a preference for delivery and a consumer that doesn’t easily call the place they live in “home.” For city dwellers, modular, utilitarian couches are taking hold. And it’s increasingly clear you don’t have to leave your couch to purchase one. Let’s return to Burrow, which has raised a total of $19.2 million, according to Crunchbase. The startup has created a modular couch built for those who live in dense urban environments and may move often. “Our customers are reflective of larger trends in the market. They’re more likely to be renters rather than homeowners,” Kuhl explained. “They’re likely to move multiple times over the course of a few years, and they crave thoughtful, high-quality goods.” To account for this new type of customer, Burrow delivers each section of the couch in distinct packages. Burrow claims on its website that its direct to consumer business model and its ability to ship parts of couches, rather than one whole couch, removes “over 70 [percent] of standard shipping costs.” The couch also includes modern amenities such as a USB charger, and Burrow has also “launched an AR app that helps customers visualize a Burrow in their home,” according to Kuhl. However, Burrow isn’t completely eschewing the showroom as part of its selling strategy. In a podcast interview with TotalRetail, Kuhl noted that the startup has “partner showrooms” in co-working spaces and other retail locations in more than 20 cities. Of course, while modular design is helpful for city dwellers, there are those who enjoy a bit more of a personal twist. a Chicago-based startup, has raised $27.2 million to offer direct to consumer couches and dining room sets. And, according to Interior Define’s founder Rob Royer, its appeal is being driven by a new breed of consumers who are interested in brands that have “an authentic mission, deliver on a promised experience, and offer a real value proposition (not just a lower price).” That said, both of these options still require that the furniture be owned — an unnecessary burden if you move often or just like fresh looks without the commitment. Through , customers can subscribe to a whole living room, bedroom or dining room for as low as $35 a month. According to Crunchbase, the New York-based startup has raised $3.5 million from established venture firms such as Y Combinator and Kleiner Perkins. There are also startups looking to simply help brands sell more furniture by using artificial intelligence and augmented reality. One such startup, , has raised $2.5 million for an app that identifies furniture by image as well as style and pricing preferences. In general, streets, kitchens and even front doors are being claimed by venture-backed startups. What you sit on might as well be paid for, in part, by venture capitalists, too. |
Fortnite’s Summer Skirmish kicks off today, with $8 million prize pool | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 14 | Fortnite Battle Royale has swept the gaming world. Alongside its 125 million users and record-breaking Twitch streams, the game has also drawn many competitive players away from their usual titles to try their hand at Battle Royale. Today, that competitive play reaches at inflection point. At 4pm ET, will kick off, with $8 million going to tournament winners over the course of the competition, with a whopping $250K going to the winners of today’s tournament. This isn’t the first competitive Fortnite tournament we’ve seen. Celebrity Twitch streamer Ninja held a charity tournament in April, and Epic held a ProAm tournament combining competitive players and celebs who play Fortnite in June. Plus, sites like UMG and CMG have been holding smaller tournaments since Fortnite first rose to popularity. And then there are $20K Fortnite Friday tournaments for streamers held by UMG. But today, the ante has most certainly been upped. This will be one of the highest paying Fortnite tournaments to date, and is yet just a small fraction of Epic Games’ for competitive play this year. For some context, Dota 2 (previously the biggest competitive esports title out there) had a for the International Championship tournament in 2017, with the winners taking home $10.8 million. Call of Duty, one of the most popular titles over the last decade, is only paying out $1.5 million for its own Champs tournament this summer. In other words, Fortnite is catching up quickly to the competitive gaming scene, not only in terms of talent but money. Epic Games’ Fortnite pulled in a record-breaking $318 million in June alone. In fact, Battle Royale is generating so much revenue for Epic that the company is . But with that growth comes increased scrutiny. Though the company is passing along its fortunes to developers on the Unreal Engine and competitive players, some have noticed situations in which Epic might have been a bit stingy. Fortnite should put the actual rap songs behind the dances that make so much money as Emotes. Black creatives created and popularized these dances but never monetized them. Imagine the money people are spending on these Emotes being shared with the artists that made them — Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) The stream for Fortnite Summer Skirmish begins at 4pm ET and is embedded below: |
iFixit finds dust covers in latest MacBook Pro keyboard | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 7 | 14 | Apple released a refreshed MacBook Pro this week and top among the new features is a tweaked keyboard. Apple says its quieter than the last version and . But something else: thin, silicone barriers that could improve the keyboard’s reliability. This is big news. Users have long reported the butterfly switch keyboard found in MacBook Pros were less reliable than past models. There are countless reports of dust and lint and crumbs causing keys to stick or fail. Personally, I have not had any issues, but many at TechCrunch have. To date Apple has yet to issue a recall for the keyboard.. iFixit found a thin layer of rubberized material covering the new butterfly mechanism. The repair outlet also points to an Apple patent for this exact technology that’s designed to “prevent and/or alleviate contaminant ingress.” According to Apple, which held a big media unveiling for new models, the changes to the keyboard were designed to address the loud clickity-clack and not the keyboard’s tendency to get mucked up by dust. And that makes sense, too. If Apple held an event and said “We fixed the keyboards” it would mean Apple was admitting something was wrong with the keyboards. Instead Apple held an event and said “We made the keyboards quieter” admitting the past keyboards were loud, and not faulty. We just got our review unit and will report back on the keyboard’s reliability after a day or two at the beach. Because science. |
PayU acquires Zooz to take on international payment services | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | A week after PayPal led a in the cross-border payment specialist PPRO, one of its big competitors in the developing world has announced an acquisition of its own in the same space. — the payments division of Naspers that is sometimes described as the PayPal of the developing world — has acquired , a startup based out of Israel that provides an API to merchants that lets them accept a variety of payments depending on the market. The two had already been working together — specifically to provide PayU payment options to merchants in markets where PayU is active — and the plan will be to integrate the services further to enable PayU to step deeper into the cross-border payment services space, potentially even by enabling the integration of the payment methods of competitors as part of the mix of payment options. “In the choice between building a closed walled garden and open platform, we decided to go with the second model,” PayU’s CEO Laurent le Moal said in an interview. “The reality is that you need to be neutral and work with everyone.” PayU will also invest in adding further features to the Zooz platform, such as fraud management (which you could argue is ), real-time reporting and smart routing. Zooz’s whole team of 70 will be joining, including co-founders Oren Levy (CEO) and Ronen Morecki (CTO), who will respectively take senior roles at PayU as business development with larger merchants, and CTO of innovation. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but PayU has said that this deal brings its total spend on acquisitions and investments to about $350 million to date. That includes , investing €100 million (between and several . Doing the math, this potentially puts this deal at a range of between $50 million and $100 million. was founded in 2010 and had raised , from investors that include Target Global Ventures, Fang Fund, iAngels, Kreos Capital and existing investors Blumberg Capital, lool ventures, Rhodium, Claltech (Access Industries’ Israeli tech vehicle), XSeed Capital, CampOne Ventures and angel investor Eilon Tirosh. Similar to PPRO, the company in which PayPal invested earlier this month, Zooz’s service addresses the widespread fragmentation that exists in payments globally. While credit cards are very much the norm in the US, globally they account for just under 20 percent of all e-commerce transactions, with consumers and businesses in different geographies developing their own localised payment methods and preferences. For example, , or also play big roles. This can be a problem for a merchant that is based in one country but interested in selling to people in another — an opportunity estimated to be worth $994 billion globally — if it doesn’t accept whatever the local payment method happens to be. Zooz addresses this by providing an API to merchants that gives them the option of a number of payment providing companies and methods so that they can enable the most popular variety of payment options to buyers depending on the market. It will be worth watching whether payment companies will continue to be happy integrating with Zooz after its sale to PayU is complete. The fact that Zooz already integrates with different payment options, and itself is not a payment services provider, was one reason why PayU was interested in it. At a time when there are multiple options for payment methods, including PayU itself, there is potentially an opportunity to be able to make revenues by trying to play in as many of those transactions as possible. Notably, PayU already lets people integrate some 250 methods into its own wallet, and it says it’s the leading online payment service provider in 16 markets out of the 17 in which it is active.. Zooz potentially will be boosting that footprint with more than just a platform that enables multiple payment options, but the transaction data and analytics that come with those transactions, which can become useful for other services in other parts of the business. “The unique contribution we bring to PayU is an advanced technological layer which not only helps merchants worldwide to upscale their operations and provide a better customer experience, but also offers analytics and optimization capabilities that equip them with unprecedented insights,” noted Levy, Zooz’s CEO. |
Reminder: Other people’s lives are not fodder for your feeds | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 14 | You should cringe when you read that hashtag. Because it’s a reminder that people are being socially engineered by technology platforms to objectify and spy on each other for voyeuristic pleasure and profit. The short version of the story attached to the cringeworthy hashtag is this: Earlier this month an individual, called Rosey Blair, spent all the hours of a plane flight using her smartphone and social media feeds to invade the privacy of her seat neighbors — publicly gossiping about the lives of two strangers. Her speculation was set against a backdrop of rearview creepshots, with a few barely there scribbles added to blot out actual facial features. Even as an entire privacy invading narrative was being spun unknowingly around them. #PlanePrivacyInvasion would be a more fitting hashtag. Or #MoralVacuumAt35000ft And yet our youthful surveillance society started with a far loftier idea associated with it: Citizen journalism. Once we’re all armed with powerful smartphones and ubiquitously fast Internet there will be no limits to the genuinely important reportage that will flow, we were told. There will be no way for the powerful to withhold the truth from the people. At least that was the nirvana we were sold. What did we get? Something that looks much closer to mass manipulation. A tsunami of ad stalking, intentionally fake news and social media-enabled demagogues expertly appropriating these very same tools by gamifying mind-less, ethically nil algorithms. Meanwhile, masses of ordinary people + ubiquitous smartphones + omnipresent social media feeds seems, for the most part, to be resulting in a kind of mainstream attention deficit disorder. Yes, there is citizen journalism — such as people recording and broadcasting everyday experiences of aggression, racism and sexism, for example. Experiences that might otherwise go unreported, and which are definitely underreported. That is certainly important. But there are also these telling moments of #hashtaggable ethical blackout. As a result of what? Let’s call it the lure of ‘citizen clickbait’ — as people use their devices and feeds to mimic the worst kind of tabloid celebrity gossip ‘journalism’ by turning their attention and high tech tools on strangers, with (apparently) no major motivation beyond the simple fact that they can. Because technology is enabling them. Social norms and common courtesy should kick in and prevent this. But social media is pushing in an unequal and opposite direction, encouraging users to turn anything — even strangers’ lives — into raw material to be repackaged as ‘content’ and flung out for voyeuristic entertainment. It’s life reflecting commerce. But a particularly insidious form of commerce that does not accept editorial let alone ethical responsibility, has few (if any) moral standards, and relies, for continued function, upon stripping away society’s collective sense of privacy in order that these self-styled ‘sharing’ (‘taking’ is closer to the mark) platforms can swell in size and profit. But it’s even worse than that. Social media as a data-mining, ad-targeting enterprise relies upon eroding our in privacy. So these platforms worry away at that by trying to disrupt our understanding of what privacy means. Because if you were to consider what another person thinks or feels — even for a millisecond — you might not post whatever piece of ‘content’ you had in mind. For the platforms it’s far better if you just forget to think. Facebook’s business is all about applying engineering ingenuity to eradicate the thoughtful friction of personal and societal conscience. That’s why, for instance, it uses facial recognition technology to automate content identification — meaning there’s almost no opportunity for individual conscience to kick in and pipe up to quietly suggest that publicly tagging others in a piece of content isn’t actually the right thing to do. Because it’s polite to ask permission first. But Facebook’s antisocial automation pushes people away from to ask for permission. There’s no button provided for that. The platform encourages us to forget all about the existence of common courtesies. So we should not be at all surprised that such fundamental abuses of corporate power are themselves trickling down to infect the people who use and are exposed to these platforms’ skewed norms. Viral episodes like #PlaneBae demonstrate that the same sense of is being actively passed onto the users these platforms prey on and feed off — and is then getting beamed out, like radiation, to harm the people around them. The damage is collective when societal norms are undermined. Social media’s ubiquity means almost everyone works in marketing these days. Most people are marketing their own lives — posting photos of their pets, their kids, the latte they had this morning, the hipster gym where they work out — having been nudged to perform this unpaid labor by the platforms that profit from it. The irony is that most of this work is being done for free. Only the platforms are being paid. Though there are some people making a very modern living; the new breed of ‘life sharers’ who willingly polish, package and post their professional existence as a brand of aspiration lifestyle marketing. Social media’s gift to the world is that anyone can be a self-styled model now, and every passing moment a fashion shoot for hire — thanks to the largess of highly accessible social media platforms providing almost anyone who wants it with their own self-promoting shopwindow in the world. Plus all the promotional tools they could ever need. Just step up to the glass and shoot. And then your vacation beauty spot becomes just another backdrop for the next aspirational selfie. Although those aquamarine waters can’t be allowed to dampen or disrupt photo-coifed tresses, nor sand get in the camera kit. In any case, the makeup took hours to apply and there’s the next selfie to take… What does the unchronicled life of these professional platform performers look like? A mess of preparation for projecting perfection, presumably, with life’s quotidian business stuffed higgledy piggledy into the margins — where they actually sweat and work to deliver the lie of a lifestyle dream. Because these are also fakes — beautiful fakes, but fakes nonetheless. We live in an age of entitled pretence. And while it may be totally fine for an individual to construct a fictional narrative that dresses up the substance of their existence, it’s certainly not okay to pull anyone else into your pantomime. Not without asking permission first. But the problem is that social media is now so powerfully omnipresent its center of gravity is actively trying to pull everyone in — and its antisocial impacts frequently spill out and over the rest of us. And they rarely if ever ask for consent. What about the people who don’t want their lives to be appropriated as digital windowdressing? ho don’t want to participate in this game at all — neither to personally profit from it, nor to have their privacy trampled by it? The problem is the push and pull of platforms against privacy has become so aggressive, so virulent, that societal norms that protect and benefit us all — like empathy, like respect — are getting squeezed and sucked in. The ugliness is especially visible in these ‘viral’ moments when other people’s lives are snatched and consumed voraciously on the hoof — as yet more content for rapacious feeds. Think too of the fitness celebrity who posted a creepshot + commentary about a less slim person working out at their gym. Or the YouTuber parents who monetize videos of their kids’ distress. Or the men who post creepshots of women eating in public — and try to claim it’s an online art project rather than what it actually is: A privacy violation and misogynistic attack. Or, on a public street in London one day, I saw a couple of giggling teenage girls watching a man at a bus stop who was clearly mentally unwell. Pulling out a smartphone, one girl hissed to the other: “We’ve got to put this on YouTube.” For platforms built by technologists without thought for anything other than growth, everything is a potential spectacle. Everything is a potential post. So they press on their users to think less. And they profit at society’s expense. It’s only now, after social media has embedded itself everywhere, that platforms are being called out for their ; for building systems that encourage abject mindlessness in users — and serve up content so bleak it represents . Human have always told stories. Weaving our own narratives is both how we communicate and how we make sense of personal experience — creating order out of events that are often disorderly, random, even chaotic. The human condition demands a degree of pattern-spotting for survival’s sake; so we can pick our individual path out of the gloom. But platforms are exploiting that innate aspect of our character. And we, as individuals, need to get much, much better at spotting what they’re doing to us. We need to recognize how they are manipulating us; what they are encouraging us to do — with each new feature nudge and . We need to understand their underlying pull. The fact they profit by setting us as spies against each other. We need to wake up, personally and collectively, to social media’s antisocial impacts. Perspective should not have to come at the expense of other people getting hurt. Additionally, I’ve not earned anything off of this. And do not wish to. The greatest gift I’ve been given – when I shouldn’t have received anything to begin with – is perspective. — Rosey Blair (@roseybeeme) This week the women whose privacy was thoughtlessly repackaged as public entertainment when she was branded and broadcast as #PlaneBae — and who has suffered harassment and yet more unwelcome attention as a direct result — gave a statement to . “#PlaneBae is not a romance — it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent,” she writes. “Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.” And as a strategy to push against the antisocial incursions of social media, remembering to respect people’s privacy is a great place to start. |
Tesla reportedly asked suppliers for cash back to help it reach profitability | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | In an unusual move, Tesla reportedly asked some suppliers to return part of the money it’s paid them since 2016, including for past work. According to , which reviewed a memo Tesla sent to a supplier last week, the electric auto maker said it is asking suppliers for refunds to help it reach profitability. This stokes concerns about the company’s cash flow, despite that it will be profitable in the third and fourth quarters of this year. After months of production delays for the Model 3, Tesla recently hit a major milestone, announcing earlier this month that it . According to the Wall Street Journal, the memo, sent by one of Tesla’s global supply managers, said the company is requesting back a “meaningful” portion of its payments since 2016. Tesla described it as not only important for Tesla’s operations, but an investment in the company’s long-term growth that will also benefit its suppliers. Tesla declined to comment about the memo to the Wall Street Journal, but said it is seeking price reductions on some projects, including several dating back to 2016 and some which haven’t been completed. It also told the newspaper that requests like the memo are standard in procurement negotiations between auto manufacturers and their suppliers. But if Tesla is indeed asking suppliers for money back on past work to help it achieve profitability, as opposed to reduced prices on future work, it adds to concerns about company’s cash flows. It may also make some suppliers reluctant to work with Tesla. As manufacturing consultant Dennis Virag told the Wall Street Journal, “it’s simply ludicrous and it just shows that Tesla is desperate right now. They’re worried about their profitability but they don’t care about their suppliers’ profitability.” TechCrunch has contacted Tesla for comment. |
Get passes to Disrupt SF 2018 before prices increase on July 25 | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Don’t look now, but July 25 is sneaking up mighty fast. Why should you care? That’s the day prices go up on all passes to , which takes place on September 5-7. If you want to attend one of the best tech conferences for all-things startup and — depending on the type of pass you select — save up to $1,200 in the process, then stop what you’re doing and go . Seriously, why wouldn’t you? You simply don’t want to miss this event, and we’ll tell you why. Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — the largest Disrupt event we’ve ever produced — is the Disrupt event happening in North America this year. We’re dedicating our time, resources and talent to making this the biggest, boldest Disrupt show ever. More than 10,000 attendees will descend on Moscone Center West (our new venue with three times the floor space) to see the latest technologies from hundreds of early-stage startups. More than 1,200 of those startups — along with other exhibitors — will showcase a staggering array of technology in . All tech industries are welcome to exhibit, but you’ll find a special focus on these categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics/IoT/Hardware. You’ll enjoy three programming-packed days of presentations from world-class speakers — known movers and shakers, plus rising stars, too — who will share their insight and experience. You’ll hear from the likes of Marillyn Hewson, the chairman, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin; Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund; and Mike Judge of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” fame. You’ll find . We also went full tilt on by increasing the prize money to a tidy $100,000 in non-equity cash. We’re hard at work evaluating the applicants — it’s a highly selective process — but we can assure you that this startup pitch competition will be an epic battle for the ages. Boo-ya! If you’re an early-stage startup founder or looking to invest in one, then you need to know about . It’s our free, curated business match-making service that helps connect founders with investors who share similar business goals. You’ll receive an invitation to CrunchMatch when you . There’s so much more to do, see and experience at Disrupt SF 2018, including interactive workshops and , our , unparalleled networking opportunities and, of course, the TechCrunch After Party. takes place on September 5-7, and you have until July 25 at midnight PST before our pass prices increase. Avoid buyers’ remorse and . |
null | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 7 | 13 | null |
