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Stride.VC, a new seed fund founded by Fred Destin and Harry Stebbings, sees first £40M closing | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 6 | 4 | We already knew that veteran venture capitalist Fred Destin had with podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings to raise a fund of their own, but now more details have emerged, including that the new VC firm has reportedly achieved its first closing. According to my sources, Stride.VC — as the VC is to be called — has already closed £40 million, with a final target of £50 million or more. I’m told that LPs include a number of notable U.K. founders, although I’ve yet to peg who, along with the usual mix of institutional VC investors and family offices. One name that has surfaced, however (via a Companies House regulatory filing) is Delin Capital, the investment vehicle of Russian-born entrepreneur Igor Linshits. He previously backed Mail.ru alongside Yuri Milner of DST fame, amongst many other investments spanning petrochemical, commodities trading, and tech. According to Wikipedia, he immigrated to the U.K. in 2009, where he became a British citizen and founded Delin Capital. Delin’s core businesses are DCAM, one of Europe’s leading e-commerce logistics real estate players, and Delin Ventures, which supports emerging venture fund managers and makes direct investments in early-stage companies. People with knowledge of Stride.VC’s strategy and investment remit say the new firm is targeting seed stage startups with a strong focus on the U.K., where both Destin and Stebbings are based. It will remain “sector agnostic,” however, and is looking to partner with “contrarian entrepreneurs” who are attempting to reshape various industries. Destin has always maintained that at the earliest of stages it is less about a company’s strategy — which at seed is based on limited data and clearly subject to change — and more about a team’s conviction and determination. It is perhaps why a number of VCs and founders I talk to have always thought he was an odd fit at Accel in London, . Accel typically doesn’t invest in seed and is known to be extremely data-driven. However, although it wouldn’t normally come as a surprise to see a VC with Destin’s experience and track record raise a fund of his own — having previously backed successful companies such as Zoopla, Secret Escapes, Carwow, Deliveroo, DailyMotion, Integral Ad Science, and Pillpack — it was by Bloomberg last July that Stride.VC’s fundraising efforts were facing additional scrutiny after an accusation of inappropriate behaviour by Destin towards a female founder at a conference in 2013. , Destin issued a statement saying that he had “on occasion acted without awareness at parties and been flirty” and that if he had “offended anyone or made anyone feel uncomfortable in any way, I am truly sorry”. He also told BI that he had never used his position as a VC inappropriately. Meanwhile, although only 21 years old, Stebbings has already packed a lot in for such a short career. He is best known as the founder and host of the popular “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast, which he still publishes. He was also most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Atomico, the VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, and has no doubt built up an impressive network in the U.K. and across the pond. , the two met when Destin was interviewed by Stebbings on one of the earlier episodes of “The Twenty Minute VC” and after the show had finished being recorded, the two continued to chat. This led to Destin agreeing to be Stebbings’ VC mentor. They have since become close friends, including getting to know each other and their respective families outside of work, and this eventually resulted in the idea of doing a fund together. Lastly, Stride.VC may have already written its first cheque, backing a yet-to-launch London fintech startup. Who that is, I haven’t been able to confirm, although if my information is correct it broadly plays in the home financing space. |
Announcing space speakers and startups featured at Disrupt SF | Ned Desmond | 2,018 | 6 | 4 | null |
Microsoft announces the Windows Collaboration Display platform for offices | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | null |
Microsoft program provides a decade of updates for Windows IoT devices | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | If you have an essential Internet of Things device running , you don’t want to be worried about security and OS patches over a period of years. Microsoft wants to help customers running these kinds of devices with a new program that guarantees 10 years of updates. The idea is that as third-party partners build applications on top of the Windows 10 IoT Core Services, these OEMs, who create the apps, can pay Microsoft to guarantee updates for these devices for a decade. This can help assure customers that they won’t be vulnerable to attack on these critical systems from unpatched applications. The service does more than provide updates though. It also gives OEMs the ability to manage the updates and assess the device’s health. “The Windows IoT Core service offering is enabling partners to commercialize secure IoT devices backed by industry-leading support. And so device makers will have the ability to manage updates for the OS, for the apps and for the settings for OEM-specific files,” Dinesh Narayanan, director of business development for emerging markets explained. It gives OEMs creating Windows-powered applications on machines like healthcare devices or ATMs this ability to manage them over an extended period. That’s particularly important as these devices tend to have a more extended usage period than say a PC or tablet.”We want to extend support and commit to that support over the long haul for these devices that have a longer life cycle,” Narayanan said. Beyond the longevity, the service also provides customers with access to the Device Update Center where they can control and customize how and when the devices get updated. It also includes another level of security called Device Health Attestation that allows the OEMs to evaluate the trustworthiness of the devices before they update them using a third party service. All of this is designed to give Microsoft a foothold in the growing IoT space and to provide an operating system for these devices as they proliferate. While predictions vary dramatically, Gartner has predicted that will be online in 2020. While not all of these will be powered by Windows, or require advanced management capabilities, those that do can be assured if their vendor uses this program that they can manage the devices and keep them up-to-date. And when it comes to the Internet of Things, chances are that’s going to be critical. |
Norwest just scored an interesting new partner: Google and Facebook alum Priti Youssef Choksi | Connie Loizos | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | A lot of people who’ve been working in the venture industry — even for many years — haven’t seen a true down cycle. Somewhat ironically, Priti Youssef Choksi, a newly minted VC, knows very well what one looks like. The newest partner of the multi-stage investment firm has been working in tech since before the last boom and bust — and she has lessons to share about both good times and bad. It all started in her native Mumbai (“Bombay to me!” she says). Choksi didn’t tell her parents when, as a teenager, she applied to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture and business. “I couldn’t study both back home,” she says, somewhat sheepishly from Norwest’s glass-lined new offices in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood. Instead of winding up at an architecture firm, she landed at Broadview Associates, an investment bank that was based in the Bay Area and advised dozens of tech companies during the go-go dot-com days — before nosediving along with the market. (In 2003, it was by bigger rival Jefferies.) By then, Choksi had already joined one of the bank’s clients, an internet marketing company called USWeb, whose CEO asked her to work for him despite having no discrete job description. Looking back now, Choksi remembers the experience fondly, saying she ran strategy projects and competitive analysis of what others in the industry were doing as USWeb grew from a 200- to an 8,000-person operation. This being the dot-com era, however, USWeb, which was renowned for its roll-up strategy at the time, Choksi again left before her employer’s demise to join an early streaming media company, but alas, it wasn’t meant to last long either. If at this point Choksi felt ready to throw in the towel, she doesn’t seem to recall it. Instead, she entered into a one-year program at the Kellogg School to burnish her “soft skills and negotiating skills and things you don’t have time to practice” at a startup. Then she headed right back to Silicon Valley. Her return would begin a second chapter of sorts. In fact, like a lot of people who came to the Bay Area in the ’90s and stayed, Choksi’s fortunes began to turn after the detritus of the bubble’s burst began to blow away. First came a job at Google, where she stayed six years, holding roles in both strategic partnerships and, later, distribution partnerships, where she says she helped convince management to bundle the company’s search bar with other products to get it into the world more widely. By 2009, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — a former Google exec who’d seen Choksi’s work — was reaching out to Choksi to ask if she would help run business development at Facebook, which itself was still privately held at the time. Choksi said yes, so thoroughly enjoying the company that five years later, she moved to the “dark side, doing M&A at Facebook” for another four years. She notes that, by then, Facebook had “moved beyond acqui-hires to doing big tech bets,” but like everyone in the M&A world, It was apparently a match from the start. Sitting in an airy conference room, Choksi says of the move that she and Crowe were and remain “just very direct with each other.” Norwest was also, somewhat incredibly, the “only venture firm that invited me to a partner-and-pitch meeting” while it was trying to lure her into the fold, she says. Crowe certainly sees Choksi’s hire as a big win as the firm continues to build out it consumer-facing investment practice. He volunteers that he’s particularly appreciative of Choksi’s ties to Facebook and to the many people who’ve spun out of the company to work on their own projects. But he also recognizes her ability to identify a good opportunity when she sees one and to support founders as they grow their companies. “Somebody who’s been in the industry a long time, knows a lot of people, seen a lot of technologies and worked with entrepreneurs both inside of out of companies like Facebook — including during their awkward teenage phase?” says Crowe. “It’s pretty exciting for us.” |
Caroobi, a marketplace for automotive mechanics, raises $20M led by Nokia’s NGP Capital | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | The long-term future of transportation might see fewer people owning cars, but today a lot of private vehicles are still on the road, and now a startup that’s building a multi-faceted marketplace to help fix them has raised some funding. , a Berlin company that connects individuals with mechanics, and mechanics with parts suppliers, has picked up $20 million, money that it plans to use to expand its business into new markets — it’s active today only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and is just starting to open for business in the UK — and its platform to cover a wider range of services. The Series B round was led by NGP Capital, formerly known as Nokia Growth Partners, a fund backed by the Finnish telecoms giant. This is part of its “smart mobility” investment strategy. “We are looking for promising companies in the mobility sector globally and believe that the integrated model across the value chain that Caroobi is building has huge potential. The team is great and we are looking forward to supporting the company’s international expansion and building a global category winner,” said Walter Masalin, Partner at NGP Capital, in a statement. Other investors in this round include Target Global, BMW iVentures, DN Capital and Cherry Ventures. The BMW investment is financial, co-founder and MD of Caroobi Mark Michl said in an interview, with no strategic plans for now between the two. Although BMW an iconically German company, the iVentures arm is actually in the Bay Area; Caroobi, in fact, is iVentures’ first investment in BMW’s home country. Caroobi is not disclosing its valuation but I understand that it is now over $100 million. The company is not yet profitable, by design, and has raised around $30 million to date. The amount of this investment is notable when you consider the size of it versus the potential of Caroobi’s business today. The company says that in its current German footprint, for example, it works with only 750 mechanics today, but with a total addressable market of around 35,000 mechanics. It’s currently servicing some 2,000 cars per month and growing 100 percent month-over-month. “The market potential is huge, and we currently have well below only one percent of it,” Michl said. As Michl and his co-founder Nico Weiler explain it, Caroobi is providing a platform to fill what is effectively a gap in the legacy automotive market. In many countries, one of the most common routes for repairing a car, or getting it serviced, is to use an independent garage or mechanic. But these days, as much of the process of finding and contacting tradespeople has moved online, much of the mechanic world has not come along. You may find some recommendations on services like Yelp, and even some targeted directories that help direct referrals for independent mechanics to quote for work, such as WhoCanFixMyCar in the UK, or even services that come to you on-demand, such as YourMechanic in the US. But what’s largely lacking is a platform that not only helps match up car owners with mechanics and their garages, but also provides those customers with transparent price lists and helps to manage not just bookings, but payments and potentially disputes (and soon, service guarantees). On top of that, the Caroobi platform offers services to the mechanics themselves. “There are two customers we are addressing,” said Michl. “One is consumers, who often may not know if mechanics are offering them fair quality and price. We are getting around that by offering services directly to customers,” he said. This includes the option to use a team of experts, remotely via the Caroobi app, to help diagnose the problem. “Two is the mechanic,” he continued. Mechanics services come in two parts. The first is the customer-facing side, where Caroobi is giving mechanics a more efficient way of interfacing with customers, with accounting and billing software that links up with Caroobi’s back-end, and scheduling tools to book in appointments. Weiler said that Caroobi’s customer referrals typically account for 50 percent – 60 percent of all mechanics’ jobs once they join. The second is the supplier-facing side, which is a newer area of business for Caroobi. Mechanics typically work with either a small group of distributors, or more likely one or two purchasing groups, which gives the mechanics less flexibilty in what they can order, the general supply levels, and how much everything costs. Caroobi currently sources parts from over 100 distributors and manufacturers, giving those mechanics a better selection and likely more competitive pricing. “For mechanics, the parts acquisition process has always been intransparent and inefficient. By sourcing our parts directly from manufacturers we are establishing a lean, efficient process in the market, which becomes more cost effective for our customers and partner mechanics.” Michl said. Caroobi is not disclosing what this works out to in terms of actual prices, or what kind of a cut Caroobi gets from it. Michl does say that the company takes a small percentage for every kind of transaction, and that these often work out to be competitive or even cheaper than what the mechanic might have charged, were he working directly. For now, Caroobi is going to remain focused just on growing its business providing car repair services to consumers, and services to mechanics both to source parts and manage their businesses. But you could see the potential of offering this service to other sectors that are heavily populated by small businesspeople or sole traders, who have been late (or are yet to arrive) to the idea of tapping technology to bring their businesses into the 21st century. Other tradespeople such as large appliance technicians can be equally hard to find for the average consumer, and those technicians also could use better access to parts and that value chain. This potentially puts a company like Caroobi — or at least the business model behind it — into the crosshairs of companies like Amazon, or even Square. The former is not only selling cars and car parts, but has been eyeing up ways of building up its services business, and this seems like a natural complement to all of these. The latter type of company, meanwhile, has developed a strong platform for servicing small and medium businesses, and similar to Caviar, this could be one way of building up a stronger vertical operation targeting tradespeople specifically with more than just purchasing but business services. It’s notable that both Michl and Weiler both hail from not from an automotive background but another area that has been much-shaped by the rise of omni-commerce and all the logistics of managing on-demand consumer services around that: food. Michl had previously worked at meal-kit provider HelloFresh, while Weiler previously worked for table booking service Quandoo, known as the OpenTable of Europe, in 2015. |
Real estate property manager and developer JLL launches a $100 million tech investment fund | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | The multi-billion-dollar real estate developer and property manager JLL is getting into the tech investment game with the launch of a new $100 million fund run by corporate subsidiary . Initially envisioned of the multinational real estate company, the firm eventually turned to the more traditional venture capital investment model as a way to get more exposure to all of the new technologies that are coming to market, according to JLL Spark’s co-chief executive, Mihir Shah. For Shah and his co-founder Yishai Lerner, running the real estate company’s investment firm is the first foray by either executive into the world of real estate or property technology. But both men have been working in the startup world of the Bay Area for more than a decade. In fact, the two serial entrepreneurs launched one of their first companies from the TechCrunch 50 conference way back in 2007 (it was a mobile app that mimicked Yelp). The two eventually sold their mobile review business to GroupOn and began doing some angel investing. It was during that venture into the wild world of seed-stage prospecting that Shah got bitten by the real estate bug while trying to buy some commercial real estate. “I was looking at the process and was thinking ‘Wow! That is not a modern process,’ ” Shah said. Unbeknownst to Shah, at the same time he was looking for commercial real estate, the commercial real estate industry was looking for someone like him. JLL had put out feelers and hired headhunters to find someone who could take the lead at the firm’s burgeoning technology practice, Shah said. “They had all sorts of internal initiatives bringing in new technology companies and services to their existing clients,” Shah said. “They understood that technology was going to transform all aspects of the industry.” One of the first steps that JLL had taken , which developed and sold asset management software for the real estate industry. But Shah and Lerner quickly realized that the buy and build strategy wouldn’t be robust enough for JLL’s needs. “Over the last six months we saw how much innovation was happening in the proptech space and we thought it made more sense to launch a venture fund,” Shah said. The firm will invest anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million into seed stage or Series A companies with the option to dabble in later stage deals, according to Shah. The firm has made two investments so far — neither one of them in startups. The commitments have been in one accelerator program, the New York-based , which focuses on real estate tech investment, and , which is billed as a later-stage investor in the same space. Both investments appear to be geared toward educating the firm’s two principals on the market and what’s already happening in the space. The benefit that a corporate firm like JLL can provide to startups is the access to pilot projects where companies can deploy their technologies and, indeed, that’s the pitch that Shah makes to potential portfolio companies. “Money is not enough,” he said. “There’s a lot of products out there, but they’re struggling with distribution.” JLL has designated a few buildings in top cities around the world to fast track new technologies and provide trial spaces for them to develop, Shah told me. “Our value as a strategic is to build that bridge and make that connection.” “Creating this $100 million venture fund through JLL Spark allows us to continue to lead the real estate industry in bringing the best proptech ideas to reality,” said Christian Ulbrich, JLL’s Global chief executive. “It complements and expands our substantial ongoing investments in innovative, cutting-edge digital solutions, which is a core part of our Beyond strategic vision and commitment to achieve ambitions for our clients.” |
Facebook shared data with Chinese telecom Huawei, raising US government security concerns | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | Concerns around Facebook’s with some device makers just took a turn for the worse. The practice, first revealed over the weekend, is now confirmed to have included relationships with Chinese companies Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL, according to . Given that the U.S. government has longstanding , Facebook’s newly revealed data deal with the Chinese company has raised some eyebrows in Congress. “Concerns about Huawei aren’t new – they were widely publicized beginning in 2012, when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released on the close relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei,” U.S. Senator Mark Warner said of the revelation. Warner serves as the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. “The news that Facebook provided privileged access to Facebook’s API to Chinese device makers like Huawei and TCL raises legitimate concerns, and I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers.” In , the House Intelligence Committee wrote that “Huawei did not fully cooperate with the investigation and was unwilling to explain its relationship with the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party, while credible evidence exists that it fails to comply with U.S. laws” and that Huawei’s history indicated that it likely had ties to the Chinese military. Earlier in the day, the Senate Commerce Committee addressed a to Facebook over the broader issue of these manufacturer relationships and questioning Facebook’s assertion that the shared data was not abused. As The New York Times reports, these relationships date back to “at least 2010” — the relative dark ages of Facebook’s mobile strategy. It does not appear that ZTE had a similar agreement with Facebook. [scribd id=381106039 key=key-IOB7XD8nBjFvvhsnQo4q mode=scroll] Facebook has the characterization of these relationships as a privacy scandal, emphasizing that it imposed tight restrictions on this class of device integration. These integrations are very different from our public APIs — the goal was to recreate Facebook-like experiences on these devices, and they were tightly controlled. — Facebook (@facebook) Facebook told The New York Times that while the partnerships have been ongoing for years, the company would end its relationship with Huawei by the week’s end. Huawei provided the following statement to TechCrunch: “Like all leading smartphone providers, Huawei worked with Facebook to make Facebook’s services more convenient for users. Huawei has never collected or stored any Facebook user data.” |
Indiegogo expands its efforts to help Chinese startups reach global consumers | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | While crowdfunding company Indiegogo has been running for the past couple of years, it’s now building on those efforts with the launch of . CEO David Mandelbrot is in Shenzhen, China this week to announce the program, which is designed to help Chinese entrepreneurs reach a global audience. In an email, he told me: The China Pilot Program is officially out of pilot phase — today, we are officially launching the Indiegogo Global Fast Track. During the pilot phase, the team experimented with different ways to help service Chinese brands and manufacturers who were looking to launch products overseas. After helping companies raise over $100 million and launch over 3,000 China-based projects over two years time, the team has finalized its new suite of services. Those services include guidance around crowdfunding and marketing in the United States and other countries, access to a network of more than 65 service providers (including retailers and marketing firms, as well as Indiegogo’s manufacturing partner Arrow Electronics and shipping partner Ingram Micro) and Chinese-to-English consultation with bilingual staff. Even while in the pilot phase, Indiegogo has had some success stories in helping Chinese companies launch globally. For example, Bluetooth headphone company raised more than $4 million across three campaigns. Mandelbrot said Indiegogo also has opened a satellite office in the Tencent incubator in Shenzhen — a manufacturing hub that’s . |
FCC has a redaction party with emails relating to mystery attack on comment system | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | You may remember the explaining that in both 2014 and 2017, its comment system was briefly taken down by a denial of service attack. At least, so it says — but newly released emails show that the 2014 case was essentially fabricated, and the agency has so aggressively redacted documents relating to the 2017 incident that one suspects they’re hiding more than ordinary privileged information. As a very quick recap: Shortly after the comment period opened for both net neutrality and the rollback of net neutrality there was a rush of activity that rendered the filing system unusable for a period of hours. This was corrected soon afterwards and the capacity of the system increased to cope with the increased traffic. based on more than 1,300 pages of emails shows that David Bray, the FCC’s chief information officer for a period encompassing both events, appears to have advanced the DDoS narrative with no real evidence or official support. The 2014 event was not called an attack until much later, when Bray told reporters following the 2017 event that it was. “At the time the Chairman [i.e. Tom Wheeler] did not want to say there was a DDoS attack out of concern of copycats,” Bray wrote to a reporter at Federal News Radio. “So we accepted the punches that it somehow crashed because of volume even though actual comment volume wasn’t an issue.” Gigi Sohn, who was Wheeler’s counsel at the time, put down this idea: “That’s just flat out false,” she told Gizmodo. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.” And it is the second time that is most suspicious. Differing on the preferred nomenclature for a four-year-old suspicious cyber event would not be particularly damning, but Bray’s narrative of a DDoS is hard to justify with the facts we do know. written in response to the report, Bray explained regarding the 2017 outage: Whether the correct phrase is denial of service or “bot swarm” or “something hammering the Application Programming Interface” (API) of the commenting system — the fact is something odd was happening in May 2017. Bray’s analysis appears sincere, but the data he volunteers is highly circumstantial: large amounts of API requests that don’t match comment counts, for instance, or bunches of RSS requests that tie up the servers. Could it have been a malicious actor doing this? It’s possible. Could it have been bad code hammering the servers with repeated or malformed requests? Also totally possible. The FCC’s justification for calling it an attack seems to be nothing more than a hunch. Later the FCC, via then-CIO Bray, would categorize the event as a flooding the API interface. But beyond that it has produced so little information of any import that Congress has had to re-issue its questions in stronger words. No official documentation of either supposed attack has appeared, nor has the FCC released any data on it, even a year later and long after the comment period has closed, improvements to the system have been made and the CIO who evaded senators’ questions departed. But most suspicious is the extent to which the FCC redacted documents relating to the 2017 event. Having read through the trove of emails, Gizmodo concludes that “every internal conversation about the 2017 incident between FCC employees” has been redacted. Every one! The FCC stated before that the “ongoing nature” of the threats to its systems meant it would “undermine our system’s security” to provide any details on the improvements it had made to mitigate future attacks. And Bray wrote in his post that there was no “full blown report” because the team was focused on getting the system up and running again. But there is also an FCC statement saying that “our analysis reveals” that a DDoS was the cause. What analysis? If it’s not a “significant cyber incident,” as the FBI determined, why the secrecy? If there’s no report or significant analysis from the day — wrong or right in retrospect — what is sensitive about the emails that they have to be redacted en masse? Bray himself wrote more technical details into his post than the FCC has offered in the year since the event — was this information sent to reporters at the time? Was it redacted? Why? So little about this whole information play makes no sense. One reasonable explanation (and just speculation, I should add) would be that the data do support the idea of an attack, and internal discussions are an unflattering portrait of an agency doing spin work. The commitment to transparency that FCC Chairman Pai so frequently invokes is conspicuously absent in this specific case, and one has to wonder why. The ongoing refusal to officially document or discuss what all seem to agree was an important event, whether it’s a DDoS or something else, is making the FCC look bad to just about everyone. No amount of redaction can change that. |
Amazon is bringing Alexa and Echo to France this month | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | null |
AirPods to get Live Listen feature in iOS 12 | Steven Aquino | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | Apple has one hardware-specific feature planned that wasn’t announced at Monday’s WWDC keynote. In iOS 12, users will be able to use , a special feature previously reserved for hearing aids certified through Apple’s , with their AirPods. After enabling the feature in the iPhone’s settings, users will be able to use their phones effectively as a directional mic. This means you can have AirPods in at a noisy restaurant with your iPhone on the table, for example, and the voice of whomever is speaking will be routed to your AirPods. Live Listen is a feature Apple developed and eventually launched in 2014 that allows iPhone users with hearing aids to hear people in noisy environments or from across a room, such as a crowded restaurant or lecture hall. If a compatible hearing aid is paired to a user’s phone, there are options to turn Live Listen on and off, adjust volume and even set it as their preferred Accessibility Shortcut. Live Listen support in AirPods is key. The inclusion of this feature makes AirPods more capable and more alluring; it’s significant given they are almost universally hailed as one of Apple’s best products in years. Soon, anyone — particularly someone with limited hearing — will have access to this feature without needing to buy dedicated hardware to get it. Still, it’s critical to note AirPods with Live Listen is not a full replacement for a hearing aid. It’s obviously best to speak with your audiologist to determine the best solution for your ears. |
The Uberization of telcos | Dieter Gerdemann | 2,018 | 6 | 5 |
For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates. While particularly mobile operators have enabled increasing prosperity in third-world countries, new ways of working and fueled entirely new markets, much of the wealth created has landed on the books of companies that we look upon with increasing discomfort: Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and others. And as if this was not enough, the very ingredient — ubiquitous connectivity — that has served as lubricant for the disruption of entire industries is now on the verge of being disrupted itself. While many expect finance or healthcare to be next on the list of global serial disruptors, and technologies like wearables, blockchain and AI are cited to be the nails in the coffins of these industries, small players have cooked up the ingredients that could well marginalize today’s prevailing telco business models globally. There are three ingredients that could make that happen… Among the top 100 most trusted brands globally, you will find companies of almost any industry, except telco. You will find our serial disruptors, big brand consumer packaged goods, car manufacturers — even banks, payment companies and healthcare service providers. But you won’t find telcos. In their battle for growth, telcos globally have largely alienated their customers for the sake of managing yield and profitability. Furthermore, simple customer engagement processes are often broken, and telcos have struggled to achieve a high quality of service with zero defects, high responsiveness and a great customer experience on even their most relevant customer interactions. They have broken the trust equation with their customers. Why is that relevant? Because trust is an important ingredient in disintermediation, à la Uber or Airbnb. Uber has put trust and ease into the car-hailing business, while Airbnb has put the trust in-between guest and host. On the flip side, an existing trusted relationship is hard to disintermediate. However, the telco-customer relationship, as global brand indicators show, is ready to be disrupted. Perhaps even more so than the bank-client or doctor-patient relationships. While telcos are grappling with fixing their customer front ends, becoming more nimble and responsive to customer needs and putting “greatness” back into the overall customer experience equation, small startups (and large telco suppliers alike) are creating what is known as “liquid infrastructures.” In today’s cloud-based world, global network traffic is exploding while traffic patterns, with globally scaled and load-balanced cloud-based back-ends, are becoming more and more fluid and less predictable. Likewise, decreasing enterprise assets actually connect to the enterprise network directly. The internet of things (IoT) is creating massively distributed architectures with globally roaming assets that need to seamlessly blend into critical enterprise applications. So, enterprises are challenged with creating more flexible network infrastructures that not only connect their various operating sites, but also create reliable connections to public cloud service providers, while connecting remote and mobile IoT assets to the core network. And all that while accommodating massive shifts in traffic patterns depending on the day of the week, time of day or reconfigurations happening at service providers. Liquid infrastructure promises to provide a solution for such challenges, and it’s not a concept telcos are capable of, or offering, in the market place as of now. It is players like , a venture-backed startup from San Francisco, that are disrupting the market place by providing solutions for the completely self-managed, liquid infrastructure that can handle today’s network demand. Envision such an offering as a global OTT service and you have a recipe for a serious contender to the global enterprise telco services market. is another such interesting disruptor in the telco space. Imagine your IoT assets are roaming around the world globally. Which telco would you go to in order to buy a data plan, plus device management, which enables you to provision and deprovision your devices globally and on the fly? Telcos globally have been struggling to come up with competitive offerings that make managing such global asset bases economical and a breeze. That is firstly because none of the globally leading telcos can offer a truly global network — be it of their own or partner assets. Secondly, given multiple telcos are forced to collaborate if they want to offer a global virtual mobile data service, long-standing roaming agreements often stand in the way of economical pricing models. Telcos are not yet willing to sacrifice existing global roaming revenue at the expense of a potentially growing global IoT mobility data market opportunity. Despite these challenges, however, the demand is increasing. While global mobile traffic was 7 exabytes in 2016, it will skyrocket 700 percent by 2021. That’s where Redtea Mobile comes into the picture. With Redtea Mobile’s technology, you could imagine someone buying regional capacity with enough associated international mobile subscriber identities (IMSI), the unique numbers assigned to mobile phone users, around the globe at wholesale prices, bundling this capacity as a global mobile IoT data service, and reselling it to enterprises globally to fuel their IoT devices. The way Redtea Mobile’s technology works is that it can reprogram eSIMs on the fly from the cloud, so a device that operates on one mobile network in one country can be reprogrammed to another network on the fly once it crosses the border. Both Redtea Mobile and Waltz Network enable the disintermediation of telcos, cutting out the expensive middle man. In the scenarios described above, the end-customer relationship would likely not reside with the telco, but with a service provider smartly repackaging core telco services with new technology into an over-the-top (OTT) service that completely marginalizes the telco to a pure infrastructure provider — much like the Uber drivers or the Airbnb property owners. And, as my first argument suggests, it is unlikely that many customers will bemoan the demise of global telcos as customer-facing service providers. Enough cases have proven already that companies are better off disrupting than being disrupted. True, telcos have one strength that is impossible to beat — they own assets that are hard, in most markets impossible, to replicate. However, while telcos will not vanish entirely, they run the risk of being completely marginalized. To prevent that, they should drive disruptive change of their own. While small companies are innovating, telcos could be at the forefront of deploying those technologies across their infrastructure and of developing new and innovative offerings that disrupt their prevailing products and business models on top of those technologies. Will this be enough to win? No, telcos will still have to fix the trust equation with their customers, become more responsive, etc. But if telcos rely on their stagnant existing revenue streams and are too timid in embracing disruption, they are likely to continue their slow path toward the ultimate horror scenario of many telco executives: that of becoming a dump pipe. |
Washington sues Facebook and Google over failure to disclose political ad spending | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | Facebook and Google were paid millions for political advertising purposes in Washington but failed for years to publish related information — such as the advertiser’s address — as required by state law, alleges a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general. Washington law requires that “political campaign and lobbying contributions and expenditures be fully disclosed to the public and that secrecy is to be avoided.” Specifically, “documents and books of account” must be made available for public inspection during the campaign and for three years following; these must detail the candidate, name of advertiser, address, cost and method of payment and description services rendered. Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, alleging that both Facebook and Google “failed to obtain and maintain” this information. Earlier this year, Eli Sanders of Seattle’s esteemed biweekly paper The Stranger requested to view the “books of account” from both companies, and another person followed up with an in-person visit; both received unsatisfactory results. They alerted the AG’s office to these investigations in mid-April, and here we are a month and a half later with a pair of remarkably concise lawsuits. (This is separate from the Seattle Election Commission’s by Facebook in February; one is at the city level, the other at the state level.) All told, Facebook took in about $3.4 million over the last decade, including “$2.5 million paid through political consultants and other agents or intermediaries, and $619,861 paid directly to Facebook.” Google received about $1.5 million over the same period, almost none of which was paid directly to the company. (I’ve asked the AG’s office for more information on how these amounts are defined.) The total yearly amounts listed in the lawsuits may be interesting to anyone curious about the scale of political payments to online platforms at the state scale, so I’m reproducing them here. (Note that these don’t add up to the totals mentioned above; these are the numbers filed with the state’s Public Disclosure Committee. 2018 amounts are listed but are necessarily incomplete, so I omitted them.) At least some of the many payments making up these results are not properly documented, and from the looks of it, this could amount to willful negligence. If a company is operating in a state and taking millions for political ads, it really can’t be unaware of that state’s disclosure laws. Yet according to the lawsuits, even basic data like names and addresses of advertisers and the amounts paid were not collected systematically, let alone made available publicly. It’s impossible to characterize flouting the law in such a way as an innocent mistake, and certainly not when the mistake is repeated year after year. This isn’t an academic question: If the companies are found to have violated the law, the lawsuit asks that damages be tripled (technically, “trebled.”) Neither company addressed the claims of the lawsuit directly when contacted for comment. Facebook said in a statement that “Attorney General Ferguson has raised important questions and we look forward to resolving this matter with his office quickly.” The company also noted that it has taken several steps to improve transparency in political spending, such as its planned and an API for requesting this type of data. Google said only that it is “currently reviewing the complaint and will be engaging with the Attorney General’s office” and asserted that it is “committed” to transparency and disclosure, although evidently not in the manner Washington requires. The case likely will not result in significant monetary penalties for the companies in question; even if fines and damages totaled tens of millions it would be a drop in the bucket for the tech giants. But deliberately skirting laws governing political spending and public disclosure is rather a bad look for companies under especial scrutiny for systematic dishonesty — primarily Facebook. If the AG’s suit goes forward and the companies are found to have intentionally avoided doing what the law required, they (and others like them) would be under serious pressure to do so in the future, not just in Washington, but in other states where similar negligence may have taken place. AG Ferguson seems clearly to want to set a precedent and perhaps inspire others to take action. I’ve asked the AG’s office for some clarifications and additional info, and will update this post if I hear back. |
Startup Battlefield application deadline extended by one week | Samantha Stein | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | Here’s a heartfelt gift for all you procrastinating early-stage startup founders who haven’t gotten your act together to in at on September 5-7. You’re strapped for time, we get it. So, we’re extending the application deadline by one week. You now have until June 13 — that’s seven days to collect your team and take your shot at winning $100,000. Yup, we doubled the prize money this year because we’re supersizing Disrupt SF. We’ve moved to Moscone Center West, which offers three times the floor space. That’ll make it much more comfortable for the more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibitors and more than 400 media outlets we expect to take in all that Disrupt has to offer. Like, for example, Startup Battlefield — humanity’s best launching pad for early-stage startups. Seriously, winning this gig can have life-altering implications. Consider New York-based chore wizard , which at Disrupt SF back in 2014. The company — founded by Jessica Beck and Marcela Sapone — is ready to scale having in a Series B round of funding. That’s what we call a good ROI. In case you’re wondering how well other Battlefield competitors have fared, listen up. The Startup Battlefield alumni community consists of more than 800 companies and has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. The networking opportunities alone make applying worth your time. And let’s not forget all the press and investor interest. The competition takes place on the Disrupt Main Stage in front of a live audience that numbers in the thousands. The funding you seek is no doubt sitting in that audience. If you make the cut, experienced TechCrunch editors will coach you on the finer points of startup-pitching, so you’ll make the best impression possible. We live-stream the entire event around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later, on demand. Remember, applying and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. Where else will you find media and investor exposure at that price? Battlefield competitors also get to exhibit their company in Startup Alley for all three days of the show — for free. Remember all those attendees and media outlets? They spend a lot of time combing the Alley for the next big thing. Competing in the Battlefield is the gift that keeps on giving. takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have one extra week to get your application to us. Don’t delay any longer. . |
Password AutoFill in iOS 12 will work with third-party password managers | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | Apple will now allow password manager applications to integrate with Password AutoFill in iOS 12. That means you’ll have easier access to all your passwords when trying to sign into mobile websites and apps, not just those stored in iCloud Keychain. This may seem like a small change, but it’s actually an important one. Many users today take advantage of password management applications to help get control over their dozens, or even hundreds, of online accounts. Password managers help them secure their credentials and recall them quickly, making it easier to use complex, secure, but hard-to-remember passwords. And the password managers can help alert to other problems — like services that have experienced a data breach such as with , for example — as well as issues with re-used passwords, passwords that are too easy to guess, and other issues. But even though many users today rely on password managers, they’ve been a bit cumbersome to access while on Apple mobile devices. You’d either have to launch the password manager’s iOS app and copy and paste the password, then return to the app or website in question, or you could use workaround solutions — like 1Password’s use of the iOS Share Sheet to pull up your password with a series taps without having to directly launch its own app. This still took time, and was overly complicated when compared to the ease-of-use of just tapping on the AutoFill option on the QuickType Bar. Allowing users to instead access the passwords they’ve saved in their preferred password manager application through the same Password AutoFill flow they’re comfortable with today will make it not only faster to sign in, but could also encourage more adoption of password manager apps, in general. What a wonderful present for us at WWDC this year! Thank you to all our friends at Apple for this great new API. — 1Password (@1Password) 1Password, upon hearing the news at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week in San Jose, was so excited about the solution that it went ahead and gave the new software a shot. As you can see in the 1Password demo above, will allow you to simply tap on the QuickType bar to access your credentials saved with 1Password. The location of those credentials is also identified on the bar itself, after the dash. If two different sets of credentials are stored in both the password manager and in iCloud Keychain, they would both appear in the QuickType bar, so the user could choose. This is a feature 1Password has been clamoring for since the introduction of Password AutoFill for Apps “With iOS 11, Apple introduced the ability to fill from your iCloud Keychain into Safari and into apps,” says 1Password’s Mac and iOS team lead at AgileBits, Michael Fey. “As soon as we saw this, we got in touch with them, and said can we get this for 1Password as well?” “We filed some bug reports and presented them with mockups of ways we though it could work. And this year, it turns out, they granted our request,” he says. (The enhancement request filed with Apple was a joint effort between 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass. All three filed the same request with the same requirements.) 1Password, and likely those other password manager apps as well, will have their integrations ready as soon as Apple’s software launches publicly this fall. |
null | Matt Burns | 2,018 | 6 | 4 | null |
Apple Podcasts now hosts more than 550,000 active shows | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | null |
Facebook announces Oculus Connect dates Sept. 26-27 | Lucas Matney | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | The is back for its fifth year of chasing the VR dream. Facebook VP or VR Hugo Barra that the company’s virtual reality-centric conference would be returning to San Jose on September 26 and 27. In past years, Oculus has used the conference to reveal its latest prototype hardware and to announce new software upgrades. This year, VR took center stage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference with the company using the event to launch the $199 Oculus Go standalone headset while also It will be interesting to see what VR announcements are saved for Oculus at its own developer-centric event and whether they use the opportunity to talk more about prototypes like its positionally tracked “Santa Cruz” standalone, which they have discussed the development of for the past two years. Registration details for OC5 aren’t available yet but the application has typically gone live in mid-summer. |
Acorns receives 10,000 pre-orders for its newly launched payments card and debit account in its first four hours | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | , the financial management service for micro-investments, is adding a rewards debit card to its arsenal of tools aimed at getting Americans to create balanced stock portfolios for economic health. The company has already racked up 10,000 pre-orders for its new (gorgeous) payment card that offers perks like investments into Acorns accounts when users purchase with the card at certain online and brick and mortar retailers. The debit card comes with Acorns micro-investment and its retirement account built into the cards services. According to the company, it’s the next step in its mission to build an easy, automated system to spend and save money in a way that benefits average consumers. ; The card comes with real-time round-ups on all purchases so that consumers are automatically putting money into their Acorns accounts every time they spend. Linked with Acorns customers’ bank accounts, the card also offers digital direct deposit, mobile check deposit and check sending, free bank-to-bank transfers and unlimited free or fee-reimbursed withdrawals from automatic teller machines around the country. in addition to those features, the company said users can get up to 10% of every purchase made at local merchants deposited into an Acorns account. Card users get a bundle of the card, Acorns, and the Acorns later account for $3 per month. The Acorns portfolio management service costs $1 on its own and coupled with the retirement account, the service is $2. The debit card works as an Acorns checking account which is secured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for up to $250,000. For Acorns chief executive Noah Kerner, the card’s physical design was just as important as the services it offers. “The design is important to us because this card is a badge of honor,” said Noah , CEO. “By choosing it, people are choosing to save, invest and earn while they spend. They’re handling their business and they deserve a card that reflects that — a card made of tungsten metal, the heaviest non-radioactive element, and designed together with the visionary behind Apple’s design group.” According to Kerner, the company has already received 10,000 pre-orders for the card. Only 100,000 cards will be available initially, and the first cards will be mailed by November 1 2018. Existing Acorns customers . New customers need to create an Acorns account and then are eligible to sign up for the debit card. |
MyHeritage breach exposes 92M emails and hashed passwords | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | The genetic analysis and family tree website MyHeritage was breached last year by unknown actors, who exfiltrated the emails and hashed passwords of all 92 million registered users of the site. No credit card info, nor (what would be more disturbing) genetic data appears to have been collected. The company , explaining that an unnamed security researcher contacted them to warn them of a file he had encountered “on a private server,” tellingly entitled “myheritage.” Inside it were the millions of emails and hashed passwords. Hashing passwords is a one-way encryption process allowing sensitive data to be stored easily, and although there are theoretically ways to reverse hashing, they involve immense amounts of computing power and quite a bit of luck. So the passwords are probably safe, but MyHeritage has advised all its users to change theirs regardless, and they should. The emails are not fundamentally revealing data; billions have been exposed over the years through the likes of the Equifax and Yahoo breaches. They’re mainly damaging in connection with other data. For instance, the hackers could put 2 and 2 together by cross-referencing this list of 92 million with a list of emails whose corresponding passwords were known via some other breach. That’s why it’s good to use a password manager and have unique passwords for every site. MyHeritage’s confidence that other data was not accessed appears to be for a good reason: Credit card information is not stored on MyHeritage to begin with, but only on trusted third-party billing providers (e.g. BlueSnap, PayPal) utilized by MyHeritage. Other types of sensitive data such as family trees and DNA data are stored by MyHeritage on segregated systems, separate from those that store the email addresses, and they include added layers of security. We have no reason to believe those systems have been compromised. Of course, until recently the company had no reason to believe the other system had been compromised, either. That’s one of those tricky things about cybersecurity. But we can do the company the credit of understanding from this statement that it has looked closely at its more sensitive servers and systems since the breach and found nothing. Two-factor authentication was already in development, but the team is “expediting” its rollout, so if you’re a user, be sure to set that up as soon as it’s available. A full report will likely take a while; the company is planning to hire an external security firm to look into the breach, and is working on notifying relevant authorities under U.S. laws and GDPR, among others. I’ve asked MyHeritage for further comment and clarification on a few things and will update this post if I hear back. |
Meet the author of The Lean Startup at Disrupt SF | Ned Desmond | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | null |
Facebook allows videos with copyrighted music, tests Lip Sync Live | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | no longer have their uploaded videos with copyrighted background music taken down thanks to a of with plus many indies. Facebook is also a feature designed to steal users from teen sensation app Musically. Facebook’s new Lip Sync Live lets users pick a popular song to pretend to sing on a Facebook Live broadcast. Hundreds of songs will be available to start, including “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Welcome to The Jungle” by Guns N Roses, and “God’s Plan” by Drake. When users upload videos with music with the new rules in effect, they’ll be quickly notified if that song is allowed via the deals and fine to share, or if their video will be muted unless they submit a dispute to the copyright holder who then okays it through Facebook’s Rights Manager tool. Facebook will compensate artists and labels whose music is used, but it wouldn’t disclose the rates or whether they’re calculated by upload or video view. The launch is separate from the feature Facebook announced in December that only lets users add sound effects or no-name music to their videos. Facebook won’t be offering a tool, at least not yet, that lets users select popular copyrighted music to add to their videos — a feature TechCrunch has been calling for and that was . That’s unfortunate, as most users don’t have the editing tools to add music before uploading a video, especially not from their phones. But at least if there’s a song playing on a stereo in the background, users won’t get their videos blocked like before. Luckily, Facebook says in the coming months it plans to “start testing options for adding the music you love to Facebook Stories.” That could use the same design as the Instagram feature we reported. Instagram’s unlaunched music stickers prototype lets users add popular songs to their Stories. Today’s announcement is a big step in right direction for Facebook as it seeks ways to encourage original sharing. A shaky, off-the-cuff video from a friend can be tough to watch in the feed, particularly if it’s longer than the 15 second clips people now add to their Stories. But with the right soundtrack, a boring clip becomes epic, or a nice one becomes truly sentimental. Music-equipped videos could boost watch time and engagement on Facebook without relying on viral pap the company has demoted in service of users’ mental well-being. Facebook has had a tough time keeping teens on its social network, as evidenced by declines in popularity amongst the demographic according Pew’s survey data. Though teens trying to look cool might say they use Facebook less than they actually do, the responses reveal a downward trend for the app amongst the youth. One app that’s had no problem recruiting them is lip syncing app Musical.ly. It’s rife with concerning, possibly Child Online Protection Act-violating videos of tween girls dancing to risqué pop songs. But the opportunity to perform without necessarily having singing talent and the easy to grasp content prompts have grown the app to 200 million registered and 60 million monthly active users. Facebook wants to hook those kids as soon as they’re 13 so they become lucrative lifetime users. So Facebook is now testing Lip Sync Live in several markets. Users first go to broadcast Live, select the Lip Sync Live option, select a song, mouth the words while adding filters and effects during the stream, and then can permanently share the resulting video. The Live With feature for co-streaming with a friend lets people duet on their favorite jam. Viewers can tap on titling for the song and artist to follow that musician on Facebook, though I think there should be a way to tap through to hear the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music. It’s going to be tough for Facebook to suddenly become cool enough for kids to enthusiastically lip sync, especially since it requires going Live which notifies their friends. That plea for attention could make some users too shy to strut their stuff on camera. Lip syncing might work better for static videos where people can be sure they looked good enough before sharing, or within Stories that friends have to actively go watch. Music is one of the most core ways human share and connect. It’s actually surprising Facebook has stayed at arm’s-length from the record industry for so long. iLike’s music streaming app was one of the most popular on v1 of Facebook’s platform, but the tech giant moved in a different direction. It also shut down landing tabs in 2012 that bands used to stream music from their Pages with apps like BandPage. And though Spotify got its big break in America through viral distribution in Facebook’s now defunct desktop sidebar ticker, Facebook never made a move to invest in or acquire the startup that’s since gone public. At least, it’s good to see Facebook concentrating on the social side of music now that it has label deals in place rather than trying to build a Spotify competitor of its own. If it can legally build a way for anyone to add soundtracks to their videos, we might watch a lot more of them. Not only would that acclimate us to more video ads, but it could let friends express a different side of themselves with the emotional power of pop music. |
Looks like macOS 10.14 will have a new dark mode and an Apple News app | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 2 | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMjAozgeyuk Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is , but some of the updates appear to have been revealed early. Specifically, developer Steve Troughton-Smith some screenshots this morning of what he said was macOS 10.14. And while the screenshots focused on Xcode 10, they also revealed a couple of bigger changes to the operating system. For one thing, it looks like the new version of macOS will include a more comprehensive dark mode — one that doesn’t just darken the menu bar and the dock, but applies much more broadly, affecting apps and . The screenshots also include an icon for Apple News in the dock, so there’s probably a new desktop version of the app on the way. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Xcode 10 on macOS 10.14. Dark Appearance, Apple News, App Store w/ video previews — Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) How did Troughton-Smith get ahold of these screenshots? He Apple posted a preview video for Xcode to the Mac App Store API — a video he then . So it seems the Mac App Store will start include preview videos like this one (the iOS App Store already does). Ahead of WWDC, there have been that work on both desktop and mobile. Nothing here confirms that, but it does suggest Apple is working to make iOS and macOS — and their respective App Stores — more similar. |
Not just another decentralized web whitepaper? | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 2 | Given all the hype and noise swirling around crypto and decentralized network projects, which runs the full gamut from scams and stupidity, to very clever and inspired ideas, the release of yet another whitepaper does not immediately set off an attention klaxon. But this — which details a new protocol for achieving consensus within a decentralized network — is worth paying more attention to than most. , the team behind it, are also the literal opposite of fly-by-night crypto opportunists. They’ve been working on decentralized networking since long before the space became the hot, hyped thing it is now. Their overarching mission is to engineer an entirely decentralized Internet which bakes in privacy, security and freedom of expression by design — the ‘Safe’ in their planned ‘Safe Network’ stands for ‘Secure access for everyone’ — meaning it’s encrypted, autonomous, self-organizing, self-healing. And the new consensus protocol is just another piece towards fulfilling that grand vision. What’s consensus in decentralized networking terms? “Within decentralized networks you must have a way of the network agreeing on a state — such as can somebody access a file or confirming a coin transaction, for example — and the reason you need this is because you don’t have a central server to confirm all this to you,” explains MaidSafe’s COO Nick Lambert, discussing what the protocol is intended to achieve. “So you need all these decentralized nodes all reaching agreement somehow on a state within the network. Consensus occurs by each of these nodes on the network voting and letting the network as a whole know what it thinks of a transaction. “It’s almost like consensus could be considered the heart of the networks. It’s required for almost every event in the network.” We wrote about MaidSafe’s alternative, server-less Internet in . But they actually began work on the project in stealth all the way back in 2006. So they’re over a decade into the R&D at this point. The network is p2p because it’s being designed so that data is locally encrypted, broken up into pieces and then stored distributed and replicated across the network, relying on the users’ own compute resources to stand in and take the strain. No servers necessary. The prototype Safe Network is currently in an alpha testing stage ( ). Several more alpha test stages are planned, with a beta release still a distant, undated prospect at this stage. But rearchitecting the entire Internet was clearly never going to be a day’s work. MaidSafe also ran a multimillion dollar — for a proxy token of the coin that will eventually be baked into the network — and did so long before ICOs became a crypto-related bandwagon that all sorts of entities were jumping onto. The SafeCoin cryptocurrency is intended to operate as the inventive mechanism for developers to build apps for the Safe Network and users to contribute compute resource and thus bring MaidSafe’s distributed dream alive. Their timing on the token sale front, coupled with prudent hodling of some of the Bitcoins they’ve raised, means they’re essentially in a position of not having to worry about raising more funds to build the network, according to Lambert. A rough, back-of-an-envelope calculation on MaidSafe’s original crowdsale suggests, given they raised in April 2014 when the price for 1BTC was up to around $500, the Bitcoins they obtained then be worth between ~$30M-$40M by today’s Bitcoin prices — though that would be assuming they held on to most of them. Bitcoin’s price also peaked far higher last year too. As well as the token sale they also did an equity raise in 2016, , pulling in around $1.7M from that — in a mixture of cash and “some Bitcoin”. “It’s gone both ways,” says Lambert, discussing the team’s luck with Bitcoin. “The crowdsale we were on the losing end of Bitcoin price decreasing. We did a raise from bnktothefuture in autumn of 2016… and fortunately we held on to quite a lot of the Bitcoin. So we rode the Bitcoin price up. So I feel like the universe paid us back a little bit for that. So it feels like we’re level now.” “Fundraising is exceedingly time consuming right through the organization, and it does take a lot of time away from what you wants to be focusing on, and so to be in a position where you’re not desperate for funding is a really nice one to be in,” he adds. “It allows us to focus on the technology and releasing the network.” The team’s headcount is now up to around 33, with founding members based at the HQ in Ayr, Scotland, and other engineers working remotely or distributed (including in a new dev office they opened in India at the start of this year), even though MaidSafe is still not taking in any revenue. This April they also made the decision to switch from a dual licensing approach for their software — previously offering both an open source license and a commercial license (which let people close source their code for a fee) — to going only open source, to encourage more developer engagement and contributions to the project, as Lambert tells it. “We always see the SafeNetwork a bit like a public utility,” he says. “In terms of once we’ve got this thing up and launched we don’t want to control it or own it because if we do nobody will want to use it — it needs to be seen as everyone contributing. So we felt it’s a much more encouraging sign for developers who want to contribute if they see everything is fully open sourced and cannot be closed source.” MaidSafe’s story so far is reason enough to take note of their whitepaper. But the consensus issue the paper addresses is also a key challenge for decentralized networks so any proposed solution is potentially a big deal — if indeed it pans out as promised. MaidSafe reckons they’ve come up with a way of achieving consensus on decentralized networks that’s scalable, robust and efficient. Hence the name of the protocol — ‘Parsec’ — being short for: ‘Protocol for Asynchronous, Reliable, Secure and Efficient Consensus’. They will be open sourcing the protocol under a GPL v3 license — with a rough timeframe of “months” for that release, according to Lambert. He says they’ve been working on Parsec for the last 18 months to two years — but also drawing on earlier research the team carried out into areas such as conflict-free replicated data types, synchronous and asynchronous consensus, and topics such as threshold signatures and common coin. More specifically, the research underpinning Parsec is based on the following five papers: 1. Baird L. , Swirlds Tech Report SWIRLDS-TR-2016-01 (2016); 2. Mostefaoui A., Hamouna M., Raynal M. (2014); 3. Micali S. , (2018); 4. Miller A., Xia Y., Croman K., Shi E., Song D. T (2016); 5. , (2018). One responding to the just over a week ago wonders whether it’s too good to be true. Time will tell — but the potential is certainly enticing. Bitcoin’s use of a drastically energy-inefficient ‘proof of work’ method to achieve consensus and write each transaction to its blockchain very clearly doesn’t scale. It’s slow, cumbersome and wasteful. And how to get blockchain-based networks to support the billions of transactions per second that might be needed to sustain the various envisaged applications remains an essential work in progress — with projects investigating various ideas and approaches to try to overcome the limitation. MaidSafe’s network is not blockchain-based. It’s engineered to function with asynchronous voting of nodes, rather than synchronous voting, which should avoid the bottleneck problems associated with blockchain. But it’s still decentralized. So it needs a consensus mechanism to enable operations and transactions to be carried out autonomously and robustly. That’s where Parsec is intended to slot in. The protocol does not use proof of work. And is able, so the whitepaper claims, to achieve consensus even if a third of the network is comprised of malicious nodes — i.e. nodes which are attempting to disrupt network operations or otherwise attack the network. Another claimed advantage is that decisions made via the protocol are both mathematically guaranteed and irreversible. “What Parsec does is it can reach consensus even with malicious nodes. And up to a third of the nodes being malicious is what the maths proofs suggest,” says Lambert. “This ability to provide mathematical guarantees that all parts of the network will come to the same agreement at a point in time, even with some fault in the network or bad actors — that’s what Byzantine Fault Tolerance is.” In theory a blockchain using proof of work could be hacked if any one entity controlled 51% of the nodes on the network (although in reality it’s likely that such a large amount of energy would be required it’s pretty much impractical). So on the surface MaidSafe’s decentralized network — which ‘only’ needs 33% of its nodes to be compromised for its consensus decisions to be attacked — sounds rather less robust. But Lambert says it’s more nuanced than the numbers suggest. And in fact the malicious third would also need to be nodes that have the authority to vote. “So it is a third but it’s a third of well reputed nodes,” as he puts it. So there’s an element of proof of stake involved too, bound up with additional planned characteristics of the Safe Network — related to dynamic membership and sharding (Lambert says MaidSafe has additional whitepapers on both those elements coming soon). “Those two papers, particularly the one around dynamic membership, will explain why having a third of malicious nodes is actually harder than just having 33% of malicious nodes. Because the nodes that can vote have to have a reputation as well. So it’s not just purely you can flood the Safe Network with lots and lots of malicious nodes and override it only using a third of the nodes. What we’re saying is the nodes that can vote and actually have a say must have a good reputation in the network,” he says. “The other thing is proof of stake… Everyone is desperate to move away from proof of work because of its environmental impact. So proof of stake — I liken it to the Scottish landowners, where people with a lot of power have more say. In the cryptocurrency field, proof of stake might be if you have, let’s say, 10 coins and I have one coin your vote might be worth 10x as much authority as what my one coin would be. So any of these mechanisms that they come up with it has that weighting to it… So the people with the most vested interests in the network are also given the more votes.” Sharding refers to closed groups that allow for consensus votes to be reached by a subset of nodes on a decentralized network. By splitting the network into small sections for consensus voting purposes the idea is you avoid the inefficiencies of having to poll all the nodes on the network — yet can still retain robustness, at least so long as subgroups are carefully structured and secured. “If you do that correctly you can make it more secure and you can make things much more efficient and faster,” says Lambert. “Because rather than polling, let’s say 6,000 nodes, you might be polling eight nodes. So you can get that information back quickly. “Obviously you need to be careful about how you do that because with much less nodes you can potentially game the network so you need to be careful how you secure those smaller closed groups or shards. So that will be quite a big thing because pretty much every crypto project is looking at sharding to make, certainly, blockchains more efficient. And so the fact that we’ll have something coming out in that, after we have the dynamic membership stuff coming out, is going to be quite exciting to see the reaction to that as well.” Voting authority on the Safe Network might be based on a node’s longevity, quality and historical activity — so a sort of ‘reputation’ score (or ledger) that can yield voting rights over time. “If you’re like that then you will have a vote in these closed groups. And so a third of those votes — and that then becomes quite hard to game because somebody who’s then trying to be malicious would need to have their nodes act as good corporate citizens for a time period. And then all of a sudden become malicious, by which time they’ve probably got a vested stake in the network. So it wouldn’t be possible for someone to just come and flood the network with new nodes and then be malicious because it would not impact upon the network,” Lambert suggests. The computing power that would be required to attack the Safe Network once it’s public and at scale would also be “really, really significant”, he adds. “Once it gets to scale it would be really hard to co-ordinate anything against it because you’re always having to be several hundred percent bigger than the network and then have a co-ordinated attack on it itself. And all of that work might get you to impact the decision within one closed group. So it’s not even network wide… And that decision could be on who accesses one piece of encrypted shard of data for example… Even the thing you might be able to steal is only an encrypted shard of something — it’s not even the whole thing.” Other distributed ledger projects are similarly working on He also suggests there’s a question mark over whether Hashgraph’s algorithm can achieve consensus when there are malicious nodes operating on the network. Which — if true — would limit what it can be used for. “The Hashgraph algorithm is only proven to reach agreement if there’s no adversaries within the network,” Lambert claims. “So if everything’s running well then happy days, but if there’s any maliciousness or any failure within that network then — certainly on the basis of what’s been published — it would suggest that that algorithm was not going to hold up to that.” “I think being able to do all of these things asynchronously