Tall Poppy aims to make online harassment protection an employee benefit | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | For the nearly 20 percent of Americans , there’s a new company launching in the latest batch of Y Combinator called that’s giving them the tools to fight back. Co-founded by Leigh Honeywell and Logan Dean, Tall Poppy grew out of the work that Honeywell, a security specialist, had been doing to hunt down trolls in online communities since at least 2008. That was the year that Honeywell first went after a particularly noxious specimen who spent his time sending death threats to women in various Linux communities. Honeywell cooperated with law enforcement to try and track down the troll and eventually pushed the commenter into hiding after he was visited by investigators. That early success led Honeywell to assume a not-so-secret identity as a security expert by day for companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Slack, and a defender against online harassment when she wasn’t at work. Honeywell started working one-on-one with victims of online harassment that would be referred to her directly. As those referrals began to climb (eventually numbering in the low hundreds of cases), Honeywell began to think about ways to systematize her approach so it could reach the widest number of people possible. Primarily, Tall Poppy will provide an educational toolkit to help people lock down their own presence and do incident response properly, says Honeywell. The company will work with customers to gain an understanding of how to protect themselves, but also to be aware of the laws in each state that they can use to protect themselves and punish their attackers. Based on research conducted by the Pew Foundation, there are millions of people in the U.S. alone, who could benefit from the type of service that Tall Poppy aims to provide. According to a 2017 study, “nearly one-in-five Americans (18%) have been subjected to particularly severe forms of harassment online, such as physical threats, harassment over a sustained period, sexual harassment or stalking.” The women and minorities that bear the brunt of these assaults (and, let’s be clear, it is primarily women and minorities who bear the brunt of these assaults), face very real consequences from these virtual assaults. Take the case of the when an ex-boyfriend sent stolen photographs of her to the New York Post and her boss. In a powerful piece for she wrote about the consequences of her harassment. As a result, city investigators escorted me out of my school pending an investigation. The subsequent investigation quickly showed that I was set up by my abuser. Still, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration demoted me from principal to teacher, slashed my pay in half, and sent me to a , the DOE’s notorious reassignment centers where hundreds of unwanted employees languish until they are fired or forgotten. In 2016, I took a yearlong medical leave from the DOE to treat extreme post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Since the leave was almost entirely unpaid, I took loans against my pension to get by. I ran out of money in early 2017 and reported back to the department, where I was quickly sent to an . There the city tried to terminate me. I was charged with eight counts of misconduct despite the conclusion by all parties that my ex-partner uploaded the photos to the computer and that there was no evidence to back up his salacious story. I was accused of bringing “widespread negative publicity, ridicule and notoriety” to the school system, as well as “failing to safeguard a Department of Education computer” from my abusive ex. According to cyber stalking victims routinely need to take time off from work, or change or quit their job or school. And the stalking costs $1200 on average to even attempt to address the harassment, the study said. Tall Poppy’s co-founders That was in early 2015. But, afraid that striking out on her own would affect her citizenship status (Honeywell is Canadian), she and Dean waited before making the move to finally start the company. What ultimately convinced them was the election of Donald Trump. “After the election I had a heart-to-heart with myself… And I decided that I could move back to Canada, but I wanted to stay and fight,” Honeywell says. Initially, Honeywell took on a year-long fellowship with the American Civil Liberties Union to pick up on work around privacy and security that had been handled by Chris Soghoian who had left to take a position with Senator Ron Wyden’s office. But the idea for Tall Poppy remained, and once Honeywell received her green card, she was “chomping at the bit to start this company.” A few months in the company already has businesses that have signed up for the services and tools it provides to help companies protect their employees. Some platforms have taken small steps against online harassment. Facebook, for instance, so that the social network can monitor when similar images are distributed online and contact a user to see if the distribution is consensual. Meanwhile, Twitter has made a series of changes to its algorithm to combat online abuse. To underscore how pervasive a problem online harassment is, o |
Rental attacks mean that blockchains must evolve or die | Abe Othman | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Blockchain technologies have a well-earned reputation for hacking and fraud, but In May and June, these second-tier cryptocurrencies suffered from where attackers rented more processing power than the honest participants of the network, enabling them to control the transaction register and engage in nefarious behavior. For instance, an attacker could steal from an exchange by sending a deposit of compromised cryptocurrency, cashing it out then striking the initial deposit from the public ledger. from my friend and occasional collaborator , an economics professor at the , argues that any blockchain with reasonably low transaction fees is fundamentally vulnerable to 51% attacks. The risk of these attacks was known, informally, from the earliest days of cryptocurrency, and to counter this risk exchanges do not immediately credit deposits. Instead, they wait for deposit transactions to “age” on the blockchain in an escrow period. The assumption is that it would be hard for an attacker to control more computational power than honest miners for the whole escrow period. Budish tests this assumption through a sophisticated simulation. He finds that, because it is easier for an attacker with majority compute capability to mine blocks than the honest network, escrow periods provide far less protection than has been thought previously. Budish’s simulations suggest that increasing escrow periods 100-fold would generally increase the cost to an attacker by less than 10 times. The most pointed criticism of Budish’s argument is that . The average Bitcoin transaction fee is about a dollar; Budish suggests that these fees should be 100x higher (or more) to secure Bitcoin’s blockchain. , a website that tracks the vulnerability of cryptocurrencies to 51% attacks, provides an answer for why Bitcoin appears secure while other currencies are not: only a small fraction of the mining capability of the Bitcoin network is available to rent. Bitcoin remains secure because there is a great deal of scarcity in the market for latest-generation mining equipment, such as the expensive ASIC chips that have driven . Looking at the hourly attack-rental prices on Crypto 51 (generally only a few thousand dollars) it is easy to draw the conclusion that every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin and (perhaps) Ethereum should simply not exist because it is too easy for scammers to destabilize them. Even with the recent collapse in cryptocurrency prices, these second-tier coins still represent tens of billions of dollars of market capitalization. The protections that Bitcoin enjoys come from the fact that these ASIC miners are hard to get, but there is no law that says this need always be the case. now; if they were to glut the market with cheap, rentable Bitcoin mining rigs, the result would probably be the mass destabilization of the Bitcoin network. The threat of rental attacks means that Proof-of-Work blockchains must evolve or die. Ethereum is in the process of rolling out just such an evolution, called . Casper is a mechanism for adding new blocks to the Ethereum blockchain (“minting”) wherein Ethereum holders will lock up (“stake”) some of their ether and use those stakes as bonds to vouch for newly mined blocks. If a staker acts honestly, they will get rewarded with a fraction of the transaction fees in the ecosystem. If they act dishonestly and vouch for blocks that could be part of an attack, Casper confiscates a large amount of their staked ether. The threat of confiscation means that any rental attack on the system would require buying a substantial amount of ether, significantly driving up the cost of an attack. Casper would be a big change to the way Ethereum works, and it . To be fair, it is not a finished product yet in at least two respects. First, the parameters that define the economic benefits and potential losses for stakers are still in flux. It is important that the parameters of Casper are set attractively enough that a significant fraction of ether would be staked, because the strength of the system would be proportional to the amount of honestly staked ether. And, although Casper uses Proof-of-Stake for adding blocks to the Ethereum blockchain, it still requires Proof-of-Work mining to create new blocks of transactions. That means Casper will not fix the power consumption or GPU scarcity issues that have been a consequence of Ethereum’s rise. Ideally, Casper would be a stepping stone to a purely Proof-of-Stake system, one in which we don’t need farms of computers wasting energy to solve meaningless computational problems. Budish’s economic argument suggests that any Proof-of-Work blockchain with low transaction fees will be vulnerable to rental attacks. If blockchain technologies have a future, it will not be from Proof-of-Work. The replacement of Proof-of-Work with better, more robust, more energy-efficient technology will be the challenge of the second chapter of blockchain development. |
Here are some of the movie and TV trailers to come out of San Diego Comic-Con 2018 | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Over the course of a weekend we got a glimpse at some of the coming seasons and movies for various sci-fi, superhero, and other types of highly-anticipated fan-favorite franchises from the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Here’s a quick selection of some of the ones shown over the weekend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp_RnJcb8Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5dIwGAYcWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBaKVC1wIW4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoSjI3N3_rA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ65JKBLoq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw30raSbrhE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REO2otlUp0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XF09xzl_T8 |
Inside the rise and reign of supergiant venture capital rounds | Jason Rowley | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | There was a time not so long ago when nine-figure venture capital rounds weren’t a near-daily feature of tech business news. But now funding rounds of $100 million or more cross the wires with . The is now the new normal. This is attributable, in part, to billions of dollars flowing into new venture capital funds — the largest of which are raised by the oldest, most entrenched firms — and competition from relative newcomers, like . Q2 2018 may have set new records for worldwide VC deal and dollar volume in this post-dot com cycle, but that belies an important fact: Investors are dumping the bulk of capital into a relatively small number of companies. The rise of supergiant rounds wound up in a “takeover” of the market. The chart below shows the proportion of capital raised in rounds of $100 million or more, tracing the period between Q1 2017 and the end of Q2 2018. Just a little over a year ago, in Q1 2017, nine and 10-figure venture capital deals accounted for a healthy 35 percent of global dollar volume. Five quarters later, in Q2 2018, $100 million-and-up deals accounted for a majority — some 61 percent — of equity funding into upstart technology companies. It’s not just that these mega-rounds are eclipsing smaller counterparts as a percent of dollar volume totals. Supergiant rounds also appear to be driving most of the growth in reported dollar volume, as the chart below shows. Between Q1 2017 and Q2 2018, reported dollar volume in sub-$100 million deals grew by around 42 percent. By that same token, dollar volume in nine and 10-figure venture deals ballooned by about 325 percent over that stretch of time. Granted, this is all based on recorded data in Crunchbase. And like all private-market databases, Crunchbase is subject to some reporting delays. Those delays primarily affect seed and early-stage rounds, which tend to be smaller. Still though, unless billions of dollars in small rounds get added to recent quarters, these figures are likely to remain relatively stable. The obvious question to ask here: Why are $100+ million rounds more prevalent these days, and what explains their slow-motion takeover of the global venture capital market? As with most things, the answer is, “it’s complicated, and it depends.” The rise and reign of supergiant rounds is a phenomenon that emerges from a confluence of different factors: It really does seem like mega-rounds are here to stay. And, based on just the last couple of weeks, it looks like the third quarter is likely to see a continuation of the trend. Here are just a few examples from the first weeks of Q3: e-cigarette maker , self-driving car company , Chinese cafe chain and scooter and bike giant Lime raised . Bigger funds are able to invest in bigger rounds. And as competitors raise big rounds, it becomes more strategically important for companies to also raise big rounds. It’s a positive feedback loop. What stops the fundraising arms race, though, remains to be seen. |
Snapchat will shut down Snapcash, forfeiting to Venmo | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Snapcash ended up as a way to pay adult performers for private content over Snapchat, not just a way to split bills with friends. But Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. Code buried in Snapchat’s Android app includes a “Snapcash deprecation message” that displays “Snapcash will no longer be available after %s [date]”. Shutting down the feature will bring an end to Snapchat’s four-year partnership with Square to power the feature for sending people money. Snapcash may have become more of a liability than a utility. With apps like Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Square Cash itself, there were plenty of other ways to pay back friends for drinks or Ubers, so Snapcash may have seen low legitimate usage. Meanwhile, a quick surfaced plenty of offers of erotic content in exchange for payments through the feature. It may have been safer for Snapchat to ditch Snapcash than risk PR problems over its misuse. TechCrunch tipster provided the below screenshot of Snapchat’s code to TechCrunch. When presented with the code and asked if Snapcash would shut down, a Snapchat spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that it would, explaining: “Yes, we’re discontinuing the Snapcash feature as of August 30, 2018. Snapcash was our first product created in partnership with another company – Square. We’re thankful for all the Snapchatters who used Snapcash for the last four years and for Square’s partnership!” The spokesperson noted that users would be notified in-app and through the support site soon. [Update 7/23: Square also issued a statement to TechCrunch, tell us that, yes, it’s ending the partnership with Snapchat at the end of next month. Aiming to show its Square Cash product is still alive, a spokeperson told us “With more than 7 million monthly customers, Cash App continues to see strong growth, while delivering utility and flexibility for individuals’ money. We continue to focus on building new features that address the financial needs of our customers as we work to expand financial access for all.” Snapcash gave Snapchat a way to get users to connect payment methods to the app. That’s increasingly important as the where you can shop without leaving the app. Having payment info on file is what makes buying things through Snapchat easier than the web and draws brands to use Snapchat storefronts. We’ll see how Snapchat plans evolve its commerce strategy without this driver. Earlier this month, TechCrunch revealed that Snapchat’s code contained mentions of a project codenamed “eagle” that’s a camera search feature. It was designed to allow users to scan an object or barcode with their Snapchat camera and see product results in Amazon. But since our report, mentions of Amazon have disappeared from the code. It’s unclear what will happen in the future, but camera search could give Snapchat new utility and monetization options. Snapcash won’t be a part of that future, though. Given Snapchat’s cost-cutting efforts , its desperate need to attract and retain advertisers to hit revenue estimates its missed, and its persistent bad rap as a sexting app, it couldn’t afford to support unnecessary features or another scandal. |
Trill Project aims to be a safe community for people to express their true selves | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Trill Project, founded by three high school girls, recently launched out of private beta to help people safely express themselves online. For those unfamiliar with the word “trill,” it’s a combination of “true” and “real.” An investor described it to me as a positive Yik Yak. began as a community for teenagers, especially for transgender teens who felt like they didn’t have a safe space to be themselves. It has since expanded it to a platform for everyone to express anything from their struggles with addiction, mental illnesses to workplace issues. “We’re reinventing the narrative of social networking and we kind of elevate social media by being private and anonymous,” Trill Project co-founder Georgia Messinger told TechCrunch over the phone. On Trill Project, everything is anonymous (there are no usernames) and monitored by 50 moderators around the clock. Trill Project also has machine learning algorithms as work to learn from reported posts to be able to recognize problematic posts in the future. And if someone feels unsafe or thinks someone has figured out their trill identity, they can always just change it. In addition to wanting to prevent bullying and harassment, Trill Project wants to be helpful to those suggesting they want to harm themselves or those reporting being hurt by others. That’s why Trill Project has partnered with non-profit organizations that specifically support people experiencing mental health crises. Trill Project will always be free to the users, but the idea is to possibly license its machine learning algorithms, sell ad space and sponsorships for communities, Trill Project co-founder Ari Sokolov told TechCrunch. Anonymous social networks, of course, are nothing new. Startups like Whisper, Secret and Yik Yak have all tried . “People have tried before but as teenagers in particular, we really are closer to our users,” Messinger said. “It gives us access and insight those companies have been lacking.” Trill Project is currently participating in , an accelerator for high schoolers. Through the accelerator, Trill Project has received $50,000 in funding. Next month, Trill Project intends to start raising a seed round. |
Information wants to be siloed | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | Data, they say, is the new oil, and open public data is the new commons. Give the people the facts, and they will use them to make informed decisions. Right? Except that’s not the bureaucratic instinct. Bureaucrats fear the free flow of information. And all too often they’ll try to quench it by intoning the magic word “ ,” and if that doesn’t work, “ “, in the most idiotic ways and places possible. This is a wide and general rule: whenever some tinpot official says something painfully dumb has to be done Because Security, the odds are better than even that they’re lazy, lying, and/or incompetent. (Think of this every time e.g. your work password expires and you’re required to change it.) There are so many specific examples that it’s hard to choose just one — but, conveniently, recently an old friend of mine stumbled across an example of this so vivid and unforgettable that I can’t write about it. The situation is explored in depth , but to summarize: Gavin Chait, an independent development economist, asked local authorities in the UK to provide data on business properties registered in those areas, including whether those properties were vacant or not. A fifth of them were already publishing that information to their open-data websites; easy enough. The value of that information should be obvious: determining economic trends over time, and making predictions; tracking the retailpocalypse, if and when it occurs; measuring the lifespan of businesses; more precisely estimating values and the timing of business real-estate development and investment; etcetera. Quite dry, if you ask me, but the kind(s) of thing which economists love. So, naturally, Westminster City Council basically responded by claiming that this kind of open data would . No, wait, it gets worse! The forms of malicious activities which they claim would be encouraged by the open publication of registered business property data include, as mentioned, terrorism, but also identity fraud, money laundering, drug consumption, crack houses, and … wait for it … the horror! the horror! … “meeting places for young people, and rave parties.” Obviously the vast pool of nefarious young people, terrorists, crack house builders, and ravers who are apparently poised to invade, once this Maginot Line of obscurity is breached, would never be able to find any vacant properties without the publication of this data. Truly, Westminster City Council is holding back a veritable tsunami of terror, identity theft, and drug abuse by keeping this toxically dangerous data away from our collective prying eyes. It’s absurd, it’s painfully stupid, and I hope that Gavin’s forthcoming appeal overturns this risible idiocy. But it also an example of two worrying trends: locking up data which should be open, and the notion that the claim “it’s for security reasons,” no matter how ludicrous those reasons may be, is an unchallengeable magic spell which trumps any other consideration. Public data should be a commons, not a treasure hoarded behind lock and key. But data be the new oil. I suspect that’s one big reason why bureaucrats instinctively want to keep it to themselves. (Before you quote “information wants to be free” at me, please keep in mind that that’s only half of what Stewart Brand said.) “It’s for security,” though — that’s what really enrages me. No one should ever get to shut down conversation with the magic word “security.” Indeed, the opposite should be true: that claim should require far more supporting evidence than any other justification. Let’s hope we get to live in that world some day. |
The blockchain begins finding its way in the enterprise | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | middle of a major hype cycle at the moment, and that makes it hard for many people to take it seriously, but if you look at the core digital ledger technology, there is tremendous potential to change the way we think about trust in business. Yet these are still extremely early days and there are a number of missing pieces that need to be in place for the blockchain to really take off in the enterprise. Suffice it to say that it has caught the fancy of major enterprise vendors with the likes of SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon all looking at providing some level of Blockchain as a service for customers. While the level of interest in blockchain remains fluid, of 400 large companies by UK firm Juniper Research found 6 in 10 respondents were “either actively considering, or are in the process of, deploying blockchain technology.” In spite of the growing interest we have seen over the last 12-18 months, blockchain lacks some basic underlying system plumbing, the kind any platform needs to thrive in an enterprise setting. Granted, some companies and the open source community are recognizing this as an opportunity and trying to build it, but many challenges remain. Even though the blockchain clearly has many possible use cases, some people still have trouble separating it from its digital currency roots, and , who helped develop Open Stack while working at NASA and now is head of Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, sees this as a real problem, one that could hold back the progress of blockchain as an enterprise technology. He believes that right now bitcoin and blockchain are akin to Napster and peer to peer (P2P) technology in the late 90s. When Napster made it easy to share MP3 files illegally on a P2P network, McKenty believes, it set back business usage of P2P for a decade because of the bad connotations associated with the popular use case. “You couldn’t talk about Napster [and P2P] and have it be a positive conversation. Bitcoin has done that to blockchain. It will take us time to recover what bitcoin has done to get to something that is really useful [with blockchain],” he said. Photo by Spencer Platt/Newsmakers – Getty Images A of over 1000 participants in 7 countries found that outside the US in particular this perception held true. “When asked if they believed that blockchain was just “a database for money” with little application outside of financial services, just 18 percent of US respondents agreed with that statement versus 61 percent of respondents in France and the United Kingdom,” the report stated. Richie Etwaru, founder and CEO and author of the book, sees it as a matter of trust. Companies aren’t used to dealing from a position of trust. In fact, his book argues that the entire contract system exists because of a total lack of it. “The hurdle [to widespread blockchain adoption in the enterprise] is that those who have traditionally designed or transformed business models in large enterprise settings have systematically and habitually treated trust and transparency as second, sometimes third level characteristics of a business model. The raw material needed are the willingness and executive level alignment and harmonization around the notion that trust and transparency are the next differentiators,” Etwaru explained. Blockchain was originally created as a system to track bitcoin (digital currency) ownership, and it’s still used extensively for that purpose, but a trusted and immutable record has great utility to track virtually anything of value and enforce a set of rules. We have seen companies like po.et trying to use it , Hu-manity, which wants , and the from mine to store. Photo: LeoWolfert/Getty Images Rob May, who is CEO at Talla and whose company helped launch to track the authenticity of bots, says finding good use cases could help ultimately determine the technology’s success or failure. “Blockchain has a bunch of different use cases, and they are usually either all lumped together or poorly understood separately,” May said. He believes that in many instances today, companies don’t understand the advantages of blockchain, which he identifies as immutability, trust and tokenization, the latter of which can help finance blockchain initiatives (but which can also contribute to confusion with digital currency use cases). “Right now, businesses are missing real blockchain opportunities and instead throwing blockchain in places where it doesn’t belong. For example, they are trying to use it for smart contracts, and that stuff isn’t ready. They also try to use it for cases that require a lot of speed, and again blockchains aren’t ready,” he said. Finally, he says, if you don’t require immutability, trust and tokenization, you might want to consider a different approach other than blockchain. Like any network, identity will be at the core of any blockchain network because it is imperative that you understand whom you are communicating with. Charles Francis, a senior analyst at Accenture says for now blockchains will remain private for the most part, but authentication will become increasingly important as we eventually have blockchain-to-blockchain communications. Photo: NicoElNino/Getty Images “Initially blockchain-to-blockchain connections will be manually set up and you will manage your network in a private model and bad actors will be immediately obvious,” he explained. But he believes that we will require a system in place to ensure we are authentically who we say we are as we move beyond private networks. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and VP of Blockchain says that there will come a time when there are multiple networks and we will need to set up systems for them to communicate. “There won’t be one blockchain network to rule them all. It’s a very safe bet. Once you make that statement, these systems need to work together,” he said. “All [the different pieces of networks] need identity and the identity better play across networks. My identity on one network better be the same on another network,” he explained. For Etwaru it comes back to trust, and a trusted identity would be a natural extension of that. “Transformational blockchain use cases require a network of trading partners to start to operate in a more trusted and transparent way, not just one individual,” he said. All this said, there is still a steady march toward adoption in the enterprise. As Talla’s May says, there may be open questions, but that just represents a big opportunity for smart companies. “If you are interacting with a network instead of a single company, whose throat do you choke when something goes wrong? I think you will see many companies in the blockchain space do what Red Hat did for Linux. Enterprises need consulting help and better frameworks to think about how [blockchain] networks will work, since Ethereum isn’t a product per se in the traditional sense,” he said. Gil Perez, SVP for products and innovation, as well as head of digital customer initiatives at SAP says he’s seeing companies with real projects in production. “It is beyond just wanting to do something. We’re doing large scale implementations and pilots. For example, we did one in the pharmaceutical industry with over a billion transactions,” he said. In fact, SAP has a total of 65 companies working on various projects at different stages of progress at the moment. Perez says the next level of adoption will require a way to involve multiple parties, not just a single company, as with a supply chain example, which involves moving goods and paperwork across multiple countries involving many individuals. Photo: allanswart He also points out the importance of making sure there is good data because ultimately, if you have bad data in an immutable record, that is going to be a serious problem. That requires the companies involved to come together and agree to a common system to enter and agree upon each piece of information that moves through the system and that is a work in progress. May sees blockchain technology transforming the way we do business in the future and providing a more standard way of interacting than today’s hodgepodge of vendor approaches. “Now that blockchain is here, what if we could launch a standard and have shared marketplace by all apps in a space? So as a developer, you write your [application] add-on one time and it works with any [similar application] that supports that standard, and they share one giant marketplace. But how do you get them to share a marketplace? Blockchain and tokens provide decentralization and incentives such that, if you set the right rules, maybe you could do it. That could be transformational,” he said. As with any new technology, the more it scales the more the tools and adjacent technologies are required. We are still in the early stages of discovering what those are, and before the technology can take off in a big way, we will need more underlying infrastructure in place. If that happens, blockchain could be just as transformational as May suggests. |