with all of the mathematical guarantees is very difficult,” he continues, returning to the core consensus challenge. “So at the moment we see that we have come out with something that is unique, that covers a lot of these bases, and is a very good use for our use-case. And I think will be useful for others — so I think we like to think that we’ve made a paradigm shift or a vast improvement over the state of the art.” Despite the team’s conviction that, with Parsec, they’ve come up with something very notable, early feedback includes some very vocal Twitter doubters. For example there’s a lengthy back-and-forth between several MaidSafe engineers and Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir — who dubs the Parsec protocol “overhyped” and a “marginal innovation if that”… so, er, ouch. Well, I don't think asynchronous consensus on an order of events can be described as "never been done before" or "a paradigm shift". And it's not asynchronous, but "very asynchronous" or "randomly synchronous" [sic], and this synchrony assumption isn't very clearly documented — Vlad ''not giving away ETH'' Zamfir (@VladZamfir) Lambert is, if not entirely sanguine, then solidly phlegmatic in the face of a bit of initial Twitter blowback — saying he reckons it will take more time for more detailed responses to come, i.e. allowing for people to properly digest the whitepaper. “In the world of async BFT algorithms, any advance is huge,” MaidSafe CEO David Irvine also tells us when we ask for a response to Zamfir’s critique. “How huge is subjective, but any advance has to be great for the world. We hope others will advance Parsec like we have built on others (as we clearly state and thank them for their work). So even if it was a marginal development (which it certainly is not) then I would take that.” “All in all, though, nothing was said that took away from the fact Parsec moves the industry forward,” he adds. “I felt the comments were a bit juvenile at times and a bit defensive (probably due to us not agreeing with POS in our ) but in terms of the only part commented on (the coin flip) we as a team feel that part could be much more concrete in terms of defining exactly how small such random (finite) delays could be. We know they do not stop the network and a delaying node would be killed, but for completeness, it would be nice to be that detailed.” A developer source of our own in the crypto/blockchain space — who’s not connected to the MaidSafe or Ethereum projects — also points out that Parsec “getting objective review will take some time given that so many potential reviewers have vested interest in their own project/coin”. It’s certainly fair to say the space excels at public spats and disagreements. Researchers pouring effort into one project can be less than kind to rivals’ efforts. (And, well, given all the crypto Lambos at stake it’s not hard to see why there can be no love lost — and, ironically, zero trust — between competing champions of trustless tech.) Another fundamental truth of these projects is they’re all busily experimenting right now, with lots of ideas in play to try and fix core issues like scalability, efficiency and robustness — often having different ideas over implementation even if rival projects are circling and/or converging on similar approaches and techniques. “Certainly other projects are looking at sharding,” says Lambert. “So I know that Ethereum are looking at sharding. And I think Bitcoin are looking at that as well, but I think everyone probably has quite different ideas about how to implement it. And of course we’re not using a blockchain which makes that another different use-case where Ethereum and Bitcoin obviously are. But everyone has — as with anything — these different approaches and different ideas.” “Every network will have its own different ways of doing [consensus],” he adds when asked whether he believes Parsec could be adopted by other projects wrestling with the consensus challenge. “So it’s not like some could lift [Parsec] out and just put it in. Ethereum is blockchain-based — I think they’re looking at something around proof of stake, but maybe they could take some ideas or concepts from the work that we’re open sourcing for their specific case. “If you get other blockchain-less networks like IOTA, Byteball, I think POA is another one as well. These other projects it might be easier for them to implement something like Parsec with them because they’re not using blockchain. So maybe less of that adaption required.” Whether other projects will deem Parsec worthy of their attention remains to be seen at this point with so much still to play for. Some may prefer to expend effort trying to rubbish a rival approach, whose open source tech could, if it stands up to scrutiny and operational performance, reduce the commercial value of proprietary and patented mechanisms also intended to grease the wheels of decentralized networks — for a fee. And of course MaidSafe’s developed-in-stealth consensus protocol may also turn out to be a relatively minor development. But finding a non-vested expert to give an impartial assessment of complex network routing algorithms conjoined to such a self-interested and, frankly, anarchical industry is another characteristic challenge of the space. “The MaidSafe guys are pretty sincere, and they’ve been at this since before Bitcoin. But there’s any number of mathematical white papers promising the decentralisation results of Bitcoin without proof-of-work,” says , author of a book on Bitcoin and blockchain. “The real question is: How does a non-mathematical observer work out which of these is worth paying attention to? “The key heuristic is: These things are promoting themselves in the blockchain space. And the first rule there is that hypotheticals are utterly worthless. Everyone makes grandiose promises of magical results, that rarely if ever work out. If someone in crypto says something’s coming soon, that’s nice, but it should absolutely not be treated as ‘exciting news’ until they have a product, and the product doesn’t fail in some hilariously obvious manner. So the MaidSafe project are working hard and sincerely, and that’s good! But the rule for all these math-coins is: it’s not a game changer until it succeeds in changing the game.” Irvine’s view is that DAG based projects which are using a centralized component will have to move on or adopt what he dubs “state of art” asynchronous consensus algorithms — as MaidSafe believes Parsec is — aka, algorithms which are “more widely accepted and proven”. “So these projects should contribute to the research, but more importantly, they will have to adopt better algorithms than they use,” he suggests. “So they can play an important part, upgrades! How to upgrade a running DAG based network? How to had fork a graph? etc. We know how to hard fork blockchains, but upgrading DAG based networks may not be so simple when they are used as ledgers. “Projects like Hashgraph, Algorand etc will probably use an ABFT algorithm like this as their whole network with a little work for a currency; IOTA, NANO, Bytball etc should. That is entirely possible with advances like Parsec. However adding dynamic membership, sharding, a data layer a currency is a much larger proposition, which is why Parsec has been in stealth mode while it is being developed. “We hope that by being open about the algorithm, and making the code open source when complete, we will help all the other projects working on similar problems.” Of course MaidSafe’s team might be misguided in terms of the breakthrough they think they’ve made with Parsec. But it’s pretty hard to stand up the idea they’re being intentionally misleading. Because, well, what would be the point of that? While the exact depth of MaidSafe’s funding reserves isn’t clear, Lambert doesn’t sound like a startup guy with money worries. And the team’s staying power cannot be in doubt — over a decade into the R&D needed to underpin their alt network. It’s true that being around for so long does have some downsides, though. Especially, perhaps, given how hyped the decentralized space has now become. “Because we’ve been working on it for so long, and it’s been such a big project, you can see some negative feedback about that,” as Lambert admits. And with such intense attention now on the space, injecting energy which in turn accelerates ideas and activity, there’s perhaps extra pressure on a veteran player like MaidSafe to be seen making a meaningful contribution — ergo, it might be tempting for the team to believe the consensus protocol they’ve engineered really is a big deal. here’s a very long road to travel still on that front, clearly. The Safe Network is in alpha 2 testing incarnation (which has been up and running since September last year) — consisting of around a hundred nodes that MaidSafe is maintaining itself. The core decentralization proposition of anyone being able to supply storage resource to the network via lending their own spare capacity is not yet live — and won’t come fully until alpha 4. “People are starting to create different apps against that network. So we’ve seen Jams — a decentralized music player… There are a couple of storage style apps… There is encrypted email running as well, and also that is running on Android,” says Lambert. “And we have a forked version of the Beaker browser — that’s the browser that we use right now. So if you can create websites on the Safe Network, which has its own protocol, and if you want to go and view those sites you need a Safe browser to do that, so we’ve also been working on our own browser from scratch that we’ll be releasing later this year… So there’s a number of apps that are running against that alpha 2 network. “What alpha 3 will bring is it will run in parallel with alpha 2 but it will effectively be a decentralized routing network. What that means is it will be one for more technical people to run, and it will enable data to be passed around a network where anyone can contribute their resources to it but it will not facilitate data storage. So it’ll be a command line app, which is probably why it’ll suit technical people more because there’ll be no user interface for it, and they will contribute their resources to enable messages to be passed around the network. So secure messaging would be a use-case for that. “And then alpha 4 is effectively bringing together alpha 2 and alpha 3. So it adds a storage layer on top of the alpha 3 network — and at that point it gives you the fully decentralized network where users are contributing their resources from home and they will be able to store data, send messages and things of that nature. Potentially during alpha 4, or a later alpha, we’ll introduce test SafeCoin. Which is the final piece of the initial puzzle to provide incentives for users to provide resources and for developers to make apps. So that’s probably what the immediate roadmap looks like.” On the timeline front Lambert won’t be coaxed into fixing any deadlines to all these planned alphas. They’ve long ago learnt not to try and predict the pace of progress, he says with a laugh. Though he does not question that progress is being made. “These big infrastructure projects are typically only government funded because the payback is too slow for venture capitalists,” he adds. “So in the past you had things like Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet — that was obviously a US government funded project — and so we’ve taken on a project which has, not grown arms and legs, but certainly there’s more to it than what was initially thought about. “So we are almost privately funding this infrastructure. Which is quite a big scope, and I will say why it’s taking a bit of time. But we definitely do seem to be making lots of progress.” |
Scaling startups are setting up secondary hubs in these cities | Joanna Glasner | 2,018 | 6 | 2 |
America’s mayors have spent the past nine months tripping over each other to curry favor with Amazon.com in its high-profile search for a second headquarters. More quietly, however, a similar story has been playing out in startup-land. Many of the most valuable venture-backed companies are venturing outside their high-cost headquarters and setting up secondary hubs in smaller cities. Where are they going? Nashville is pretty popular. So is Phoenix. Portland and Raleigh also are seeing some jobs. A number of companies also have a high number of remote offerings, seeking candidates with coveted skills who don’t want to relocate. Those are some of the findings from a Crunchbase News analysis of the geographic hiring practices of . Since most of these companies are based in high-cost locations, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and New York, we were looking to see if there is a pattern of setting up offices in smaller, cheaper cities. (For more on survey technique, see Methodology section below.) Here is a look at some of the hotspots. One surprise finding was the prominence of Nashville among secondary locations for startup offices. We found at least four unicorns scaling up Nashville offices, plus another three with growing operations in or around other Tennessee cities. Here are some of the Tennessee-loving startups: When we referred to Nashville’s popularity with unicorns as surprising, that was largely because the city isn’t known as a major hub for tech startups or venture funding. That said, it has a lot of attributes that make for a practical and desirable location for a secondary office. Nashville’s attractions include high ratings, a growing population and economy, mild climate and lots of live music. Home prices and overall cost of living are also still far below Silicon Valley and New York, even though the Nashville real estate market has been on a tear for the past several years. An added perk for workers: Tennessee has no income tax on wages. Phoenix is another popular pick for startup offices, particularly West Coast companies seeking a lower-cost hub for customer service and other operations that require a large staff. In the chart below, we look at five unicorns with significant staffing in the desert city: Affordability, ease of expansion and a large employable population look like big factors in Phoenix’s appeal. Homes and overall cost of living are a lot cheaper than the big coastal cities. And there’s plenty of room to sprawl. One about a new office opening also cited low job turnover rates as an attractive Phoenix-area attribute, which is an interesting notion. Startup hubs like San Francisco and New York see a lot of job-hopping, particularly for people with in-demand skill sets. Scaling companies may be looking for people who measure their job tenure in years rather than months. Nashville and Phoenix aren’t the only hotspots for unicorns setting up secondary offices. Many other cities are also seeing some scaling startup activity. Let’s start with North Carolina. The Research Triangle region is known for having a lot of STEM grads, so it makes sense that deep tech companies headquartered elsewhere might still want a local base. One such company is cybersecurity unicorn , which has a lot of technical job openings in the area. Another is , developer of software containerization technology, which has open positions in Raleigh. The Orlando metro area stood out mostly due to , the zero-fee stock and crypto trading platform that recently hit the $5 billion valuation mark. The Silicon Valley-based company has a significant number of open positions in Lake Mary, an Orlando suburb, including HR and compliance jobs. Portland, meanwhile, just drew another crypto-loving unicorn, digital currency transaction platform . The San Francisco-based company recently opened an office in the Oregon city and is currently in hiring mode. But you don’t have to be anywhere in particular to score jobs at many fast-growing startups. A lot of unicorns have a high number of remote positions, including specialized technical roles that may be hard to fill locally. , which makes tools developers can use to collaborate remotely on projects, does a particularly good job of practicing what it codes. A notable number of engineering jobs open at the San Francisco-based company are available to remote workers, and other departments also have some openings for telecommuters. Others with a smattering of remote openings include Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity provider , enterprise software developer and also Docker. Of course, not every unicorn is opening large secondary offices. Many prefer to keep staff closer to home base, seeking to lure employees with chic workplaces and lavish perks. Other companies find that when they do expand, it makes strategic sense to go to another high-cost location. Still, the secondary hub phenomenon may offer a partial antidote to complaints that a few regions are hogging too much of the venture capital pie. While unicorns still overwhelmingly headquarter in a handful of cities, at least they’re spreading their wings and providing more jobs in other places, too. For this analysis, we were looking at U.S. unicorns with secondary offices in other North American cities. We began with a U.S.-based companies and looked at open positions advertised on their websites, focusing on job location. We excluded job offerings related to representing a local market. For instance, a San Francisco company seeking a sales rep in Chicago to sell to Chicago customers doesn’t count. Instead, we looked for openings for team members handling core operations, including engineering, finances and company-wide customer support. We also excluded secondary offices outside of North America. Additionally, we were looking principally for companies expanding into lower-cost areas. In many cases, we did see companies strategically adding staff in other high-cost locations, such as New York and Silicon Valley. A final note pertains to Austin, Texas. We did see several unicorns based elsewhere with job openings in Austin. However, we did not include the city in the sections above because Austin, although a lower-cost location than Silicon Valley, may also be characterized as a large, mature technology and startup hub in its own right. |
It’s OK to leave Facebook | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 2 | The slow-motion privacy train wreck that is Facebook has many users, perhaps you, thinking about leaving or at least changing the way you use the social network. Fortunately for everyone but Mark Zuckerberg, it’s not nearly has hard to leave as it once was. The main thing to remember is that social media is for you to use, and not vice versa. Social media has now become such an ordinary part of modern life that, rather than have it define our interactions, we can choose how we engage with it. That’s great! It means that everyone is free to design their own experience, taking from it what they need instead of participating to an extent dictated by social norms or the progress of technology. Here’s why now is a better time than ever to take control of your social media experience. I’m going to focus on Facebook, but much of this is applicable to Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks as well. The Facebooks of 2005, 2010, and 2015 were very different things and existed in very different environments. Among other things over that eventful ten-year period, mobile and fixed broadband exploded in capabilities and popularity; the modern world of web-native platforms matured and became secure and reliable; phones went from dumb to smart to, for many, their primary computer; and internet-based companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon graduated from niche players to embrace and dominate the world at large. It’s been a transformative period for lots of reasons and in lots of ways. And products and services that have been there the whole time have been transformed almost continuously. You’d probably be surprised at what they looked like and how limited they were not long ago. Many things we take for granted today online were invented and popularized just in the last decade. But the last few years have seen drastically diminished returns. Where Facebook used to add features regularly that made you rely on it more and more, now it is desperately working to find ways to keep people online. Why is that? Well, we just sort of reached the limit of what a platform like Facebook can or should do, that’s all! Nothing wrong with that. It’s like improving a car — no matter how many features you add or engines you swap in, it’ll always be a car. Cars are useful things, and so is Facebook. But a car isn’t a truck, or a bike, or an apple, and Facebook isn’t (for example) a broadcast medium, a place for building strong connections, or a VR platform (as hard as they’re trying). The things that Facebook does well and that we have all found so useful — sharing news and photos with friends, organizing events, getting and staying in contact with people — haven’t changed considerably in a long time. And as the novelty has worn off those things, we naturally engage in them less frequently and in ways that make more sense to us. Facebook has become the platform it was intended to be all along, with its own strengths and weaknesses, and its failure to advance beyond that isn’t a bad thing. In fact, I think stability is a good thing. Once you know what something is and will be, you can make an informed choice about it. Every technology has its naysayers, and social media was no exception — I was and to some extent remain one myself. But over the years of changes these platforms have gone through, some fears were shown to be unfounded or old-fashioned. The idea that people would cease interacting in the “real world” and live in their devices has played out differently from how we expected, surely; trying to instruct the next generation on the proper way to communicate with each other has never worked out well for the olds. And if you told someone in 2007 that foreign election interference would be as much a worry for Facebook as oversharing and privacy problems, you might be met with incredulous looks. Other downsides were for the most part unforeseen. The development of the bubble or echo chamber, for instance, would have been difficult to predict when our social media systems weren’t also our news-gathering systems. And the phenomenon of seeing only the highlights of others’ lives posted online, leading to self esteem issues in those who view them with envy, is an interesting but sad development. Whether some risk inherent to social media was predicted or not, or proven or not, people now take such risks seriously. The ideas that one can spend too much time on social networks, or suffer deleterious effects from them, or feel real pain or turmoil because of interactions on them are accepted (though sadly not always without question). Taking the downsides of something as seriously as the upsides is another indicator of the maturity of that thing, at least in terms of how society interacts with it. When the hype cycle winds down, realistic judgment takes its place and the full complexities of a relationship like the one between people and social media can be examined without interference. Between the stability of social media’s capabilities and the realism with which those capabilities are now being considered, choice is no longer arbitrary or absolute. Your engagement is not being determined by any more. Your experience may differ from mine here, but I feel that in those days of innovation among social networks your participation was more of a binary. You were either on or you were off. The way they were advancing and changing defined how you engaged with them by adding and opting you into features, or changing layouts and algorithms. It was hard to really choose how to engage in any meaningful way when the sands were shifting under your feet (or rather, fingertips). Every few months brought new features and toys and apps, and you sort of had to be there, using them as prescribed, or risk being left behind. So people either kept up or voluntarily stayed off. Now all that has changed. The ground rules are set, and have been for long enough that there is no risk that if you left for a few months and come back, things would be drastically different. As social networks have become stable tools used by billions, any combination or style of engagement with them has become inherently valid. Your choice to engage with Facebook or Instagram does not boil down to simply whether you are on it or not any more, and the acceptance of social media as a platform for expression and creation as well as socializing means that however you use it or present on it is natural and no longer (for the most part) subject to judgment. That extends from choosing to make it an indispensable tool in your everyday life to quitting and not engaging at all. There’s no longer an expectation that the former is how a person must use social media, and there is no longer a stigma to the latter of disconnectedness or Luddism. You and I are different people. We live in different places, read different books, enjoy different music. We drive different cars, prefer different restaurants, like different drinks. Why should we be the same in anything as complex as how we use and present ourselves on social media? It’s analogous, again, to a car: you can own one and use it every day for a commute, or use it rarely, or not have one at all — who would judge you? It has nothing to do with what cars are or aren’t, and everything to do with what a person wants or needs in the circumstances of their own life. For instance, I made the choice to remove Facebook from my phone over a year ago. I’m happier and less distracted, and engage with it deliberately, on my terms, rather than it reaching out and engaging me. But I have friends who maintain and derive great value from their loose network of scattered acquaintances, and enjoy the immediacy of knowing and interacting with them on the scale of minutes or seconds. And I have friends who have never been drawn to the platform in the first place, content to select from the myriad other ways to stay in touch. These are perfectly good ways to use Facebook! Yet only a few years ago the zeitgeist around social media and its exaggerated role in everyday life — resulting from novelty for the most part — meant that to engage only sporadically would be more difficult, and to disengage entirely would be to miss out on a great deal (or fear that enough that quitting became fraught with anxiety). People would be surprised that you weren’t on Facebook and wonder how you got by. Social networks are here to improve your life the same way that cars, keyboards, search engines, cameras, coffee makers, and everything else are: by giving you the power to do something. But those networks and the companies behind them were also exerting power over you and over society in general, the way (for example) cars and car makers exerted power over society in the ’50s and ’60s, favoring highways over public transportation. Some people and some places, more than others, are still subject to the influence of car makers — ever try getting around L.A. without one? And the same goes for social media — ever try planning a birthday party without it? But the last few years have helped weaken that influence and allow us to make meaningful choices for ourselves. The networks aren’t going anywhere, so you can leave and come back. It isn’t all or nothing, so you can engage at 100 percent, or zero, or anywhere in between. You won’t miss anything important, because you decide what is important to you. Your friends won’t mind, because they know different people need different things. Give it a shot. Pick up your phone right now and delete Facebook. Why not? The absolute worst that will happen is you download it again tomorrow and you’re back where you started. But it could also be, as it was for me and has been for many people I’ve known, like shrugging off a weight you didn’t even realize you were bearing. Try it. |
Gillmor Gang: Hollywood Signs | Steve Gillmor | 2,018 | 6 | 2 | The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Esteban Kolsky, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, June 1, 2018. Why Mary Meeker’s report is real news, the streaming economy flexes its muscles, sit-down comedy. G3: Ethical Healing — Mary Hodder, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva, and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Thursday, May 31, 2018. @stevegillmor, @ekolsky, @fradice, @mickeleh, @kteare Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor [ustream id=115339985 hwaccel=1 version=3 width=480 height=302] |
Indian food delivery startup Swiggy raises $210M at a $1.3B valuation | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | India’s food delivery race is hotting up after , one of the startups vying for pole position, landed $210 million in new capital for expansion and joined the billion-dollar startup unicorn club. The investment is led by existing backer Naspers, the media conglomerate famous for an early bet on Tencent in China, and new investor DST Global. Others taking part in the round include returning investor China’s Meituan Dianping and (another new investor) Coatue Management. The deal takes Swiggy’s valuation past the $1 billion mark for the first time. Sources with knowledge of negotiations told TechCrunch that it values the company at around $1.3 billion. There’s perhaps not a tonne of surprise around today’s announcement since it has been rumored in the Indian press for some time, . This Series G investment comes just months after . The new round takes Swiggy to over $465 million raised from investors to date, making it India’s most-capitalized food delivery startup. Nearest competitor from investors that include Alibaba’s Ant Financial affiliate, Sequoia Capital and Temasek, but its business also includes markets outside of India, whereas Swiggy’s is firmly focused on its homeland. ( ) Swiggy claims to cover 35,000 restaurants with a delivery fleet of over 40,000. The company isn’t giving financials at this point, but it said that it has seen “a three-fold increase in revenues in the last financial year.” The company isn’t saying in specifics how it will use the new capital, but a representative told TechCrunch that the plan is to invest in extending its reach to new locations in India and also to build out its logistics network to better serve customers. “With this investment, we will continue to widen Swiggy’s offerings, along with bolstering our capabilities and plugging the gaps in the on-demand delivery ecosystem,” added Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety in a statement. In addition, no doubt the business is capital intensive given the competition, so you’d imagine that a significant amount of money is needed to offset the monthly burn rate that Swiggy and others chalk up. Beyond Zomato, Swiggy’s competitors also include ride-hailing companies Ola — which — and Uber, . A smaller player (but equally big-name) is Google, which . |
Singapore-based game studio Mighty Bear raises $2.5M ahead of debut release | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | a game studio startup that grew out of King.com’s former office in Singapore, has landed new funding as it readies its debut title for smartphones. The startup was founded by four former King.com staffers — Simon Davis, Fadzuli Said, Benjamin Chevalier and Saurabh Shukul — after the gaming giant closed its Singapore office — inherited via the acquisition of Non Stop Games — following . Today, Mighty Bear’s team of 18 counts experience working with Ubisoft, EA, Lucasarts, Disney, Gameloft and others. The startup , and this time around it has pulled in a seven-figure USD investment. The deal is officially undisclosed, but a source with knowledge of discussions told TechCrunch it is worth around $2.5 million. The deal was led by U.S.-based Skycatcher, New York hedge fund banker Eric Mindich’s Everblue fund, and M Ventures from Los Angeles. Others in the round include Singapore’s Atlas Ventures, Lev Leviev — who is co-founder of VK.com among other things — and existing backer Global Founders Capital, which is affiliated with Rocket Internet. “We’ve already got a good set of investors from Europe and Asia so we realized we needed networks in North America, too,” Mighty Bear CEO Simon Davis told TechCrunch in an interview. Davis added that, beyond extending their reach for purposes like hiring, partnerships and more, they open up the potential for IP and media deals further down the road. First thing first though: Mighty Bear is working to launch its first title, which Davis said will be an MMORPG. Right now, it is being secretly tested for scalability and technical capabilities among users in India and the Philippines with a view to a full launch on iOS and Android later this year. Davis said the company plans to launch another title, too, with both games managed concurrently. “We’ve basically hardcore users big desktop experiences and streamline them into five-minute bursts,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. You may not know it, but you may have run into Mighty Bear’s concepts already even though it hasn’t fully launched a title yet. That’s because part of the research and development process includes creating and disseminating videos and advertising for mock games through channels like Facebook. That, Davis explained, can help Mighty Bear in all manner of ways, from basics such as figuring out what kind of visuals or advertising approach gets engagement from users, to broader purposes such as understanding the types of games that people want to play. “The process helps witter down ideas to those that will get traction with users. If a game makes it through the various internal gates we have, and to soft launch, then we have the best potential for it to perform well,” Davis said. Developing artwork and advertising for ‘fake’ games isn’t as obscure as it may sound. While it isn’t usual for smaller studios, it’s a practice that Davis said is common at huge game development companies — that in turn is a reflection in the experience that the team at Mighty Bear has under its belt. |
Drip Capital helps exporters access working capital | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | is raising a $20 million funding round from Accel, Wing VC and Sequoia India. The company is helping small exporters in emerging markets access working capital in order to finance big orders. The startup also participated in Y Combinator . Many small companies in emerging markets have to turn down orders because they can’t finance big orders. Even if you found a client in the U.S. or Europe, chances are companies will end up paying for your order a month or two after signing a contract. If you’re an importer or an exporter, capital is arguably your most valuable resource. You know where to source your products and how to ship many goods. But you still need to buy goods yourself. And in many emerging markets, you have to pay right away. It creates a sort of capital gap. At the same time, local banks are often too slow and reject too many credit applications. Drip Capital thinks there’s an opportunity for a tech platform that finances exporters in no time. The startup is first focusing on India because it meets many of the criteria I listed. This could be particularly useful for small and medium businesses. Large companies don’t necessarily face the same issues as they can access capital more easily. So far, Drip Capital has funded more than $100 million of trade. After signing up to the platform, you can submit invoices and open a credit line to finance your next orders. Family offices and institutional investors can also invest some money in Drip Capital’s fund and get returns on investment. This isn’t the only platform that helps you get paid faster. But larger companies tend to do it all and optimize the supply chain for the biggest companies in the world. Drip Capital is focusing on a specific vertical. With today’s funding round, the company plans to get more customers and expand to other countries. |
Official near-earth object plan will look into nuking asteroids and other ‘planetary defense missions’ | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Space is a big place, and mostly empty — but there’s no shortage of objects which, should they float our direction, could end life as we know it. A new national plan for detecting and handling such objects was proposed today, and it includes the possibility of nuclear strikes on the incoming asteroids and other “planetary defense missions.” , is far from a joke — it’s just that the scales these threats operate at necessarily elevates the discourse to Hollywood levels. It’s not so much “let’s do this” as “let’s figure out what we can do.” As such it has five major goals. First, improve our ability to detect and track near-earth objects, or NEOs. We’ve been doing it for years, and projects like NEOWISE have captured an incredible amount of these objects, ranging in size from the kind that will safely burn up in orbit, to those that might cause serious damage (like the Chelyabinsk one), to proper planet-killers. But we often hear about NEOs for the first time on near-collision courses just days before approach, or even afterwards. So the report recommends looking at how existing and new programs can be utilized to better catch these objects before they become a problem. Second, improve our knowledge of what these objects can and have done by studying and modeling them. Not just so that we know more in general, but so that in the case of a serious incoming object we know that our predictions are sound. Third, and this is where things go a little off the rails, we need to assess and develop NEO “deflection and disruption” technologies. After all, if a planet-killer is coming our direction, we should be able to do , right? And perhaps it shouldn’t be the very first time we’ve tried it. The list of proposed methods sounds like it was sourced from science fiction: This assessment should include the most mature in-space concepts — kinetic impactors, nuclear devices, and gravity tractors for deflection, and nuclear devices for disruption — as well as less mature NEO impact prevention methods. I wasn’t aware that space nukes and gravity tractors were our most mature concepts for this kind of thing! But again, the fact is that a city-sized object approaching at a significant fraction of the speed of light is an outlandish problem that demands outlandish solutions. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather we tried a space nuke once or twice on a dry run rather than do it live while Armageddon looms. At first these assessments will be purely theoretical, of course. But in the medium and long-term NASA and others are tasked with designing actual “planetary defense missions”: This action includes preliminary designs for a gravity tractor NEO deflection mission campaign, and for a kinetic impactor mission campaign in which the spacecraft is capable of either functioning as a kinetic impactor or delivering a nuclear explosive device. For the latter case, the spacecraft would contain all systems necessary to carry and safely employ a nuclear explosive device, but would carry a mass simulator with appropriate interfaces in place of an actual nuclear device. Designs should include reconnaissance spacecraft and methods to measure the achieved deflection. Actual flight tests “would not incorporate an actual nuclear device, or involve any nuclear explosive testing.” Not yet, anyway. It’d just be a dry run, which serves its own purposes: “Thorough flight testing of a deflection/disruption system prior to an actual planetary defense mission would substantially decrease the risk of mission failure.” Fourth the report says that we need to collaborate on the world stage, since of course NEO strikes don’t exactly discriminate by country. So in the first place we need to strengthen our existing partnerships with countries sharing NEO-related data or studies along these lines. We should all be looking into how a potential impact could affect our country specifically, of course, since we’re the ones here — but that data should be shared and analyzed globally. Last, “Strengthen and Routinely Exercise NEO Impact Emergency Procedures and Action Protocols.” In other words, asteroid drills. But it isn’t just stuff like “here’s where Boulder residents should evacuate to in case of impact.” As the document points out, NEO impacts are a unique sort of emergency event. Response and mitigation actions cannot be made routine to the same degree that they are for other natural disasters such as hurricanes. Rather, establishing and exercising thresholds and protocols will aid agencies in preparing options and recommending courses of action. The report recommends exploring some realistic scenarios based on objects or situations we know to exist and seeing how they might play out — who will need to get involved? How will data be shared? Who is in charge of coordinating the agencies if it’s a domestic impact versus a foreign one? (See for a surprisingly good example of bureaucratic paralysis in the face of an unknown threat.) It’s strange to think that we’re really contemplating these issues, but it’s a lot better than sitting on our hands waiting for the Big One to hit. |