MyEtherWallet’s secure login app is now in beta for iOS [Update: Now available for all] | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Popular crypto wallet service a limited beta version of its first companion mobile app, . If you’re a big MyEtherWallet user or just curious about crypto, you’ll want to get hold of the app. Since it’s in beta, you’ll need to head and follow the instructions to email the company to request access. A full launch for iOS and Android is expected in August. The MEW Connect app allows users to log into the service without typing their private key, just like hardware solutions such as Ledger or Trezor. That’s important because inputting sensitive information like a private key can lead to an account being compromised in the event of a phishing attack. , so the threat is very real. Unlike Ledger or Trezor, though, MEW Connect is free which could help encourage more people to adopt better security practices since MyEtherWallet.com is a much-trafficked website. The company says its domain sees upwards of 600,000 visitors each day. MyEtherWallet founder Kosala Hemachandra told TechCrunch that he hopes beta users will comb through the code and help find issues with the app before its wider release to all, and the arrival of the Android app. Those with bugs can submit them on HackerOne , where the rewards on offer range from $250 to $2,000. Beyond enabling a secure connection for MyEtherWallet.com users, the app could offer features including payments in the future, Hemachandra admitted, which could provide a major boost to the crypto industry as it aims to reach more mainstream attention. MyEtherWallet isn’t the only service supporting a connection app. MyCrypto.com, a service that broke away from MyEtherWallet earlier this year, . |
The quantum meltdown of encryption | Shlomi Dolev | 2,018 | 7 | 22 | The world stands at the cusp of one of the greatest breakthroughs in information technology. Huge leaps forward in all fields of computer science, from data analysis to machine learning, will result from this breakthrough. But like all of man’s technological achievements, from the combustion engine to nuclear power, harnessing quantum comes with potential dangers as well. Quantum computers have created a slew of unforeseen vulnerabilities in the very infrastructure that keeps the digital sphere safe. The underlying assumption behind nearly all encryption ciphers used today is that their complexity precludes any attempt by hackers to break them, as it would take years for even our most advanced conventional computers to do so. But quantum computing will change all of that. Quantum computers promise to bring computational power leaps and bounds ahead of our most advanced machines. Recently, scientists at Google began testing their cutting edge 72 qubit quantum computer. The researchers expect to demonstrate with this machine , or the ability to perform a calculation impossible with traditional computers. Today’s standard encryption techniques are based on what’s called Public Key Infrastructure or PKI, a set of protocols brought to the world of information technology in the 1970’s. PKI works by generating a complex cipher through random numbers that only the intended recipient of a given message, the one in possession of the private key, can decode. As a system of encoding data, PKI was sound and reliable. But in order to implement it as a method to be used in the real world, there was still one question that needed to be answered: how could individuals confirm the identity of a party reaching out and making a request to communicate? This vulnerability left the door open for cybercriminals to impersonate legitimate servers, or worse, insert themselves into a conversation between users and intercept communications between them, in what’s known as a . The industry produced a solution to this authentication problem in the form of digital certificates, electronic documents the contents of which can prove senders are actually who they claim to be. The submission of certificates at the initiation of a session allows the parties to know who it is they are about to communicate with. Today, trusted third party companies called Certificate Authorities, or CAs, create and provide these documents that are relied upon by everyone from private users to the biggest names in tech. The problem is that certificates themselves for their reliability, which, in the not too distant future, will be vulnerable to attack by quantum machines. Altered certificates could then be used by cyber criminals to fake their identities, completely undermining certificates as a method of authentication. Intel’s 17-qubit superconducting test chip for quantum computing has unique features for improved connectivity and better electrical and thermo-mechanical performance. (Credit: Intel Corporation) This isn’t the first time we’ve had to get creative when it comes to encryption. When Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, whose true identity is still unknown, revealed his revolutionary idea in a , he also introduced the beginnings of a unique peer-to-peer authentication system that today we call blockchain. The brilliantly innovative blockchain system at its core is an open ledger that records transactions between two parties in a permanent way without needing third-party authentication. Blockchain provided the global record-keeping network that has kept Nakamoto’s digital currency safe from fraudsters. Blockchain is based on the concept of decentralization, spreading the authentication process across a large body of users. No single piece of data can be altered without the alteration of all other blocks, which would require the collusion of the majority of the entire network. For years, blockchain and Bitcoin remained one and the same. About five years ago, innovators in the industry began to realize that blockchain could be used for more than just securing cryptocurrency. Altering the original system designed for Bitcoin could produce programs to be applied in a wide range of industries, from healthcare, to insurance, to political elections. Gradually, new decentralized systems began to emerge such as those of and . In 2015, one of the original contributors to the Bitcoin codebase Vitalik Buterin released his project also based on blockchain. What these new platforms added to the picture was the ability to record new types of data in addition to currency exchanges, such as loans and contractual agreements. The advantages of the blockchain concept quickly became apparent. By 2017, nearly were using blockchain to secure aspects of their operations. The number of industries incorporating decentralized systems continues to grow. The best solution for protecting encryption from our ever-growing processing power is integrating decentralization into Public Key Infrastructure. What this means essentially, is that instead of keeping digital certificates in one centralized location, which makes them vulnerable to being hacked and tampered with, they would be spread out in a world-wide ledger, one fundamentally impervious to alteration. A hacker attempting to modify certificates would be unable to pull off such a fraud, as it would mean changing data stored on enumerable diversified blocks spread out across the cyber sphere. Decentralization has already been proven as a highly effective way of protecting recorded data from tampering. Similarly, using a blockchain-type system to replace the single entity Certificate Authority, can keep our digital certificates much safer. It is in fact one of the only foreseeable solutions to keep the quantum revolution from undermining the foundation of PKI. |
YouTube punishes Alex Jones’ channel for breaking policies against hate speech and child endangerment | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Google confirmed it has issued a strike against Infowars founder Alex Jones’ YouTube channel for breaking the video platform’s policies against child endangerment and hate speech. Four videos were also removed. The strike means Jones’ channel will not be allowed to live stream for 90 days. In a statement emailed to reporters, a Google representative said “We have long standing policies against child endangerment and hate speech. We apply our policies consistently according to the content in the videos, regardless of the speaker or the channel. We also have a clear three strikes policy and we terminate channels when they receive three strikes in three months.” , two of the deleted videos contained hate speech against Muslims, a third had transphobic content and the fourth showed a child being shoved to the ground by a grown man with the headline “how to prevent liberalism.” The fact that four deleted videos only amounted to one strike against Jones’ channel has prompted scrutiny of YouTube’s moderation policy, with critics , especially for prolific repeat offenders. Jones’ channel was for a video promoting the conspiracy theory that survivors of the Parkland, Florida shooting, which killed 17 people, were actually “crisis actors.” But strikes expire after three months, so the Alex Jones channel currently has only one active strike against it. While he promotes ideas that are ridiculous and hateful, Jones is influential and Infowars has helped promulgate many pernicious conspiracy theories. For example, he is currently for claiming that the mass shooting, which killed 27 people, including 20 small children, was staged. Since the shooting in December 2012, victims’ families have been targeted for harassment by conspiracy theorists. The YouTube strike come a few days after Facebook refused to take down a video of Jones ranting against Robert Mueller, in which he accused the special counsel of committing sex crimes against children and mimed shooting him. Jones’ comments in the video, which was posted to his verified page, did not violate community standards because they are not a credible statement of intent to commit violence. TechCrunch has also contacted Infowars for comment. |
Disrupt SF 2018 early-bird prices extended for one more week | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | The tech gods and goddesses must adore procrastinators, because we were suddenly compelled to extend our early-bird pricing on passes to . It kills us to see folks paying more than necessary, so you now have until — another full week — to get your tickets and experience all the tech and VC goodness that Disrupt San Francisco 2018 has to offer. Don’t put it off; . Our most ambitious Disrupt event takes place at our new, larger venue, Moscone Center West, on September 5-7. If you haven’t heard, this will be our only Disrupt event in North America this year, and we’ve gone all-out to make these three days special and value-packed. is always frenzied excitement, but this year, we super-sized the stakes. The grand prize? $100,000 in non-equity cash. The competition will be fierce, and we can’t wait to see how it all goes down. We’ve gone global with a , which features thousands of the world’s best tech-heads, coders, designers and programmers hacking some incredible creations and competing for a $10,000 grand prize. And thanks to our generous sponsors, we have a bunch of that offer thousands of dollars in cash and prizes. Every Disrupt offers an incredible , and this year may stand out from the rest. We’re particularly excited to have some of the grace our stage. We’re talking Megan Quinn, a general partner at Spark Capital; Sarah Tavel, Benchmark’s first — and so far, only — female general partner; and Aileen Lee, who coined the term Unicorn and has formed her own company, Cowboy Ventures. Whether you’re a founder, an investor, a marketer or a job-seeker, you won’t find any better place to network than . Our exhibition floor features more than 1,200 early-stage startups showcasing a range of technological goodness with a particular emphasis on these 12 categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech/Healthtech, Fintech, Gaming, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics/IoT. Founders and investors can make their networking a whole lot easier by using . That’s our free business match-making service that connects early-stage startup founders and investors who share similar business interests and profiles. takes place on September 5-7. So many great reasons to go, and now you have one extra week to buy your pass. Early-bird pricing ends on . Depending on which type of pass you choose, you can save up to $1,200. Don’t pay more than necessary. today. |
Korean hotel firm Yanolja moves into Southeast Asia with $15M investment in Zen Rooms | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | , the budget hotel network startup founded by Rocket Internet, had after a prospective funding deal collapsed, but now the business appears to have found a home. Korea’s , that has , has made a strategic investment that could see it fully acquire the business. Ten-year-old Yanolja is initially paying $15 million for an undisclosed “strategic non-controlling stake,” but it will retain the rights to buy 100 percent of the Zen Rooms business. Zen Rooms clarified that the acquisition is an option and not based on performance or financial metrics. Founded by a former hotel worker, Lee Su-jin, Yanolja is best known for its lovel hotels although it is trying to clean up the general image of short-stay hotels by promoting them as destinations for business travelers, tourists and families, . The company has also grown its own app-based booking service which among the most used in its homeland with 20,000 rooms. The company is reportedly planning an IPO, so expansion is on its mind. For those reasons, Zen Rooms fits that new focus. The company borrowed the budget hotel model, first pioneered by SoftBank-backed Oyo in India, and brought it to Southeast Asia . The concept is simple, Zen Rooms guarantees minimum standards at all hotels including free WiFi, fresh towels and bedding, hot showers, etc all of which is controlled via a mobile app. Those standards are normal to most hotel stayers, but when traveling in the East, standards can vary wildly especially at budget hotels, which Zen Rooms is focused on. For hotels, Zen Rooms manages the brand — and sometimes more — and it allows helps them tap the internet to find customers and bookings. Today, Zen Rooms is active in six cities in Southeast Asia — it had previously also run operations in Brazil, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka — across which it claims to operate 1,000 hotel franchisees with an inventory of more than 7,000 rooms. Its rivals in Southeast Asia include Red Doorz, . The startup has raised $8 million from investors to date, including that was led by Korea’s Redbadge Pacific and SBI Investment Korea with participation Asia Pacific Internet Group (APACIG), the joint venture fund in Asia between Rocket Internet and Qatari operator Ooredoo. However, TechCrunch understands that a major funding deal of over $10 million fell apart in Q1 2018 which left the company with a rapidly depleting runway. , the company was aggressively shopped to potential buyers, investors and rival companies in order to keep the business afloat. Yanolja has come to the rescue but a full buy-out looks like it will be dependent on the company’s future performance, such is often the arrangement with strategic deals made with a view to full ownership. Rocket Internet, which remains a major investor in Zen Rooms, will hope that the deal goes as smoothly as Lazada, its e-commerce service that is now owned by Alibaba. and Alibaba, the Chinese internet giant, came to its aid with a $1 billion investment. . until it fully owned the business, and today it is a key part of the firm’s overseas expansion strategy. Already, TechCrunch understands from one source that Zen Rooms has gone on a hiring spree in recent weeks after it closed the deal. It had earlier been forced to make cutbacks to its team as a result of cost-cutting following the collapse of the funding deal earlier in the year. “We now have the capital to invest,” ZenRooms co-founder Kiren Tanna told TechCrunch. “The deal has been in discussion since earlier this year…. we are treating like an acquisition but this is step one.” Tanna added that the company plans to focus on five markets in Southeast Asia, and an expansion to Vietnam may be in the pipeline soon. |
Nanotech powers this super-sensitive microphone | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | The trouble with microphones is that they don’t just hear — they have to . Powering the mic and its signal processor means using energy, and energy means a battery, and a battery means charging. This new microphone-like system hears more like the way our own ears do, requiring little or no power, and could help fill the world with voice-responsive machines. (If that’s something we really want.) The device is called a “triboelectric auditory sensor,” and it works via what’s called the triboelectric effect — essentially when two surfaces rub together and create a charge. They’re still trying to figure out this happens, but what matters to engineers is that it happens reliably. have been around for a few years, creating power by having two compatible materials interact with each other at super-small scales. While they’re tiny and highly efficient, they don’t actually produce a lot of power. found that, fortunately, you don’t need a lot of power for the purposes of detecting sound. Our own ears have what’s called a cochlea inside them, a sort of long sealed canal filled with liquid and motion-sensitive cells; when sound hits the end of the cochlea, different parts of it vibrate depending on the frequencies that make up the sound. It’s basically a done instantly by organic hardware and is very cool. The triboelectric auditory sensor does something like this. All along its surface are tiny membranes that vibrate when sound waves strike them, causing the materials to rub together and generate a small charge. By recording the different charges from the different membranes with different frequency responses, the device puts together a complete picture of the sound it hears, using no power but what is created by the nanogenerators. It’s also extremely sensitive. Currently it’s just a prototype, but the researchers demonstrate it in use in various everyday circumstances, so it definitely works. Such a low-power solution could be a way for, say, a piece of electronics to save energy and sleep all day, only waking when it detects someone has walked in the room. It’s a good fit for robots, too, as the device is thin and flat and can even be transparent. No need for ear holes, then. Hearing aids could also be improved with these: hearing loss often covers a stretch of frequencies — say, from 500-1,000 Hz — and the triboelectric sensors can be tuned to accept only sound from that span and amplify it for the wearer. No need to accept all the frequencies, process the sound, apply filters, and retransmit it. These aren’t going to replace microphones altogether, but they’re an attractive option for applications where energy consumption must be kept to an absolute minimum — and such applications are multiplying with the growth of IoT and embedded electronics. |
Apple’s Search Ads expand to six more markets in Europe and Asia | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | In December, Apple a new pay-per-install ad product called Search Ads Basic aimed at smaller developers, to complement the existing , which then became known as Search Ads Advanced. Today, the company is expanding Search Ads to more countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Spain, bringing the total number of countries where Search Ads is available to thirteen. In addition to the U.S., Search Ads Advanced had already expanded to Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the U.K. Developers in the newly supported countries will be able to create campaigns using Search Ads Advanced starting on July 25, 2018 at 4 PM PDT, with those campaigns appearing on the App Store starting August 1, 2018 at 4 PM PDT. Meanwhile, Search Ads Basic will be available across all thirteen supported countries starting on August 22, 2018 at 10 AM PDT. To encourage sign-ups, Apple is offering first-time advertisers a $100 USD credit to try out the product. While the first version of Search Ads launched back in October 2016 in the U.S., the idea behind the newer “Basic” product was to offer developers a different – and simpler – means of reaching potential customers. Search Ads was originally designed to allow developers to target users’ keyword searches, combined with other factors like location, gender or whether or not they had installed the app in the past. Developers would pay when users tapped on those targeted ads. With the launch of Search Ads Basic, it’s easier to set up campaigns. Developers only have to enter the app to be advertised, the campaign’s budget, and how much they want to pay per install. Apple helps by suggesting the max developers should pay using historical data. Then, developers only pay for actual installs, not taps. Although the to offer improved discoverability, search is still a key way people find out about apps. Apple says that over 70 percent of App Store visitors use search to discover apps, in fact, and 65 percent of all downloads come directly from an App Store search. The ads work well, too, as they have an over 50 percent conversion rate, on average, says Apple. Apple’s advantage over the pay-per-install ads found elsewhere on the web isn’t only the ads’ placement – at the top of App Store searches, where they’re identified with a blue background and “Ad” icon – it also manages this without violating user privacy. That is, it doesn’t build specific profiles on individuals for ad targeting purposes, and it doesn’t share user data with developers. By its nature, this makes the system GDPR compliant. In addition, Apple only places an ad when it’s relevant to a user’s search – developers can’t pay more to have their ad shown more often across less relevant searches, which offers a more level playing field. Apple didn’t say when Search Ads would reach other countries, but with the new expansions it has some of the top markets now covered. |