Lyft makes it easier to track business travel expenses | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Lyft that taking a business trip and then actually turning in your travel receipts just got a whole lot easier. A new feature for business profiles will allow employers to create a direct connection between employee trips and travel managers in charge of their reimbursement. While this integrated functionality is not new for the ridesharing company, it is the smoothest it has ever been. In 2016, to allow users the ability to easily share receipts via their work emails. Then, in the in-app integration with expense management partners like Concur and Expensify to expedite the process further. Now, instead of emailing a receipt, people can choose from a pre-selected list of expense codes before their ride even begins to ensure that receipts are sent along to their company and its business management system. This feature will also use the trip data to provide travel managers with access to monthly reports that keep track of employees’ costs, rides and routes. With the task of chasing down receipts off their plates, this will allow companies the opportunity to fine-tune their travel processes instead. |
Truepic raises $8M to expose Deepfakes, verify photos for Reddit | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | How can you be sure an image wasn’t Photoshopped? Make sure it was shot with . This startup makes a camera feature that shoots photos and adds a watermark URL leading to a copy of the image it saves, so viewers can compare them to . Now Truepic’s technology is getting its most important deployment yet as one way Reddit will are being conducted live by the actual person advertised — oftentimes a celebrity. [Update: Though to be clear, there’s no Reddit-wide or corporate partnership here. Reddit’s independent R/iAMA subreddit moderators have opted to suggest people use Truepic.] But beyond its utility for verifying AMAs, dating profiles and peer-to-peer e-commerce listings, Truepic is tackling its biggest challenge yet: identifying artificial intelligence-generated Deepfakes. These are where AI convincingly replaces the face of a person in a video with someone else’s. Right now the technology is being used to create fake pornography combining an adult film star’s body with an innocent celebrity’s face without their consent. But the big concern is that it could be used to impersonate politicians and make them appear to say or do things they haven’t. The need for ways to weed out Deepfakes has attracted a new $8 million round for Truepic. The cash comes from untraditional startup investors, including Dowling Capital Partners, former Thomson Financial (which become Reuters) CEO Jeffrey Parker, Harvard Business school professor William Sahlman and more. The Series A brings Truepic to $10.5 million in funding. “We started long before manipulated images impacted democratic elections across the globe, digital evidence of atrocities and human rights abuses were regularly undermined, or online identities were fabricated to advance political agendas — but now we fully recognize its impact on society,” says Truepic founder and COO Craig Stack. “The world needs the technology to help right the wrongs that have been created by the abuse of digital imagery.” For example, the r/iAMA Wiki recommends that app to with their name and the date on it. “ ’s technology allows us to quickly and safely verify the identity and claims for some of our most eccentric guests,” says Reddit AMA moderator and Lynch LLP intellectual property attorney Brian Lynch. “ is a perfect tool for the ever-evolving geography of privacy laws and social constructs across the internet.” The abuses of image manipulation are evolving, too. could embarrass celebrities… or start a war. “We will be investing in offline image and video analysis and already have identified some subtle forensic techniques we can use to detect forgeries like deepfakes,” Truepic CEO Jeff McGregor tells me. “In particular, one can analyze hair, ears, reflectivity of eyes and other details that are nearly impossible to render true-to-life across the thousands of frames of a typical video. Identifying even a few frames that are fake is enough to declare a video fake.” This will always be a cat and mouse game, but from newsrooms to video platforms, Truepic’s technology could keep content creators honest. The startup has also begun partnering with NGOs like the Syrian American Medical Society to help it deliver verified documentation of atrocities in the country’s conflict zone. The Human Rights Foundation also trained humanitarian leaders on how to use Truepic at the 2018 Freedom Forum in Oslo. Throwing shade at Facebook, McGregor concludes that “The internet has quickly become a dumpster fire of disinformation. Fraudsters have taken full advantage of unsuspecting consumers and social platforms facilitate the swift spread of false narratives, leaving over 3.2 billion people on the internet to make self-determinations over what’s trustworthy vs. fake online… we intend to fix that by bringing a layer of trust back to the internet.” |
New $71.3 billion Disney bid for Fox tops Comcast’s | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | In a (perhaps not so shocking) turn of events, the Walt Disney Company has reentered its tug-of-war with Comcast over the acquisition of Fox’s film and TV divisions with a today. This bid is not only $18.9 billion higher than its but it has also changed its terms, which had originally offered only stock, to offer a 50/50 split between a cash and stock payout. Importantly, this also is $6.3 billion more than . This new bid puts Disney back on firm footing in its battle to acquire Fox’s film and television assets, including Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures, FX Productions, National Geographic Partners and a majority stake in Hulu. But, if we’ve learned anything from these updates, it’s that nothing should be set in stone just yet. In case you’re not caught up on the twists and turns of this acquisition, here’s what you missed: In December, Disney bid to buy Fox’s film and television assets — excluding Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network and a few others that will branch off to form the “New Fox” channel — for an all-stock offer of $52.4 billion. According to this was a “definitive agreement” between the companies, but that was shaken up this summer by an offer from Comcast. In May, that it was considering a “superior” all-cash bid on the Fox assets and made good on that statement with a $65 billion offer. Today, that scale tips once more in Disney’s favor. In response to the news, Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, “We remain convinced that the combination of 21CF’s iconic assets, brands and franchises with Disney’s will create one of the greatest, most innovative companies in the world.” However, despite this praise, that it retains the rights to weigh competing bids. So buckle-up, it looks like this ride isn’t over yet. |
StreetCred is building a blockchain-based marketplace for location data | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | While applications like Google Maps and Yelp seem to provide an inexhaustible source of information about local restaurants, stores and other points of interest, they also can come up short — moments when you arrive somewhere only to discover that the hours you had were wrong, or the store is closed for a holiday, or it’s just shut down altogether. The team at is trying to build a better system for gathering and selling that data. And it’s raised $1 million in seed funding from Bowery Capital and Notation Capital. CEO Randy Meech explained that if someone wanted to build the next Uber or the next Pokémon GO, they’d need location data to make it work. And while they could buy that data now, it’s “very difficult, very expensive.” Plus, he sees room for lots more data — while Foursquare has data about 105 million points of interest and Google has 100 million, Meech estimates that there are more than 1 billion POIs across the world, many of them in developing nations where the data is more spotty. So StreetCred is building a marketplace where users should be rewarded for collecting this data, while interested companies should be able to buy the data more easily. Meech has been working on mapping for years, serving as the CTO at MapQuest (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon/Oath) and then as CEO at Mapzen, an open-source mapping subsidiary of Samsung. That’s where Meech met his StreetCred co-founder Diana Shkolnikov — he said StreetCred was created partly in response to the disappointment of earlier this year. “If we can get this protocol and data economy right, it can’t be shut down,” Meech said. That means leveraging blockchain technology: “It’s a very natural way to open up and decentralize the data and also to build a payment mechanism around that.” StreetCred is just starting to test the system out around New York City. The idea is that users can download an app and then collect location data around the city, earning crypto tokens as they do. (They take photos to validate their location, and the data is also verified by other users.) Then companies that want to buy the data can do so by purchasing tokens. Meech drew parallels to Foursquare, which started as a location-sharing app before . StreetCred, on the other hand, won’t have any social component — Meech said the app will be “completely anonymous” and focus entirely on the collection of location data. The team is still experimenting with the specific details of how contributions are incentivized and compensated, but Meech said users will be paid through an “anonymized wallet mechanism.” And while it’s important to make sure StreetCred’s tokens can be converted into “fiat currency” (i.e. regular money), Meech said this approach should also mean users are more invested in StreetCred’s success: “We want to build an asset where the value of the currency is tied to the value of the data,” Meech emphasized. “Our thesis is that if you make the data much more accessible, much cheaper to buy … you’re going to make things a lot easier and enable things that don’t exist today,” he said. |
Automakers are burning through billions in EV, AV race | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | The race to develop autonomous and electric vehicles could be a race to the bottom for the automotive industry — at least in the near-term. A new global study by consulting firm AlixPartners paints an ominous forecast for automakers in the next few years, a toxic cocktail of big spending and lots of competition mixed with softening sales in some markets and an unwillingness of consumers to fork over money for the tech. is based on an analysis of data from public and proprietary sources and two online consumer surveys of Americans age 18 and older possessing driver’s licenses. Last year, automakers spent $226 million — a 47 percent increase from 2012 — on electrification and autonomous vehicle technology. And AlixPartners predicts companies will spend $255 billion in R&D and capital expenditures globally by 2023 on electric vehicles. Some 207 electric models are set to hit the market by 2022. That’s good news for prospective EV consumers. But AlixPartners predicts many of those impending EVs will be unprofitable due to currently high systems costs, low volumes and intense competition. For instance, automakers will likely offer high incentives to buy EVs, which would depress used-vehicle residual values and allow the spiral of lower new-vehicle sales to continue. The situation is just as tenuous on the AV front. Some 55 percent of the 175 mergers and acquisition deals in the past two years have been related to electric and autonomous vehicles, with another pileup in AVs coming. “A pile-up of epic proportions awaits this industry as hundreds of players are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on electric and autonomous technologies as they rush to stake a claim on the biggest change to hit this industry in a hundred years,” said John Hoffecker, global vice chairman at AlixPartners, adding that “billions will be lost by many.” An additional $61 billion has been earmarked for autonomous-vehicle technologies, according to the study. However, a separate survey conducted by AlixPartners found consumers are only willing to pay $2,300 for autonomy, compared with the industry costs of around $22,900 to provide that technology in a vehicle. That’s a 10-fold misalignment on cost. Of course, there is evidence that consumers, such as Tesla fans, are willing to pay more than $2,300 for a system far short of fully autonomous. An enhanced version of Tesla’s Autopilot feature, which promises to match traffic speeds, keep within a lane, change lanes and exit the freeway, costs $5,000. For another $3,000, Tesla sells “full self-driving” packages for even more automation sometime in the future. This feature doesn’t yet exist for public use, although customers can — and have — purchased it in advance. Meanwhile, the AlixPartners study predicts weakening vehicles sales. The study forecasts that the global auto market will grow at an annual rate of 2.4 percent through 2025, lagging expected worldwide GDP growth of 3.3 percent. The U.S. market will continue its cyclical downturn this year, absorbing 16.8 million units, down from 17.2 million in 2017, the study predicts. U.S. sales will hit a trough of around 15.1 million in 2020. Autonomous ride-hailing fleets will start cutting into sales by 2030, the study forecasts. Amid the chaos and lost billions, there are some rosier outlooks in the AlixPartners study. Full battery-electric vehicles will reach about 20 percent of the U.S. market, about 30 percent of the European market and about 35 percent of the Chinese market by 2030, the study predicts. A separate AlixPartners’ consumer survey found 22.5 percent of Americans are “likely” to purchase a plug-in electric vehicle as their next car. And autonomous vehicles will account for 3 million in sales in the U.S. by 2030. |
California legislators stealthily ‘eviscerate’ state’s net neutrality bill | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | A group of legislators in California have sneakily but comprehensively “eviscerated” the state’s imminent net neutrality bill, removing a huge amount of protections in a set of last-minute amendments. State Senator Scott Wiener called the hostile rework of the bill “outrageous.” California’s net neutrality bill has been cited as an excellent example of what states can do to protect their citizens now that the 2015 rules have been officially rolled back and weaker ones substituted. And in some ways it actually went further than the FCC’s popular rules, which were a bit more conservative on, for example, the practice of zero rating. While the FCC found that could basically be pursued up to a certain point, the California bill would essentially render illegal the ones that exist today. would allow zero rating to happen, but prohibit the part where an ISP could prioritize certain apps or businesses over others. So they could allow all music, or medical data, or indeed video advertising traffic to be free to consumers — but not Spotify, or this insurance provider, etc. Consumers get the benefits and are protected from most of the quiet but substantial ill effects. But late last night the chair of the committee through which the bill must pass, Miguel Santiago, proposed some “suggested amendments” that completely removed the zero rating rules and several other important protections. Now, disagreements on proposed laws are perfectly ordinary and that’s what committees like this are for, to balance different viewpoints and ostensibly produce a better law. And Sen. Wiener has indicated that he and the others behind the bill are willing to negotiate. “We attempted to work with the committee and made clear we were willing to make amendments, but we also made clear what our bottom lines were, and what we couldn’t remove from the bill,” he told me. “The way the committee went about doing this is pretty outrageous.” Normally the amendments would be proposed and the author of the bill would work with them on how to integrate them — if they can’t reach an agreement, the bill doesn’t pass the committee. But in this case the committee literally proposed the changes late last night and forcibly injected them first thing this morning. “It’s not common to force hostile amendments into the bill, and it’s particularly uncommon to force amendments before the hearing even starts,” Wiener said. To be clear, the amendments aren’t minor changes: pages of rules and definitions are entirely removed or reduced to far simpler versions. “These amendments eviscerate the bill,” Wiener said. “They remove critical protections on interconnection, paid access fees, anti-consumer zero rating.” Naturally these are issues that broadband and mobile providers are very concerned about. Since many already zero-rate lots of services, they would have to bring their offerings into line with the law, the process of which would probably remove any competitive benefit they derive from them. Why couldn’t these decisions wait until the bill is formally heard and public opinion formally sought? The bill as it was written had received plenty of support, but substantive changes could still be made in the months before it is voted on. Wiener was frustrated but not defeatist. “We’re all professionals,” he said. “These are my colleagues. I’m sure we’ll have lots of discussions over the next few weeks, or even the next few months.” That said, it’s clear from this ambush on the bill that there are powerful forces at work opposing it. What happens next is anybody’s guess, but we’ll know more in the coming weeks as more hearings and committees consider the now deeply compromised law. |
Trump signs an executive order to detain families together at the border indefinitely | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | President Trump has signed an to reverse a practice that resulted in the separation of children from their families at the border. The language of the executive order, titled “ ,” points blame at Congress, echoing Trump’s previous statements demanding that this issue be resolved through legislation, although it was not implemented through legislation. The meat of the order: Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of this Administration to rigorously enforce our immigration laws. Under our laws, the only legal way for an alien to enter this country is at a designated port of entry at an appropriate time. When an alien enters or attempts to enter the country anywhere else, that alien has committed at least the crime of improper entry and is subject to a fine or imprisonment under section 1325(a) of title 8, United States Code. This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise. It is also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources. It is unfortunate that Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law. The executive order proposes a “temporary detention policy” that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to detain families attempting to enter the United States at the southern border “during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.” That portion of the order suggests that DHS would indefinitely detain a family together while any of its members await prosecution and potential deportation, a policy that looks likely to violate an existing court decision, . Because that legal precedent forbids the indefinite detainment of children at the border, the administration is likely gearing up for a clash in the courts. Through the executive order, the president makes plain his plan to challenge the decision, known as the Flores agreement: The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to modify the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions, CV 85-4544 (“Flores settlement”), in a manner that would permit the Secretary, under present resource constraints, to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings. As controversy around the southern border erupted in recent days, many major to the Trump administration’s recent practice of separating adults who enter the U.S. illegally from the children they bring with them. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella , though the company is facing both and external criticism over its previously announced intentions to to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through a lucrative federal contract. |
Review: Waxed canvas bags from Filson, Ona, Croots and more | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions. If you’re looking for a good jacket or bag, you have your choice of materials: leather, heavy nylon, waterproof synthetic weaves like Gore-Tex… but for my money (and not a little of it either) the king of them all is waxed canvas. Pliant yet protective, wind and water-resistant but breathable, handsome to start but grows a character of its own, waxed canvas strikes, for me, the perfect balance of attributes. I drape myself in it, and in the case of bags, drape it from myself. The main caveat is that it is not is cheap — sure, you can get a bag for $30 or $40 on Amazon, but if you want something that will live for years and years and get better with age, you’re going to be spending quite a bit more than that. The bags here are expensive, but like leather the craftsmanship and material quality matter a great deal in whether you end up with an item that deteriorates steadily or comes into its own. Like so many things, you get what you pay for — up to a certain point, of course. I’ve collected bags from a variety of producers and tried them all for the last few months during everyday use and trips out of town. I focused on the “fits a medium-size laptop with room for a couple of books and a camera” size, but many of these makers have plenty of variety to choose from. Check the galleries under each bag to see examples of anything I pick out as nice or irritating. (The galleries are all really tall because of a bug in our system. Don’t worry about it.) Rigidity and padding, customizable dividers, nice snaps Cheap-feeling interior, bulky, could be waxier Ona’s bags, at least these, are aimed more at the laptop-camera combo than others, with extra padding and internal dividers for bodies and extra lenses. years and years ago during a previous bag week and liked it so much that I decided to buy one. It’s the larger of these two bags, fitting a 15-inch laptop and a DSLR with an extra lens or two small ones. Not only is the whole interior lined with padding, but the dividers are padded and the main flap itself has a sturdiness that has helped protect my gear against drops and kicks. The bottom, although it is also padded and feels soft, has lived through years of scooting around and placement on rough terrain. I like the spring-powered self-locking snaps, though when I first got the bag I was convinced they’d be the first thing to fail. Seven years and thousands of snaps later, they’re still going strong, and when I was worried one was failing (it didn’t), Ona gladly sent me a replacement. It was my standby for a long time, and I still have it. It has aged well in some ways, not so well in others — its waxed front has survived years of scratches and slides along the floor and is marvelously smooth and still water-resistant. I don’t know how they did it. On the other hand, some areas have worn holes and the magnet that holds the back flap shut (a smart idea) eventually burrowed its way out. The newer one feels very lightly waxed, but I know it’s in there. That said, if you want the full waxy look and feel, it could use a bit more. It’s really a matter of taste. [gallery ids="1660239,1660237,1660238,1660236,1660241,1660240"] The inside is the weakest link. The fuzzy plush interior feels cheap to me (though it’s undeniably protective), there are no internal pockets and repeated sticking and unsticking of the Velcro dividers wears the material down in places. Although being able to customize the interior space is invaluable for photographers specifically, a couple of strong decisions inside would make it a better all-purpose bag, in my opinion. is the Union Street’s smaller sibling, fitting a 13-inch laptop and a bit less camera-wise. They share many qualities, including price (only a $10 difference) and ultimately the decision is one of what you need rather than which is better. For me it’s a toss-up. I like the open, separate pockets on the exterior of the Brixton for things like filters and cables, but the zippered front pocket of the Union Street is better for pens, phones and more valuable stuff. Personally I like the look of the Union Street better, with its riveted straps and uninterrupted waxed canvas flap. If I had to choose, I’d go with the Union Street again, since it’s not so much larger that it becomes cumbrous, but the extra space may make the difference between having to pack a second bag or not. Versatile, well made and guaranteed, spacious Lighter material and wax, floppy handles, storm flap nitpick Filson has been a Seattle standby for a century and more, with its signature waxed-canvas jackets covering the bodies of the hip, the outdoorsy and the tourists alike. Their most practical bag is this one, , which as the name indicates is a little more on the overnight bag side of things. This bag has a large main compartment with a padded laptop area that will hold a 15-incher easily, and a couple of pockets on the inside to isolate toothbrushes and pens and the like. On the outside is a pair of good-sized zippered pockets that open wide to allow access from either the top or side; inside those are organizer strips and sub-pockets for pens and so on. This is definitely the best generalist out of the bags I tried — it’s equally at home as a daily driver or at the airport. Essentially it’s the perfect “personal item” carry-on. When I’m leaving for a trip I invariably grab this bag because it’s so adaptable. Although it looks a bit bulky it flattens down well when not full, but it doesn’t look weird when it’s packed tightly. [gallery ids="1660230,1660234,1660231,1660229,1660227,1660226,1660224"] A bonus with Filson is that should it ever rip or fail — and I mean ever — you can take it in and they’ll fix or patch it for free. I’ve done this with my jackets and it’s 100 percent awesome. The scars where the tears were make for even more character. On the other hand, unlike many Filson products, this one feels only lightly waxed. If you want more protection from rain you’ll want to add some wax yourself, not something everyone wants to do. You’ll eventually re-wax any of these bags, but this one just seemed to need it right off the bat. The material is a little lighter than some of the other bags, but that could be a plus or a minus. I wouldn’t mind if it was a bit more heavy-duty, The handles are nicely made and thick, but tend to sort of flop around when not needed. And the storm flap that covers the top zipper, while welcome, feels like it has the snap on the wrong side — it makes attaching or detaching it a two-hand affair. When it isn’t full, the bag can be a bit shapeless — it’s not really boardroom ready. For that you want Croots or Ernest Alexander below. Great texture and color, nice style details, low profile Impractical closure on Hudson, Walker has limited space, looks compromise utility a bit Note: I tried two bags from this maker and unfortunately in the meantime both have sold out. I’ve asked when they’ll be back on the market, but for now you can take this review as a general indicator of the quality of Ernest Alexander bags. The one I took to from the start is the ; it has a pleasantly sleek, minimal look on the outside, the material a handsome chocolate color that has started to wear well. But open up the flap and you have this lovely blue fine canvas inside (there’s a reverse scheme as well). To me this was the most refined of all the bags in this roundup. I like that there are no snaps, clips or anything visible on the outside — just a wide expanse of that beautiful material. It’s a slim bag but not restrictively so; if what you need to carry isn’t awkward or bulky, there’s room for a good amount in there. Books, a mirrorless with a pancake lens, laptop — sure. But you’re definitely not fitting a spare set of clothes or some groceries. The small zippered exterior pocket is great for a phone or cables, while the deep interior and exterior pockets are easily accessed and relatively spacious. If you control your loadout, there’s room for lots of stuff in here. [gallery ids="1660219,1660221,1660218,1660222,1660217,1660216"] Unfortunately, if you control it, the bag gets bent out of shape easily. Because the top flap attaches to the bottom at the center, if it gets too full the whole thing bulges awkwardly and the tips flip out. And the carry strap, alas, tends to tug on the flap in a way that draws its sides up and away from the clip. And don’t even try to pick it up with the flap detached. Placing the clip underneath the flap also makes for a fiddly procedure — you have to lift up one side to get at it, and because the loop flips down when not in use, it becomes a two-handed operation to put the two pieces together. A sturdier, more fixed loop would make this easier. But it’s all in the name of style, and the sleek exterior may make up for these fussy aspects. The cross-body strap has a lot of extra material but I made it into a neat little knot. I think it works pretty well, actually. The larger messenger I was prepared to like but ultimately just can’t recommend. Theoretically it’s fantastic, with magnetic pocket closures, tons of room, and a cross between the simplicity of the Walker and the versatility of the Filson bag. But the closure system is just too much of a hassle. It’s two straps in a simple belt style, which are a huge pain to do over and over if you’re frequently opening and closing the bag. Compared to Ona closures, which combine speed with the flexibility of belt-style adjustment, it just takes forever to access the Hudson. If they make a revised version of this bag that addresses this, it will have my hearty recommendation. Handsome, well padded, excellent craftsmanship and materials Flappy handles, uneven wear, laptop compartment, expensive Having encountered a Croots bag in the wild one time, I knew I had to include this long-time waxed canvas player in the roundup. Croots waxed canvas is less oily than Filson or ONA, more like a heavy sailcloth. It feels very strong and holds its shape well. It is, however, on the high end of the spectrum. That said, because of its stiffness, the seems to want to wear prematurely in areas that stick out a bit, like corners or folds near stitching. The wear process shifts the material from the smooth, almost ballistic nylon texture to a rough fuzzy one that I’m not so sure about. The aging from just a couple of weeks of use already has me a worried, but it’s also very thick canvas. The design is a bit more busy than the Ernest Alexander bags, but very handsome and mostly practical. I love the olive color, which contrasts beautifully with the red backing for the zippers. It doesn’t look Christmas-y at all, don’t worry. The straps are a standout feature. The thick leather handles are attached below the zipper and rear pocket to D-rings, which in turn attach to separate leather straps that go under the entire bag. First this means that the handles flip down easily out of the way, since the D-rings rotate in their loops. The riveted construction also means that there’s no stitching to worry about in the whole strap assembly. And the bottoms of the loops do a little basic protection of the canvas down there. [gallery ids="1660207,1660206,1660210,1660211,1660212,1660209,1660208,1660204,1660214"] It also means that when you’re walking, the outside handle tends to flap rather ungracefully against the side; the inner one, up or down, will be rubbing against your flank or back. You can, however, stow them in the side pockets with a bit of effort, which is a thoughtful touch. The interior is a lovely shade of red, with several large loose pockets and some stiff leather ones for notebooks and so on. Unfortunately the laptop pocket is poorly proportioned: it’s hugely spacious, enough for three or four laptops to slide in, but the button to snap it shut is so low that I can’t get it fastened over a single 13-inch MacBook Pro. The idea that it could hold a 15-inch is ludicrous. There’s lots of padding, though, so I wasn’t worried about anything banging around. There’s also the option for a separate camera insert, though large SLR users will likely want to size up. There isn’t a heck of a lot of room in there but this is definitely meant to be a daily driver briefcase and not an overnight bag — a “personal item” on the plane perhaps but I would take the Filson or ONA over it for space reasons. However as a bag to take to work the cafe, or the bookstore it’s a great option and a striking one. The is a slightly more expansive and unique option. Price, magnetic closures, leather edge details Cheap-feeling interior and leather, little padding for laptop To balance out the admittedly very expensive bags in this review I decided to grab a cheap one off Amazon as well. As I expected, it isn’t up to the quality level of the others, but for $30 it’s a bargain. If you want to experience how waxed canvas evolves and wears, an inexpensive bag like this is a great way to try it out. fabric is a little thin but solid, rather stiff to begin with, but that’s fine — it’ll loosen up as you use the bag. The interior is a cheap-feeling synthetic, however — it’ll work, but you won’t feel like royalty using it. There’s leather detailing all over, and in some places it feels solid, like the attachments for the shoulder strap and at the corners, where there are big patches that will scuff up nicely. But the handle feels like trouble waiting to happen. [gallery ids="1660249,1660246,1660244,1660247,1660243,1660248,1660245"] Instead of a D-ring to allow it to flip down, the leather itself has been loosened up so that it’s extra bendy just above where it attaches. When it’s down, the thin rope around which the handle leather is wrapped is exposed; I can just see this getting soaked, bent, soaked again, bent, and getting weaker and weaker. The front pockets are a little tight, but I like the little magnetic snaps — they make it easy to open and close them without looking. Just be careful not to stuff too much in there or the snaps won’t hold against the pressure. There’s a good deal of room inside, more than the Croots or Ernest Alexander, but less than the ONA or Filson. But then there’s the curious design choice to put padding in the divider defining the laptop section, rather than on the outside. And the leather corner pieces stop just short of it! That means the only thing between the corner of your laptop and the ground is the nylon and canvas — and they don’t make for much of a cushion. Though the other bags don’t all have dedicated padding in this area, they do all seem to mitigate it better, and the S-Zone bag puts your laptop in the most danger of hitting the ground. Hopefully the high prices of these won’t turn you off — watch for sales and you can get even these high-end options at huge discounts (it’s how I’ve been able to afford them myself). Do you have any recommendations for more bags along these lines that we should check out for the next time we do Bag Week? Tell me in the comments! |
null | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 5 | null |
Instagram hits 1 billion monthly users, up from 800M in September | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Instagram’s meteoric rise continues, dwarfing the stagnant growth rates of Snapchat and Facebook. Today Instagram announced that it has reached 1 billion monthly active users, after passing 800 million in September 2017 with 500 million daily users. That massive audience could be a powerful draw for I . While IGTV monetization options are expected in the future, content makers may flock to it early just to get exposure and build their fan base. While daily user count grew just 2.13 percent in Q1 2018 to 191 million, and monthly count grew 3.14 percent to reach 2.196 billion, Instagram is growing closer to 5 percent per quarter. Hitting the 1 billion user milestone could put pressure on Instagram to carry its weight in the Facebook family and bring home more cash. Facebook doesn’t break out Instagram’s revenue and has never given any guidance about it. But eMarketer estimates that Instagram will generate $5.48 billion in U.S. ad revenue in 2018, up 70 percent from last year. It reports that Instagram makes up 28.2 pecent of Facebook’s mobile ad revenue. IGTV could open even more premium mobile ad inventory that traditional television advertisers crave, which helped push Facebook’s share price up more that 2.2 precent to $202. The Instagram brand increasingly looks like Facebook’s life raft. Sentiment toward Facebook, especially amongst teens, has been in decline, and it’s constantly rocked by privacy scandals. But many users don’t even realize Facebook owns Instagram, and still love the photo-sharing app. With the 1 billion user badge, businesses and content creators may take the photo and video app even more seriously. Selling windows into your friends’ worlds is a lucrative business. |
Oracle could be feeling cloud transition growing pains | Ron Miller | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | is learning that it’s hard for enterprise companies born in the data center to make the transition to the cloud, an entirely new way of doing business. Yesterday and it was a mixed bag, made harder by changing the way the company counts cloud revenue. In its from yesterday, it put it this way: “Q4 Cloud Services and License Support revenues were up 8% to $6.8 billion. Q4 Cloud License and On-Premise License revenues were down 5% to $2.5 billion.” Let’s compare that with : “Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) revenues were up 33% to $1.2 billion. Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) plus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues were up 28% to $415 million. Total Cloud Revenues were up 32% to $1.6 billion.” See how they broke out the cloud revenue loudly and proudly in March, yet chose to combine their cloud revenue with license revenue in June. In the , Safra Catz, Oracle Co-CEO, responding to a question from analyst John DiFucci, took exception to the idea that the company was somehow obfuscating cloud revenue by reporting it in this way. “So first of all, there is no hiding. I told you the Cloud number, $1.7 billion. You can do the math. You see we are right where we said we’d be.” She says the new reporting method is due to the new combined licensing products that lets customer use their license on-premise or in the cloud. Fair enough, but if your business is booming you probably want to let investors know about that. They seem to be uneasy about this approach with the stock down over 7 percent today as of publishing this article. Oracle Stock Chart: Google Oracle could of course settle all of this by spelling out their cloud revenue, but instead chose a different path. John Dinsdale, an analyst with , a firm that watches the cloud market was dubious about Oracle’s reasoning. “Generally speaking, when a company chooses to reduce the amount of financial detail it shares on its key strategic initiatives, that is not a good sign. I think one of the justifications put forward is that is becoming difficult to differentiate between cloud and non-cloud revenues. If that is indeed what Oracle is claiming, I have a hard time buying into that argument. Its competitors are all moving in the opposite direction,” he said. Indeed most are. While it’s often hard to tell exactly the nature of cloud revenue, the bigger players have been more open about this. For instance in its most recent earnings report, Microsoft reported its . Amazon reported its cloud revenue from in revenue, getting very specific about the revenue number. Further you can see from Synergy’s from the 4th quarter last year, Oracle was lumped in with “the Next 10,” not large enough to register on its own. That Oracle chose not to break out cloud revenue this quarter can’t be seen as a good sign. To be fair, we haven’t really seen Google break out their cloud revenue either . But when the guys at the top of the market shout about their growth, and the guys further down don’t, you can draw your own conclusions. |
Microsoft is buying AI startup, Bonsai | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | “Going forward, we see a massive opportunity to empower enterprises & developers globally with the tools and technology needed to build and operate the BRAINs that power these intelligent autonomous systems,” Bonsai co-founder/CEO Mark Hammond . “We are not the only ones that feel this way. Today we are excited to announce that Microsoft will be acquiring Bonsai to help accelerate the realization of this common vision.” |
In a push into Europe, WeWork competitor Knotel acquires Ahoy!Berlin | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Coworking and flexible office space has become a hot business in the last few years, as attested by the rise and rise of WeWork. Startups and entrepreneurs needed flexible working space that could flex up and down as their companies changed. The days of signing a 5-year lease were very, very over. But others have arrived in this office space arena. In the US, the company beginning to breathe down the neck of WeWork is , which last year raised a Series A round of $25 million, then another round of $70m, and then another $5m in debt (not previously announced). It now claims it has one million square feet in NYC versus WeWork’s four million, achieved in the last 2 years. It’s now pushing out internationally, with the acquisition today of , a workspace operator in Berlin, Germany. The deal follows Knotel’s expansion in Europe – first in London, in the first quarter of 2018. Amol Sarva, co-founder and CEO of Knotel said in a statement: “Many innovative CEOs have been making Berlin their HQ. Now they have the first of many agile offices to locate and achieve their ambitions.” Ahoy is in Berlin’s historic Mitte district and has clients such as Daimler-backed Fleetboard Innovation Hub, and Bringmeister, an online food and home delivery service. Ahoy was co-founded in 2012 by Nikita Roshkow and Nikolas Woischnik, who previously launched the entrepreneurship community TechBerlin. Woischnik also cofounded the 20,000 person tech event , on this week. “We’re thrilled to join up with Knotel and expand deeper in Berlin and beyond,” said Roshkow. “What they’ve achieved in a short period, combined with our local expertise, is a signal for growth.” |
Tiller raises $13.9 million for its modern cash register | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | French startup has raised a $13.9 million Series B round (€12 million) from . Omnes Capital and existing investors 360 Capital Partners also participated in today’s funding round. The company has been working on a cash register that works better than your clunky touchscreen from ten years ago. Tiller is working on a software solution for restaurants. It works with a good old iPad and connects with multiple payment solutions. You can customize the menu and restaurant layout in the app to make it as easy as possible to enter an order. And at the end of the meal, you can make your customers pay using multiple payment methods and keep track of what’s left to pay. This sounds like basic features, but Tiller’s secret sauce is that you can configure your app and integrate with many . For instance, you can manage your inventory and your staff directly from Tiller with third-party services. You can receive orders from UberEats or Lunchr on your Tiller tablet. You can manage bookings from TheFork and other services. When it comes to payment, you can pair Tiller with a Sumup or Ingenico card reader and accept all sorts of cards and contactless payments. You can also add Lydia, Lyf Pay and other mobile payment apps. Finally, Tiller tries to automate your accounting reports as much as possible. If you want to use Tiller even more than that, you can give an iPhone to your waiters so that they can use the Tiller mobile app to write down orders. You can also get reports and track your revenue depending on the time of the day or the product category. Most of Tiller’s clients are based in France and Spain, and the startup has attracted 5,000 clients so far. With today’s funding round, the company plans to attract more customers in other European countries. It’s also worth noting that Tiller has the option to raise an additional $9.3 million (€8 million) to finance acquisitions. It could be a good way to get started in new markets. |
Google Play now makes it easier to manage your subscriptions | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Mobile app subscriptions are a big business, but consumers sometimes hesitate to sign up because pausing and cancelling existing subscriptions hasn’t been as easy as opting in. Google is now addressing those concerns with the official for Android users. The new feature centralizes all your Google Play subscriptions, and offers a way for you to find others you might like to try. The feature was first at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, and recently rolled out to Android users, the company says. However, Google hadn’t formally announced its arrival until today. Access to the subscriptions center only takes one tap – the link is directly available from the “hamburger” menu in the Play Store app. Apple’s page for subscription management, by comparison, is far more tucked away. On iOS, you have to tap on your profile icon in the App Store app, then tap on your name. This already seem unintuitive – especially considering that a link to “Purchases” is on this Account screen. Why wouldn’t Subscriptions be here, too? But instead, you have to go to the next screen, then scroll down to near the bottom to find “Subscriptions” and tap that. To turn any individual subscription off, you have to go to its own page, scroll to the bottom and tap “Cancel.” This process should be more streamlined for iOS users. In Google Play’s Subscriptions center, you can view all your existing subscriptions, cancel them, renew them, or even restore those you had previously cancelled – perfect for turning HBO NOW back on when “Game of Thrones” returns, for example. You can also manage and update your payment methods, and set up a backup method. Making it just as easy for consumers to get out of their subscriptions as it is to sign up is a good business practice, and could boost subscription sign-ups overall, which benefits developers. When consumers aren’t afraid they’ll forget or not be able to find the cancellation options later on, they’re more likely to give subscriptions a try. In addition, developers can now create deep links to their subscriptions which they can distribute across the web, email, and social media. This makes it easier to direct people to their app’s subscription management page directly. When users cancel, developers can also trigger a survey to find out why – and possibly tweak their product offerings a result of this user feedback. There’s also a new subscription discovery section that will help Android users find subscription-based apps through both curated and localized collections, Google notes. These additional features, along with a good handful of subscription management tools for developers, were all previously announced at I/O but weren’t in their final state at the time. Google had cautioned that it may tweak the look-and-feel of the product between the developer event and the public launch, but it looks the same as what was shown before – right down to the demo subscription apps. Subscriptions are rapidly becoming a top way for developers to generate revenue for their applications. Google says subscribers are growing at more than 80 percent year-over-year. Sensor Tower also reported that to $60 billion in 2017, in part thanks to the growth in subscriptions. |
Sesame Workshop will produce children’s shows for Apple | Anthony Ha | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind beloved public television series Sesame Street, will be creating children’s TV programs for Apple. The partnership will involve multiple shows, including live action and animated series, as well as a show with puppets. The deal does not include Sesame Street itself. I’m guessing that many (most? all?) of you watched Sesame Street on the public TV network PBS, where it still airs — but in 2015, where episodes are broadcast on HBO months before they make it to PBS. Apple, meanwhile, continues to make one big content deal after another — just this week, it , an anthology show about immigrants from Big Sick writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, as well as Office producer Lee Eisenberg and Master of None producer Alan Yang. Unless you count unscripted efforts like Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps, none of these announced shows have actually launched yet. Apple reportedly plans to launch the first wave of its original content initiative , presumably as part of a new subscription streaming service. And while it’s also been reported that (as opposed to the edgier fare that you might find on Netflix or HBO), this is the first time it’s announced programming created specifically for kids. |
Microsoft says it is “dismayed” by the forced separation of migrant families at the border | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Amid calls for a boycott and over its cloud-computing deal with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Microsoft issued a saying that the company “is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.” The ICE is currently under fire from for separating migrant parents from their children at the United States-Mexico border. The controversy over Microsoft’s involvement with the ICE stems from earlier this year. In a January blog post, Microsoft said the ATO would enable the ICE to deliver cloud-based identity and access services and “help employees make more informed decisions faster.” It also said that the use of its government compliant cloud computing software would allow ICE to “process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.” Though the ATO has been public for six months already, it resurfaced as outrage grew over the separation of families, including those , with many social media users and . In its statement, however, Microsoft said it is not working with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on “any projects related to separating children from their families at the border” and that it is unaware of Azure being used for that purpose. It also “urged” the Trump administration to change the policy. Microsoft’s full statement is below. TechCrunch has contacted the company for more information.
 In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border, and contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose. As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border. Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II. As a company Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents. We need to continue to build on this noble tradition rather than change course now. We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families. |
Instagram launches IGTV app for creators, 1-hour video uploads | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | Instagram is ready to compete head-on with YouTube. Today at a flashy event in San Francisco, the company announced it will begin allowing users to upload videos up to one hour in length, up from the previous one-minute limit. And to house the new longer-form videos from content creators and the general public, Instagram is IGTV. Accessible from a button inside the Instagram homescreen, as well as a standalone app, IGTV will spotlight popular videos from Instagram celebrities. The launch confirms and of that we said would arrive today, following the that Instagram would offer videos up to an hour in length. “It’s time for video to move forward, and evolve,” said Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom onstage at the event. “IGTV is for watching long-from videos from your favorite creators.” Just before he took the stage, outed details of IGTV. Kevin Systrom onstage at the IGTV launch IGTV will let anyone be a creator, not just big-name celebrities. People will be able to upload vertical videos through Instagram’s app or the web. Everyone except smaller and new accounts will be able to upload hour-long videos immediately, with that option expanding to everyone eventually. The IGTV app will be available globally on and sometime today, as well as in the Instagram app through a TV shaped button above Stories. “We made it a dedicated app so you can tap on it and enjoy video without all the distraction,” Systrom explained. In IGTV’s dedicated app or its in-Instagram experience, viewers will be able to swipe through a variety of longer-form videos, or swipe up to visit a Browse tab of personally recommended videos, popular videos, creators they’re following and the option to continue watching previously started videos. Users will also get callouts from the IGTV button alerting them to new content. IGTV will also let creators develop Instagram Channels full of their different videos that people can subscribe to. Creators will be able to put links in the description of their videos to drive traffic elsewhere. “There’s no ads in IGTV today,” says Systrom, but he says it’s “obviously a very reasonable place [for ads] to end up.” He explained that since creators are investing a lot of time into IGTV videos, he wants to make that sustainable by offering them a way to monetize in the future. Instagram isn’t paying any creators directly for IGTV videos either, like Facebook did to jump-start its flopped Facebook Watch video hub. With , IGTV could be popular with creators not only trying to earn money but grow their audience. Instagram is expected to build out a monetization option for IGTV creators, potentially including ad revenue shares. The big user base could also attract advertisers. eMarketer already expects Instagram to earn $5.48 billion in U.S. ad revenue in 2018. Facebook shareholders loved the sound of more premium ad inventory that businesses crave as they shift spend away from television. Facebook’s share price is up over 2.2 percent today to nearly $202. Instagram has evolved far beyond the initial simplicity of just filtering and sharing photos. When it launched, mobile networks, screens and cameras weren’t ready for longer-form video, and neither were users. As more families cut the cord or teens ignore television altogether, though, Instagram has an opportunity to become the TV of mobile. YouTube may always have a wider breadth of content, but through curation of creators and publishers’ video content, Instagram could become the reliable place to watch something great on the small screen. |
ezCater raises $100M as it looks to own office-catered meals around the world | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Everyone at the office needs lunch (or in some cases dinner) — but for salespeople trying to entice a potential lead or convince an architect to pick up their project, they might need to use a free meal as a bit of a lure to get them in the room to make that pitch. It was a problem that Stefania Mallett, CEO of , and co-founder Briscoe Rodgers ran into plenty of times — and decided to turn it into a full company. ezCater gives all those sales people, or financial advisors, or anything along those lines a way to quickly set up a catered meal and have an expectation that it’ll work without any kinds of bottlenecks all across the country. The company said it has raised a new round of funding led by Wellington Management Company, with existing investors ICONIQ capital and Insight Venture Partners, among others, also participating. This round brings ezCater’s total funding to around $170 million, at a valuation of $700 million, according to a source familiar with the matter. “It’s a high stakes event, you’re ordering food for a sales call, you only get an hour with that customer,” Mallett said. “When you’re ordering food for a company meeting, you have 1.5 hours. You have to make this work on time and make sure if there are any problems that you can jump in with really high-class customer service. More than half of our staff are in customer service and we have a tremendous amount of automation that makes the customer service be effective for us. But without that, you’re not gonna get very far.” Like the rest of the companies trying to woo offices looking for catered meals, ezCater looks to collect as much data as it can. That could be an analog situation, like one in its own office where employees try to find the best setup to remove as many bottlenecks as possible for lunch on a Thursday — even timing the process with stopwatches. As more information comes in, like reviews or critiques of the whole process, ezCater can turn around and use that to adapt to any changing environments or office cultures and figure out how to provide the best experience. Mallett says the company has more than 60,000 restaurants signed up to the service, and the hope with this new round of funding is to continue to expand that — especially as the company eyes growth abroad. While they’re able to sign on plenty of chains, ezCater also has to hit the ground to find high-quality local restaurants and make sure they do a quality check on them before they end up on the catering platform. That certainly requires a lot of manpower, and Mallett said more than half of the company is centered around customer service. That, too, is still a pretty analog process even as the company looks to put out more of its tools and automate all these processes. “We need to reach out to [independent restaurants] one at a time, and our marketing department has done a good job of turning the phones around,” Mallett said. “We still don’t accept many of the inbounds, we’re looking for people whom we believe can deliver quality. We curate for reliability, not for a price point or a type of food. Another thing we have to offer them is a catering management suite that allows them to handle all the orders we send them, as well as other orders they might get through other channels.” Still, there’s plenty of activity when it comes to catering. Startups like ZeroCater are raising money to and own other parts of the office dining experience, like providing snacks. Delivery apps like DoorDash too might see the opportunity for catering as a significant business model. But Mallett’s argument is that those organizations are either still pretty local, or they won’t have the kind of restaurant overlap that ezCater has as they look to capture business from larger clients that need to put together a quick meal for the office. ezCater, too, offers options for daily lunches or other meals with a white glove service. “We can’t expand into the consumer business very fast, and they can’t expand into catering very fast,” Mallett said. “Restaurants have an internal flow that makes sense for being a restaurant, and in many restaurants if you fill in with a catering order for 25 people, the kitchen wants to kill you. They don’t even have space in the storage room for the big trays. If you take all the restaurants that DoorDash or GrubHub or any of the guys who are doing the individual orders, and you take all our restaurants, and you map them on top of each other, there will be a small amount of overlap.” |
Veriff raises $7.7M Series A to become the ‘Stripe for identity’ | Steve O'Hear | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | , the Estonian startup that wants to become something akin to the ‘Stripe for identity’, has raised $7.7 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Mosaic Ventures, joining an impressive list of backers that include Taavet Hinrikus, Ashton Kutcher, Paul Buchheit, Elad Gil, SV Angel, ACE Ventures, and Superangel. Mosaic’s Simon Levene, and Hinrikus, who co-founded and is chairman of TransferWise, have joined the Veriff board. Founded by 23 year old Kaarel Kotkas — who is now on his third startup and has garnered quite a bit of publicity in his home country — Veriff has developed a SaaS and underlying technology to make it easy for companies, such as banks and fintechs, to easily verify a person’s identity online. In fact, Kotkas previously spent some time at TransferWise, where he solidified the idea, before founding the startup and as part of its W18 batch. Offered as a developer-friendly API — hence the Stripe comparison — Veriff says its solution can be implemented “in minutes”. It costs €49 per month, plus €2 per verification. The aim, says Kotkas, is to make premium identity verification available to smaller companies and not just large corporations that can easily absorb high integration costs of incumbent offerings. However, what really sets Veriff apart from a number of competitors is its use of live video to verify you are who you say you are. “Veriff has created an online identity verification service that is more secure than physical face to face verification and now we’re making it available to everyone,” he tells me. “We’re the first ones that understood that pictures never do them justice. It’s all about building up trust online and our service uses a unique video based approach to make sure the verification is done in real-time and voluntarily by the right person”. Off the record, Kotkas divulged some of Veriff’s “secret sauce,” which — understandably — he wants to keep secret. The startup uses hundreds of data points collected through analysing the live video feed, including frame by frame, and from a user’s device and network. It then uses machine learning to sift through this data and, individually and in aggregate, spot patterns and anomalies that might otherwise be missed by a human. “We know that pictures never do the justice so instead of analysing only pictures we record everything as a video and analyse frames from the video. Our fraud prevention has been built up combining device information, user behaviour, document validation & face comparison,” he says. As a result of its video-based approach, Kotkas claims that Veriff has the highest conversion rate on the market, without compromising security. “We’ve created an online verification flow that is all about building up trust, so honest users can go through the flow conveniently, but fraudsters will drop”. To that end, Kotkas says Veriff remains at least two steps ahead of fraudsters. Then, after an uncomfortably long pause and following prodding from me, he attempts to explain how the startup comes up with new techniques and tests them in the wild, again without disclosing much information. “It’s a good question but a hard one to answer!” he says knowingly. Meanwhile, Veriff says it has over 40 paying customers globally. They include financial enterprises, marketplaces, sharing economy companies and e-commerce sites. The company has its development and customer service team based in Tallinn, Estonia, and will soon move sales and marketing operations to the U.S. |
[Updated] GameStop reportedly discussing buyout with private equity firms | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Struggling retail chain is discussing a potential buyout with private equity firms, . The report says that one of the private equity firms is Sycamore Partners and that GameStop has hired a financial advisor to help with the talks, though there’s no guarantee that a deal will come to fruition. Founded in 1984 and once a mainstay for gamers, GameStop has struggled to cope with competition from online retailers like Amazon and digital distribution platforms including Steam, even after several attempts to diversify its business model. For example, last fall GameStop announced a used game subscription service, but that was shelved, . Despite other efforts, including selling secondhand games and devices and the , the has fallen steadily since November 2013, when it hit $56.53 a share, to $13.96 now. Reuter’s report comes about a month after investor , asking it to launch a strategic review of its business model. Around that time, CEO Michael Mauler , citing personal reasons. Microsoft Xbox executive Shane Kim at the beginning of June. Sycamore Partners said it has no comment. TechCrunch has also contacted GameStop. |
What’s under those clothes? This system tracks body shapes in real time | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | With augmented reality coming in hot and depth tracking cameras due to arrive on flagship phones, the time is right to improve how computers track the motions of people they see — even if that means virtually stripping them of their clothes. A new system that does just that may sound a little creepy, but it definitely has its uses. The basic problem is that if you’re going to capture a human being in motion, say for a movie or for an augmented reality game, there’s a frustrating vagueness to them caused by clothes. Why do you think motion capture actors have to wear those skintight suits? Because their JNCO jeans make it hard for the system to tell exactly where their legs are. Leave them in the trailer. Same for anyone wearing a dress, a backpack, a jacket — pretty much anything other than the bare minimum will interfere with the computer getting a good idea of how your body is positioned. , due to be presented at , combines depth data with smart assumptions about how a body is shaped and what it can do. The result is a sort of X-ray vision, revealing the shape and position of a person’s body underneath their clothes, that works in real time even during quick movements like dancing. The paper builds on two previous methods, DynamicFusion and BodyFusion. The first uses single-camera depth data to estimate a body’s pose, but doesn’t work well with quick movements or occlusion; the second uses a skeleton to estimate pose but similarly loses track during fast motion. The researchers combined the two approaches into “DoubleFusion,” essentially creating a plausible skeleton from the depth data and then sort of shrink-wrapping it with skin at an appropriate distance from the core. As you can see above, depth data from the camera is combined with some basic reference imagery of the person to produce both a skeleton and track the joints and terminations of the body. On the right there, you see the results of just DynamicFusion (b), just BodyFusion (c) and the combined method (d). The results are much better than either method alone, seemingly producing excellent body models from a variety of poses and outfits: Hoodies, headphones, baggy clothes, nothing gets in the way of the all-seeing eye of DoubleFusion. One shortcoming, however, is that it tends to overestimate a person’s body size if they’re wearing a lot of clothes — there’s no easy way for it to tell whether someone is broad or they are just wearing a chunky sweater. And it doesn’t work well when the person interacts with a separate object, like a table or game controller — it would likely try to interpret those as weird extensions of limbs. Handling these exceptions is planned for future work. The paper’s first author is Tao Yu of Tsinghua University in China, but researchers from Beihang University, Google, USC, and the Max Planck Institute were also involved. “We believe the robustness and accuracy of our approach will enable many applications, especially in AR/VR, gaming, entertainment and even virtual try-on as we also reconstruct the underlying body shape,” write the authors in the paper’s conclusion. “For the first time, with DoubleFusion, users can easily digitize themselves.” There’s no use denying that there are lots of interesting applications of this technology. But there’s also no use denying that this technology is basically X-ray Spex. |
SurveyMonkey has filed confidentially to go public | Matthew Lynley | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | The IPO window continues to remain open as SurveyMonkey, which last raised money in 2014 at a $2 billion valuation, announced today that it has . SurveyMonkey can file confidentially with the SEC through the JOBS act signed in 2012, which allows those companies to test the waters before they formally release an S-1. It’s increasingly popular as it allows the companies an opportunity to get a gut check while investors appear to have at least some of an appetite for fresh IPOs, while not having to spill publicly the entire financial guts of the company. SurveyMonkey is also the latest of a wave of enterprise IPOs in the past six months or so. There’s still plenty that can change given that it’s a confidential filing. We won’t know how much money the company wants to raise, what its business even looks like or any of the other granular details of the IPO. SurveyMonkey gives businesses a way to submit surveys to their customers and try to more seamlessly gather feedback about products, customer service or anything else that a company might be able to measure based on those responses. In an era where tracking all of that data becomes increasingly important thanks to more robust predictive tools and considerably more processing power to make those projections, SurveyMonkey’s data is likely even more valuable than it was when it raised funding in 2014. SurveyMonkey on its own end, too, might be easily able to understand how people are actually rating the companies they work with. Dropbox and DocuSign are the most recent successful IPOs, both valued at more than $10 billion at this point. But there are companies like Zuora, , zScalar and others that have seen significant success after they went public. That means there’s plenty of demand for companies that are about to go public, which is where the saying of the “IPO window being open” comes from. |
‘Gaming disorder’ is officially recognized by the World Health Organization | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Honestly, “gaming disorder” sounds like a phrase tossed around by irritated parents and significant others. After much back and forth, however, the term was , as the World Health Organization opted to include it in the latest edition of its Internal Classification of Diseases. The volume, out this week, diagnoses the newly minted disorder with three key telltale signs: I can hear the collective sound of many of my friends gulping at the sound of eerily familiar symptoms. Of course, the disorder has been criticized from a number of corners, including health professionals who have written it off as being overly broad and subjective. And, of course, the potential impact greatly differs from person to person and game to game. The effects as specified above share common ground with other similar addictive activities defined by the WHO, including gambling disorder: “Disorders due to addictive behaviours are recognizable and clinically significant syndromes associated with distress or interference with personal functions that develop as a result of repetitive rewarding behaviours other than the use of dependence-producing substances,” writes the WHO. “Disorders due to addictive behaviors include gambling disorder and gaming disorder, which may involve both online and offline behaviour.” In spite of what may appear to be universal symptoms, however, the organization is quick to note that the prevalence of gaming disorder, as defined by the WHO, is actually “very low.” WHO member Dr. Vladimir Poznyak , “Millions of gamers around the world, even when it comes to the intense gaming, would never qualify as people suffering from gaming disorder.” |