Facebook loses $120 billion in market cap after awful Q2 earnings | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Facebook’s share price fell more than 20 percent in after-hours trading today after the company announced its slowest-ever user growth rate and a scary warning that its revenue growth would rapidly decelerate. Before today’s brutal Q2 earnings, Facebook’s share price closed today at $217.50 — a record high — but fell to around $172 after the earnings call. That’s a market cap drop of roughly $123 billion. In two hours, Facebook lost more value than most startups and even public companies are ever worth. Here’s the full story on : So why did Facebook’s share price sink like a stone? There are five big reasons: – Facebook’s monthly user count grew just 1.54, compared to 3.14 last quarter. Daily active users grew even slower at 1.44 percent, compared to 3.42 percent last quarter. For reference, 2.18 percent was its previous slowest DAU growth rate back in Q4 2017. Suddenly hitting this wall could limit Facebook’s total user count over the long-run, and its revenue with it. Facebook tried to distract from these facts by announcing a new “family of apps audience” metric of 2.5 billion people using at least one of its apps, which will hide the shift of users from Facebook to Instagram and WhatsApp. – Facebook saw its first-ever decline in monthly user count in Europe, from 377 million to 376 million. It got stuck at 241 million in the U.S. and Canada after similarly pausing at 239 million in Q4 2017. Those are Facebook’s two most lucrative markets, with it earning $25.91 per user in North America and $8.76 in Europe. If those markets stall, even swift growth in the Rest of World region, where it earns just $1.91 per user, won’t save it. – Facebook’s revenue grew a remarkable 42 percent year-over-year this quarter. But CFO David Wehner warned that metric would decelerate by high single-digit percentage per quarter over the coming quarters. Wehner said a combination of currency headwinds, new privacy controls and new experiences like Stories will contribute to the deceleration. This news is what caused Facebook’s share price to drop from -7 percent to -20 percent. – Q2 saw the debut of Europe’s GDPR that forced Facebook to change its privacy policies and get users to agree to how it collects data about them. Wehner blamed GDPR for Facebook loss of users in Europe. That law and Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal led the company to have to improve its privacy controls. These could make it tougher for Facebook to target people with ads or show their content to more people. Meanwhile, Facebook has continued to adopt the “Time Well Spent” philosophy, removing click-bait news and crappy viral videos that lead to passive internet content consumption that studies say is unhealthy. Instead, Facebook is pushing features like Watch Party, where users actively interact with each other. Those might not produce as much time on site and subsequent ad views, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the changes are “positive and we’re going to continue in this direction.” – Facebook estimates that by 2019, . The problem is that advertisers may be slower than users to make that shift. “Will this monetize at the same rate as News Feed? We honestly don’t know,” COO Sheryl Sandberg said. Stories ads might be full-screen and more immersive, but they don’t show off links to online stores, nor are they as well-optimized from decades of banner ad experience by the industry. Luckily, even though Snapchat invented the Stories format, Facebook has far more people using it each day, with 150 million Stories users on Facebook, 70 million on Messenger, 400 million on Instagram and 450 million on WhatsApp. If Facebook does manage to figure out Stories ads, it could dominate, but it could take years for its advertiser count and ad prices to rise to offset the shift away from feeds. |
FameGame wants to recreate reality TV for a mobile age | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | The pre-social media phenomenon that was early 2000s American Idol might be a weird place to spend a lot of focus when it comes to thinking about the future. But it’s also worth noting how little these types of shows adapted to build themselves into the fabric of live social commentary. Twitter has offered a nice second screen for thirsty users, but what would reality TV look like if it was built for the smartphone? The team behind is aiming to answer these very fascinating/worrying questions with their new app which envisions the rebirth of live reality TV on your smartphone. The company’s first offering seems to be a mix of American Idol, Musical.ly and HQ Trivia with young users vying to flex their talents and social media prowess to win cash and glory. The startup sees live gamified engagement as a social outlet that existing apps and platforms aren’t making much of a dent in. FameGame CEO Alexandra Botez grew interested in the concept after getting into live-streaming herself playing chess on Twitch and seeing the potential of bringing users closer to less gaming-focused verticals. “We thought that the interactivity of live gaming could also be applied to make conventional TV more entertaining,” Botez tells TechCrunch. “We think Musical.ly and Instagram are pretty big so it’s hard for them to change their infrastructure in such a way that they make the type of immersive experience that we’ve created with FameGame.” FameGame plays the game of fame by getting users to submit self-shot smartphone videos of their talents. The challenges differ by week but one contest may be focused on dance skills while another may be focused on lip-syncing. After an initial submission period, users can check out what’s been uploaded and vote for their favorites which will be included in a live show that’s hosted at 5:00 PM PT every day. Cash prizes are at stake, but the real emphasis seems to be on social validation. Winners will also get a shoutout from a Musical.ly “celebrity” user and a big emphasis is put on the host shouting out users and their handles to drive attention their way. The whole design seems to take some pretty clear, erm, inspiration from HQ Trivia but the live voting component adds a more impactful community vibe to it though once users see they aren’t included amongst the finalists, it might be hard to hold onto viewers. The startup’s efforts are going to start with a focus on the crowd that has helped catapult apps like Instagram and Musical.ly to rabid success. “We decided to go with young teenage girls because they are really obsessed with becoming famous on social media and they spend a lot of time on Musical.ly posting videos and not necessarily getting the gratification that they might want,” CTO Ruben Mayer-Hirshfeld tells me. There are certainly some unique challenges with catering to such a young user base, especially from a safety standpoint. The company is going to curate the few videos that go into the live show, but there isn’t any screening happening in between user submission and user voting aside from a reporting button so the burden is ultimately put on a young user base to decide what crosses the line. FameGame is just the start for the company’s ambitions. Botez tells me that there are a number of different TV show formats that seem ripe for the live social mobile elements, but that the main focus is getting excited teens on FameGame right now and seeing whether the format can catch steam and move beyond what’s out there already. |
Indian H-1B applicants face particular scrutiny in Trump’s work visa crackdown | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Coming to the U.S. on a work visa is getting harder across the board, but workers from India in particular are feeling the effects of recent policy shifts from the Trump administration. A sheds light on how the “Buy American and Hire American” executive order from April 2017 has impacted H-1B applicants in the last year. The H-1B visa, popular in Silicon Valley, lets skilled foreign workers live and work in the U.S. for a six year term. For the three months period starting in July 2017, H-1B denial rates went from 15.9% to 22.4%. In the same time period, Requests for Evidence seeking additional documentation in the fourth quarter of 2017 nearly equaled the total amount of Requests for Evidence from the year’s other three quarters combined (63,184 and 63,599 requests, respectively). Drilling down, workers from India appear to be the most affected. From July to September 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) demanded additional documentation from 72% of Indian H-1B applications, compared to the 61% rate of other countries considered together. During that same three month period, 23.6% of Indian applications were rejected, up from 16.6% between April and June 2017. “The increase in denials and Requests for Evidence of even the most highly skilled applicants seeking permission to work in America indicates the Trump administration is interested in less immigration, not ‘merit-based’ immigration,” the report adds. “… U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has enacted a series of policies to make it more difficult for even the most highly educated scientists and engineers to work in the United States.” In January, for green card applicants had H-1B workers nervous. In June, new rules went into effect. While China only accounted for 9.4% of total H-1B visa applications in the 2017 fiscal year compared to , the Trump administration will likely continue to tighten immigration policies targeting China as it obsessively tries to on its perceived trade nemesis. |
Qualcomm says it will drop its massive $44B offer to acquire NXP | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Qualcomm today said it wouldn’t extend its offer to buy NXP for $44 billion today as part of its release for its quarterly earnings, and instead be returning $30 billion to investors in the form of a share buy-back. So, barring any last-second changes in the approval process in China or “other material developments”, the deal is basically dead after failing to clear China’s SAMR. As the tariff battle between the U.S. and China has heated up, it appears the Qualcomm/NXP deal — one of the largest in the semiconductor industry ever — may be one of its casualties. The White House , kicking off an between Qualcomm and NXP even after Qualcomm . Qualcomm issued the announcement this afternoon, and the company’s shares rose more than 5% when its earnings report came out. “We reported results significantly above our prior expectations for our fiscal third quarter, driven by solid execution across the company, including very strong results in our licensing business,” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said in a statement with the report. “We intend to terminate our purchase agreement to acquire NXP when the agreement expires at the end of the day today, pending any new material developments. In addition, as previously indicated, upon termination of the agreement, we intend to pursue a stock repurchase program of up to $30 billion to deliver significant value to our stockholders.” Today’s termination also marks the end of another chapter for a tumultuous couple of months for Qualcomm. The White House , and there’s . Now Qualcomm will instead be returning an enormous amount of capital to investors instead of tacking on NXP in the largest ever consolidation deal in the semiconductor industry. |
SmartArm’s AI-powered prosthesis takes the prize at Microsoft’s Imagine Cup | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | A pair of Canadian students making a simple, inexpensive prosthetic arm have , a global startup competition the company holds yearly. SmartArm will receive $85,000, a mentoring session with CEO Satya Nadella, and some other Microsoft goodies. But they were far from the only worthy team from the dozens that came to Redmond to compete. The Imagine Cup is an event I personally look forward to, because it consists entirely of smart young students, usually engineers and designers themselves (not yet “serial entrepreneurs”) and often aiming to solve real-world problems. , I saw a pair of young women from Pakistan looking to reduce stillbirth rates with a new pregnancy monitor, an automated eye-checking device that can be deployed anywhere and used by anyone, and an autonomous monitor for water tanks in drought-stricken areas. When I was their age, I was living at my mom’s house, getting really good at Mario Kart for SNES and working as a preschool teacher. Even Nadella bowed before their ambitions in his appearance on stage at the final event this morning. “Last night I was thinking, ‘What advice can I give people who have accomplished so much at such a young age?’ And I said, I should go back to when I was your age and doing great things. Then I realized…I definitely wouldn’t have made these finals.” That got a laugh, but (with apologies to Nadella) it’s probably true. Students today have unbelievable resources available to them and as many of the teams demonstrated, they’re making excellent use of those resources. Congratulations to Team smartARM from , champion of today's ! Watch the live show on demand at 🏆 — Microsoft Imagine (@MSFTImagine) SmartArm in particular combines a clever approach with state of the art tech in a way that’s so simple it’s almost ridiculous. The issue they saw as needing a new approach is prosthetic arms, which as they pointed out are often either non-functional (think just a plastic arm or simple flexion-based gripper) or highly expensive (a mechanical arm might cost tens of thousands). Why can’t one be both? Their solution is an extremely interesting and timely one: a relatively simply actuated 3D-printed forearm and hand that has its own vision system built in. A camera built into the palm captures an image of the item the user aims to pick up, and quickly classifies it — an apple, a key ring, a pen — and selects the correct grip for that object. The user activates the grip by flexing their upper arm muscles, an action that’s detected by a Myo-like muscle sensor (possibly actually a Myo, but I couldn’t tell from the demo). It sends the signal to the arm to activate the hand movement, and the fingers move accordingly. It’s still extremely limited — you likely can’t twist a doorknob with it, or reliably grip a knife or fork, and so on. But for many everyday tasks it could still be useful. And the idea of putting the camera in the palm is a high-risk, high-reward one. It is of course blocked when you pick up the item, but what does it need to see during that time? You deactivate the grip to put the cup down and the camera is exposed again to watch for the next task. Bear in mind this is not meant as some kind of serious universal hand replacement. But it provides smart, simple functionality for people who might otherwise have had to use a pincer arm or the like. And according to the team, it should cost less than $100. How that’s possible to do including the arm sensor is unclear to me, but I’m not the one who built a bionic arm so I’m going to defer to them on this. Even if they miss that 50 percent it would still be a huge bargain, honestly. There’s an optional subscription that would allow the arm to improve itself over time as it learns more about your habits and objects you encounter regularly — this would also conceivably be used to improve other SmartArms as well. As for how it looks — rather robotic — the team defended it based on their own feedback from amputees: “They’d rather be asked, ‘hey, where did you get that arm?” than ‘what happened to your arm?’ ” But a more realistic-looking set of fingers is also under development. The team said they were originally looking for venture funding but ended up getting a grant instead; they’ve got interest from a number of Canadian and American institutions already, and winning the Imagine Cup will almost certainly propel them to greater prominence in the field. My own questions would be on durability, washing, and the kinds of things that really need to be tested in real-world scenarios. What if the camera lens gets dirty or scratched? Will there be color options for people that don’t want to have white “skin” on their arm? What’s the support model? What about insurance? SmartArm takes the grand prize, but the runners up and some category winners get a bunch of good stuff too. I plan to get in touch with SmartArm and several other teams from the competition to find out more and hear about their progress. I was really quite impressed not just with the engineering prowess but the humanitarianism and thoughtfulness on display this year. Nadella summed it up best: “One of the things that I always think about is this competition in some sense ups the game, right?” he said at the finals. “People from all over the world are thinking about how do I use technology, how do i learn new concepts, but then more importantly, how do I solve some of these unmet, unarticulated needs? The impact that you all can have is just enormous, the opportunity is enormous. But I also believe there is an amazing sense of responsibility, or a need for responsibility that we all have to collectively exercise given the opportunity we have been given.” |
2.5 billion people use at least one of Facebook’s apps | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Facebook is hiding that users are leaving its main app but sticking with Instagram and WhatsApp by publicizing a new metric. Facebook today for the first time announced that in June, 2.5 billion people used at least one of its apps: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger. That’s a helpful number, because it counts real people, rather than accounts, since people can have multiple accounts on a single app. Two and a half billion people compares to 2.23 billion monthly users on Facebook, 1 billion users on Instagram, 1.5 billion users on WhatsApp and 1.3 billion users on Messenger. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new stat on that saw its user growth slow to its lowest rate ever. Zuckerberg said the 2.5 billion counts “Individual people rather than active accounts,” which he says “excludes when people have multiple accounts on a single app. And it reflects that many people use more than one of our services.” It seems as if Facebook announced the stat in hopes of deflecting attention from the fact that its user count shrank in Europe and was flat in the U.S. and Canada, contributing to extraordinarily low monthly and daily user growth. That growth trouble in turn sent . On the 2.5 billion stat, Facebook CFO David Wehner explained that “We believe this number better reflects the size of our community.” He also clarified that Facebook’s monthly active user count of 2.23 billion “does count multiple accounts for a single user, and that accounts for 10 percent of Facebook’s MAU,” or 223 million. By bundling the user counts into a “family of apps audience metric,” Facebook can obscure the fact that its core app is hitting a wall. Instead, it can rely on WhatsApp and Instagram to shore up the number. For example, if teens slip from Facebook to Instagram, they’ll still be counted in the new metric. But that doesn’t change the fact that the company’s main money-maker is losing its edge. |
Zbiotics says it’s bioengineered a hangover cure | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Y Combinator backed has spend two years developing what they’re billing as the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic. The startup’s initial product isn’t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they’ve invented an elixir of ‘next day’ life: Aka a hangover cure. Although you actually have to take it — or, well, during — drinking rather than waiting until the moment of regretful misery when you wake up. How have they done this? For their first product they’ve bioengineered probiotic bacteria to produce more of the enzyme that the body naturally uses to break down a toxic chemical byproduct of alcohol which is in turn responsible for people feeling awful after too many alcoholic drinks. So you could say they’re hoping to put probiotics on steroids. (NB: No steroids are involved, obviously.) While probiotics themselves aren’t at all new, having been in the human diet for thousands of years — with wide acceptance that certain strains of these live ‘friendly’ bacteria/microorganisms be beneficial for things like human gut health — the team’s approach of using gene editing techniques (specifically fiddling with the bacteria’s DNA) to enhance what a probiotic can deliver to the person who’s ingested it is the novel thing here. So new they haven’t yet conducted the placebo controlled, peer-reviewed clinical trials that will ultimately be necessary to back up the efficacy claims they’re making for their biotech enhanced hangover cure. Nor are they therefore in a position to defend their forthcoming hangover elixir from accusations of supplementary ‘snake oil’ — and, well, the supplement industry as a whole often has that charge leveled at it. And yet people keep buying and popping its pills. (Therein lies the temple rub, vitamin potion and wellness capsule. And, well, also the investor appetite for carving a fresh chunk out of a very large pie.) Zbiotics co-founders Zack Abbott and Stephen Lamb freely admit it’s going to be a challenge to stand out — and be considered amid all this, er, noise. “This consumer space is rife with pseudo science,” agrees Abbott, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. “Everybody is banging the drum of real science. And so we have a huge challenge to differentiate ourselves. And really convince the consumer that we’ve built something specific. “And it really is a first effort to invent a product to specifically address their problem, as opposed to grabbing vitamins off a shelf, putting them in a bottle and labelling it.” “There are some companies… [that] address dehydration [for hangovers]; that’s not enough. There are other companies they just put [vitamins] into a bottle, that’s not enough. There’s so much noise out there. How do we break through that? It could take some time,” admits Lamb. “And it could take a lot of work.” At this pre-launch stage, the founders say they’ve tested their beefed up probiotic on themselves — and will go so far as to say they’ve seen “promising results”. “I had the fortune of having the final prototype built just a week or two before my birthday and so I ended up trying it out for my birthday and it was great,” adds Abbott. They are also keen to say they don’t want to encourage irresponsible drinking. So don’t expect their future marketing to talk about ‘a biotech license for your next bender’. Product pricing is tbc but they say they’re aiming for widely affordable, rather than lux or overly premium. With hangover results that speak for themselves, their hope is that people will feel confident enough to have a pop and see whether the idea of a biotech enhanced probiotic that’s pumping out extra alcohol-metabolizing enzymes stands up to several pints of lager and a few chasers (or not). Though — when asked — they do say they also want to carry out clinical trials to glean data on the efficacy of their hangover cure. “We are a very science-first company and so we don’t want to be making any claims about anything that we don’t have data to back up,” says Abbott. “At this point… we’ve done significant testing in a test tube, in vitro, and shown that the bacteria we’ve built do perform the function that they’re supposed to perform. Which is to break down acetaldehyde. But we can’t make further health claims until we do clinical trials. And we in the process of drafting up a protocol for a human clinical study with one of our scientific advisors — Dr — a world expert in academic hangover research. But in the meantime we can’t make those claims until we have that.” They are also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year — in order to start making some of their own noise and trying to drum up interest and, well, willing guinea pigs. Though they are also adamant the product is entirely safe. It’s just the efficacy vs hangover misery that’s yet to be stood up in human clinical trials. While a hangover cure might seem a trivial problem to focus high tech bioengineering effort on, they say the unmissable fact of a hangover — or indeed the lack of one — was one of the reasons why they selected such an “everyday problem” for the first application of their technique vs going for a more fuzzy (and, well forgiving on the efficacy front) generic goal like ‘wellness’. Or indeed targeting an issue where a ‘cure’ is pretty subjective and hard to quantify (like anti-aging). Absolutely no one is going to mistake a hangover for feeling great. Though of course the power of the placebo effect working its psychological magic cannot be ruled out — not until they’ve clinically tested their stuff against it in robust trials. On the other hand, even if it ends up that a placebo effect is what’s making people feel better, given that the target problem is (just) a hangover there aren’t likely to be too many consumer complaints and cries for money back. “One of the reasons why we chose this use-case was that it would allow people to try it and feel the advocacy for themselves. That was very important,” says Abbott. “It’s something you can feel the results of. So that was really important. Having a visceral read-out of efficacy. People can experience the product working for themselves.” The other reason for choosing a hangover cure was more practical: They needed a problem that could be solved with an enzyme and therefore which could be helped by genetically engineering bacteria to produce more of the sought for substance. “The whole point here is that we’ve engineered a bacteria to express an enzyme specifically that can solve a problem,” he explains. “Enzymes are these really powerful complex molecules that are not easy to deliver to people. So it has to be a problem that you can solve with an enzyme. “There has to be a nice fit with the technology. So we look for things where parts of the body where bacteria has access to you; you have a lot of bacteria in your gut, in your skin, in your mouth, in your nose… places were we can deliver bacteria and they can express these enzymes to solve problems of everyday health.” “We start with probiotics that have an extremely good safety profile, have been used in regular food by humans for centuries. And we identify those because we know that they’re going to be safe, and we know that they’re going to be able to interact with your body in the way that we want them to. And then we engineer those bacteria as oppose to choosing something that your body may never have seen before,” adds Lamb, who brings prior experience helping food companies enter new markets to the startup. He says they’ve been safety testing their prototype probiotic for the past year and change at this point — “making sure that this is ready for market before we actually launch anything”. “We are not going to launch any kind of product until it’s completely safety tested according to every regulatory framework here in the U.S. — and we’re totally comfortable with that,” he adds emphatically. They do also intend to move beyond hangover cures, with the plan being to develop additional probiotics that target other use-cases. And say they’ve been building a gene editing platform that’s flexible for that purpose. Though they’re not disclosing exactly what else they’re working on or eyeing up — wanting to keep that powder dry for now. “I spent over a year building the first product, and the lion’s share of that time was spent making sort of a genetic platform… that was adaptable to multiple use-cases,” says Abbott. “At first I just engineered the bacteria to be able to make a lot of enzyme generally. Whatever enzyme I put into the platform. And so the first enzyme I put in was to break down acetaldehydes. That being said it could be easily switched out for an enzyme to break down… a different toxin that your body has to deal with. So the platform is very adaptable and it was designed to be that way.” “That being said there are certain use-cases we’re really excited about that may require additional optimization techniques in order to make them work specifically for that use-case. So, generally speaking, some may require more work than others but the platform we started with gives us a good launch pad,” he adds. As well as YC’s standard startup deal, the team has raised an additional $2.8M in seed funding this year for R&D and the initial product roadmap. They’re hoping the forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will give them the additional lift to ship the consumer product into the US market. Investors in the seed round aren’t being disclosed at this stage. Abbott also notes that he previously got a small amount of pre-seed funding, early on, to fund building the prototype. It’s fair to say that biotech as an investment space isn’t a bet for every investor — given product development risks, timeframes and perhaps also some of the deflated hype of past years. Which perhaps explains why Zbiotics investors aren’t ready to shout all about it just yet. Even if they’re feeling great about not having a hangover. “We’ve found different levels of success with different investors,” agrees Lamb. “Where we’ve found the most success is in investors who see the vision for the technology and understand it as something that is and can be truly innovative relative to what’s on the market today. So probiotics themselves — traditional probiotics — are a $40BN industry, and the fact is that most of those probiotics don’t do anything or are inconsistent at best. So we found investors who have a mindset where they can see how a novel probiotic, something that actually is engineered to work and is based in a high level of biotech is something that can really disrupt that area. And that may or may not be traditional biotech investors. Oftentimes it’s investors who are really looking to push the envelope. “We definitely had to find the right investor and the traditional biotech investor often is looking for different things than we had to offer,” adds Abbott. “And different pathways — more traditional pathways. We’re going not conventionally I think with bringing this hard biotech to market quickly. So it definitely is threading the needle and finding the right investors.” |