Bet money on yourself with Proveit, the 1-vs-1 trivia app | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Pick a category, wager a few dollars and double your money in 60 seconds if you’re smarter and faster than your opponent. offers a fresh take on trivia and game show apps by letting you win or lose cash on quick 10-question, multiple choice quizzes. Sick of waiting to battle a million people on HQ for a chance at a fraction of the jackpot? Play one-on-one anytime you want or enter into scheduled tournaments with $1,000 or more in prize money, while Proveit takes around 10 percent to 15 percent of the stakes. “I’d play Jeopardy all the time with my family and wondered ‘why can’t I do this for money?’ ” says co-founder Prem Thomas. Remarkably, it’s all legal. The spent two years getting approved as “skill-based gaming” that exempts it from some laws that have hindered fantasy sports betting apps. And for those at risk of addiction, Proveit offers players and their loved ones a way to cut them off. The scrappy Florida-based startup has raised $2.3 million so far. With fun games and a snackable format, Proveit lets you enjoy the thrill of betting at a moment’s notice. That could make it a favorite amongst players and investors in a world of mobile games without consequences. “I could spend $50 for a three-hour experience in a movie theater, or I could spend $2 to enter a Proveit Movies tournament that gives me the opportunity to compete for several thousand dollars in prize money,” says co-founder Nathan Lehoux. “That could pay for a lot of movies tickets!” St. Petersburg, Fla. isn’t exactly known as an innovation hub. But outside Tampa Bay, far from the distractions, copycatting and astronomical rent of Silicon Valley, the founders of Proveit built something different. “What if people could play trivia for money just like fantasy sports?” Thomas asked his friend Lehoux. That’s the same pitch that got me interested when Lehoux tracked me down at TechCrunch’s SXSW party earlier this year. Lehoux is a jolly, outgoing fella who became interested in startups while managing some angel investments for a family office. Thomas had worked in banking and health before starting a yoga-inspired sandals brand. Neither had computer science backgrounds, and they’d raised just a $300,000 seed round from childhood friend Hilt Tatum who’d co-founded beleaguered real money gambling site Absolute Poker. Yet when he Lehoux thrust the Proveit app into my hand, even on a clogged mobile network at SXSW, it ran smoothly and I immediately felt the adrenaline rush of matching wits for money. They’d initially outsourced development to an NYC firm that burned much of their initial $300,000 seed funding without delivering. Luckily, the Ukrainian they’d hired to help review that shop’s code helped them spin up a whole team there that built an impressive v1 of Proveit. Meanwhile, the founders worked with a gaming lawyer to secure approvals in 33 states including California, New York, and Texas. “This is a highly regulated and highly controversial space due to all the negative press that fantasy sports drummed up,” says Lehoux. “We talked to 100 banks and processors before finding one who’d work with us.” Proveit founders (from left): Nathan Lehoux, Prem Thomas Proveit was finally legal for the three-fourths of the U.S. population, and had a regulatory moat to deter competitors. To raise launch capital, the duo tapped their Florida connections to find John Morgan, a high-profile lawyer and medical marijuana advocate, who footed a $2 million angel round. A team of grad students in Tampa Bay was assembled to concoct the trivia questions, while a third-party AI company assists with weeding out fraud. Proveit launched early this year, but beyond a SXSW promotion, it has stayed under the radar as it tinkers with tournaments and retention tactics. The app has now reached 80,000 registered users, 6,000 multi-deposit hardcore loyalists and has paid out $750,000 total. But watching HQ trivia climb to more than 1 million players per game has proven a bigger market for Proveit. “We’re actually fans of HQ. We play. We think they’ve revolutionized the game show,” Lehoux tells me. “What we want to do is provide something very different. HQ, you can’t pick your category. You can’t pick the time you want to play. We want to offer a much more customized experience.” To , you download its iOS-only app and fund your account with a buy-in of $20 to $100, earning more bonus cash with bigger packages (no minors allowed). Then you play a practice round to get the hang of it — something HQ sorely lacks. Once you’re ready, you pick from a list of game categories, each with a fixed wager of about $1 to $5 to play (choose your own bet is in the works). You can test your knowledge of superheroes, the ’90s, quotes, current events, rock ‘n roll, Seinfeld, tech and a rotating selection of other topics. In each Proveit game you get 10 questions, 1 at a time, with up to 15 seconds to answer each. Most games are head-to-head, with options to be matched with a stranger, or a friend via phone contacts. You score more for quick answers, discouraging cheating via Google, and get penalized for errors. At the end, your score is tallied up and compared to your opponent, with the winner keeping both player’s wagers minus Proveit’s cut. In a minute or so, you could lose $3 or win $5.28. Afterwards you can demand a rematch, go double-or-nothing, head back to the category list or cash out if you have more than $20. The speed element creates intense, white-knuckled urgency. You can get every question right and still lose if your opponent is faster. So instead of second-guessing until locking in your choice just before the buzzer like on HQ, where one error knocks you out, you race to convert your instincts into answers on Proveit. The near instant gratification of a win or humiliation of a defeat nudge you to play again rather than having to wait for tomorrow’s game. Proveit will have to compete with free apps like Trivia Crack, prize games like student loan repayer Givling and virtual currency-based Fleetwit, and the juggernaut HQ. “The large tournaments are the big draw,” Lehoux believes. Instead of playing one-on-one, you can register and ante up for a scheduled tournament where you compete in a single round against hundreds of players for a grand prize. Right now, the players with the top 20 percent of scores win at least their entry fee back or more, with a few geniuses collecting the cash of the rest of the losers. Just like how DraftKings and FanDuel built their user base with big jackpot tournaments, Proveit hopes to do the same… then get people playing little one-on-one games in-between as they wait for their coffee or commute home from work. Thankfully, Proveit understands just how addictive it can be. The startup offers a “self-exclusion” option. “If you feel that you need to take greater control of your life as it relates to skill-gaming,” users can email it to say they shouldn’t play any more, and it will freeze or close their account. Family members and others can also request you be frozen if you share a bank account, they’re your dependant, they’re obligated for your debts or you owe unpaid child support. “We want Proveit to be a fun, intelligent entertainment option for our players. It’s impossible for us to know who might have an issue with real-money gaming,” Lehoux tells me. “Every responsible real-money game provides this type of option for its users. That isn’t necessarily enough to thwart addiction, because dopamine can turn people into dopes. Just because the outcome is determined by your answers rather than someone else’s touchdown pass doesn’t change that. Skill-based betting from home could be much more ripe for abuse than having to drag yourself to a casino, while giving people an excuse that they’re not gambling on chance. Zynga’s titles like Farmville have been turning people into micro-transaction zombies for a decade, and you can’t even win money from them. Simultaneously, sharks could study up on a category and let Proveit’s random matching deliver them willing rookies to strip cash from all day. “This is actually one of the few forms of entertainment that rewards players financially for using their brain,” Lehoux defends. With so much content to consume and consequence-free games to play, there’s an edgy appeal to the danger of Proveit and apps like it. Its moral stance hinges on how much autonomy you think adults should be afforded. From Coca-Cola to Harley-Davidson to Caesar’s Palace, society has allowed businesses to profit off questionably safe products that some enjoy. For better worse, is one of the most exciting mobile games I’ve ever played. |
BitTorrent is selling for $140M to Justin Sun and his blockchain startup Tron | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | , an early mover (and currently the largest player) in decentralised computing architecture to distribute and store data, is being sold for $140 million in cash to Justin Sun and his blockchain media startup , according to multiple sources close to the deal, who spoke to TechCrunch. Variety reported that a sale of the company to Sun closed last week, without naming a price, following rumors that circulated for at least a that the two were in negotiations. Shareholders have now been sent the paperwork to sign off on the deal, and that has detailed the $140 million price — which includes both a cash payment from Sun as well as cash in the company being distributed to shareholders alongside proceeds. Some are, we understand, still disputing the terms, as more than one person claims to have made the introduction between Sun and BitTorrent. A source says it’s unlikely that the disputes will actually kill the acquisition, given how long BitTorrent has been looking for a buyer. it has about 170 million users of its products. Currently, these include its main client and . The latter is focused on video, music and other creative content. BitTorrent claims that its protocols move as much as 40 percent of the world’s Internet traffic on a typical day, making it the largest decentralised application around at the moment. Tron is one of the new kids on the block in the wide world of blockchain startups. Founded by Sun, who previously had (a settlement system built on blockchain tech), Tron says its mission is to build “a truly decentralized Internet and its infrastructure.” That has included (no surprises here) the creation of its own cryptocurrency, the TRX. TRX, loosely, appears to be a cryptocoin for the entertainment industry. Tron has plans to use TRX as a way to pay for content on its network, according to this . TRX is also intended for simple trading. The company has launched a MainNet distributed ledger for transactions, with its own TRX migrating to the MainNet starting later this week. that the market cap for all TRX is currently valued at just under $4.6 billion with the value of a single TRX coin $0.045. Neither Tron, Justin Sun, nor representatives for BitTorrent responded to our requests for comment, so it’s not completely confirmed how Tron plans to use BitTorrent. But one shareholder we spoke to says there are two plans. First, it will be used to “legitimise” Tron’s business, which has met with some controversy: it has been FileCoin and Ethereum in the development of its technology. And second, as a potential network to help mine coins, using BitTorrent’s P2P architecture and wide network of users. The acquisition will close off a tumultuous but also interesting life for BitTorrent, founded in 2004 by Bram Cohen and Ashwin Navin to commercialise peer-to-peer networking technology as a way to share and store files. BitTorrent was a trailblazer in considering how decentralised network architectures using all the machines in a network as nodes — in contrast with the server-based architectures that dominate the tech world today — could be used to share, store and backup data. Some believe this is a more secure system overall because there is no central repository to hack. Yet the company has also become synonymous with “file sharing” and all the pros and cons that have come with that. Most notably, it has fought long against a — which can be used to share copyrighted files illegally — by positioning itself as creator-friendly, buying in content rights, and establishing a range of products built on the P2P protocol. It also used its architecture to on the web at the height of the NSA controversy. But while BitTorrent makes revenues — it hadn’t raised money since 2008 — its strategy to build a long-term larger business on that technology never really took off as investors and others hoped it would. That resulted in a number of and a couple of reshuffles of its product as its leaders looked for the killer app. Some of its earlier product efforts are still around: BitTorrent’s enterprise services were spun off into a standalone company now called , led by BitTorrent’s former CTO and CEO, Eric Klinger. Despite the current buzz for decentralised architectures around blockchain, we understand that BitTorrent had been looking for a buyer for a while. Long ago, one source told us, both Akamai and Rovi (which is now TiVo) had both considered buying BitTorrent but nothing came to pass. Akamai instead , a BitTorrent competitor that was Travis Kalanick’s first startup before Uber, and Rovi moved on in its own direction. More recently, offers were less forthcoming, although there was interest from other crypto companies in addition to Tron. The company had raised around $60 million in funding in the last 14 years, according to , which notes that it had been valued around $145 million at its peak. Its investors have included DCM, Accel and DAG. We will update this story as we learn more. |
SpeakSee makes it simple for a deaf person to join a group conversation | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | There’s a great deal of activity in the fields of speech recognition and the “Internet of Things,” but one natural application of the two has gone relatively unpursued: helping the deaf and hard of hearing take part in everyday conversations. (after , naturally) with a clever hardware design that minimizes setup friction and lets everyone communicate naturally. It’s meant to be used in situations where someone hard of hearing needs to talk with a handful of others — a meeting, a chat at dinner, asking directions and so on. There are speech-to-text apps out there that can transcribe what someone is saying, but they’re not really suited to the purpose. “Many deaf people experienced a huge barrier in asking people to download the app and hold the phone close to their mouth. These limitations in the interface meant no one kept using it,” explained SpeakSee CEO and co-founder Jari Hazelebach. “But because we designed our own hardware, we were able to customize it towards the situations it will be used in.” SpeakSee is simple to use: A set of clip-on microphones live in a little charger case, and when the user wants to have a conversation, they hand those microphones out to whoever will be talking. The case acts as a wireless hub for the mics and relays the audio to the smartphone with which it’s paired. This audio is sent off, transcribed quickly somewhere in the cloud, and displayed on the deaf user’s phone. Critically, though, each microphone also intelligently and locally accounts for its speaker and background noise. “Naturally the microphones pick up speech from multiple people,” said Hazelebach. “So we included sensors that tell the microphone what direction the sound is coming from, and the microphones exchange these values. So we can determine which microphone should pick up which person’s speech.” The result is quickly transcribed speech divided by speaker, delivered quickly and with decent accuracy (there’s always a trade-off between turnaround time and how the process is). And no one has to do anything but wear a mic. (They have a patent pending for this multi-microphone system.) Hazelebach’s parents are deaf, and he grew up seeing how their ability to interact in ordinary circumstances was being limited. The mics aren’t exactly small… but that’s how you know they’re real working hardware and not imaginary. “As you can imagine my parents were the first to test this out,” he said. “At first we had a lot of issues but soon we started engaging with others. We wrote a post on a deaf blog and out of nowhere 200 people signed up. So we’ve been testing in the field with groups in the U.S., and also in the U.K. and the Netherlands.” Right now English speech recognition is considerably ahead of Dutch and other languages, so the transcriptions will be better for the former, but even so the devices should work with any of 120 languages supported by the cloud service. Transcription is free for up to 5 hours of audio monthly, after which it’s a $10/month subscription. But if it works, it may be more than worth the money. The team has a finished prototype but is to get production off the ground. “We need to improve the electronics to meet specifications, battery life for example. We expect to ship in February of 2019,” Hazelebach said. Pre-orders are set at $350 for a dock and three mics. The usual caveats (primarily “emptor”) apply when backing an Indiegogo type campaign — but at the very least, having spoken to the creator, I feel pretty sure this is a real, working product that just needs a boost to get to market. |
Beat the clock and apply for TC Top Picks at Disrupt SF 2018 | Emma Comeau | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Time is running out on one of the best ways for an early-stage startup to experience September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. We’re designating a select few pre-Series A companies to be a . If we select your company, you get to experience Disrupt SF in all its techno-glory for free. That’s right, people: F-R-E-E. Applications close on June 29, so get a move on and . Here’s the low-down on how the TC Top Pick program works. First off, it’s a highly competitive process. The TechCrunch editorial team carefully evaluates every application before selecting the winning startups to represent each of these 12 tech categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics. Each TC Top Pick finalist receives a free Exhibitor Package. The package includes a one-day exhibit space in Startup Alley and three Founder passes (good for all three days of the show). You’ll get to participate in — our investor-to-startup matching platform — to simplify finding and making appointments with potential investors, and you’ll have access to the full event press list. Earning a TC Top Pick designation also gets you a three-minute interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms. That’s promotional gold right there, my friend. One of the other fabulous opportunities for any startup exhibiting in Startup Alley (including Top Picks) is the chance to be voted the Wildcard by Alley attendees and TechCrunch editors. If that happens, you get to compete for the $100,000 Startup Battlefield prize. Yowza! Wait, you don’t think that could happen? Guess again. After being voted the Wildcard at Disrupt NY 2017, . takes place on September 5-7. The TC Top Pick deadline is June 29. Don’t miss your opportunity to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. . |
Google rolls out Messages on the web for Android users | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Messages, Google’s for its scattered messaging efforts following its decision to “pause” work on Allo, is now available for web users. The company that it would begin rolling out starting today, with the full rollout completing over the next week. The feature, along with others including GIF search, smart replies, and more, is part of an updated messaging experience for Android users that aims to be Google’s response to iMessage. The company earlier this year its Allo team to work on Android Messages, Google’s app that utilizes the messaging standard. The standard, by numerous mobile operators worldwide, offers more feature parity with iMessage, thanks to its support for things like read receipts, typing indicators, high-res photo sharing, better group chat, and other features. Now, Messages is gaining another feature to better compete with iMessage: web support. Today, Apple users can access iMessage conversations on their Mac using a dedicated app. Google’s Messages for web is similar in the sense that it also offers cross-platform access to messages – that is, it lets Android users view and respond to chats when they’re not on their phone. However, the implementation of Messages for web is more like WhatsApp for the desktop, right down to how you scan a code on the Message to sync things up with your phone. Google says Messages for web will support sending stickers, emoji and image attachments, as well as text, at launch. The company also announced a few other features that will come to the Messages app over the next week, including built-in GIF search; Smart Replies, which suggest English language text responses and emoji for now; preview web links in conversations; and the ability to copy one-time passwords with a tap. This last feature is also similar to a new addition coming to iMessage in iOS 12. When you’re logging into a site or app that requires a one-time password sent over text message, iOS 12 will let you paste that into the necessary field with one tap. Google’s system looks like it requires two taps – both the copy and the paste functions – but it’s still a lot easier than before. To try out the new features, Android users will need to be on the from Google Play. |
US Armed Forces is getting a Space Force over the objections of the Secretary of Defense | Jonathan Shieber | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | President Donald J. Trump intends to create a new Space Force within the U.S. Armed Forces. The surprise announcement came today at the third meeting of the White House’s newly reconvened Space Council. “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force — separate but equal. It is going to be something. So important,” the president said. Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis voiced opposition to the creation of new branch of the military last year when the idea was first proposed by Congress. Congressional leadership first floated the creation of sixth branch of the armed forces focused on space combat (sadly, not against ) last year… and Mattis promptly blasted the idea. In a letter to Ohio Representative Mike Turner, one of the leaders of the Space Force initiative in Congress, Mattis wrote: At a time when we are trying to integrate the Department’s joint warfighting functions, I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations. Apparently, the president has come around on the subject in the intervening months. Trump is now “directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.” The House Armed Services Committee began pushing for the creation of a space corps last year as part of the last spending authorization bill for the military. The new military force would fall under the purview of the Air Force in the same way that Marines work with the Navy, according to the proposal. That spending authorization bill was ultimately approved, but the space corps proposal was left on the cutting floor. Now the proposal is taking flight at the highest levels of the Trump administration. The newly reconvened Space Council is helmed by Vice President Mike Pence. At today’s announcement were celebrity astronauts like Jack Schmitt, Buzz Aldrin and Eileen Collins. Also in attendance were Gwynne Shotwell, Wes Bush of Northrup Grumman and Bob Smith, the chief executive of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. “When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” the president said. For the president, the establishment of the Space Force is of a piece with a strategy to create a lasting American presence on the Moon — and eventually Mars. “This time, we will do more than plant our flag and leave our footprints. We will establish a long-term presence, expand our economy, and build the foundation for the eventual mission to Mars — which is actually going to happen very quickly,” Trump said. “And, you know, I’ve always said that rich guys seem to like rockets. So all of those rich guys that are dying for our real estate to launch their rockets, we won’t charge you too much. Just go ahead. If you beat us to Mars, we’ll be very happy and you’ll be even more famous.” The announcement also put to rest any questions about where the Trump administration would move policy around space exploration. “I am instructing my administration to embrace the budding commercial space industry,” Trump said. “We are modernizing out-of-date space regulations. They’re way out of date. They haven’t been changed in many, many years. And today we’re taking one more step to unleash the power of American ingenuity.” The statement from the president also included a discussion of the current administration’s policy of separating children from parents at the U.S. border. “The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be. If you look at what’s happening in Europe, if you look at what’s happening in other places, we can’t allow that to happen to the United States — not on my watch,” the president said. The U.S. is currently operating holding facilities for more than 1,000 migrant children who have been separated from their parents as part of the current administration’s efforts to get tough on immigration and push policy reform. “We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world. Nobody has such sad, such bad, and actually, in many cases, such horrible and tough. You see about child separation; you see what’s going on there,” the president said. Currently there is no law on the books in the United States that requires the separation of children from their parents. The policy is one that was enacted by the president’s appointed attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and is being implemented by the president’s appointed director for the Department of Homeland Security. |
Prisma co-founders raise $1M to build a social app called Capture | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Two of the co-founders of the have left to build a new social app. Prisma, as you may recall, had a viral moment when selfie takers went crazy for the fine art spin the app’s AI put on photos — in just a few seconds of processing. Downloads leapt, art selfies flooded Instagram, and similar arty effects soon found their way into all sorts of rival apps and platforms. Then, after dipping a toe into social waters with the , the company — and we understand it’s since become profitable. But two of Prisma’s co-founders, Aleksey Moiseyenkov and Aram Hardy, got itchy feet when they had an idea for another app business. And they’ve both now left to set up a new startup, called . The plan is to launch the app — which will be called Capture — in Q4, with a beta planned for September or October, according to Hardy (who’s taking the CMO role). They’ve also raised a $1M seed for Capture, led by US VC firm General Catalyst. Also investing are KPCB, Social Capital, (the seed fund of former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos), Paul Heydon, and Russian internet giant, Mail.Ru Group. Josh Elman from Greylock Partners is also involved as an advisor. Hardy says they had the luxury of being able to choose their seed investors, after getting a warmer reception for Capture than they’d perhaps expected — thinking it might be tough to raise funding for a new social app given how that very crowded space has also been monopolized by a handful of major platforms… (hi Facebook, hey Snap!) But they also believe they’ve identified overlooked territory — where they can offer something fresh to help people interact with others in real-time. They’re not disclosing further details about the idea or how the Capture app will work at this stage, as they’re busy building and Hardy says certain elements could change and evolve before launch day. What they will say is that the app will involve AI, and will put the emphasis for social interactions squarely on the smartphone camera. Speed will also be a vital ingredient, as it was with Prisma — literally fueling the app’s virality. “We see a huge move to everything which is happening right now, which is really real-time,” Hardy tells TechCrunch. “Even when we started Prisma there were lots of similar products which were just processing one photo for five, ten, 15 minutes, and people were not using it because it takes time. “People want everything right now. Right here. So this is a trend which is taking place right now. So we’re trying to give it to them.” “Our team’s mission is to bring an absolutely new and unique experience to how people interact with each other. We would like to come up with something unique and really fresh,” adds Moiseyenkov, Capture’s CEO (pictured above left, with Hardy). “We see a huge potential in new social apps despite the fact that there are too many huge players.” Having heard the full Capture pitch from Hardy I can say it certainly seems like an intriguing idea. Though how exactly they go about selectively introducing the concept will be key to building the momentum needed to power their big vision for the app. But really that’s true of any social product. Their idea has also hooked a strong line up of seed investors, doubtless helped by the pair’s prior success with Prisma. (If there’s one thing investors love more than a timely, interesting idea, it’s a team with pedigree — and these two certainly have that.) “I’m happy to have such an amazing and experienced team,” adds Moiseyenkov, repaying the compliment to Capture’s investors. “Your first investors are your team. You have to ask lots of questions like you do when you decide whether this or that person is a perfect fit for your team. Because investors and the team are those people with whom you’re going to build a great product. At the same time, investors ask lots of questions to you.” Capture’s investors were evidently pleased enough with the answers their questions elicited to cut Capture its founding checks. And the startup’s “We’ll be their neighbors in Venice beach,” he confirms, though he stresses there will still be clear blue water between the two companies’ respective social apps, adding: “Snapchat is really a different product.” |
Photomyne raises $5 million for its A.I.-powered photo scanning app | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Tel Aviv-based , an A.I.-powered app that helps you bring your old photo prints online, has been benefitting from the subscription app boom to the tune of $5 million in Series A funding. Today, the app is used by a million people every month, and 250,000 people pay the $20 annual subscription for the expanded service. This adds a handful of additional features, including the option to build a family website where all your photos are uploaded immediately after being scanned. There is something of a limited lifetime for apps that convert physical media to digital – at some point, everyone who wants to transition their old media to the web will have done so. Another issue is that some people will make scanning photos a one-time project. They’ll then save all their photos to their own device and cloud storage, and cancel their subscription. And as those users drop off, physical media will continue to die out. For those reasons, Photomyne will eventually need to expand into other areas – perhaps scanning other things beyond photos. As it has a couple of patents for things like scanning business cards, documents, and sticky notes, it’s clearly thinking about this, too. But in the meantime, there’s still an audience of self-appointed family historians, who are making old photos available to their extended families, as well as older folks who grew up in the pre-smartphone era and now want to bring their memories online, too. By leveraging A.I. technology which runs locally, in real-time, on mobile devices, Photomyne is able to speed up the fairly tedious process of photo scanning using a handheld device. That is, instead of having to focus on one photo – as with , for example – Photomyne lets you scan multiple photos in a single shot as you flip through the pages of old albums. It then breaks those up into individual photos by auto-detecting the boundaries. It also auto-rotates sideways photos, crops the photos, corrects the photo perspective, and saves them in a digital album where you can further filter them, share, or – with the subscription – save locally, backup to the cloud, sync to other devices, or publish to a family website. The ability to scan more photos in one shot makes the app appealing to those who want to upload their entire collection of old photos to the web, instead of picking and choosing specific photos to import. In addition, the app’s A.I.-based technology improves over time the more you use it, says Photomyne’s co-founder and CFO Yair Segalovitz. And soon, the company plans to roll out other advanced features, too, he notes. “We are focused on a new set of exciting features that we expect to release in the very near future. We intend to offer automatic color correction – such as fixing color decay – and the ability to search interesting photos in our 70 million-plus photo archive,” says Segalovitz. To date, Photomyne has been downloaded 7 million times and is largely used in the U.S. and in Western Europe, though it’s starting to see growth in China, too. The Series A round was led by Luxembourg-based Maor, a co-investment tech fund from Philippe Guez and Eric Elalouf. It also included participation from Israeli investors and others from With the new funding, the company plans to expand its team of 16 to around 25 and scale the business in Japan and South East Asia, in particular. is a free download on and , but the full range of feature is only available to subscribers. |
Oval Money app launches its investment products for millennials | Mike Butcher | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | Back in April Oval Money with the idea of combining expense tracking, saving, and investing into one app, while also adding a social element by enabling its community of users to share tips and suggestions to one another. The idea is to help users grow their savings in less time by teaching them to monitor spending habits and make saving virtually automatic. The company has raised €1.2M in funding, largely from Italian investors. The startup is launching a raft of investment products for socially-conscious savers. Beginning with three funds – supporting gender diversity in boardrooms, flexible working and the brands that millennials trust – the investments marketplace will be available to customers in the smartphone app this summer. The “Women at the Table” fund will allow investors to support companies that ensure that at least 20% of board members are women, while a “Belong but Work Remote” fund promotes the growing flexible jobs economy. “Generation Millennials” will track the leading consumer brands that millennials are into most. The three are the first of 20 cause-themed products to be released in the marketplace. Oval co-founder Benedetta Arese Lucini said: “Young people want to invest in the causes they care about. We’ve been listening to millennials for a long time, and these products will mean not only can we help people start to save towards their futures, but we can provide them with the opportunity to invest in companies which are really making a difference in the world.” Oval Money uses machine learning to review the individual spending habits of its users, and adjusts saving automatically. A beta-test of the marketplace begins today. By updating the app, Ovalers will be able to go through an initial set of questions about what type of investor they are and will be encouraged to share with friends. The users that share the most will get a privileged access to the beta The firm will also launch opportunities to invest in cryptocurrency, insurance and other alternative finance products over the rest of the year. Also today, it has launched its product to 20,000 tobacconists across Italy via Intesa SanPaolo Group’s bank Banca 5, reaching a so-far-unserved demographic of immigrants and young people. Banca 5, which already provides a physical banking experience through tobacconists, will now be able to offer consumers new, online services through Oval Money’s app. |
null | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 6 | 20 | null |
YouTube rolls its music subscription services into 12 more markets | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | YouTube has rolled out its music streaming service to a bunch more international markets, adding 12 new countries today, and also launching the premium music video version of the service across the full 17 markets. In CEO chief executive Susan Wojcicki discussed the company’s ambitious expansion plans for the service, saying it was intending to expand to as many as 100 countries. The first markets for YouTube Music were the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea. The additional markets being added today are: Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. YouTube launched the streamlining revamp of its subscription service offerings in , routing a streaming music service, called YouTube Music, in pay monthly and ad-supported flavors (the latter with pared back features), to replace Google Play Music; and also announcing YouTube Premium (formerly called YouTube Red) — for music with video streaming. It also announced and in tandem with the service restructuring — which includes features such as dynamic custom recommendations; expansive search options (search by lyrics or generic description); and “thousands” of playlists across genre, mood and activity. The audio only YouTube Music offering — which in the US is priced at $9.99 monthly (or $14.99 for a family plan) — is intended to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music. While YouTube Premium includes a full video service, albeit for $2 more ($11.99) per month than the YouTube Red service it replaced. (Or $17.99 per month for a Family Plan.) Though it’s currently running a promotion offering the premium service free for the first three months. As well as offering ad-free music streaming, YouTube Premium includes background listening/playing and downloads across all the platform. Members also get access to all shows and movies. The company says current members of YouTube Red and Google Play Music members (including family plans) in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico will automatically receive access to YouTube Premium at their current price. While Google Play Music subscribers in all other countries will automatically receive access to YouTube Music Premium at their current price as it becomes available in their markets. It also claims nothing is changing for subscribers of Google Play Music — saying users will still be able to access all their purchased music, uploads and playlists. |
Google’s Datally app adds more ways to limit mobile data usage | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | In November, , a data-saving app largely aimed at emerging markets where users often rely on prepaid SIM cards, and don’t have access to all-you-can-eat unlimited data plans. The app lets users granularly control which apps can use data, which resulted in a 30% savings on data usage during pilot testing and now saves users 21%, on average. Today, Google is giving Datally an upgrade with several new features that will help users cut data usage even further. One key feature is the introduction of daily limits, which allow you to control your data usage on a per-day basis. This one is more about creating better habits around data consumption, so you don’t accidentally burn through too much data in a day, then end up without any data left before the month ends. This also ties into to Google’s larger push to give users more insights into their own behavior when using mobile devices, and more tools to combat the addictive nature of smartphones. The company in May new time management features for Android users, as well as new features to help users silence their phones and wind down at bedtime. It also has for parents to limit screen time for their children. While the Datally feature is primarily about conserving data, it acknowledges that it’s often easy to get sucked into your smartphone and lose track of how much time – and then, consequently, how much mobile data – you want to spend. Another new Datally feature lets you enable a guest mode where you control how much data someone borrowing your phone can use – helpful in those situations where phones are shared among family members. The “Unused Apps” feature, meanwhile, highlights those apps you’ve stopped using but could still be leaking data. Google notes that, for many people, 20 percent of mobile data is from apps using data in the background that haven’t been opened for over a month. Unused Apps will find those culprits so you can uninstall them, it says. And finally, a new Wi-Fi Map shows all the nearby Wi-Fi networks so you can find those with a good signal and stop using your mobile data. Though Datally is aimed at helping come online, it’s not limited to emerging markets. Anyone concerned with data usage can give it a shot. The new additions are rolling out to Datally today, says Google. The Android app, which has been downloaded over 10 million times, is |
Execs from DJI, 3DR and Skydio to discuss drones at Disrupt SF 2018 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | We’re excited to have these industry leaders speak at Disrupt. There are countless opportunities in the drone space right now and these leaders are best positioned to discuss to the challenges facing founders entering the market. |
The long Cocky-gate nightmare is over | John Biggs | 2,018 | 6 | 18 | I’ve been wanting to write about Cocky-gate for some time now but the story – a row between self-published authors that degenerated into ridiculousness – seems finally over and perhaps we can all get some perspective. The whole thing started , began attempting to enforce her copyright on books that contained “cocky” in the title. This included, but was not limited to, Cocky Cowboy, Cocky Biker, and Cocky Roomie, all titles in Hopkins oeuvre. Hopkins filed a trademark for the use of the word Cocky in romance titles and began attacking other others who used the word cocky, including Jamila Jasper who wrote a book called Cocky Cowboy and received an . After taking up the cause on Twitter and creating a solid example of Streisand Effect, Jasper changed the title of her book to . But other authors were hit by cease and desist letters and even Amazon stepped in briefly as well and took down multiple titles for a short time. From the : Pajiba reported on Monday that the author Nana Malone had been asked to change the title of her novel Mr Cocky, while TL Smith and Melissa Jane’s Cocky Fiancé has been renamed Arrogant Fiancé. Other writers claimed that Hopkins had reported them to Amazon, resulting in their books being taken down from the site. This went on for a number of weeks with the back and forth verging on the comical… Hubby: What ya doin' honey? Me: Working on a dystopian short story inspired by . Hubby: Is it called The Cocky Were-Rooster? Me:… Me: Dammit! Now I have to write that! True Story. It wound up being "Diary of a Cocky Werecock" — Lara Grey (@authorlaragrey) to the serious. I am so freakin' pissed. Candace Blevins' new book, Cocky Queen, was removed from B&N, iBooks, and Kobo. IT'S NOT EVEN IN ROMANCE, IT'S WOMEN'S FICTION! — Bianca-Quietly Loud-Sommerland 🏒🏳️🌈 (@BSommerland) Hopkins went to court to defend her trademark and then bumped up against the powerful who supported three defendants including a publicist who was incorrectly named as the publisher of one of the offending titles, The Cocktales Anthology. “Beyond the obvious issues with the merits, it is evident from the face of the complaint that Plaintiffs failed to conduct a reasonable pre-filing investigation before racing to the courthouse. Indeed, the number and extent of defects alone call into question whether the filing was made in good faith. Plaintiffs’ lack of due diligence failed to uncover the stark difference between a publisher and a publicist, i.e., non-party best-selling author Penny Reid is the former, while Defendant Jennifer Watson is the latter (Ms. Watson’s website even states that she provides “publicist and marketing services” and nowhere indicates that she writes or publishes books),” wrote Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York. “In sum, there is nothing meritorious about Plaintiffs’ situation, let alone urgent or irreparable. Defendant Watson cannot offer Plaintiffs the relief they seek as she bears no responsibility for The Cocktales Anthology they wish to enjoin from further publication. Defendant Crescent’s first allegedly infringing book was published over nine months ago. Plaintiffs have admitted that her use of “cocky” in titles would not likely cause confusion as to source or affiliation; moreover, she has publicly stated that she has not suffered lost sales.” Online communities are wonderful but precarious things. One or two attacks by bad – or even well-meaning – actors can tip them over the edge and ruin them for everyone. In fact, Cocky-gate has encouraged other authors to try this tactics. One writer, , has attempted to register the words “Dragon Slayer” in a book title and there is now a Twitter bot that . Now that the cocky has been freed, however, it looks like the romance writers of the world are taking advantage of the opportunity to share their own cocky stories. 🐓 COCKY QUICKIES 🐓 You’ve heard about the scandal, you’ve read all of the reports. Now it’s time to forget all that hoopla and dive into these short, emotionally charged reads filled with cocky men and women in Cocky Quickies. — ღ Nicole Morgan ღ (@AuthorNicMorgan) |
Jury rules Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine owe $25M to early Beats collaborator | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Beats Studio 3 wireless headphones A Los Angeles jury has ruled that Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, the founders of Apple-owned Beats Electronic, owe $25.25 million in royalties to an early collaborator who helped create the first model of Beats Studio headphones. Founded in 2008, Beats was . The plaintiff, Steven Lamar, claims that he first proposed the concept behind the headphones to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre (real name Andre Young) in early 2006 and continued working with the Beats founders until falling out with them later that year. This led to a settlement that Lamar . Dre and Iovine argued, however, that they had fulfilled their end of the agreement by paying Lamar royalties for the original headphone model, which was released in 2008. The jury decided that under the 2007 settlement, Lamar is indeed entitled to a percentage of the sales on all models of Studio headphones. TechCrunch has sent requests for comment to Apple, Beats and Roam, the headphone company founded by Lamar. |
India’s Times Internet buys popular video app MX Player for $140M to get into streaming | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Times Internet, the digital arm of Indian media firm Times Group, is getting into the digital content space, but not in the way you might think. The company’s previous venture — an OTT called BoxTV.com — shut down in 2016 after an underwhelming four-year period. Now it is taking a radically different strategy by buying video playback app MX Player for Rs 1,000 crore, or around $140 million. The company didn’t disclose its stake but said it is a majority percentage. The service originates from Korea but it has become hugely popular in India as a way to play media files, for example from an SD card, on a mobile device. It is a huge hit India, where the app claims 175 million monthly users — while the country accounts for 350 million of its 500 million downloads. From here, Times Internet plans to introduce a streaming content service to MX Player users which Karan Bedi, MX Player CEO, expects to go live before August. The plan is to introduce at least 20 original shows and more 50,000 content across multiple local languages in India during the first year. The duo said the lion’s share of that investment money would go into developing content. Bedi, a long-time media executive who took the job at MX Player eight months ago, said the service will be freemium and very much targeted at the idea of providing an alternative to television in India. He added that the deal had been in negotiation for the past year, which validates which first broke news of acquisition. There are plenty of video streaming services in India. Beyond Netflix and Amazon Prime, Hotstar (from Rupert Murdoch-owned Star India) is making waves alongside Jio TV from Reliance Jio, but data from App Annie suggests MX Player is way out ahead. The analytics firm pegs MX Player at nearly 50 million daily users, as of June, well ahead of Hotstar (14.1 million), JioTV (7.4 million) and others. Both Bedi and Times Internet MD Satyan Gajwani explained to TechCrunch in an interview that a big focus is differentiation and building a digital channel for India’s young since the average viewer demographics for MX player are hugely different to Indian TV audiences. Some 80 percent of the app’s users are aged under 35 (70 percent is aged under 25), while the gender balance is skewed more towards men. “A lot of people aren’t happy with Indian TV,” Bedi said. “There are a lot is soaps and it is not focused on young people. [The MX PLayer audience] is exactly the opposite of the Indian tv demographic.” That not only plays into growing a place for ‘millennial’ content, but it also means the streaming service may find success with advertisers if it can offer a gateway to young Indians. Beyond audience, there’s also flexibility. Gajwani explained further that unlike traditional TV and even YouTube, the Times Internet-MX Player service will offer different options for advertisers who “work with content creators to create stuff, sponsor a show, or find various different ways to reach scale.” “India has a $6 billion TV ad market and we think this could unlock some of the money going to TV,” he said. Times Internet MD Satyan Gajwani “This audience on here is genuinely different, [rather than cord-cuttters] they’re almost cord-nevers,” Bedi added. “This is a big new audience that’s never been tapped by broadcasters.” The idea is to gently introduce programming that is accessible to a large audience in India, who might not be open to paying, and then test other revenue models later. “Further down the line, we might include subscriptions to scale,” Gajwani added. “Subscription is growing but it’s much much smaller today, what excites us is the idea we’ll have 100 million people streaming a show.” MX Player might not be well known, but scale is one thing it certainly has in spades. The company just crossed , but Bedi pointed out that many are not counted because they are side-loaded, which doesn’t register with the Google Play Store. All told, he said, the app picks up 1.2 million downloads per day with around 350,000 coming from the official Android app store, he said. Bedi said that, among other things, the app is typically distributed by smartphone vendors in tier-two and three Indian cities to help phone buyers get the essential apps for their device right away. The question now is whether Times Internet can leverage that organic growth to build another business on top of the basic demand for video playback. This is certainly a unique approach. |
Redbox lands deal with Warner to rent DVDs on the same day they go on sale in physical stores | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | DVD and Blu-ray rental kiosk operator Redbox with Warner Bros. today that allows it to begin offering new releases on the same day they go on sale in physical retail stores. Redbox’s former agreement with the studio meant they had to wait until seven days after the home-video release. In a statement, Redbox said this deal also maintains the availability of new releases in Redbox On Demand, its streaming rental service. , this means Redbox now has same-day deals with almost all of the major studios. In addition to Warner Bros., they include Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate (its deal with 20th Century Fox is similar to its previous one with Warner Bros., in that it allows Redbox to rent its movies seven days after their home-video release). One notable exception is Disney, which Redbox has not had a distribution deal with since 2012. This is likely due to an involving digital download codes for Disney content. Redbox now operates more than 41,500 kiosks, which it said in its announcement is “more locations than Starbucks and McDonalds in the U.S. combined.” While the idea of waiting for DVD rentals might seem quaint in the age of on-demand and streaming everything, many Americans still rent discs. According to the NPD Group, it surveyed in the United States last year said they rent DVDs and Blu-rays in addition to using a subscription service like Netflix. Despite before its parent company, Outerwall, , Redbox doubled down on kiosks last year, adding 1,500 with plans to add more this year. |
Oh BiBi raises $21 million for its mobile gaming studio | Romain Dillet | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | French startup raised $21 million from with also participating. Oh BiBi is a team of mobile gaming veterans trying to build the next big thing when it comes to mobile gaming. The company has already released a handful of games, such as LoL Kart, Motor World Car Factory, Dino Factory and SUP Multiplayer Racing. But the company’s next big bet is . Frag is an online first-person shooter. You’ll fight against other players in one-on-one matches. There’s a metagame element as well — you’ll need to put together your team of characters as you can swap between multiple characters in the middle of a match. Each character has a cartoonish design and some special powers. Oh BiBi keeps comparing it to Fortnite in its press release, but it sounds more like 1 vs. 1 Overwatch. Frag will be available as an open beta next month on iOS and Android. Oh BiBi is taking a freemium approach and distributing its games as a free download with in-app purchases. Building a mobile gaming startup is incredibly hard. It’s not just about building engaging games. You also need to tweak paid acquisition strategies, retention numbers, in-app purchase triggers and improve the lifetime value of your players. This is Atomico’s first investment in a French startup as a lead investor. Atomico has invested in Rovio and Supercell in the past. So the VC firm thinks the Oh BiBi team is well positioned to tackle this market. [gallery ids="1664212,1664213,1664214,1664215,1664216"] |
Study calls out ‘dark patterns’ in Facebook and Google that push users toward less privacy | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy. It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe’s , which has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data is their main source of income. goes into detail on exactly how these companies create an illusion of control over your data while simultaneously nudging you towards making choices that limit that control. Although the companies and their products will be quick to point out that they are in compliance with the requirements of the GDPR, there are still plenty of ways in which they can be consumer-unfriendly. In going through a set of privacy popups put out in May by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the researchers found that the first two especially feature “dark patterns, techniques and features of interface design mean to manipulate users…used to nudge users towards privacy intrusive options.” Flowchart illustrating the Facebook privacy options process – the green boxes are the “easy” route. It’s not big obvious things — in fact, that’s the point of these “dark patterns”: that they are small and subtle yet effective ways of guiding people towards the outcome preferred by the designers. For instance, in Facebook and Google’s privacy settings process, the more private options are simply disabled by default, and users not paying close attention will not know that there was a choice to begin with. You’re always opting of things, not in. To enable these options is also a considerably longer process: 13 clicks or taps versus 4 in Facebook’s case. That’s especially troubling when the companies are also forcing this action to take place at a time of their choosing, not yours. And Facebook added a cherry on top, almost literally, with the fake red dots that appeared behind the privacy popup, suggesting users had messages and notifications waiting for them even if that wasn’t the case. When choosing the privacy-enhancing option, such as disabling face recognition, users are presented with a tailored set of consequences: “we won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you,” for instance, to scare the user into enabling it. But nothing is said about what you will be opting into, such as how your likeness could be used in ad targeting or automatically matched to photos taken by others. Disabling ad targeting on Google, meanwhile, warns you that you will not be able to mute some ads going forward. People who don’t understand the mechanism of muting being referred to here will be scared of the possibility — what if an ad pops up at work or during a show and I can’t mute it? So they agree to share their data. Before you make a choice, you have to hear Facebook’s case. In this way users are punished for choosing privacy over sharing, and are always presented only with a carefully curated set of pros and cons intended to cue the user to decide in favor of sharing. “You’re in control,” the user is constantly told, though those controls are deliberately designed to undermine what control you do have and exert. Microsoft, while guilty of the biased phrasing, received much better marks in the report. Its privacy setup process put the less and more private options right next to each other, presenting them as equally valid choices rather than some tedious configuration tool that might break something if you’re not careful. Subtle cues do push users towards sharing more data or enabling voice recognition, but users aren’t punished or deceived the way they are elsewhere. You may already have been aware of some of these tactics, as I was, but it makes for interesting reading nevertheless. We tend to discount these things when it’s just one screen here or there, but seeing them all together along with a calm explanation of why they are the way they are makes it rather obvious that there’s something insidious at play here. |
Instagram Lite quietly launches to find a billion more users abroad | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Instagram’s future growth depends on the developing world, so it’s built a version of its app just for them. “Instagram Lite” for Android appeared today in the without any announcement from the company. “The Instagram Lite app is small, allowing you to save space on your phone and download it quickly,” the description reads. At just 573 kilobytes, Instagram Lite is 1/55th the size of Instagram’s 32 megabyte main app. It lets you filter and post photos to the feed or Stories, watch Stories and browse the Explore page, but currently lacks the options to share videos or direct message friends. Instagram Lite addresses many problems common amongst mobile users in the developing world who are often on older phones with less storage space, slower network connections or who can’t afford big data packages. Users might not have to delete photos or other apps to install Instagram Lite, or wait a long time and pay more for it to download. Screenshots of Instagram Lite The release follows Instagram’s that launched last month, also designed for the developing world. At the time I wrote, “The launch begs the question of whether Instagram will release an Instagram Lite version of its native app.” The answer is yes. Mobile analytics service tipped off TechCrunch to the release. When asked for comment, an Instagram spokesperson confirmed that Instagram Lite began testing in Mexico this week, and provided this statement: “We are testing a new version of Instagram for Android that takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster.” The company wouldn’t say whether ads would be included. Later this year the app will expand to more countries, and get messaging and video posting capabilities. The “Lite” trend has picked up steam recently. Facebook launched Facebook Lite in 2015, and it had . That paved the way for the launch of , and earlier this month. Users have clearly been craving Instagram Lite, as a fake/unofficial Facebook Page with that racked up more than 2,000 Likes. Instagram announced last week at the IGTV unveiling that it had hit . It’s been growing at roughly 100 million users every four months, with much of that coming from the developing world. Snapchat neglected international markets to focus on U.S. teens, leaving the door open for Instagram and WhatsApp’s clones of Snapchat Stories to grab big user bases in countries like India and Brazil. With this new growth tool in its belt, Instagram may see even swifter adoption in emerging markets. It could potentially score revenue straight from Lite if ads are included, then as phones and networks improve, hope to shift users onto the full-fidelity version. Now, eyes will be on Snapchat to see if it builds its own Lite app. Otherwise it risks continuing to slip further behind the Instagram juggernaut. |
Pokémon Quest hits app store with a jolt | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Coming just shy of a month after its , Pokémon Quest has hit the the and today with an impressive response. According to analytics by , the app on iPhone is already at No. 2 in Japan and No. 3 in Korea. While hovering at No. 5 in the U.S., the momentum looks like it could carry it to No. 1 by the end of the day. The game itself is designed to be an easily accessible, free-to-play RPG that features your favorite pokémon from Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue — with a geometric twist. Taking a left-turn from their typical animation style, the pokémon in Quest have been transformed into cube versions of themselves and inhabit a brightly colored — also 90-degree angled — terrain called Tumblecube Island. After choosing a pokémon companion to begin your quest, trainers are tasked with exploring the island for hidden treasure. But if Minecraft-ified Pokémon is not exactly your cup of tea, don’t worry, , Nintendo, the Pokémon Company (the group behind Quest) and Niantic (the creators of ) announced a plan to release four new Pokémon titles by 2019. Pokémon Quest jump-starts that plan and two new Switch titles — Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! — are slated to be released to the Switch in November. A yet untitled game is scheduled to be released by the end of 2019. The companies plan to begin weaving these platforms, games and fans together, including allowing users to transport their pokémon from GO to the Switch titles and the creation of a for the Switch. It’s too early to speculate on the success of these grand plans, but it’s an exciting prospect for pokémon trainers worldwide. |
This clever case pops open to protect your phone when you drop it | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | That moment when you drop your phone and everything stops. You can hear your heart beat — the buzz of the world around you is silenced — all cognition stops — you see as if in slow motion the pirouette of your $700 piece of electronics toward the cement. How will it land? Will you get lucky this time? But if you had this case on it, you’d then see it spring horns and land with a jaunty bounce. , a bit like an airbag for your phone, is the brainchild of Philip Frenzel, an engineer at Aalen University in Germany. His idea won the top award from the German Society for Mechatronics, which considered projects from students all over the country, and you can see him explain its genesis . Frenzel, like me, doesn’t like compromising his phone’s aesthetic with some ugly protective shell, but he likes even less the shattered countenance that inevitably results from this aesthetic decision. Why not something that only deploys when the phone is in danger, then? He got to work. The activation mechanism he arrived at early: sensors that detect when the phone is in free fall and activate the next step. But what was that step? In his tinkering, he initially thought of installing an actual airbag mechanism on the phone. But that, and a foam-based alternative, and a few others, simply didn’t prove practical. Finally inspiration struck. Instead of something soft, why not something springy? Perhaps… springs. As you see above, what he arrived at is a set of eight thin metal curls that normally lie flat inside the case. But when released, they pop out and curl up, protecting the edges of the phone from impact and softening the blow considerably compared with a full stop on the concrete. When you pick up your (hopefully undamaged) phone, you simply fold the springs back into their holsters, priming them for their next deployment. Of course, there’s the consideration that having these things deploy while the phone is still in your pocket would be at best embarrassing and at worst rather painful. One assumes there are considerations in place for that — tapping into the phone’s proximity sensor, for instance, to see if it’s in a pocket or bag. Frenzel has already applied for a patent, and even printed T-shirts with a catchy logo. So this thing is practically for sale. Next stop: Kickstarter. |
Google invests $22M in feature phone operating system KaiOS | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into , the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year. “This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that still cannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets,” . Our mobile world is dominated today by smartphones: there were sold last year. But feature phones have continued to move, too: it’s estimated that there were about 450 million-500 million of them shipped in 2017. And their sales are actually growing faster right now than their souped-up cousins. KaiOS-powered phones play squarely in the latter category, and they are gaining traction in markets where feature phones still hold sway. In India, they have overtaken Apple’s iOS to become the after Android handsets. KaiOS tells us that there have been more than 40 million KaiOS phones shipped to-date, while suggests its shipments grew 11,400 percent year-on-year to reach 23 million in Q1 2018. The research firm estimates that a more broad uptick in feature phone buying, fueled no doubt by Jio’s huge numbers and HMD Nokia, led to Android-based smartphone shipments declining 14 percent year-on-year in that same Q1 2018 period. Google’s KaiOS investment could be seen as a way of introducing its services to feature phone users who might eventually graduate to smartphones. However, there is also scope for holding on to these users even as they stay in the feature phone category, which continues to evolve and become more functional. “We’re excited to work with Google to deliver its services on more mobile devices,” said Codeville, the KaiOS CEO. “Having an intelligent voice assistant on an affordable mobile phone is truly revolutionary as it helps overcome some of the limitations a keypad brings.” A Nokia device running KaiOS KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozilla’s , as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better. KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax and Alcatel, and it works with carriers including Sprint and AT&T — it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with India’s Reliance Jio, . Reliance Jio offers its own range of KaiOS handsets, and coupling that with its low-cost data packages, KaiOS’ share of India’s phone market has — overtaking Apple’s iOS in the process and putting it second behind only Android. ( , such has been its impact in the country.) That market share alone in a high-growth market like India is likely enough to pique Google’s interest. “We want to ensure that Google apps and services are available to everyone, whether they are using desktops, smartphones, or feature phones.” said Anjali Joshi, VP of Product Management for Google’s Next Billion Users division, in a statement. “Following the success of the JioPhones, we are excited to work with KaiOS to further improve access to information for feature phone users around the world.” Beyond this, the Next Billion business unit works on customizing the Google experience and services to fit the needs of new internet users in emerging markets, including the launch of new services like this and . While Google continues to develop its Android smartphone platform, it has long been an advocate of expanding its services to other platforms, too, and that’s been the case with KaiOS. In February, KaiOS announced that it would be adding Google Search, Google Maps and the Google Voice Assistant to the new , and it seems that this is the Google agreement that will be expanded to all models as part of Google’s investment. To be clear, Google services are not the only ones on KaiOS. It earlier this year, and it mixes dedicated KaiOS apps — WhatsApp is said to be coming — with others that are more basic HTML-5 web apps. Google’s investment in KaiOS is the latest in a line of direct startup deals from the U.S. tech giant that sit alongside investments made by GV and CapitalG, its two investment arms. Google has also backed and is to make investments and potentially acquire startups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. |
Facebook makes Stories another Like contest with emoji reactions | Josh Constine | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Ready to scrounge for Likes on your Stories too? Facebook Stories can feel like a ghost town even though it has 150 million daily users. So Facebook is trying to get To the same effect, Facebook is letting people start a group reply to your Story with multiple friends that launches a group thread on Messenger. And when you tap to see who’s viewed your Facebook Story, the viewer list will highlight people who sent reactions or Messenger replies. Combined, these four new ways to give feedback on Stories should make it feel less like you’re posting into a black hole. Facebook has found great success with its Like button and other Reactions for News Feed posts and Instagram’s Heart button. They both trigger a dopamine hit of self-satisfaction that encourages you to continue sharing that’s more visceral than just knowing someone watched your Story. I wonder if a Like button will come to Instagram Stories, especially after former Facebook VP of News Feed Adam Mosseri was recently named VP of product for Instagram. Oh, and just in case Stories wasn’t turning into a vanity contest already, according to Mari Smith via Facebook is now testing a Selfie mode in the Stories camera with a Soft Focus option similar to the recent . When Snapchat invented the Stories format, it purposefully left out a Like button because it would make sharing into a competition where users craved the binary feedback and posted whatever was most popular. In fact, he told me, “We definitely asked ourselves what if we removed Likes from Instagram? What would happen? … If you have Likes … you get certain behaviors, and the behavior we wanted was for you to be able to share as much as you wanted. And the lack of Likes in this space lets you let down your guard.” Now Facebook is changing that fundamental principle of Stories, which could give us a whole new quantified measure of our worth to turn into an addiction and coerce us to share not what’s authentic but what’s Likeable. |
Hi, I’m Sarah, TechCrunch’s new intern | Sarah Wells | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Hi. I’m Sarah Wells, TechCrunch’s summer intern. I’m a Vermont native but have been living in the Boston area for the past five years completing a BA in English (with a sprinkling of minors in Physics and Computer Science) and an MS in Science Journalism. It’s hard to say whether my techie fate was sealed when the computer in my childhood home had installed or when I enthusiastically attended a live-taping of with my family during our first trip to San Francisco circa 2003. I’ll be writing this summer remotely out of Boston coffee shops (and occasionally the ) and focusing on robotic and machine learning news and features — and any other interesting stories that cross my plate. If you want to see more of me feel free to check out my , or follow me on ! |
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ExceptionAlly helps parents navigate the special needs education labyrinth | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | The challenges faced by parents of kids with special needs are always unique, but in one way they are surely much alike: making sure the kids are getting what they need from schools is way harder than it ought to be. that aims to help parents understand, organize and communicate all the info they need to make sure their child is getting the help they require. “There are millions of parents out there trying to navigate special education. And parents with special needs should have access to more information than what one school tells them,” said ExceptionAlly co-founder and CEO Rayford Davis. “Those with the means actually hire special education attorneys, but those are few and far between. We thought, how can we democratize this? So we’re trying to do what TurboTax did for CPAs: deliver a large percentage of the value for a small percentage of the cost.” The company just emerged from Y Combinator and is pursuing full deployment ahead of this school year, with a visibility push during the usual back-to-school dates. It’s still early days, but Davis tells me they already have thousands of users who are taking advantage of the free and paid aspects of the service. Just because a parent has a kid with dyslexia, or a hearing impairment, or a physical disability, doesn’t mean they suddenly become an expert in what resources are out there for those kids — what’s required by law, what a school offers voluntarily and so on. Achieving fluency in these complex issues is a big ask on top of all the usual parental duties — and on top of that, parents and schools are often put in adversarial positions. There are resources out there for parents, certainly, but they’re scattered and often require a great deal of effort on the parents’ part. So the first goal of the service is to educate and structure the parents’ information on the systems they’re dealing with. Based on information provided by the parent, such as their kid’s conditions or needs, and other information like school district, state and so on, the platform assists the parent in understanding both the condition itself, what they can expect from a school and what their rights are. It could be something as simple as moving a kid to the front row of a classroom to knowing how frequently the school is required to share reports on that kid’s progress. Parents rarely know the range of accommodations a school can offer, Davis said, and even the schools themselves might not know or properly explain what they can or must provide if asked. For instance, an IEP, or individual education plan, and yearly goals are required for every student with special needs, along with meetings and progress reports. These are often skipped or, if not, done in a rote way that isn’t personalized. Davis said that by helping parents collaborate with the school and teacher on IEPs and other facets of the process, they accomplish several things. First, the parent feels more confident and involved in their kid’s education, having brought something to the table. Second, less pressure is put on overworked teachers to produce these things in addition to everything else they have to do. And third, it either allows or compels schools to provide all the resources they have available. Naturally, this whole process produces reams of documents: evaluations, draft plans, lesson lists, observations, reports and so on. “If you talk to any parent of a child with special needs, they’ll tell you how they have file cabinets full of paperwork,” Davis said. ExceptionAlly will let you scan or send it all these docs, which it helps you organize into the various categories and find again should you need them. A search feature based on OCR processing of the text is in development and should be in place for the latter half of the coming school year, which Davis pointed out is really when it starts being necessary. That, he said, is when parents need to keep schools accountable. Being informed both on the kid’s progress and what the school is supposed to be doing lets the resulting process be collaborative rather than combative. But if the latter comes to pass, the platform has resources for parents to deploy to make sure the schools don’t dominate the power equation. “If things progress that way, there’s a ‘take action toolkit’ to develop communications with the school,” Davis said. Ideally you don’t want to be the parent threatening legal action or calling the principal at home. A timely reminder of what was agreed upon and a nudge to keep things on track keeps it positive. “It’s sort of a reminder that we should all be on ‘team kid,’ if you will,” he added. Schools, unfortunately, have not shown themselves to be highly willing to collaborate. “We spent about six months talking to over a hundred schools and districts. What we found was not a lot of energy to provide parents with any more information than what the school was already providing,” Davis explained. The sad truth here is that many schools are already neck-deep in administrative woes, the teachers are overworked and have new responsibilities every year and the idea of volunteering for new ones doesn’t strike even the most well-intentioned schools as attractive. So instead, ExceptionAlly has focused on going directly to parents, who, confidently and well-armed, can take their case to the school on their own. “Listen, we’re not getting ready to solve all of education today with our solution. We’re going to find that one mom who says, ‘I know there’s more out there, can someone help me find it?’ Yes, we’re going to help you do that,” he said. “Could that put pressure on the system? As long as it does it legally and lawfully, I am perfectly okay with advocating for a child and parents’ legal rights and putting pressure on the system to give them what they by law deserve.” After the official launch ahead of this school year, the company plans to continue adding features. Rich text search is among them, and deeper understanding of the documents could both help automate storage and retrieval and also lead to new insights. At some point there will also be an optional program to submit a child’s information (anonymously, of course) to help create a database of what accommodations in which places and cases led to what outcomes — essentially aggregating information direct from the source. ExceptionAlly if you’re curious whether it might be helpful for you or someone you know, and there are a variety of paid options should it seem like a good fit. |
Waymo names ex-Netflix, Cruise Automation executive as chief people officer | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has hired former Netflix and Cruise Automation executive Tawni Nazario-Cranz as its chief people officer. Nazario-Cranz will be responsible for hiring workers, shaping the company’s culture and diversity initiatives. She will report directly to Waymo CEO John Krafick. The executive comes with a long background in human resources, including a 10-year stint at Netflix, Bausch & Lomb and FedEd Kinko’s. She was most recently chief people officer at Cruise, GM’s self-driving unit, a position she held for eight months before leaving in April, according to her Nazario-Cranz’s hiring comes at an auspicious time for , which is poised to launch its first driverless service later this year. Waymo is already shuttling a group of approved “early riders” in self-driving vehicles without a behind the wheel in the Phoenix area. The company has also been expanding partnerships with automakers. In May, Waymo said it would order up to from Fiat Chrysler for its driverless ride-hailing service. Waymo has also formed a strategic partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, with plans to make the part of Waymo’s driverless fleet beginning in 2020. The burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry, which has exploded in the past two years, requires people with specific and highly sought skills. The limited pool of talent has made recruitment and retention of skilled workers a highly competitive process. And while salary, benefits and perks can lure new talent, it’s a company’s culture that often keeps them there. Nazario-Cranz has experience here, including helping shape (along with others at the company) Netflix’s first Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said “may well be the most ever to come out of the Valley.” |