Facebook stock tanks from mixed Q2 with slowest-ever growth | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Facebook has hit a wall. The social network succumbed to its uncoolness and public backlash over its handling of fake news, privacy and digital well-being to miss some of Wall Street’s estimates, showing mixed results in its Q2 2018 earnings. GDPR, Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress and more scandals appear to have contributed to Facebook’s weak user growth. Facebook reached 2.23 billion monthly users, up just 1.54 percent, much slower than 3.14 percent (where its growth rate has hovered for years). Facebook earned $13.23 billion in revenue, missing Thomson Reuters consensus estimates of $13.36 billion, but beat with $1.74 EPS compared to an estimated $1.72 EPS. Daily active users hit 1.47 billion, up an especially low 1.44 percent percent compared to Q1’s 3.42 percent. For comparison, before now Facebook’s slowest quarter-over-quarter, daily user growth rate was 2.18 percent in Q4 2017. In an attempt to deflect attention from its weak user growth, Zuckerberg announced on the earnings call that : Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger. The stock market frowned on the slow growth rates, to around $170 per share. That’s down from $217.50 when the markets closed. Initially the share price dropped 7 percent on news of slow user growth, but then fell much further when Facebook announced revenue growth would slow significantly in upcoming quarters. The share price descent comes despite Facebook earning $5.106 billion in profit and revenue being up 42 percent year-over-year. Zuckerberg noted in the earnings release that “Our community and business continue to grow quickly.” And while that’s true if you’re looking year-over-year, Q2 could break that trend. Facebook’s daily and monthly user counts were up 11 percent year-over-year, confirming that the momentum of its business is still overpowering its PR problems when you zoom out. And its DAU to MAU ratio held firm at 66 percent, indicating that users are still visiting the site often. But the question for today’s earnings call will be whether time spent on the site has decreased significantly, dragging down revenue with it. One tough spot for Facebook was that it got stuck at 241 million monthly U.S. and Canada users, the same count as last quarter. After failing to grow in that core market in Q4 2017, it appears that Facebook finally has hit saturation at home after 14 years. And in Europe, Facebook lost 1 million users, sinking to 376 million monthlies. That could be a sign that GDPR requirements and the annoying terms of service changes it had to get users to agree to deterred some from browsing. In fact, CFO David Wehner said the failure to grow in Europe was “due to the GDPR.” Facebook still managed to boost its average revenue per user in all markets, growing from $23.59 to $25.91 in the U.S. and Canada, showing its targeting continues to improve and competition for ads is strong. But the fact that it’s stopped growing at home could weigh heavily on its share price. Facebook will have to continue to invent more ways to squeeze dollars out of its existing users. The earnings call saw a worrying warning from Wehner, who said that after 42 percent year-over-year revenue growth this quarter, Facebook expected high single-digit drops each quarter to that metric over the next few quarters. “In terms of what’s driving the deceleration, it’s a combination of factors. First of all there’s currency that’s going from a tailwind to a modest headwind. Secondly, we’re going to be focusing on growing new experiences like Stories . . . and that’s going to have a negative impact on revenue growth. And we’re giving people who use the service more choice in terms of privacy.” Looking back, the quarter saw for developers in hopes of preventing another Cambridge Analytica-style disaster. Its CEO faced tough days of questioning from Congress over the privacy problem, alleged bias against conservatives and its failure to protect the 2016 presidential election. Facebook has and election interference. Facebook tried to redirect attention away from its troubles during its F8 conference that saw it announce plans for a dating feature. But all the problems may be taking a toll on user engagement, leading to the revenue miss. Weak daily and monthly user growth should be a big concern, and will put even more pressure on Instagram to prop up the corporation. |
Android P’s final beta preview is live | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | null |
Daimler deepens ties with China’s Baidu on automated driving | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Daimler, the owner of the Mercedes-Benz brand, and China’s Baidu are expanding their partnership with plans to cooperate more closely on automated driving and connectivity services in the German automaker’s vehicles. The two companies have signed an agreement to collaborate in these two areas, specifically with Baidu’s Apollo program, an open-source autonomous driving platform. Both companies said they will also work to explore new fields in vehicle connectivity services. What this deeper relationship will produce isn’t entirely clear, although there is at least one component of the announcement that provides a bit more detail. Baidu’s connectivity services will be integrated into Mercedes-Benz’s new infotainment system known as MBUX, Daimler said. Daimler’s relationship with Baidu has strengthened as it has expanded its presence in China. Daimler was one of the first partners to join Apollo, which Baidu launched in April 2017. Daimler is also a member of the Apollo Committee, a group that wants to accelerate research on safer solutions in automated driving in China and promotes the drafting of related laws and regulations. was granted in July a license to test self-driving vehicles on , making it the first international automaker to receive such permission. The automaker was given the test permit by the Chinese government after extensive closed-course testing. Daimler said, at the time, that is marked an important milestone in its research and development efforts in China. Baidu’s open source Apollo program reflects the Chinese search engine’s strategy to gaining a piece of the autonomous vehicle industry pie. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car — just the software that drives it. Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. And it’s betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of . The goal, of course, is to persuade as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistics. Daimler was one of the first. Baidu unveiled an at its developer conference in July. Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. It also includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses and autonomous microcars. A previous update, announced in January at , included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services. |
Tommy Hilfiger has launched a ridiculous line of smart clothing that rewards you for wearing it | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Here comes more smart clothing nobody asked for. Fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger today announced the launch of a new line of and clothing, Tommy Jeans Xplore, which comes with smart-chip embedded technology. Unlike, say, Google’s Project Jacquard and , the goal is not to offer access to calls, texts, maps and music controls when you can’t get to your phone – like when you’re riding your bike, for example. Instead, Hilfiger’s smart clothing aims to reward you with points for wearing Hilfiger clothing. Yes, really. It’s come to this, folks. The line includes t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, jeans, jackets, caps, and bags which pair with the Tommy Jeans Xplore (or “XPLORE” if you use their branding) over Bluetooth. Once paired, the idea is that users will compete in challenges in the app to earn points. You get points for things like how often you wear the clothes (!!!) and for walking around to find heart-shaped, Tommy-branded icons on the app’s map. (???) The points can be translated into rewards, including gift cards, signed merchandise and pieces from the Tommy Hilfiger archives, among other things, the company says. I guess doling out more Tommy Hilfiger merch to players makes sense because the only people who would spend $90 on smart sweatshirt just to play a marketing campaign’s idea of fun have got to be the most seriously devoted – nay, – Hilfiger fans. But beyond that, Tommy’s smart clothes don’t make much sense for anyone. Despite its use of smart technology – like the embedded Awear Solutions’ Bluetooth low energy smart tag – the company hasn’t actually innovated here. At best, it’s a loyalty program requiring customers to overspend in order to join. Even the company seems to be aware of the line’s niche appeal, saying in its official announcement that its goal is to create a “micro-community of brand ambassadors.” Yep, micro – as in small. The brand, however, is no stranger to experiments with new ideas and technology. But some of its prior developments have been less absurd – like testing the use of , its smartwatches, or for the disabled. Smart clothing for the sake of smart clothing though? Just no. No. No. Stop. No. [gallery ids="1680255,1680254,1680253"] |
Nextdoor CEO is stepping down | Megan Rose Dickey | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor, is stepping down from his role, . For those unfamiliar with the company, Nextdoor is like a social network for your neighborhood. Though, over the years, . Nextdoor out a new tool to address some of the issues around racial profiling. In an email sent to the team today, Tolia said he’s starting to look for his replacement and once that happens, he will move into an active chairman role on the board, according to Recode. Here’s a nugget from the email, obtained by Recode: Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed. Nextdoor last December, followed by an . The company has since : Just over eight years ago, I was blessed to be part of a group of seven friends who conceived of the idea behind Nextdoor. We were a tight-knit, ambitious group of co-founders who believed deeply in the power of community and dedicated ourselves to helping neighbors everywhere create stronger, safer, happier places to call home. It is amazing to see how this simple but powerful mission has inspired the company that Nextdoor is today. That first year, we worked tirelessly to convince 176 neighborhoods to adopt our platform. Since then, we have grown more than 1000X – we now serve over 200,000 neighborhoods across five countries – including nearly 90% of all neighborhoods in the U.S. All of this has been made possible by the passion and hard work of each of our employees. Their dedication and commitment energizes me every single day. I’ve never been more excited about our team, including our recent additions of Chief Financial Officer and Chief Legal Counsel. It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead this company as CEO. Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed. The future is exceptionally bright for Nextdoor. We’ve never been more well-positioned to achieve our potential, both as a business and force for good in the world. Thank you for the last eight years, this has been one of the best experiences of my life. I will always be inspired by the amazing opportunity – and worthy mission – that makes our company truly special. With gratitude, Nirav |
Dropbox add-on makes it easier to manage Gmail attachments | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | When Dropbox announced it was , it was more of a heads up that the two companies were working together. Today at Google Next, Dropbox announced a new add-on to manage Gmail attachments in Dropbox. Ketan Nayak, a product manager at Dropbox says this is the first concrete piece to come out of that earlier announcement. “Back in March, we announced a broader partnership with Google to bring about integrations and product initiatives across a range of different Google Cloud products. And what we wanted to share with you today was that we’re bringing one of the first [pieces] in this product partnership, the Dropbox add-on for Gmail, to GA,” he said. The partnership makes sense for the two companies as they share lots of overlapping users with more than 50 percent of Dropbox users also using G Suite. Being able to access Dropbox without leaving Gmail or other G Suite tool could potentially save users time and effort spent copying and pasting and switching programs. Instead, there is a direct integration now that displays the attachments in a side panel after which you can save them if you so choose directly into your Dropbox, and the experience is the same in the mobile app or on the web, Nayak explained. Dropbox displays the attachments in the email in a side panel for easy access. Photo: Dropbox “We created this cross-browser, cross-platform solution that doesn’t exist today, especially on mobile, where a lot of our users live and work across these different tools. It’s been really hard for users to navigate in and out of different apps, and we really think of this add-on as a first step that enables users across our two platforms to start working more seamlessly,” Nayak explained. Indeed, other integrations between products are already in the works including one that will allow users to insert a link to a file stored in Dropbox in an email without leaving the program. “Users can share and generate links to Dropbox content while composing an email,” he said. While that particular functionality isn’t ready yet, the company was demonstrating it on stage at Google Next today and it should be available soon. Nayak says, these announcements are really just a starting point of what they hope will be a much more comprehensive set of integrations between the two company’s products in the future. |
Outvote hopes to flip elections by getting Democrats to text their friends | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | , a new Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote. The idea is to take advantage of people’s willingness to use social sharing to communicate about political issues, while also leveraging the simplicity that comes with tweeting or posting to Facebook and turning that into an actionable reminder that can actually drive people to the polls during critical times. The startup was founded by , a Harvard-educated software engineer with a background in startups, including San Francisco-based Moovweb and Cambridge area’s DataCamp; along with , an MIT grad and interactive designer who once on one of its viral music videos, and who now owns the Cambridge-based creative agency Nimblebot. Mazen, who has since moved into an advisory role with Outvote, also has more direct political experience, having run for public office himself. In fact, he learned first-hand how every vote counts, having won his Cambridge City Council position in 2013 by just six votes. He also attributed his second election win to organizing low propensity, minority and younger voters — plus “really doing a lot of texting and a lot of outreach through my friend networks,” says Mazen. When Mazen’s time in politics ended, he then helped others get elected using similar means. Later, he and Makiya brought together a group of Harvard and MIT folks to formalize a company around the technology they were using. This became Outvote. While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations, like MoveOn, for example, involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends. “The way campaigns are run right now is most of the budget is spent on ads that are really low ROI — they have some effect on persuasion, but less effect on actual voter turnout,” explains Makiya. “With this effort, we’re trying to bring politics back to more of word-of-mouth and conversations between friends,” he says. The team began working on the technology for Outvote last summer, and officially founded the company early this year. While individuals are the app’s end users, they’re brought into the app by a campaign. Users give the app permission to upload their phone’s contacts, which Outvote matches up with registered voter databases. That way, you’ll only be texting those who can actually go vote in your district. When the matching completes, the app has scripts that allow users to just click to text your friends a message from your own phone number. In other words, it’s no longer a political campaign or organization bugging people to go vote via text — it’s a friend. If your friends have a problem with the unsolicited text, they’ll have to tell you. The app also uses some sort of basic modeling to figure out who best to text, based on things like past voter history, whether that person tends to vote in the primaries, if they’re a registered Democrat and so on. Oh, yes, that’s right — this app is built for Democratic campaigns only. Outvote makes no apologies about the fact that it is a tool designed to help Democrats win back seats across the U.S., both on local and national levels. “We think it’s really critical that Democrats begin to invest in and promote technology. The right is doing a much better job of investing in some of the niche technology,” says Mazen. “And, obviously, groups like Cambridge Analytica and folks have been, I would say, underhanded, in their use of technology,” he adds. “We have to work twice as hard to be twice as resolute, as a result.” The company says it has turned down right-leaning independents and Republican campaigns that wanted to use its technology, and is instead piloting with around 50 Democratic campaigns at present. Campaigns will be charged a low monthly fee for using Outvote that will vary depending on their size. However, many of the pilot customers are using Outvote for free at this time. The goal is to make Outvote far more affordable than the existing mass-texting services that charge as much as 30 cents per person per month, which can cost campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars at scale. Outvote aims to be around 2 to 5 cents per text, it says. For now, its focus is on raising awareness about the candidate and their issues, and getting people to the polls. It’s not offering the sort of “call your congressman”-style outreach efforts you’ll find in some other political apps. Outvote is also partnered with , Represent.Us, Flippable, the DNC, Vote.org and Swing Left, according to its website. The startup is already reporting some early successes. When used last November, it found millennials contacted through Outvote were twice as likely to vote, while non-millennials were 50 percent more likely to vote. The company doesn’t have the data yet from how it’s been doing in the primaries, but says it’s been getting good feedback from the participating campaigns. In addition to the Y Combinator backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding from ahead of Demo Day. Outvote’s app is available on both and . |
Meituan reportedly targets $55B valuation for Hong Kong IPO, leading to concerns that may be too high | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Meituan-Dianping is reportedly aiming for a $55 billion valuation in its upcoming initial public offering in Hong Kong, but the company’s net losses and increasing competition from Alibaba are already raising questions about whether that is too ambitious, despite the company’s market leadership in China. Meituan-Dianping, which bills itself as a that offers everything from food delivery to travel bookings, has set an IPO price range of HK$60 to HK$72 (about $7.64 to $9.17), with a valuation of $46 billion to $55 billion, . That is still less, however, than the valuation of about $60 million it targeted earlier, . Meituan-Dianping runs the leading online marketplace for services in China by gross transaction volume and also earlier this year. Meituan-Dianping was said to be valued at as much as $30 billion when it led by Tencent in October 2017. But the company’s tight margins and losses, much of which were incurred on marketing and user acquisition, are , especially after . Despite reports that it sought a valuation of $100 billion, Xiaomi ended up with a $54 billion valuation after raising $4.7 billion. A didn’t provide more information about IPO pricing or valuation, but it did give some insights into the company’s financials. It said that Meituan-Dianping’s total revenues increased by 161.2% to RMB 33.9 billion in 2017, and by an additional 94.9% from RMB 8.1 billion in the four months ending in April 30, 2017 to RMB 15.8 billion in the same period of 2018. In 2017, the platform generated over 5.8 billion transactions, totalling RMB 357 billion in gross transaction volume. It served 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants, with each transacting user making an average of 20.3 transactions in the 12 months ending April 30, 2018. Meituan-Dianping recorded a gross margin of 9.3% for food delivery in the four months ending on April 30, 2018, while its second-largest business segment, in-store, hotel and travel services, recorded gross margin of 88% in the same period. Overall, the company had gross margin of 25.5% in that time frame. In the same periods, however, it also recorded high net losses. In 2017, the company said it recorded net losses of RMB 19 billion, as well as net losses of RMB 8.2 billion and RMB 22.8 billion for the four months ending on April 30 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meituan-Dianping said the losses were due in changes to the fair value of its preferred shares, user acquisition expenses, including incentives to attract users and delivery riders, and new product launches. The pressure of acquiring new users and marketing expenses probably won’t ease up anytime soon, as Meituan-Dianping faces down rivalry from Alibaba. The e-commerce giant used to be an investor in Meituan-Dianping, but to focus on building its own online-to-offline services, including a combination of Ele.me and Koubei which recently . TechCrunch has contacted Meituan-Dianping for comment. |
Maoyan, China’s largest online movie ticket service, files to go public in Hong Kong | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Tencent-backed , China’s largest online movie ticketing service, has filed for a public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The company, which submitted a under the name Entertainment Plus, didn’t say when the IPO will be or valuation details, but said Maoyan aims to raise up to $1 billion. The timing of Maoyan’s IPO is noteworthy because it comes as another Tencent investment, Meituan-Dianping, is (Meituan is also one of Maoyan’s investors). Both Meituan and Maoyan are key chess pieces in Tencent’s online-to-offline services rivalry with Alibaba. Meituan holds the leading market share for online services in China by market volume, though Alibaba wants to challenge that with Ele.me and Kuobei, which it recently into one holding company. Likewise, Maoyan is the largest online movie ticketing app service in China, but is up against Alibaba’s Tao Piao Piao. Last November, Maoyan , a couple of months after merging with Weiying, another ticketing service backed by Tencent. In addition to Tencent and Meituan, Maoyan’s investors include Beijing-based Enlight Media. It also co-finances and distributes movies in China, such as Paramount’s “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Both Maoyan and Tao Piao Piao are fighting for domination of what is set to become the world’s biggest market for movies. In its prospectus, Maoyan cited findings from iResearch that show China’s entertainment market is currently second only to the United States, but is expected to become larger by 2019. It reached a market size of RMB 76.1 billion in 2017 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.7% to RMB 194.5 billion by 2022. Maoyan says its revenue grew to RMB 2.54 billion in 2017 from RMB 596.7 million in 2015, with a CAGR of 106.6%. In the first half of this year, it recorded revenue of RMB 1.9 billion and a net loss of RMB 231 million. Maoyan says it held market share of 60.9% by gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2018, according to iResearch. The public offering will led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. |
Political anonymity may help us see both sides of a divisive issue online | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But that exposure to the views of others, their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon Centola, examined how people’s interpretations of some commonly misunderstood climate change data changed after seeing those of people in opposing political parties. The theory is that by exposing people to information sans partisan affiliation, we might be able to break the “motivated reasoning” that leads us to interpret data in a preconceived way. The data in this case was a NASA study indicating that sea ice levels will decrease but frequently misinterpreted as suggesting the opposite. The misunderstanding isn’t entirely partisan in nature: 40 percent of self-identified Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats polled in the study adopted the mistaken latter view. The NASA graph used in the study. As you can see it’s not crazy to think that the sea ice levels would increase, though it is incorrect. Thousands from both parties, recruited via Mechanical Turk, were asked to indicate whether sea ice levels were rising or falling, and how much. After their initial guess, they were shown how others had answered and allowed to adjust their answer afterwards. Some were shown their peers answers with those peers’ political affiliation, and some were shown it without. When political party was not attached to the answers, there was a considerable effect on people’s answers. Republicans jumped from about 65 percent getting it right to around 90, and Democrats went from 75 to 85 percent. When party was shown, improvements were much smaller; and when people were only exposed to those from their own party, there was practically no improvement at all. Obviously this isn’t going to fix the problem of viral misinformation or the near-constant flame wars raging across every major online service. But it’s amazing that doing something as simple as stripping the political context from communications may lead to those communications being taken more seriously. Perhaps something along these lines could help put the brakes on runaway articles: showing highly-cited views from people with no indication of their political beliefs. Will you be so quick to dismiss or accept someone’s argument if you can’t be sure of their agenda? At worst it may force people to take a second and evaluate those ideas on their merits, and that’s hardly a bad thing. The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
Myanmar jails Reuters reporters who uncovered military atrocity | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Reporting the news isn’t illegal, unless you’re in Myanmar. The Southeast Asian country this week in response to that uncovered atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims by the army. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the two Reuters staffers, have been in custody since December. They were arrested for possession of official government documents which had been given to them by a member of the police force as part of the investigation. That puts them in violation of the colonial-time Official Secrets Act which bars civilians from accessing government information. The landmark decision has been derided worldwide. Critics argue that the Reuters reporters are being made an example of because they surfaced the untold story of an atrocity that involved the military, which controlled Myanmar for nearly 50 years until general elections were introduced in 2015. The ethnic tension for the Rohingya in Myanmar has gained global awareness in recent years, but less is known about the role that the military has played in both escalated tensions and also through outright atrocities. The Reuters report which the duo contributed to detailed how members of the army, alongside Buddhist villagers, killed 10 Rohingya men in a coastal village. “Today’s appalling verdict has condemned two innocent men to years behind bars. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo face lengthy jail terms simply because they dared to ask uncomfortable questions about military atrocities in Rakhine State. These convictions must be quashed, and both men immediately and unconditionally released,” Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s Director of Crisis Response, said in . “The outrageous convictions of the Reuters journalists show Myanmar courts’ willingness to muzzle those reporting on military atrocities. These sentences mark a new low for press freedom and further backsliding on rights under Aung San Suu Kyi’s government,” , Human Rights Watch’s Asia director. |
Shine grabs $9.3 million to build a bank for freelancers | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | French startup is raising a $9.3 million (€8 million) Series A round. The company is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France. XAnge is leading today’s round with existing investor Daphni also participating, as well as business angels Gilles Samoun and Ed Zimmerman. The company previously raised $3.3 million (€2.8 million) from Daphni, Kima Ventures and various business angels. While it’s pretty easy to get started as a freelancer in many countries, France is not one of them. You need to register a “micro-company”, report your earnings for corporate taxes, report sales tax collection in some cases and more. Arguably, it has gotten much easier recently with a ton of resources to get started. But Shine wants to go one step further and package everything you need in an app. Shine starts by helping you register your company. After downloading the app, the company will guide you through the process — you need to take a photo of your ID and fill out a form. It feels like signing up to a social network. Compared to the , Shine’s process is less intimidating and easier to understand. You can send and receive money from your Shine account just like in any banking app. Shine gives you your own banking information (IBAN) to receive payments and pay using direct debit. A few days later, you receive a debit card. You can temporarily lock the card or disable some features in the app, such as ATM withdrawals and online payments. Shine doesn’t handle IBAN and cards directly. The company partners with for those banking features. If you’re a rider on Deliveroo and UberEats, or if you work with a freelancer marketplace, such as Malt, Side, Upwork and Brigad, all you need to do is enter your Shine IBAN on those platforms. If you work with clients directly, Shine has an integrated invoicing system. It generates a web page and a PDF that you can send to your clients. When a client opens the page, you get a notification. They can pay with a card. Finally, Shine reminds you when you have to pay your taxes and has a customer support team that can help you figure out what you need to do. They’re slowly building a comprehensive on being a freelancer in France. Shine is free for everything I just described except if you choose to accept card payments on your invoices. But even for that feature, it remains . The company plans to launch a premium plan in the coming months with advanced accounting features. So far, 25,000 freelancers are using Shine in France. And 10 percent of new freelancers (“micro-entrepreneurs”) register their company through Shine. While challenger banks, such as N26 and Revolut are widely successful, it’s great to see some companies focus on niche markets with the same approach. Shine is a breath of fresh air for freelancers in France. The company is making the process so much easier for newcomers. |
Lending startup Portal Finance nabs $200 million for small business loans in Latin America | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Latin American small businesses just got a big boost with a new commitment for a $200 million lending joint venture between the Bogota-based startup and Latin America’s largest financial services institution, . For Portal Finance, the deal with BTG caps a meteoric rise, which has seen the company raise $1.5 million at a $60 million valuation and move from a small $5 million lending pilot to a $200 million deal in the span of two years. “ The company’s success is a testament to the changing fortunes of many Latin American economies and the role that venture capital is playing. For the last several years Colombia’s economic fortunes have been rising since the successful conclusion of peace talks with the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, brought an end to 50 years of civil war. Meanwhile, investment firms like Magma Partners, which led the pre-seed and seed rounds for Portal Finance are linking innovative companies in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, and Lima with Chile’s stable economic base to provide a market where innovative startups can gain traction. It’s also a sign of the significant demand for small business loans across Latin America. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis small businesses found their credit lines pulled as banks refused to take on the risks associated with lending to small businesses. That left businesses with only supply chain financing and factoring as the only alternatives. With interest rates that are typically between 20% and 50% annually. These rates are being charged even though invoices can be used as collateral and default rates hover at around 1% per year. Portal Finance, and other companies like it, solve the problem by giving banks a better window into their borrowers finances by tackling the problem from three ways. The first is by working with factoring firms who were the lenders of last resort to companies who needed cash for operations and improvement and could not take out loans or raise equity financing. Second, the company has a window into the receivables of small businesses through the large corporate customers they supply. Finally, the company has reached out to the small businesses themselves to collect additional data, giving lenders a complete view of the borrowers’ financing. That “full-stack” approach to small business financial statements was the vision that Caicedo had for his company from the moment he and his co-founders Felipe Puntarelli and Nicholas Bohorquez, took their first financing — $50,000 from Magma Partners (a Latin American focused venture capital firm). The opportunity was so great that he was able to convince his eventual Charlie Cliff, a former defense contractor in the aerospace industry, to come down to Bogota without knowing a single word of Spanish to help jumpstart the business as Chief Technology Officer. Cliff, who was connected to Caicedo through Magma Partners’ managing director and co-founder Nathan Lustig, flew down after three phone calls. Diego Caicedo and Charlie Cliff, the chief executive and chief technical officers for Portal Finance Caicedo and Cliff first tackled the problem for the factoring firms that would lend money to businesses off of the projected income for accounts receivable. It was the first product that Portal Finance brought to market when it launched in 2016. By 2017, it expanded its products to include an offering for large corporations to help them manage their payments to small businesses. With that information in hand, Caicedo reached out to financial services firms to set up a lending operation. BTG Pactual agreed to a pilot in Chile in January, and expanded to the $200 million lending joint venture in July that covers both Chile and Colombia. Caicedo called the program the largest investment in a fintech startup by a Latin American financial services firm. So far, the company has issued 200 loans in Chile and 500 in Colombia. On the heels of that investment, Caicedo says that the company expects to close an additional $2.5 million in financing soon and will be profitable by the end of November. |
Fall 2018 tech IPOs face myriad of headwinds | Danny Crichton | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | 2018 has been an year for IPOs, particularly in the technology sector. Among the brand names this year that have made their public debuts are Dropbox, Xiaomi, Spotify (through a direct listing), DocuSign, Carbon Black, Zuora, among many, many others. Given the strength of these numbers through the first eight months of this year, the key question for the public markets is whether the year will close out just as strongly or die in a whimper. It’s a decidedly mixed picture right now. The positives for the tech industry are an extremely robust pipeline of unicorns and growth-stage companies as well as soaring stock prices and strong economic data encouraging investors to seek additional risk in new issues in order to drive returns. Yet, there are serious headwinds operating against new issues that could increase friction for startups for the remainder of the year. The first is that there doesn’t look like there will be a marquee startup debuting this fall to drive excitement. China trade tensions could complicate the picture for Chinese tech companies, which have been major drivers of the IPO pipeline this year. And then there is the on-going questions of alternatives — direct listings and potentially wider usage of private investment with new rules being discussed by the SEC. One major question hovering over the fall is whether any of the largest private tech companies by valuation will decide to go public. So far, and have filed their S-1s with the SEC to debut, but the two are targeting low billions for their market caps. While companies generally demur on questions around their IPO schedules, both Uber and Airbnb look ill-prepared to do a public debut in the short run. — it’s first in years — a little more than a week ago. Airbnb has been more blunt, . Other highly-valued companies like SpaceX, WeWork, and Palantir also don’t look set to IPO in the short term. , and could target a launch early in 2019, beating Uber in the process. This is all a bit shocking considering the robust economic picture of the public markets. These advantageous windows don’t stay open for long, and it’s a bit surprising how few of these large companies are prepared to take advantage of the environment. That could leave companies like Dropbox in March and Xiaomi in June as the largest tech issues of 2018. It’s certainly been received wisdom in the Valley for the past decade that tech startups should delay going public as much as private investors will allow it. But the fact that executive teams haven’t been rounded out and revenues and expenses aren’t ready for scrutiny should be a note of caution for startup founders and venture capitalists to work harder to better prepare their companies. Chinese IPOs are facing tough policy challenges. Photo by ANTHONY WALLACE / AFP/Getty Images Chinese IPOs had been expected to be a major force in the IPO pipeline all year. Now, with trade tensions flaring and the Chinese Communist Party changing its policies, that robust pipeline is staring to look significantly less rosy. The tariffs are easy to understand. The Trump administration has said recently that it intends to . Given the constantly changing scale and scope of these tariffs, the resulting uncertainty has clouded Chinese capital markets and made public debuts much more complicated. earlier this year was also expected to drive attention to Chinese tech stocks by allowing mainland Chinese investors to invest in companies traded on overseas exchanges like NASDAQ. Yet, policy shifts by Beijing have undermined that surge of interest. , causing Tencent to , and creating a cascade of concern for other high-flying Chinese consumer tech companies. Other are complicating the picture as well. We will quickly learn how the markets perceive these challenges when NIO, a Chinese automotive startup, and Meituan-Dianping, a consumer Yelp and Groupon-like platform, go public in the next few weeks. NIO is , and . , a strong performance by either one of these companies would put some wind in the sails of other Chinese unicorns and could help them overcome some of the policy changes that are dampening the enthusiasm in the equity markets. The last macro wrinkle for the fall is around a circulating discussion at the SEC of expanding access to private companies to the general public. SEC chairman Jay Clayton for later-stage private companies so that retail investors could have access to pre-IPO issues. , expanding the pool of capital that can invest in private companies reduces the need to conduct a classic IPO. It may not literally “kill” the IPO, but it could certainly dampen enthusiasm for the public markets, . Any changes to ownership rules would likely take significant time to complete. Nonetheless, rule changes could affect the the major tech companies who are delaying to late 2019 or 2020 and allow them to stave off the public markets for just a bit more. Altogether, the economic environment couldn’t be more robust for companies to go public, but a diverse set of macro factors are clouding the picture, and that could make the rest of 2018 much less robust for IPOs than the first eight months. |
Dropbox drops some enhancements to Paper collaboration layer | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | When you’re primarily a storage company with enterprise aspirations, as Dropbox is, you need a layer to to help people use the content in your system beyond simple file sharing. That’s why to act as that missing collaboration layer. They announced some enhancements to Paper to keep people working in their collaboration tool without having to switch programs. “Paper is Dropbox’s collaborative workspace for teams. It includes features where users can work together, assign owners to tasks with due dates and embed rich content like video, sound, photos from Youtube, SoundCloud, Pinterest and others,” a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch. With today’s enhancements you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox. Gif: Dropbox In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, . With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table. Finally, Paper . As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview. By now, it’s clear that workers want to maintain focus and not be constantly switching between programs. It’s why Box created . It’s why Slack has become . These tools provide a way to share content from different enterprise apps without having to open a bunch of tabs or separate apps. Dropbox Paper is also about giving workers a central place to do their work where you can pull live content previews from different apps without having to work in a bunch of content silos. Dropbox is trying to push that idea along for its enterprise customers with today’s enhancements. |
The VoCore2 is a tiny computer that can play tiny Doom | John Biggs | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | The VoCore2 is a Wi-Fi capable computer with a 580 MHz CPU and 128 RAM that supports video, USB, and Ethernet. And it plays Doom. That’s right: this is a computer you can easily swallow and allow your biome flora to play a hard core FPS while you slowly digest the package. The product where it raised $100,000. Now it’s available for $17 for the barebones unit or $24 for the unit with USB and MicroSD card. You can also buy a four inch display for it that lets you display video at 25fps. What is this thing good for? Well, like all single board computers it pushes the limits on what computing means in the 21st century. A computer the size of a Euro coin could fit in all sorts of places and for all sorts of weird projects and even if you don’t use it to build the next unmanned Red-Tailed Hawk nest surveillance drone it could be cool to blast some demons on a computer the size of a joystick button. The VoCore2 is shipping soon and is available for . [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9iKbsRa5Ek] |
TikTok adds video reactions to its newly-merged app | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Just about a month after the merger of , the app is introducing a new social feature, allowing users to post their reactions to the videos that they watch. Instead of text comments, these reactions will take the form of videos that are essentially superimposed on top of existing clips. The idea of a reaction video should be familiar to anyone who’s spent some time on YouTube, but TikTok is incorporating the concept in way that looks like a pretty seamless. To post a reaction, users just need to choose the React option in the Share menu for a given video. The app will then record your audio and video as the clip plays. You can also decide where on the screen you want your reaction video to appear. If you don’t recognize the TikTok name, that’s probably because the app at the beginning of August, but it’s been available in China for a couple of years. Back in 2017, Bytedance — the Chinese company behind TikTok as well as news aggregator Toutiao — . It eventually merged the two apps to combine their audiences and features; Musical.ly users were moved over with their existing videos and settings. The company says Reactions will be available in the updated app on and over the next day or two. |
Audi starts mass production of its first all-electric SUV | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Audi began production of its first all-electric SUV on Monday, three years after the German automaker unveiled a of the vehicle at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt. The company won’t reveal the production-version of the Audi e-tron SUV until Sept. 17, in a what promises to be a splashy event in San Francisco. Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen Group, has been working towards mass production of the e-tron quattro for years now, offering periodic updates and teasers on the pricing, range, and interior design. The Audi e-tron is being produced at Audi’s factory in Brussels, which has been undergoing an extensive renovation since 2016 to prepare for the new vehicle. The Brussels factor has become the cornerstone of Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicle plans. Audi rebuilt the body shop, paint shop and assembly line at the Brussels factory, the company said. It also set up its own battery production there. The five-seater SUV will have DC fast-charging capability of up 150 kilowatts. The company has previously said the SUV would have a 95 kwh battery with a range of more than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles). That range has since been adjusted to somewhere around 250 miles, although the global reveal later this month should provide finalized numbers. Sales of the e-tron SUV are expected to begin by the end of the year. The Audi e-tron is the first in what the company says will be a new line of all-electric vehicles. By 2020, Audi plans to also produce a four-door Gran Turismo (the production version of the ) and a compact vehicle. The company has outlined plans to launch more than 20 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids by 2025. |
Peep the future of distributed ledgers with the leaders of Hyperledger, Parity Technologies and Tradeshift | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next. On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we’ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new architecture for computing and new processes for almost every conceivable transaction framework. For Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, distributed ledger technologies represent a powerful path for the future of networked computing — no matter the underlying technology. That’s why Behlendorf –through the Linux Foundation — is investing resources in ensuring that viable open source distributed ledger projects are supported and coming to market for any number of applications for businesses and consumers. One of the leading lights of the internet revolution, Behlendorf’s career shaping the future of the networked world began in 1993 when he co-founded Organic Inc. — the first business dedicated to building commercial websites. Going on to become one of the foundational architects of the Apache http protocol, Behlendorf has served as the chief technology officer of the World Economic Forum and as an executive director for the technology investment fund, Mithril Capital. Meanwhile, Parity Technologies is attempting to ensure that businesses don’t need to worry about the underlying technologies at all. Selling a suite of services that are all enabled by distributed ledger technologies and cryptographic computing, Jutta Steiner is giving businesses a way through the maze of competing protocols with a service that can enable the creation and adoption of distributed apps for businesses. “We see it as a way for people to build blockchains that fulfill their particular needs,” Steiner told our own Samantha Stein at our Blockchain event . “One of the challenges we’re addressing in this is to come up with a scalable framework.” Before Parity, Steiner was responsible for security and partner integration within the Ethereum Foundation when the public blockchain first launched in 2015. Steiner also co-founded Project Provenance — a London based start-up that employs blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent. Supply chains are at the heart of Tradeshift’s offerings — and the company is hoping that distributed ledgers will be too. That’s why the company created , an innovation lab and incubator that will focus on transforming supply chains through emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. “The use cases we’re working through Frontiers cover a very wide variety of themes, including supply chain financing, asset liquidity, and supply chain transparency,” said Gert Sylvest, co-founder and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, at the time. “There is so much more potential than just cryptocurrencies.” That potential will be one of the things that Sylvest, Steiner, and Behlendorf discuss. We’ll hope you’ll be in the audience to listen. Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is , and you can still buy tickets . |
Udaan, the e-commerce startup led by three former Flipkart executives, raises $225M | Kate Clark | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | SVP of business finance and analytics at Flipkart, respectively, departed the company in 2016. Shortly after setting up the B2B marketplace, the three raised $10 million in a Series A led by Lightspeed in late 2016 then another $50 million earlier this year, also led by Lightspeed, traders, wholesalers and retailers in India, enabling small- and medium-sized businesses to do business directly with manufacturers. Right now, electronics and consumer goods are for sale on the app, with plans for the company to make industrial |
Wireless headphones and earbuds to fit your budget | Makula Dunbar | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | keep us connected to our favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks. They make sure we don’t drop an important phone call. As our devices ditch the headphone jack and Bluetooth technology improves, more and more people will need to upgrade to something that offers great sound, solid performance, and helpful features. We’ve tested hundreds of wireless earbuds and headphones, and whether your budget is $30 or $300, we’ve found a pair to fit your needs. For the cheapest option that still offers good sound quality, the earbuds are the best . They come with a collar that’s equipped with large control buttons, but it’s so light you’ll forget that it’s around your neck. The Ink’d Bluetooth are comfortable and made to fit all but the largest ear canals. Plus, they’re water-resistant. The Ink’d Bluetooth’s battery will get you through a full day before it’s time to recharge. During testing, we were able to walk two rooms away from our connected smartphone before experiencing a signal drop. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald When it’s time to focus at the gym, there’s no better way to tune out distractions than a reliable pair of earbuds. For a cheap but comfortable pair that can handle casual workouts and a bit of sweat, we recommend the . They’re the best and they offer more than eight hours of battery life, which is enough for a few gym sessions before recharging. Silicone tips and wings help with keeping them secured during high-intensity activities. The cable that connects the earbuds is longer than we’d like, but the Latitude EP-B40 are a better option for than similarly priced wired earbuds, and they offer good sound quality. Photo: Kyle Fitzgerald For some, earbuds just don’t cut it. The are the best . They’re ideal for someone who prefers over-ear headphones and doesn’t want to spend a lot of money. The Move Wireless sound almost as good as Bluetooth headphones that cost four times as much—without sacrificing solid basic features like intuitive and easily accessible controls. The Move Wireless’ pivoting earcups and a padded headband add to comfort. Photo: Rozette Rago If keeping up with the latest tech gear is important to you, you’ve probably already done your research on . The majority of them are still first-generation models and come with a few kinks. Still, the perform just as well as standard Bluetooth earbuds—offering great sound, battery life, and comfort—without a wire connecting each earpiece. The Elite 65t usually block out a good amount of noise, but you have the option of using the mics to hear your surroundings by activating transparency mode. We like that these headphones work with voice assistants (Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa) and they have both track and volume controls. During testing, the Elite 65t’s Bluetooth 5.0 offered seamless and stronger connections than competitors, making calls sound especially clear. For a of these headphones, we recommend the . Photo: Rozette Rago If you’re ready to invest in a pair of high-end that come with the best features, we recommend the . You’ll get above-average active noise cancelling, long-lasting battery life, a clear mic for voice calls, and, most importantly, a pair of headphones that sound great. During testing, the H.ear On WH-H900M sounded better than competitors (with or without noise cancelling) and the bass added a noticeable boost that didn’t overpower vocals. We like that these headphones are lightweight, comfortable to wear for long periods of time, and that they come in a variety of colors. |