Google Calendar gets an ‘Out of Office’ mode | Sarah Perez | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Google Calendar is the latest Google app to get an update focused on improving users’ “digital wellbeing.” The company today it’s rolling out a new “Out of Office” feature in Google Calendar, alongside a setting for customizable working hours. The working hours signal to others when you’re unavailable, and allows Google Calendar to automatically decline meetings on your behalf outside those hours. For starters, you’ll find there’s a new “Out of Office” calendar entry type you can select when you’re creating an event via Google Calendar on the web. For example, if you’re scheduling the dates of your vacation, you could mark that event as “Out of Office.” If others send you meeting invites during this period, Google Calendar will decline them without your involvement. It’s a feature users to complement Gmail’s Vacation Responder. Google also says it will attempt to automatically detect when event types should be denoted “Out of Office,” based on the event title. Another new feature will allow you to better customize your working hours in Google Calendar. Currently, you can set working hours to one interval for all days of the week, but now you’ll be able to customize your hours for each day separately. This will help people who have irregular availability — not the usual 9 to 5, so to speak. Google Calendar will also try to infer your working hours based on your prior scheduling patterns, and may prompt you to confirm them in the app’s Settings. The changes, while seemingly small, are part of a to promote digital wellbeing across its platforms. In recent months, the company has introduced a number of features focused on helping people better manage their time, and fight back against the addictive nature of smartphones and digital services. For example, at its I/O developer conference in May, Google introduced for Android users, and it has a set of screen time tools for parents to use with children . It even rolled out new tools to mindlessly watching videos. Other services, like Gmail and Google Photos, utilize machine learning and AI to reduce the time spent in-app, by doing things like prioritizing the important mail, or automatically editing your photos. The new Google Calendar tools are rolling out now to G Suite users, Google says. Presumably, a broader consumer release will soon follow. |
Lyft valuation hits $15.1 billion after fresh $600 million in funding | Kirsten Korosec | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Lyft has raised an additional $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, pushing its post-money valuation to $15.1 billion. The company’s value has more than doubled in the past 14 months. Senator Investment Group LP joined Fidelity in the capital raise. Fidelity has poured more than $800 million into the ride-hailing company, making it one of Lyft’s largest investors. Lyft has spent the past 18 months aggressively expanding into new U.S. cities, as well and pursuing its ambitions. Lyft’s plans — along with some of rival Uber’s scandalous missteps — have helped the company increase its market share in the U.S. to 35 percent. In January 2017, Lyft had just 22 percent market share in the United States. Of course, scaling up is a costly affair. And Lyft has spent the past year seeking investor money. The ride-hailing company has raised $2.9 billion in primary capital — that includes the $600 million announced Wednesday — since April 2017. In total, Lyft has raised $5.1 billion since its inception. |
Bannersnack makes it easy to punch the monkey (and more) | John Biggs | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | An app like is something you never think you need — until you do. Designed by a digital marketer from Romania, Gabriel Ciordas, the app was originally called FlashEff and was used to create Flash banners for online marketers. Over time, however, HTML5 and graphics overtook Flash and the company pivoted to offering easy-to-use design tools for marketers and business owners. The service is free to try and costs $7 a month 30 static images; $18 a month gets you embedded banners with full analytics. The company is completely bootstrapped and has been working in the space since 2008. “Bannersnack has always been self-funded. We built our resources step by step, as our business grew together with our efforts. We think it’s fair to say that we worked for every penny we’ve ever gotten and further invested it back into growing our business,” said Ciordas. The service has 100,000 monthly users who create 180,000 visuals a month. They offer standalone graphics as well as responsive HTML5 images. The most interesting tool, the Banner Generator, creates banners in multiple sizes instantly, freeing business owners up to do what they do best: sell stuff. Again, it is rare to see a product so focused on a single, important niche, and Bannersnack fits the bill. While you could fire up Pixelmator and try to make your own banners, this tool is surprisingly pleasant to use and works quite well. “Our main objective is to empower marketers, designers, and business owners, while reshaping the way agencies and businesses create visuals for their marketing purposes,” said Ciordas. After all, not everyone has the skills or talent to create flashing banners featuring exciting mortgage reduction opportunities and free iPad sweepstakes. |
Amazon is retiring CPM Ads, a display ad network for Amazon Associates, by the end of September | Ingrid Lunden | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Amazon, by than account, wants to become a big in against the likes of Facebook and Google, but its approach to how it will do this is something of a moving target, with pieces coming and going. In the latest development, the company has quietly announced that it is retiring by the end of September an ad product called CPM Ads. CPM Ads were and represented an early foray into display advertising for Amazon, allowing smaller web publishers that were a part of the company’s Amazon Associates affiliate program to run banner and other ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) model on their sites. Amazon notified Associates with an alert on their dashboards today (see above) and it has also provided a on the retirement in its help topics for affiliates. It notes that CPM Ads will be stopped on September 30, 2018, with the last payments coming by November 30, and reports on ads getting discontinued on December 31. Amazon does not explain why it has decided to phase out CPM Ads — we have contacted the company to ask — but one reason could be because the company is either moving more publishers to other ad units and/or these have not proven to be as popular as expected. The retirement note suggests publishers consider its and , if they qualify to use them. Those who we have spoken to who were using the CPM ads described them as giving great returns (“easy money” was how one described them), and filling a gap that others were not. Amazon describes the Unified Ad Marketplace as another display ad product that brings together Amazon and supply-side platforms (which aggregate ad space from many publishers; examples include AppNexus, DoubleClick and the Rubicon Project). But it appears that it seems to be geared to larger sites, rather than smaller publishers, as CPM Ads were. Native Shopping Ads is another Associates product, and as such it is aimed at the same publishers that were using the CPM Ads. But (as with all native ads) these don’t come in the form of banners, but as product placements either within or just below text, and are meant to be for products that are triggered by content on the page. Amazon’s retiring of CPM Ads comes at a time when many are predicting that the company wants to take a bigger, not smaller, step into the ad world. There have been that Amazon is gearing up to launch a retargeting ad product aimed to compete against the likes of Google and Criteo. Retargeted ads are based on your browsing and follow you around the web in the hopes of bringing you back eventually to buy products, in this case on Amazon. If you have spent five minutes on Amazon or another e-commerce site, and have then seen your browsing history from those sites presented back to you in the form of ads for days afterwards, then you know what retargeting is. Amazon was a big user of retargeting ads on other networks; now, it seems, it wants to run ads like this on its own network. that the company is planning more search and video-related advertising formats on its own platforms; and that the company is looking to work with third parties to develop ad products for mobile and TV screens. Amazon made , and it is projected to make $9.5 billion this year. These are still modest numbers: as a point of comparison, Google pulled in $95 billion in 2017. Nevertheless, Amazon remains a huge competitor to Google in other areas, and since a leadership position can sometimes seemingly evaporate overnight, Google is not sitting idly. It has been working on ways of , bringing its platform (and its advertising) a little closer to how Amazon does business. |
ProtonMail suffers DDoS attack that takes its email service down for minutes | Natasha Lomas | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | It’s been an unexpectedly for digital comms services. It’s not just workplace IM tool Slack suffering outages but end-to-end encrypted email service ProtonMail too. In the latter case, the company has blamed several hours’ worth of sporadic outages on a major DDoS attack. Our network has been under sustained attack this morning. We are working with our upstream providers to mitigate the attack. Emails are delayed but will not be lost. Thank you for your patience. — ProtonMail (@ProtonMail) In a statement on the company says the attack is “unlike the more ‘generic’ DDoS attacks that we deal with on a daily basis” — which in turn meant its upstream DDoS protection service (Radware) needed more time than usual to mitigate the attack. The longest outage has been “on the order of 10 minutes,” according to ProtonMail. Back in 2015 the then fledgling startup . And felt compelled to pay a ransom to fend off the hackers — a decision which earned it criticism from some segments of the security industry, and is perhaps coming back to haunt it now. Although the experience also led ProtonMail to spend on upgrading its defenses. Since then it’s had a good record with uptime, despite dealing with DDoS attacks on a daily basis. That said, while it’s claiming today’s attacks were orders of magnitude bigger than usual, its CTO Bart Butler also sounds less than pleased with how things went down today, in response to a user: “We will be evaluating this incident in the future, as it definitely should have been handled better.” We were actually a little slow this time. Sorry. — Bart Butler (@BartCButler) “Radware is making adjustments to their DDoS protection systems to better mitigate against this type of attack in the future,” the company also writes on Reddit. “While we don’t yet have our own measurement of the attack size, we have traced the attack back to a group that claims to have ties to Russia, and the attack is said to have been 500 Gbps, which would be among the largest DDoS’s on record.” “It is multi-vector, and they are dynamically changing the type of attack traffic they are sending at us, so it’s a higher level of sophistication than the usual ones,” f He also pointed out that the attackers’ Twitter feed included them having “called in a lot of fake bomb threats recently,” adding: “They are clearly bad actors and we will pass on any intelligence we gather to the appropriate authorities after we make our own investigation and research.” 500gbps just too big. — APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) A little later today, and a little more comfortable about having got the attack under control — despite confirming the attackers are “still hitting us” — Yen said: “Throughout the day, we have gotten a lot better at blocking this type of attack so now things are stable. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say we have ‘won’ as these things can sometimes go on for multiple days, but its much harder for them to get through now.” Asked why he thought ProtonMail is being targeted he declined to speculate, saying only: “The reason behind these attacks is always hard to know for sure. For instance, a lot of times, the stated reason is a cover for the actual reason.” Meanwhile the Russian hackers claiming responsibility for ProtonMail’s attack — a group calling itself Apophis Squad — had been using Twitter (where they appear to have had an account since October 2016) to taunt ProtonMail users and trade insults with Butler. We're back you clowns. — Bart Butler (@BartCButler) Yo Say sorry for calling us clowns and we will allow your network backup! ( & ) — APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) Just say sorry to us. Then we will let you backup! — APOPHIS SQUAD (@apophissquadv2) Summing up, Yen dubs it “a rough day for messaging.” Though at the time of writing it’s still not clear what the root cause of Slack’s issues are. We think we've isolated the issue, and we're getting close to a resolution. Thanks for hanging in there. — Slack (@SlackHQ) |
Microsoft launches two new Azure regions in China | Frederic Lardinois | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | Microsoft today launched two new Azure regions in China. These new regions, China North 2 in Beijing and China East 2 in Shanghai, are now generally available and will complement the existing two regions Microsoft operates in the country (with the help of its local partner, ). As the first international cloud provider in China when it launched its first region there in 2014, Microsoft has seen rapid growth in the region and there is clearly demand for its services there. Unsurprisingly, many of Microsoft’s customers in China are other multinationals that are already betting on Azure for their cloud strategy. These include the likes of Adobe, Coke, Costco, Daimler, Ford, Nuance, P&G, Toyota and . In addition to the new China regions, Microsoft also today launched a new availability zone for its region in the Netherlands. While availability zones have long been standard among the big cloud providers, Azure only launched this feature — which divides a region into multiple independent zones — into general availability earlier this year. The regions in the Netherlands, Paris and Iowa now offer this additional safeguard against downtime, with others to follow soon. In , Microsoft also today announced that is now generally available. In addition, Microsoft announced the second generation of its , which is now in preview, and some updates to the , which now includes a web-based user interface for building and managing data pipelines. |
Warby Parker’s Dave Gilboa is coming to Disrupt SF | Jordan Crook | 2,018 | 6 | 27 | In 2010, the eyewear industry got its long-awaited new player. entered the market with a simple offering: stylish Rx glasses, bought online, for a reasonable price. While this sounds like a pretty obvious concept in 2018, the world of e-commerce was just beginning its insane growth streak back in 2010. And glasses, of all things, weren’t something that many people thought could be purchased online. But through a simple try-before-you-buy system, Warby Parker made it possible. Flash-forward eight years and Warby Parker has become a household name, with more than 50 stores across the United States and Canada, and more than . The brand has evolved beyond a simple set of glasses to become an example for many startups, particularly where social good is concerned. For each pair of glasses sold, Warby Parker donates a pair to someone who needs glasses but doesn’t have access to them. All that said, we’re obviously thrilled to have Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Dave Gilboa join us onstage at Disrupt SF. Gilboa has helped Warby Parker grow from a small e-commerce startup to a massive brand, and has helped evolve the company beyond an e-commerce brand, providing vision tests alongside the product. At Disrupt SF, we’ll discuss how Warby grew its e-commerce presence, the company’s approach to offline retail versus online and what’s next in store for Warby Parker. Gilboa joins other notable speakers, such as , , , and many more. Tickets to the conference, which runs September 5 to September 7, are available . |
Here’s what Sony announced at E3 2018 | Brian Heater | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Due out in September, we knew this one was going to get some solid face time at the event. Sony showed off a good deal of gameplay, featuring your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man battle some familiar supervillians inside the Raft super prison. |
Naspers is in talks to invest in Southeast Asia’s Carousell | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Naspers, the South Africa-based firm that famously backed Chinese giant Tencent in its infancy, is in talks to invest in Singapore-based startup Carousell, according to two sources with knowledge of discussions. Carousell offers a mobile app that combines listings with peer-to-peer selling across Southeast Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That makes it well-aligned with Naspers’ portfolio, which features some of the world’s largest classifieds services including , which covers 45 countries, and . TechCrunch understands that Naspers is pursuing a deal with Carousell with a view to making it the firm’s key play in Southeast Asia and other parts of the APAC region. Discussions are at a relatively early stage so it isn’t clear what percentage of the company that Naspers is seeking to acquire, although it would be a minority investment that values the Carousell business at over $500 million. The deal could be a first step towards Naspers acquiring a controlling interest in the business further down the line, one source said. Carousell declined to respond when asked for comment. “It is our company’s policy to neither acknowledge nor deny our involvement in any merger, acquisition or divestiture activity, nor to comment on market rumors,” Naspers told TechCrunch in a statement. Timing of the discussions is notable since Carousell in May. ( .) That deal — the startup’s Series C — took it to $126 million from investors to date and added big names to the Carousell cap table. EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board, and Singapore’s DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, took part in the Series C, which also included existing backers Rakuten Ventures, the VC linked to Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, Sequoia India and 500 Startups. Earlier this month, that the company had turned down acquisition offers in the past. Carousell is highly regarded in Singapore for being one of the first home-grown startups to show promise — its three founding members each graduated the National University of Singapore, NUS. Aside from raising significant investor capital, it has scaled regionally it is battle against larger and better-funded e-commerce rivals Alibaba-owned Lazada and Shopee, a business from NYSE-listed Sea. In May, Quek told TechCrunch that Carousell has helped sell over 50 million items between users and it currently has over 144 million listings. Naspers, meanwhile, has upped its focus on Southeast Asia in recent times, although its sole deal is . The firm remains best known for its Tencent deal, which is legendary in investment circles. Back in 2001, it bought 46.5 percent of Tencent for $32 million. Over time that was diluted to 33 percent, but it grew significantly in size as Tencent’s business took off, going on to last November. Naspers resisted the urge to sell until March 2018 when . Another of Nasper’s big wins this year was which in returns. |
Yes, Netflix was down, but it’s back up again | Catherine Shu | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | If you had trouble accessing Netflix earlier today, you weren’t alone. Netflix that it was “aware” of streaming issues, but said soon afterward that they had been resolved. We are aware of members having trouble streaming on all devices. We are investigating the issue and appreciate your patience. — Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) The streaming issues we reported earlier have now been resolved. Thank you for your patience, and as always, happy streaming! — Netflix CS (@Netflixhelps) A map from shows that Netflix was down for users around the world, with outages going on for a couple of hours. Outage.Report map TechCrunch has contacted Netflix to ask what caused the issues. |
Coinbase will add Ethereum Classic to its exchange ‘in the coming months’ | Jon Russell | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Coinbase may be one of the most-lauded crypto exchanges, but it supports just four coins right now which is far fewer than most others. That’s about to change a little after (ETC), an alternate version of Ethereum, to its service “in the coming months.” Ethereum Classic was created in June 2016 following , a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic. Ethereum is the second-highest valued token after only Bitcoin while ETC is number 19, . The value of ETC jumped is up nearly 20 percent over the past 24 hours . A date for the introduction of ETC will be communicated via Coinbase blog and Twitter account in due course, according to the company. Coinbase is announcing its intention to list Ethereum Classic ahead of time so that it can test integrations as part of its new policy on adding new tokens, but that move is also in response to concerns that around inside trading when the exchange added Bitcoin Cash last December. which saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange. Indeed, the price hit a high of $8,500 on Coinbase and its GDAX service for professional investors, which was on all other exchanges. That led to speculation that Coinbase staff and insiders could have profited by buying BCH on other exchanges in the knowledge that it was about to be added to Coinbase, thus raising the price significantly. This time around with ETC, Coinbase will hope that its statement of intent to list the token further down the line will avoid the potential for foul play. This listing could be the first of many for Coinbase this year. In today’s announcement, the company again reiterated its intention to add support for ERC20 tokens — the type that are generated by an ICO — and Bitcoin forks in the future. Outside of adding new tokens, Coinbase is exploring how it can work with new blockchain technology including atomic swaps, sharding, proof of stake and more, . More generally 2018 is seemingly a year for growth and development at Coinbase. Beyond hiring Srinivasan as its first CTO through the acquisition of his startup Earn.com, the firm has and . On the services side, it |
Facebook says it gave ‘identical support’ to Trump and Clinton campaigns | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Facebook’s make for decidedly uninteresting reading. Give lawyers a couple of months and they will always find a way to respond non-substantively to the most penetrating questions. One section may at least help put a few rumors to rest about Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential campaigns, though, of course, much is still left to the imagination. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), during the questioning, had several pages of questions sent over afterwards. Among the many topics was that of the 2016 campaign and reports that Facebook employees were “embedded” in the Trump campaign specifically, as claimed by the person who ran the digital side of that campaign. This has raised questions as to whether Facebook was offering some kind of premium service to one candidate or another, or whether one candidate got tips on how to juice the algorithm, how to target better and so on. Here are the takeaways from the answers, which you can find in full on page 167 of the document at the bottom of this post. It’s not exactly , but we don’t really need more fire these days. This at least is on the record and relatively straightforward; whatever Facebook’s sins during the election cycle may have been, it does not appear that preferential treatment of the two major campaigns was among them. Incidentally, if you’re curious whether Facebook finally answered Sen. Harris’s questions about who made the decision not to inform users of the Cambridge Analytica issue back in 2015, or how that decision was made — no, it didn’t. In fact the silence here is so deafening it almost certainly indicates a direct hit. Harris asked how and when it came to the decision not to inform users that their data had been misappropriated, who made that decision and why and, lastly, when Zuckerberg entered the loop. Facebook’s response does not even come close to answering any of these questions: When Facebook learned about Kogan’s breach of Facebook’s data use policies in December 2015, it took immediate action. The company retained an outside firm to assist in investigating Kogan’s actions, to demand that Kogan and each party he had shared data with delete the data and any derivatives of the data, and to obtain certifications that they had done so. Because Kogan’s app could no longer collect most categories of data due to changes in Facebook’s platform, the company’s highest priority at that time was ensuring deletion of the data that Kogan may have accessed before these changes took place. With the benefit of hindsight, we wish we had notified people whose information may have been impacted. Facebook has since notified all people potentially impacted with a detailed notice at the top of their newsfeed. This answer has literally nothing to do with the questions. It seems likely from the company’s careful and repeated refusal to answer this question that the story is an ugly one — top executives making a decision to keep users in the dark for as long as possible, if I had to guess. At least with the campaign issues Facebook was more forthcoming, and as a result will put down several lines of speculation. Not so with this evasive maneuver. Embedded below are Facebook’s answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the other set is : [scribd id=381569036 key=key-eImbnDJt35KXHMKzpYQD mode=scroll] |
Here are 454 pages of Facebook’s written follow-up answers to Congress | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Facebook finished its homework. In a pair of , the two Senate committees that in April have published the social media giant’s written answers to their considerable body of questions. Zuckerberg faced criticism for not answering many of the more intricate or controversial questions from members of Congress in the moment, but by playing it safe the company bought two months’ worth of time to craft its answers in perfect legalese. If you’re interested in combing through the 454 pages worth of explanations on everything from accusations of conservative censorship to Cambridge Analytica, you can dig into the documents, embedded below. Facebook’s answers to questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee: [scribd id=381569036 key=key-eImbnDJt35KXHMKzpYQD mode=scroll] Facebook’s answers to questions from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation: [scribd id=381569055 key=key-9DaKXAlZGjurM2VVxDDz mode=scroll] |
Palmer Luckey’s defense company Anduril is already leading to arrests at the southern border | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | Palmer Luckey’s defense project just crawled out of . Between a and its first few official tweets, the secretive year-old company known as Anduril is stepping into the light. Anduril, based out of Orange County, was founded quietly in June 2017 by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, three former Palantir employees (Matt Grimm, Anduril COO; Trae Stephens, Chairman; Brian Schimpf, CEO) and an early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen. Our first 🎂 was great, thanks for the wishes . — Anduril Industries (@anduriltech) While defense contractors typically operate under levels of secrecy uncharacteristic for the tech industry, a degree of exposure is useful for attracting additional investors and painting the project in an attractive light as it pursues government contracts. In late 2017, TechCrunch that the company was working on AR and VR for “battlefield awareness,” among other defense applications. As Wired , Anduril calls its bespoke border wall surveillance system “Lattice” and intends for it to undercut the price of traditional border wall proposals by a substantial margin, employing high-tech, low-cost off-the-shelf devices and sensors where a traditional proposal would pour vertical concrete. These sensors are networked together and feed into an AI system that sifts through the data to detect a human presence, highlight it in a green box and send push alerts designed to notify Customs and Border Protection agents in real time. Anduril is testing the system, in operation since March 2018, on private land in coordination with Texas Rep. Will Hurd and a cattle rancher on the Texas border. At a second site, Anduril is running a pilot program in coordination with DHS and a local border patrol office. Wired reports that the preliminary system has proven effective: Lattice led to the apprehension of 55 individuals crossing the Texas border and 10 “interceptions” at the San Diego site within the project’s initial 12 days in operation. Anduril’s second project, known as “Sentry,” is the development of military-style armored autonomous vehicles that can fight fires in California. Apparently MythBusters host Jamie Hyneman is currently developing such a vehicle as a subcontractor for Anduril, working out of Oakland. These vehicles could be controlled remotely and Wired describes the experience of steering the vehicle and firing water cannons as “exactly like playing a videogame.” Beyond its debut profile, Anduril also made updates to its , swapping some language, and framing its mission in light of the international arms race toward technological dominance: Look no further than statements by Chinese and Russian leaders to see their focus on technological dominance. They are devoting massive resources to win this battle for the future, and also recruiting the best tech talent available to this cause. We must, and will, do the same. As we noted previously, Anduril has established relationships with the Trump administration through Peter Thiel colleague and Anduril co-founder Stephens (Stephens was involved in the Department of Defense transition with a focus on the procurements process) and Luckey, a vocal . In 2017, through the prominent firm Invariant and another $60,000 so far in 2018. Anduril might not fit the Trump administration’s traditional idea of a border wall, but its pilot program results coupled with its ties to the Trump administration certainly won’t hurt its odds of securing a federal border contract. |
The messy, musical process behind the web’s new security standard | Devin Coldewey | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | The web is a big place, and changing the way it works isn’t a simple process. But it has to happen somehow or we’d all still be using Mosaic and transmitting our private data in cleartext. is the latest big change to how our browsers communicate, but the process by which it was created is a little weirder and less structured than you might think. “Anyone can participate from anywhere. There’s no cost — you can just send your stuff in,” said Sean Turner of the Internet Engineering Task Force, an official sort of collective that evaluates new standards for the web and decrees them best practices. Turner and Joe Salowey, with whom I spoke after the standard was approved, are co-chairs of the Working Group that put together TLS 1.3 that upends years of security practices — all for the better, they hope. Far from being a smoke-filled room where elites and captains of industry dictate the protocols and algorithms that will define the next generation of online products and services, the IETF and bodies like it are throwbacks to the early days of the internet: lots of giant open email threads, hard tech talk and almost certainly a lot of subtle shade thrown at each other’s Linux distributions. But it’s still something of a closed system: How does the average developer get their suggestions considered by the committee considering a given proposal or piece of code? In the past pretty much everything was done by mailing lists. It worked well enough, but for TLS 1.3 the team decided to shake things up and move the process into a semblance of modernity. “This time we did things a little different,” Sean said. “We actually put the document on GitHub and let anyone comment. And then we were getting these comments where we were like, who are these people and how are they so good at this?” “The IETF has generally had this process with the mailing list,” explained co-chair Joe Salowey. “GitHub provided a richer mechanism for communication. It let people actually propose changes to the document that anyone could see.” “You had to actually propose what you wanted to see in the text rather than say, ‘I want to make this faster by changing it to this.’ It can be difficult to express those details on the mailing list, he continued. “GitHub facilitated that exchange, the direct editing.” Despite said facilitation, the process of creating TLS 1.3 took four years, which for people in the security world is simultaneously forever and no time at all. Standards must be ruthlessly vetted and optimized, since once in place they’ll be used billions of times a day and a mistake or rushed protocol could derail entire businesses. But at the same time, the security world is one of constant and evolving danger — so the sooner a better option is adopted, the better. “Every week there was another attack and people were like, ‘please make this stop,’ ” said Turner. But the process was neither shorter nor longer than it had to be. “People will say, oh it took so long. It took four years, and the average time is actually probably four years. We actually built in pauses so researchers could check stuff.” “We had participation from lots of people: browser makers, privacy advocates, Mozilla, the ACLU. We also got the researcher community involved and it was a wild success, to be perfectly honest,” said Salowey. “People were following different aspects of TLS and were able to provide feedback throughout the process.” Ultimately however, the group had to fall back on its legacy options: in-person discussion and the mailing list, which are the final arbiters for negotiation and ratification respectively. “There were a couple times we were stuck, but eventually it was about whether or not it works. If it was over two or three bytes, people would get over that.” Turner recalled of an IETF meeting in Hawaii. “One time we were at a meeting and two people agreed on the way forward — I pointed out that one of them worked for the ACLU and one worked for the NSA. I figure that’s the possible consensus.” But it doesn’t just come down to majority rule. “We don’t vote, we use things like hum,” Turner said. At first I thought “hum” must be an acronym or some specialized mail daemon. But when I asked about the practice, it turned out to be weirder and in a way more elegant than anything I could think up. “We literally ask people in the room to hum,” he clarified. “It’s very Quaker-ish and they’ve been doing it for a long time. It just kinda works.” “It gives a chance to be more anonymous rather than raising a hand or vote,” said Salowey. “People stand up and spread out, and we make sure the bosses are there. People can not hum, they can hum at whatever vol they want,” explained Turner. “People will hum yes and then one person will hum no, and he’ll convince everyone that they were wrong.” Anyone can volunteer to be more specific than humming or ask for more information, but there you have it: the future of the web is at least partly decided by . Technically there’s a final consensus process done by email, but clearly the hum has stuck around for a reason. In this case the team was more than happy at what they’d managed to create. “It’s really hard to deploy crypto, but trying to get rid of stuff that’s out there is even harder,” said Turner. “We got away with simplifying, getting rid of the cruft.” “We took a lot of things out. We did surgery on pieces of the protocol that were prone to attracting vulnerabilities,” added Salowey. “That’s a hard thing to do. Some of the things that people may still rely on in certain circumstances are going to be going away, because the mechanisms are not as secure or robust as modern ones.” “But there were tangible benefits, speed and security — people were like, ‘let’s get together on this,’ ” he continued. So everyone’s a little safer, but both Salowey and Turner downplayed any credit they and their colleagues might be due for guiding the process. “People aren’t in it for individual fame or glory…we don’t really work that way,” said Turner. “If you can make something better or faster that’s just good.” Was there any tangible benefit aside from the warm, fuzzy feeling developers get after reducing the turnaround time for an encrypted packet? “Well… I made t-shirts for everyone,” Turner said. “And stickers!” said Salowey. You can get humming with the IETF by learning more . |
Twitter’s emoji for Trump’s North Korea nuclear summit is very weird | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,018 | 6 | 11 | As U.S. President Trump preps for a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Twitter doesn’t want you to forget to tweet about it under the right hashtag. In a choice that seems to make light of a lot of really quite serious things at once, Twitter is promoting its new #TrumpKimSummit emoji for Tuesday’s summit in Singapore. US President will meet North Korea Chairman Kim Jong-un on 12 June in Singapore. Tweet with these hashtags to unlock a special emoji. 👇 — Twitter Government (@TwitterGov) The event-specific symbol features what appears to be a high-five between a hand representing the U.S. president and one representing the North Korean dictator known for and exiling , where they face starvation and torture. Presumably they are high-fiving over the successful but by no means guaranteed or likely negotiation of an extremely delicate denuclearization agreement and the deescalated international threat of the through . The summit won’t be Trump’s first foray into treating an and human rights abuser like or perhaps the leader of an allied nation, though it is Twitter’s first time treating such an event like a Game of Thrones season finale. Twitter’s event-specific emojis, sometimes called , are usually reserved for things like Coca-Cola branding campaigns (#ShareACoke) or the Super Bowl, not possibly misguided diplomacy efforts between international adversaries. In the future, they should probably stay that way. Goodbye grades. Hello shades. 😎 — Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) We’ve reached out to Twitter with questions about what inspired the #TrumpKimSummit emoji campaign and will update this story if we hear back or manage to make any sense of it ourselves. Assuming that nuclear war doesn’t break out. |
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