The best of IFA 2018 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | year’s most fascinating tech shows — and not just because it means hanging out in Berlin for the week. The conference is primarily targeted at European consumers, but the late-August/early-September timing means plenty of companies use it as the global launch pad for gadgets aimed at holiday shoppers. In recent years, the conference had taken on more significance for this very reason. Though 2018 did seem to be something of an off year, with larger companies like Samsung and DJI launching their big products weeks before the big show. The other reason to love the show is its tendency toward the bizarre. There’s something about IFA that has the tendency to bring out the oddest impulses in gadget design, and this year’s event certainly fit the bill. What follows is a collection of the biggest, best and most bizarre of what IFA had to offer. Smart assistants were, naturally, everywhere at the big event. One of the most fascinating entries is the emerging trend . Both Netgear and Huawei announced devices that essentially transform a routers in a smart speaker. And why not? You’ve already got on in your house. Netgear is the more compelling of the two, using a mesh network to place them throughout the home. How much TV is too much TV? As long as consumers are interested in outdoing their neighbors, TV manufacturers will be more than happy to oblige with higher and higher resolution sets. This year’s show was all about 8K. It’s still a young tech — and content hasn’t really caught up, but it was at IFA in full force with sets from Samsung, LG, Toshiba, Sharp and more. The smartphone experience is always a bit of a crapshoot at a show like IFA. The U.S. phone market can be a tough one to crack, and many of the phones will never make their way to our shores. That said, there were plenty of fascinating flagships to see at the event. Highlights include: It’s bizarre, it’s probably pricey, and it’s roughly the size of my New York City apartment. But if you’ve absolutely got to have the most authentic arcade-style flight simulator experience at home, you could probably do a lot worse than the . |
‘Five Eyes’ governments call on tech giants to build encryption backdoors — or else | Zack Whittaker | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | A pact of five nation states dedicated to has issued a memo calling on their governments to demand tech companies build backdoor access to their users’ encrypted data — or face measures to force companies to comply. The international pact — the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, known as the so-called “Five Eyes” group of nations — quietly issued the memo last week demanding that providers “create customized solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements.” This kind of backdoor access would allow each government access to encrypted call and message data on their citizens. If the companies don’t voluntarily allow access, the nations threatened to push through new legislation that would compel their help. “Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions,” read , issued by the Australian government on behalf of the pact. It’s the latest move in an ongoing aggression by the group of governments, which met in Australia last week. The Five Eyes pact was born to collect and share intelligence across the five countries, using each nations’ diplomatic power and strategic locations as chokepoints to gather the rest of the world’s communications. Since , tech companies have doubled down on their efforts to shut out government’s lawful access to data with encryption. By using end-to-end encryption — where the data is scrambled from one device to another — even the tech companies can’t read their users’ messages. Without access, law enforcement has extensively lobbied against companies using end-to-end encryption, claiming it hinders criminal investigations. Security researchers and other critics of encryption backdoors have long said there’s no mathematical or workable way to create a “secure backdoor” that isn’t also susceptible to attack by hackers, and widely derided any backdoor effort. In 2016, rhetoric turned to action when the FBI launched a lawsuit to force Apple to force the company to build a tool to used by the San Bernardino shooter, who killed 14 people in a terrorist attack months earlier. The FBI dropped the case after it found hackers able to break into the phone. But last month, the US government renewed its effort to set legal precedent by targeting Facebook Messenger’s end-to-end encryption. The case, , aims to break the encryption on the messaging app to wiretap conversations on suspected criminals. It’s not the first time the Five Eyes nations have called for encryption backdoors. An Australian government memo last year . Although the UK’s more recent intelligence laws as allowing the government to compel companies to break their own encryption, wider legal efforts across the other member states have failed to pass. |
null | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 7 | 25 | null |
Skype rolls back its redesign by ditching stories, squiggles and over-the-top color | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Just over a year after Skype a colorful, Snapchat-inspired makeover which included its own version of “stories,” the company says it’s now going to refocus on simplicity – and it’s ditching stories along the way. The redesign had been met with a lot of backlash. Skype had clearly wanted to appeal to a more youthful demographic with its update, but in doing so, it cluttered the user experience with features no one had asked for or needed. One of these was “Highlights,” a feature that was very much Skype’s own take on Snapchat’s or Instagram’s Stories. With Highlights, Skype users were able to swipe up to pull up their smartphone’s camera, then snap a photo or record a video that could be decorated with typed or handwritten text, as well as with Skype’s own set of stickers. This could then be shared with individual Skype users, groups, or posted to the Highlights section of the app. The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the feature in its own app, too. But stories, as it turns out, may not be as ubiquitous or as in-demand as a “news feed” interface – there are places it makes sense, and those where it does not. Skype is the latter. In its , Microsoft admitted that the changes it had introduced weren’t working. “Calling became harder to execute and Highlights didn’t resonate with a majority of users,” wrote Peter Skillman, Director of Design for Skype and Outlook. Instead, the app is introducing a simpler navigation model where there are now just three buttons at the bottom of the mobile app – Chats, Calls, and Contacts. Highlights and Capture are both gone. (If you actually used Highlights, you have until September 30 to download them to save them before the feature is removed). There were already some hints Microsoft was planning to dial back its design changes. It it was keeping Skype Classic (Skype 7) around for an extended period of time, after its plans to was met with overwhelming user outcry. It said then that it would gather more feedback to find out what it is that people wanted before forcing the upgrade to Skype 8.0. With the new desktop version of Skype, the company now says it’s moving the Chats, Calls, Contacts, and Notifications to the top left of the window to make it easier for long-time Skype users to understand. Skype also toned down its over-the-top use of color in the app and introduced a Skype “Classic” blue theme adjusted for contrast and readability. It yanked out some of its goofier decorative elements, as well, like the with a squiggle shape cut out, which it admits “weren’t core to getting things done.” (Ya think?) While it’s good that Skype is now listening to users – it says it’s testing new prototypes across global markets and it launched a site – it’s concerning that it had not done enough listening beforehand. If it had, it wouldn’t have released a version of its app that bombed. Skype should embrace its “classic” status, and not feel the need to play catch-up with teen chat apps like Snapchat, or social media trends like stories. People use Skype to get things done – calling faraway friends, placing work calls, and even recording podcasts. Being a simple and stable voice and video calling app is one that can retain loyal users over time, and attract those who need to communicate across platforms without all the fluff found elsewhere. The latest design is available in Skype version (8.29) for Android, iOS, OS X, Linux, and Windows 7, 8 & 8.1 operating systems. |
Avrios has quietly raised $14M for an AI-fueled fleet management platform | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | Swiss startup reckons business mobility is going to get a whole lot more interesting as companies adopt more tailored mobility solutions, rather than sticking with the traditional one car per person model. And at the same time as businesses are seeking to accelerate their progressive cred by moving away from combustion cars to greener alternatives, new are starting to spring up to offer consumers a multi-modal spectrum of personal transport choice. So the days of businesses offering staff just a few choices of car model are numbered, is the thesis. But with increased choice to balance, the job of the fleet manager looks set to get more challenging — both when it comes to negotiating with (more and smaller) suppliers; understanding costs and utility; and intelligently matching transportation solutions with business needs and staff desires, argues Avrios. Hence it believes AI will be a key aid to manage increasingly complex fleets. Its platform, which focuses on passenger car and van fleets and is being used by ~700 customers (predominantly in Europe) to manage ~70,000 vehicles at this stage, is already using machine learning technology to help fleet managers stay on top of data related to car leasing costs. But Avrios sees this as its foundational play, and is positioning its platform to support a much bigger shift it envisages coming down the pipe — as technologies such as electric cars gain in popularity and get increasingly slotted into business’ fleets. The rich spectrum of possibility for personal urban mobility can already be glimpsed on the consumer side as ride-hailing giants like Uber turn their attention to car alternatives such as e-bikes and e-scooters. Businesses, surely, won’t want to be left behind. Which means fleet management platforms will need to be up to challenge of handling all these newer and finer-grained transport options, argues Avrios co-founder and CEO Andreas Brenner. After running a study on its own customer base last year, the 2015 founded startup estimates that at least 30% of the €60BN annual budget that European businesses currently spend on combustion cars will shift to other options over the next five years. Its findings also suggest the vast majority of businesses (80%) are currently managing the looming shift in spreadsheets and Access databases — hence Avrios spying an opportunity to step in and support the disruptive market evolution. (And claiming spreadsheets as its main competitor.) The initial play for its fleet management SaaS platform was also a supporting role (it launched as a dashboard in 2015, but was calling itself a platform by fall 2017), with the team building a system to ingest and process invoices and leasing documents for fleet managers, which Brenner says it has now almost entirely automated. “You wouldn’t believe but, for example, almost none of the large leasing companies have APIs to import invoices or leasing data — so we essentially had to build a system where we would be able to process these contracts and invoices,” he tells TechCrunch. “In the early days it all started out manually. But now we can process 99% of the documents fully automatically and this is not just the normal structured form recognition — it’s a true kind of AI system that we’re using. So that’s where most of the magic is happening.” “The unique thing that we’re able to do is that we’re the only platform that’s able to help our customers import all of the unstructured data from multiple languages. And that’s a lot of information that’s necessary for fleet management, and that saves a lot of time,” he adds. What he sees coming down the road is more exciting than tech that can automatically ingest French PDF invoices though — howsoever handy that might be — as businesses shift their policies to be able to accommodate a more richly fragmented mobility mix. Another bit of research it carried out was to look at its customer data to consider how vehicles are currently being used — by looking at mileage and vehicle type — to “deduct the use-case of the vehicle”, as Brenner puts it. “Our assumption is that any vehicle that isn’t driving a lot or isn’t carrying goods doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective — and is kind of the prime candidate for replacement by other options. At the very least by an electric car,” he suggests. “If I have a car that I’m only driving in the city for 10-20km a day it absolutely doesn’t make sense from an economic perspective to have that be a combustion car.” That’s how they got to that 30% predictive shift away from combustion cars over the next five years. They found customers were already implementing car policies that added electric vehicles to their mix (“the more progressive companies are even enforcing a certain share of electric vehicles in their 2019 car policies”, he says). They also found a “big demand” for corporate car sharing — so the platform offers a booking module to cater to that. Even more excitingly, they found that some customers were already piloting even greater flexibility — such as offering e-bikes to their staff. “They’re really thinking hard about how to use all of the new possibilities to further drive employee motivation and retention,” Brenner suggests, arguing that offering staff multi-modal mobility options could be seen as an attractive corporate benefit. “And even expand the addressable groups of their current mobility policy.” “It can be pretty motivating if, as an intern, you get access to an electric bicycle,” he continues, adding: “These are the kinds of things that we see our customers wrapping their heads around.” That said, this level of flexibility is only at pilot stage in Europe at present now though. But he “definitely” sees the European fleet market including electric vehicles in its car policies next year. And, beyond that, there’s potentially all sorts of mobility twists coming down the pipe in the next several years. “The more creative or advanced options we see more pilots happening in 2019 — and then we think, based on the results of those, we’ll see more disruption in 2020,” he ventures, fleshing out the challenges that this will create for fleet managers. “If you would put yourself in the shoes of a fleet manager, what you used to do is you used to have… typically two, three large preferred leasing providers. With those you would negotiate terms so that your employees could then choose from typically… 15 models plus some equipment options. That’s what it used to be and that was already considered complex, given all the different maintenance options, financing options etc available. And that’s the first problem we help our customers solve — to understand how is their car policy working? “But as soon as you add more specialized, smaller suppliers you’re really faced with less volume negotiation. You’re faced with additional overhead. You’re faced with additional number of suppliers, and that’s what we see happening — if you look at the rental car companies they’re offering ever more specific offerings for individual use cases, if you look at shared mobility they’re offering ever more specific offers for specific use cases. And as a fleet manager if you want to somehow provide all that for your employees, for you it just means an explosion of the number of contracts you have to maintain, an explosion of the number of options you have to put into your mobility policy, and that’s an explosion in the complexity of decision making and also in kind of delivery to your employees. “So that’s what it means for fleet managers — and that’s what we’re helping them with: The cost control, and also the delivery to the employees so they can book a pool car directly through our platform, they can order a leased car, a rental car directly through our platform. So that it all automatically aligns with the policy.” The company claims its platform helps customers reduce their fleet administration overhead by 30% now and their fleet cost by up to 10%, as well as touting additional benefits around data privacy, and compliance with environmental and owner’s liability laws. If the quantity and variety of mobility options proliferates, and gets as niche and nuanced as futuregazers suggest, then having a platform to manager cost, compliance and policy complexity starts to look essential — certainly for businesses with large staff and fleet bases to manage. The majority of Avrios’ current business is in Europe, with customers which include insurance companies, retailers, fashion companies, machine manufacturers and professional service providers. Brenner says they also have a handful of US and Middle Eastern and African customers (further noting that lots of its customers also have a global fleet footprint). On the competitive front, he bills what it offers as “a true fleet management platform” — arguing it’s the first such player to do so, suggesting longer-in-the-tooth rivals have only offered fleet administration software and/or fleet management services (while the online portals of incumbents such as AFleetLogistics, Leaseplan and Arval are, as he tells it, “customer retention tools that suggest but don’t really provide transparency”). “We have a platform approach, providing elements of what software providers would (structured data, reporting, etc) but also elements of what fleet management providers like FleetLogistics would (procurement automation, benchmarking cost against other fleets, optimizing the bidding process for the procurement of new fleets and fleet leases),” he adds. “We are neutral and help customers understand where they are truly losing money.” The funding being disclosed to TechCrunch now covers a seed round raised in December 2015; a Series A in June 2017; and ~$4M of extension/acceleration funding which it closed in July 2018 — all previously unannounced. The funding total to date adds up to ~$14M — and investors in the business include Lakestar, Notion, Verve-Capital, Siraj Khaliq (Atomico) and Andrew Flett (Fleetmatics). Brenner says the extension of the Series A will be used for product development — to “accelerate the transition from a fleet management dashboard towards adding more transportation options”. It will also be used for scaling the business faster than initially planned. “We’re now considered growth stage so for a growth state startup it’s the typical stuff — product and sales and marketing,” he adds. “Now we feel like we understand our story, we understand the long term direction we want to take the company, we understand who are customers are, what our position in the market is etc, so it felt like it was the right time to talk to the market a bit more publicly,” he says, explaining why they’ve keep their powder dry on funding announcements up to now. “It was just a matter of focus on customers and product development rather than anything else.” |
UK media giants call for independent oversight of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | The UK’s leading broadcasters and ISPs have called for the government to introduce independent regulatory oversight of social media content. The group of media and broadband operators in the tightly regulated industries spans both the state-funded and commercial sector — with the letter to the being inked with signatures from the leaders of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, BT and TalkTalk. They argue there’s an “urgent” need for independent oversight of social media, and counter suggestions that such a move would amount to censorship by pointing out that tech companies are already making choices about what to allow (or not) on their platforms. They are argue independent oversight is necessary to ensure “accountability and transparency” over those decisions, writing: “There is an urgent need for independent scrutiny of the decisions taken, and greater transparency. This is not about censoring the internet, it is about making the most popular internet platforms safer, by ensuring there is accountability and transparency over the decisions these private companies are already taking.” “We do not think it is realistic or appropriate to expect internet and social media companies to make all the judgment calls about what content is and is not acceptable, without any independent oversight,” they add. Calls for regulation of social media platforms have been growing from multiple quarters and countries, and politicians clearly feel there is political capital to spend here. (Indeed, .) Yet policymakers the world over face the challenge of to regulate platforms that have become so popular and therefore so powerful. (Germany over hate speech takedowns last year but it’s in the vanguard of government action.) The UK government has made a series of proposals around Internet safety in recent years, and the media & telco group argues this is a “golden opportunity” to act against what they describe as “all potential online harms” — further suggesting that “many of which are exacerbated by social media”. The government is , and the Telegraph says potential interventions currently under private debate include the creation of a body along the lines of the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (which reports to Ofcom), which it says could The newspaper adds that it is envisaged by proponents of this idea that such a regime would be voluntary but backed with the threat of a legislative crackdown if the online environment does not improve. (The EU has been taking this approach with .) Commenting on the group’s letter, a government spokesperson told the Telegraph: “We have been clear that more needs to be done to tackle online harms. We are committed to further legislation.” For their part, tech platforms claim they are platforms not publishers. Yet their algorithms indisputably create hierarchies of information — which they also distribute at vast scale. At the same time they operate their own systems of community standards and content rules, which they enforce (typically imperfectly and inconsistently), via after-the-fact moderation. The cracks in this facade are very evident — whether it’s a high profile failure such as the Kremlin-backed mass manipulation of Facebook’s platform or this smaller scale but no less telling . There are very clearly severe limitations to the self-regulation the companies typically enjoy. Meanwhile, the impacts of bad content decisions and moderation failures are increasingly visible — as a consequence of the the vast scale of (especially) Facebook and Google’s YouTube. In the UK, a parliamentary committee which has been probing the impact of social media amplified disinformation on democracy a third category be created to regulate tech giants that’ e committee’s first report, following a long and drama-packed enquiry this year (thanks to the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data misuse scandal), also called for social media firms to be taxed to pay for major investment in the UK’s data protection watchdog so it is better resourced to be able to police data-related malfeasance. The committee also suggested there should be an education levy also raised off social media firms to pay for the digital literacy skills necessary for citizens to navigate all the stuff being amplified by their platforms. In their letter to the Sunday Telegraph the group emphasizes their own investment in the UK, whether in the form of tax payments, original content creation or high-speed broadband infrastructure. Whereas U.S. tech giants stand accused of making lower contributions to national coffers as a result of how they structure their businesses. The typical tech firm response to tax-related critiques is to say they always pay the tax that is due. But technical compliance with the intricacies of tax law will do nothing to alleviate the reputational damage they could suffer if their businesses become widely perceived as leaching off (rather than contributing to) the nation state. And that’s the political lever the media firms and ISPs look to be seeking to pull here. We’ve reached out to Facebook, Twitter and Google for comment. |
Funding Circle, a P2P SME lending platform, steps towards an IPO | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | UK founded startup Funding Circle, a p2p lending platform which focuses on the underserved small business market, has announced a “potential intention” to float on the London Stock Exchange. In a today, announcing the publication of a Registration Document for a possible future IPO, Funding Circle says that should it proceed with floating on the stock market it would be looking to raise around £300 million (~$387M). According to the document the business is being valued at up to £1.65BN (~$2.1BN). Heartland A/S, the private holding company of Danish billionaire businessman, Anders Holch Povlsen, has Funding Circle has raised more than $373M to date since being founded back in 2010. The founders had the idea to help small businesses obtain loans after the retrenching of traditional financing sources after the 2008 financial crash. The global lending platform now connects investors in the U.K., U.S., Germany and the Netherlands with small businesses wanting to borrow money for growth. More than 80,000 retail investors, banks, asset management companies, insurance companies, government-backed entities and funds have lent more than £5BN to over 50,000 businesses globally since the platform’s launch in 2010. In a statement on the IPO announcement, Samir Desai, CEO and co-founder, said: “By combining cutting-edge technology with our own proprietary credit models and sophisticated data analytics, we deliver a better deal for small businesses and investors around the world. I am very proud of the team and culture we have created at Funding Circle, both of which have been integral to our success to date”. A year and half ago that while the business had “no current plans to IPO” that was the longer term aim. “We’ve always said that we’d like Funding Circle to be a listed business, in line with the things that we care about deeply like transparency and being a tech platform versus being a lender ourselves,” he said then. Should it now go ahead with floating the business, Funding Circle says it will use the proceeds to enhance its balance sheet position — which it says would help grow trust in the business with investors, borrowers and regulators, as well as support it pursuing growth over profitability in the medium term. It also says going public would give it strategic flexibility and let it take advantage of opportunities “either in current markets or new geographies”. The registration document describes Funding Circle as a high growth business, revealing it had revenue in the year ended 31 December 2017 of £94.5M compared to £50.9M in the year ended 31 December 2016. It also highlights an improving financial profile, flagging up strong growth in revenue — with 78% CAGR from 2015 to 2017 (excluding property loans), primarily driven by an increase in loan originations from £607M in 2015 to £1,631M in 2017 (both excluding property loans). Funding Circle exited the property loans business in 2016, tightening its focus on small business financing. According to the registration document, repeat business is growing, with approximately 40% of Funding Circle’s revenue generated from existing customers in 2017 (again excluding property loans). It also says that attractive unit economics are driving expanded margins, with the margin per loan in 2017 rising from approximately 20% for the first loan, to ~57% for repeat loans in the UK. And it adds that the path to superior margins is driven by operational leverage. The business is targeting in excess of 40% revenue growth in the medium term and longer term, and adjusted EBITDA margins of 35% or above. Commenting on Funding Circle’s announcement in a statement, Neil Rimer, partner at Index Ventures and a Funding Circle board member, said: Just as banks have become more reluctant lenders, Funding Circle has become an indispensable source of financing for small businesses in the UK, the US and in continental Europe; directly supporting the growth of the most critical engines of the economy. “It is a prime example of a new breed of financial services companies, who by making their products more transparent and more convenient, have democratised access to valuable services and increased economic activity. Rimer added: “Funding Circle has a broad impact on the growing businesses it funds, the employees they hire, the communities they operate, their customers and the countries they operate in. This is an important milestone that will allow the company to support tens of thousands of additional small businesses: something everyone should celebrate.” Index is Funding Circle’s largest shareholder and has been a backer of the business since its Series A funding round in 2011 — when it became the 2010 founded UK startup’s first institutional investor. It’s just posted a to coincide with Funding Circle’s announcement — taking an inside look at the company mission and ethos. Index also has several other fintech investments in its portfolio, including the likes of Adyen, iZettle, Revolut and Robinhood. Though the VC firm did not take an investment in UK-based payday loans firm Wonga, which . |
Are you TC Top Pick material? Apply to exhibit free at Disrupt Berlin | Leslie Hitchcock | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | Calling all early-stage startup founders! Show of hands, please. Who among you wants to exhibit your outstanding technology — to thousands of influential tech leaders, founders and investors — at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30? Here’s terrific news. We’re looking for exceptional startups to designate as TC Top Picks — and we’ll give each of the chosen few a FREE . Interested? Then get moving and before the September 28 deadline. We run a tight curation process over here at TechCrunch, and our discerning editors — in their search for exceptional founders — will vet every application thoroughly. And that alone provides value. Here’s what Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard.com, said about exhibiting in Startup Alley. “TechCrunch uses a curation process regarding the companies it accepts,” he said. “So, exhibiting at Disrupt — among all these other fantastic startups — has a hugely positive impact when you’re fundraising.” Your startup must fall into one of the tech categories below to qualify as a TC Top Pick, and we’ll choose up to five startups to represent each grouping: What exactly do you get with an Exhibitor Package? Happy to elaborate. It includes a one-day exhibit space, three Disrupt Berlin Founder Passes, access to (our free investor-to-startup matching platform), full use of the Startup Alley Exhibitor lounge and access to the Disrupt press list. Who knows, you might even be selected as one of the Startup Battlefield Wild Card winners and compete in our $50,000 startup-pitch competition. How cool is that? Top Pick designees also receive lots of media attention, including a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor, which we promote across our social media platforms. It’s the gift that keeps on giving long after Disrupt ends. takes place on November 29-30. You have an opportunity to showcase your startup to thousands of potential investors, founders, collaborators and customers in Startup Alley — for free. . Your opportunity awaits — until it disappears on September 28. |
Morgan Stanley: Tesla’s autonomous ride-sharing network is worth one-tenth of Waymo | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | Morgan Stanley has valued Tesla’s autonomous vehicle ride-sharing business, which does not yet exist, at $17.7 billion, about one-tenth of Waymo’s value, yet still above GM Cruise, the investment firm said in a research note published Tuesday. The $17.7 billion valuation, or about $95 per Tesla share, is notably lower than the $244 a share that Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said the service was worth in 2015. (Keep in mind this valuation is just for Tesla’s autonomous vehicle ride-sharing network, not the entire company.) Morgan Stanley’s current price target for Tesla is $291 a share. Placing a value on a business that doesn’t exist may seem, well, premature. But in Morgan Stanley’s view, it reflects Tesla’s stagnation in this area as much as the progress made by other autonomous vehicle technology companies such as Cruise and Waymo. Jonas noted that Tesla has shared “extremely few details about how shared autonomy can be positioned as a separate business model,” while Cruise and Waymo have become “increasingly conspicuous with their efforts to grow the business with specific targets for commercialization and deployment.” Tesla’s higher cost of capital compared to Waymo and potentially less room for adjacent revenue monetization were also cited as reasons for the lower valuation. “In our opinion, Tesla may one day need to make a strategic decision over whether to pursue a shared autonomy strategy on “go-it-alone” basis or whether to find ways to “attach” their vehicle data and fleet management ecosystem to one or more external platforms that maybe in a far better position to pursue data monetization, improved customer engagement/experience and lower cost to the consumer,” Jonas wrote in the research note. Three years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk floated an idea for a network of autonomous vehicles that Tesla owners could put to use on a ride-sharing service to earn a bit of extra money. Few details about this Tesla Network have emerged since then. The most recent smidge of information came from Musk during the company’s first-quarter earnings call in May when he said that from a “technical standpoint” by the end of this year. He also noted that regulatory approval made it difficult to predict timing of an actual launch. In the meantime, companies like Waymo and GM’s Cruise have ramped up their deployment plans for . Morgan Stanley does predict that Tesla will take the lead, at least initially. Jonas predicts that Tesla’s autonomous vehicle ride-sharing network will have more vehicles, more miles traveled and greater revenue than Waymo by 2030. However, the Waymo figures continue to ramp up very significantly through 2040, reaching $724 billion of revenue and $92 billion of operating profit by 2040, Jonas wrote. “In short, we assume Tesla gets off to a faster start than Waymo in terms of shared miles accumulation, but that Waymo catches up and surpasses Tesla just a few years later and with likely a more sustainable and protected business model,” Jonas wrote. The forecast places Waymo at the top with a $175 valuation, Tesla at $17.7 billion, and Cruise trailing with a $11.5 billion valuation. |
WSJ reports that Theranos will finally dissolve | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | is reportedly finally closing down for good, nearly three years after a Wall Street Journal investigation . The WSJ said the company, whose dramatic downfall spawned a that’s set to be , sent shareholders an email saying it will formally dissolve and seek to pay unsecured creditors its remaining cash in the coming months. Holmes resigned as CEO in June after she and Theranos’ former president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were . Both Holmes and Balwani had already been charged with fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the criminal charges are separate from the civil ones filed by the SEC). In its complaint, the SEC said the two engaged in “an elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance,” which ultimately enabled them to raise more than $700 million from investors. Holmes and the SEC settled the charges by having Holmes agree to pay a $500,000 penalty and be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years. She was also required to return the remaining 18.9 million shares she obtained while engaging in fraud and relinquish voting control of Theranos. TechCrunch has sent an email to Theranos’ public relations address asking for comment. |
null | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 9 | 3 | null |
Meditation app Headspace bets on voice and AI with Alpine.AI acquisition | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | , a meditation app with 31 million users that is valued at $320 million, is doubling down on voice and A.I. technology to help differentiate itself from the rest of the wellness pack. The company today has announced that it has acquired (previously called VoiceLabs), one of the early players in the digital assistant market, to bring more voice interaction into its main app. “There are a few meditation apps out there right now…but the ability to react to where you are in your journey with specific advice through voice applications will be [far ahead] of where our competitors are,” says Headspace’s Paddy Hannon, who will lead the Alpine team of four who are joining Headspace’s offices in San Francisco. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition includes both the team and the technology, Headspace said. The team joining will include Alpine.AI co-founder and CTO Alexandre Linares and three engineers. Alpine.AI CEO Adam Marchick will retain an advisory role going forward. VoiceLabs had experimented across a number of voice-based products over the years. They included a voice advertising product that Amazon ; an analytics service for voice app developers; and most recently, by importing retailers’ catalogs and using A.I. to answer customer questions about those products. The latter, known as Alpine.AI, is what Headspace found most interesting. Alpine.AI was working on solutions for retailers, which would allow customers to talk to their voice assistants naturally. For example, asking for a mascara, the voice assistant would respond with things like, “What color?” and “Do you want it to be waterproof?” Headspace is not about to start selling make-up, but it does see potential in applying Alpine.AI’s machine learning technologies to its own domain. Today, Headspace’s primary interface is audio. Users are guided through meditation sessions by the soothing, calm and distinctive voice of Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder who is a former Tibetan monk. Building on that foundation, the plan will be to implement Alpine.AI’s technology to give people an interactive voice-based way to discover the different meditation sessions available on Headspace, and to use those interactions to make better suggestions to individual users. A consumer might tell Headspace they’re “stressed out,” and the app would make an appropriate recommendation based on the customer’s history in the app. The addition of Alpine’s technology could be a competitive advantage for Headspace, in the crowded and field of self-care apps. Headspace is just ahead of chief rival Calm.com in terms of valuation, with the latter at around $277 million, according to data from . Beyond the initial advantage of improving Headspace’s voice apps, Hannon says Alpine’s technology can be put to use in other ways, as well, including within its iOS and Android apps where users’ actions — not a voice command — could be the trigger that kicks off a personalized suggestion. Hannon says Alpine.AI was also appealing because of how it was built. “They built everything on Amazon. They use Docker. This was another reason it was a very attractive acquisition,” Hannon explains. “They built software using the same patterns that we build our software with internally. They’re leveraging much of the same database technologies that we’re using. They use REST services like we do…so from an infrastructure perspective, it was very straightforward. “I think where it’s going to be interesting is attaching our audio content to their text-based system. But when you look at what Amazon’s providing with things like Lex right now, there’s a lot of text-to-speech or speech-to-text systems, that I think will enable us to do that implementation,” he added. The deal is also about betting on the future of voice computing. The number of voice-enabled digital assistant devices has grown to over 1 billion worldwide over the past two-and-a-half years. Today, 20 percent of U.S. households have a dedicated smart speaker, and that number is expected to grow. As one of the leading apps in the self-care app market, Headspace today reaches 31 million users, including over 1 million paying subscribers, across 190 countries. It also runs a B2B business focused on bringing its meditation exercises to larger organizations and their employees, where it has more than 250 businesses on board. Alpine.AI was a seed-stage company at the time of the acquisition, having raised “a few million” from investors including The Chernin Group, Javelin Venture Partners and Betaworks. But while voice-enabled smart speakers have proven to have some popularity, we’ve yet to see many startups working in voice-based interfaces scale up and take on the likes of Nuance or other large platform players like Apple, Google and Amazon. This might have been part of the reason why Alpine.AI was an attractive acquisition target (and was also open to the exit). The startup is winding down the small handful of retailers, including Petco, who were using the product and is offering each a one-on-one transition plan. “We are thrilled to be dedicating our efforts to coaching and guiding users to build healthy routines,” said Alpine.AI CEO Adam Marchick, about the acquisition. “Alpine’s machine learning capabilities accelerate Headspace’s efforts to bring new conversational experiences to market.” |
The Xbox Adaptive Controller goes on sale today and is also now part of the V&A museum’s collection | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | In an important move for inclusion in the gaming community, the , created for gamers with mobility issues, is . The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) also announced today that it has acquired the Xbox Adaptive Controller for display in its Rapid Response gallery dedicated to current events and pop culture. First , the Xbox Adaptive Controller can now be . To create the controller, Microsoft collaborated with gamers with disabilities and limited mobility, as well as partners from several organizations, including the AbleGamers Charity, the Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Special Effect and Warfighter Engaged. According to Microsoft, the when one of its engineers spotted a custom gaming controller made by Warfighter Engaged, a non-profit that provides gaming devices for wounded and disabled veterans. During several of Microsoft’s hackathons, teams of employees began working on gaming devices for people with limited mobility, which in turn gave momentum to the development of the Xbox Adaptive Controller. In its , the V&A said it added the Xbox Adaptive Controller to its collection because “as the first adaptive controller designed and manufactured at large-scale by a leading technology company, it represents a landmark moment in videogame play, and demonstrates how design can be harnessed to encourage inclusively and access.” The controller slopes down toward the front, enabling gamers to slide their hands onto it without having to lift them (and also makes it easier to control with feet) and has rounded edges to reduce the change of injury if it’s dropped on a foot. The Xbox Adaptive Controller was designed to rest comfortably in laps and also has three threaded inserts so it can be mounted with hardware to wheelchairs, lap boards or desks. In terms of visual design, the Xbox Adaptive Controller is sleek and unobtrusive, since Microsoft heard from many gamers with limited mobility that they dislike using adaptive devices because they often look like toys. The company’s attention to detail also , which is very easy to unbox because gamers told Microsoft that they are often forced to open boxes and other product packages with their teeth. |
Burning Man: sympathy for the turnkey devil | Jon Evans | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | The most interesting thing about Burning Man, says me, is that it’s a testbed for a post-scarcity society. The irony of course is that such a testbed requires enormous amounts of money and resources, in a highly hostile and inaccessible environment. That’s how far you have to go to get away from the monetary / scarcity hierarchies of our world. It’s a lot of other things, of course: the world’s biggest, craziest, and most spectacular party, a huge EDM festival, a massive outdoor art gallery (both ephemeral and permanent — museum curators go out there to inspect the work with an eye towards adding to their collections), an experimental community, a secular pagan ritual, a set & setting for psychedelics, a holiday / reunion with one’s friends, etcetera etcetera. Amusingly it is widely misunderstood as a hippie event, when its flamethrowers:guitars ratio is roughly 100:1 and its mottos include “Safety Third” and “Keep Burning Man Potentially Lethal.” It is also even, sometimes, very weirdly, misinterpreted as some kind of holiday-hackathon extension of Silicon Valley. That last misunderstanding is instructive. The list of events this year included a so-called ‘VC/entrepreneur networking event and pitch session.’ I did not attend, but a close friend did, and reported “it was the ultimate Poe’s Law event … many people were genuinely crestfallen when they realized it was a joke.” It seems that the concept of a place that isn’t so much to external social hierarchies as it is, much more interestingly, to them — that’s a hard one for some people to to wrap their heads around. It’s true that Burning Man is very influential in the Valley, as this discusses. It’s true that there is a lot of amazing technology out there — this year featured a glorious swarm/murmuration of 600(!) drones, paired twenty-foot Tesla coils, a whole panoply of robots, etc. But its makers go to show off what they have built to their community, not in the hopes of filthy lucre. Don’t get me wrong. This experimental desert community very much has its own hierarchies, its own social capital, its own parasites, its own textbook full of unwritten rules, its own perfectly acceptable (indeed, proudly championed) logos. But the idea, at least, is: everyone works; everyone builds (if only a tent); everyone fights, and loses to, the dust; everyone amasses social capital by giving things and experiences rather than earning them; and everyone — whether riding atop a massive fire-breathing art car, or huddled in a mini-tent in the camp allotted to those bus riders who have nowhere else to go — is equally a participant, whether just helping and collaborating with those strangers in your immediate vicinity, or building some massive art/tech project for all to enjoy. This orthogonality to external hierarchies, this competition to give rather than to take, is what makes it a fascinating de facto testbed for a post-scarcity society, among other forms of experimental community. And maybe that’s why those who come but don’t participate in any community at all are so deeply scorned, loathed, and despised. I refer of course to the infamous “turnkey camps” of (often very) wealthy people who pay money to have their hexayurts erected, their food provided, their experience guided and curated — to be spectators at the spectacle, basically. To exist differently from everyone else at the event. To bring their hierarchical upper-tier existence from the outside world to the playa; to infect our testbed with boring old capitalism. It’s true that rich people, especially from the Valley, have been coming to Burning Man and enjoying expensive luxuries there for a very long time. In 2001, Larry and Sergey chose Eric Schmidt as Google’s CEO in part because he was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man. Mark Zuckerberg once choppered in and spent an afternoon giving away grilled cheese sandwiches. Elon Musk dismissed the TV show “Silicon Valley” because it didn’t reflect the side of the Valley he saw at Burning Man. But they still made that happen themselves. It’s only been over the last few years that the experience has — allegedly — been for sale as a package deal. This makes people very angry. Mostly, I think, because they are afraid. Capitalism is basically the Borg; it infects and subsumes everything it touches. Burning Man will become just another big party festival, is the fear, no longer an experimental community, much less a post-scarcity testbed. And yet. I happened to spend Saturday night surrounded by a bunch of very clean, very wealthy people from a turnkey camp. There were old men in civilian shorts; young men in completely spotless, glittering, top-end multi-thousand-dollar burnerwear; a woman in a don’t-look-at-me-I’m-totally-not-a-celebrity custom full-face golden mask. They acted as a classic tour group, except instead of following a flag, their lead sherpa held a ten-foot length of quarter-inch rebar topped with a blinking LED heart. And what I felt most, after I got over my initial resentment, was how I was for them. I had solo camped in dusty squalor in the aforementioned bus camp … and I had clearly had a far more interesting and enjoyable time. Granted, I’m (relatively speaking) a crusty veteran of the event, but I suspect I would have had I been a virgin, too. And I think, as they looked around at the seventy thousand souls around them, many of whom were also very wealthy and could have purchased the turnkey experience, but instead chose to pour in an enormous amount of effort and experimentation, to construct colossal and/or intricate machines and/or monumental works of art, because they expected the rewards to be great — I think those much-loathed tourists knew this too. So never mind their invasion. I expect Burning Man to remain remarkably resistant to capitalism’s Borg, and therefore an interesting experimental proving ground — for cultures, communities, and technologies — for the foreseeable future. (As well as a completely ridiculous party populated by completely ridiculous people, which is also very much one of its faces.) I don’t expect the turnkey tourists to convert. They’re too committed to their own hierarchies. But I do think we live in a very interesting time of technology-enabled cultural and community experimentation, and, as silly and over-the-top as Burning Man can seem and be, those experiments there are genuinely valuable. |
SynapseFI raises $17M to develop its fintech and banking platform | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 9 | 4 | , a startup that helps banks and fintech companies work together to develop technology, has announced that it raised a $17 million Series A funding round. The funding actually closed at the back end of last year, but CEO Sankaet Pathak said the company has been so busy developing new products, hiring and more than that it is only getting around to disclosing the deal now. The investment was led by Trinity Ventures and Core Innovation Capital, with participation from other unnamed backers. The San Francisco-based startup has sat under the radar for a while now despite starting up in 2014. Its core product is a platform that helps banks and developers work together. That involves developer-facing APIs that allow companies to connect with banks to offer services, and also bank-facing APIs that allow banks to automate and extend back-end operations. Pathak describes the vision as making it possible for anyone around the world to get access to high-quality financial products. The first focus is to make financial products “like Lego bricks” to enable banks to add new products and services easily. As it stands today, development is a painful process that requires specific infrastructure development, but SynapseFI aims to standardize a lot of the processes and platform to make things much simpler. The idea for the business came when Pathak, who moved to the U.S. from India in 2010, grew frustrated at being unable to get a bank account or loan because he had no social security history. He left the University of Memphis, where he had studied computer engineering and sciences, and founded the startup in April 2014 alongside his friend Bryan Keltner. Initially, the business focused on payments, but it gradually tilted to become a technology enabler for the financial industry. Today, The SynapseFi team “There are three core things we want to fix in banking,” Pathak told TechCrunch in an interview. “The vertical integration… we want any large or small financial company to be able to come to us and operate at the same scale as the likes of Wells and Chase. We also want to automate financial advice using behavior science.” Pathak added that the startup also harbors an ambition to expand overseas. That’s likely to mean Europe first — potentially a market like the UK or Germany — but it’ll require fairly intensive localization as the SynapseFI platform is customized to accommodate U.S. APIs and data pipes, none of which will work outside of the country. An expansion would be likely to happen around the time that the company looks to raise its Series B, although Pathak stressed that he is also focused on building a sustainable business and not simply relying on venture capital money. Indeed, he said that the company is likely to reach breakeven by the end of the year. “I still think it’s a healthy business practice,” Pathak said. |
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