Month: July 2018

Harper Wilde has raised a $2 million funding round, which the company told TechCrunch it’s excited to use to not only build its workforce but to further its mission of providing women across the country with comfortable and empowering bras.

College friends Jenna Kerner and Jane Fisher launched Harper Wilde together in 2017 to address the fact that shopping for bras is awful. From local outlet malls to expensive online retailers, Kerner and Fisher bonded over their frustration and disillusionment with uncomfortable and over-sexualized bras.

“We had all of these friends and colleagues and family members who are incredible women who were doing surgery, or running board meetings, or fighting a court case, and wearing these horrible bras underneath it all,” Kerner told TechCrunch over the phone. “We really [wanted] to help empower those women.”

Together Kerner and Fisher surveyed over a hundred women to find out what they wanted in a bra and created Harper Wilde to try and deliver it.

“We just kept hearing over and over again, it’s really not about the bras,” Kerner said. “There are thousands of bras out there. It’s about sorting through all of them, how expensive they are and the condescending in-store experience.”

Unlike other popular online lingerie shops, Harper Wilde doesn’t offer dozens of styles or cover its pieces in lace or small bows. Instead, it focuses on offering an no-fuss bra in a growing variety of sizes and nude colors designed for the day-to-day hard work and successes of women, all at $35 per bra (bra prices can range from $9.99 from retailers like Fruit of the Loom all the way up to $69.50 at Victoria’s Secret.)

To bring these options to its customers in an accessible way, and avoid the overwhelming dressing room experience, Harper Wilde has taken a card out of Warby Parker’s playbook and offers customers free home try-ons of three bra options, with free returns.

Since its launch just over a year ago, Harper Wilde has seen 20 percent growth month over month and the founders say they’re not only excited to grow Harper Wilde’s collection and staff, but to continue its efforts to give back to communities of women through its #LiftUpTheLadies initiatives.

The company has partnered with The Girl Project to help spread access to education in over 120 countries and have worked to ensure a sustainable supply chain for the women overseas manufacturing its products.

“It’s one thing when you tell women you’re going to take the BS out of bra shopping, but it’s a whole different level when you say we stand for empowering women and this is how we do it,” Kerner said. “People’s eyes light up and they [say] how important of a time it is the stand for that. They’re happy to see a bra company that stands for more than just sex.”

Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the iOS App Store on July 11th, App Annie has today released a retrospective of the top iOS apps of all time, along with key milestones in App Store history. Its report tallies up the top apps of all time by both downloads and revenue, as well as the top apps by year starting in 2010 – when App Annie started tracking this data, and more.

The result is a fairly comprehensive look back at the App Store, which has now seen over 170 billion downloads and over $130 billion in consumer spend on apps since July 2010. And now, today’s App Store includes some 2.2 million apps, even after Apple’s big cleanup.

For its analysis, App Annie split “apps” into both games and traditional applications – similar to how the App Store now gives these two categories their own sections and top charts in its iOS App Store app following the App Store makeover in fall 2017. App Annie then broke down the “top” games into those that were the most downloaded and those that made the most money.

Games

Across both charts, you’ll find classics like Clash of Clans, Candy Crush Saga, and Honour of Kings. However, some of the App Store’s most memorable games – like Temple Run and Angry Birds – didn’t make the top 10 by consumer spend. Instead, the number one game by revenue is Clash of Clans, followed by Candy Crush, which was also the most downloaded game of all time.

While App Annie can reveal all the download numbers or revenue figures because of client relationships, it could say that Candy Crush has been downloaded over 280 million times worldwide from July 2010 through May 2018.

The top game by revenue, Clash of Clans, earned over $4 billion in global consumer spend on iOS to date during that same time.

 

App Annie also looked at which companies were the top publishers of these games, and found a list that included well-known brands like Electronic Arts, Tencent, Gameloft, Rovio, Glu, Disney, Zynga, King, Supercell, Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco. Storm8, Ubisoft and others.

Apps

Meanwhile, Facebook and Google’s apps dominate the top charts in terms of the most downloads iOS apps of all time.

Facebook is number one, and its Messenger app is No. 2, Instagram is No. 4, and WhatsApp is No. 5. Google has the No. 3 position with YouTube, and the No. 6 with Google Maps. The rest of the top 10 is rounded out by Snapchat (No. 7), Skype, WeChat and QQ.

To earn the top spot, Facebook was download 700 million times worldwide between July 2010 and May 2018.

However, the top charts by consumer spend are a very different picture – instead of social utilities, they’re all about subscriptions and streaming. Here, Netflix is No. 1 as it’s approaching $1 billion in global consumer spend, followed by Spotify, Pandora, Tencent Video, Tinder, LINE, iQIYI, HBO NOW, Kwai and QQ.

 

The report also includes top apps each year and several notable App Store milestones, as related to the business of apps, not the App Store itself.

This includes the doubling of app revenue between 2015 and 2017, iOS app revenue outpacing Google Play, and the growth of apps hitting more than $1 million in App Store revenue, among other things. This data is a rehashing of older App Annie reports, rather something fresh it put together for the 10 year anniversary, however.

One chart on its report could have used a bit of context, though. It chose to include a chart citing the U.S. as the largest market by all time iOS App Store consumer spend and downloads referencing data collected from July 2010 to December 2017.

But today, China is the largest app market and will continue to hold that position through 2022, according to App Annie’s own estimates. It may not have made No. 1 on “all time” chart, but only because it got a later start. Notably, it has still managed to nearly top the U.S. with 39.9 billion all-time downloads to the U.S.’s 40.1 billion, and $27.7 billion in all-time consumer spend, to the U.S.’s $36 billion.

The full report is available on App Annie’s website.

 

Right now, the cable that comes with a new iPhone does not plug into a new MacBook Pro without a dongle. #donglelife is for real. If this leak is correct, though, that wrong might soon be righted.

Photos have surfaced showing what is an engineering prototype of an Apple 18 W USB-C charger, which is supposedly to be bundled with the next iPhone. If correct, this will let owners take advantage of the iPhone’s fast charging capabilities without purchasing anything else. Plus, it will let users connect the iPhone to a MacBook Pro out of the box.

This rumor surfaced last year, too, though no photos ever surfaced to back up the claim.

If true, this adapter will mark the first major change in the iPhone’s wall charger. Apple has long bundled a 5W charger with the iPhone. It works fine, but does not supply the phone with the necessary power to charge at its fastest possible speed. Even if the photos here show something other than an official Apple product, chances are Apple is readying something similar. Previous leaks show something similar.

Apple included fast charging in the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X but didn’t include the necessary charger to take advantage of the technology. Owners have to buy a third party charger of the $50 30W charger from Apple.

Folks riding the OnePlus bandwagon will be pleased to learn that the phone maker today introduced a red version of the OnePlus 6.

The company is calling the phone the OnePlus 6 Red, and the new model follows on the success of the OnePlus 5T Lava Red.

Here’s what OnePlus CEO Pete Lau had to say in a statement:

Deciding on this color was not without its challenges. We see individual colors as a way to express certain feelings or ideas. To us, red exudes enthusiasm and personality. It also represents an inner confidence and courage. There is a kind of power in red, which the OnePlus logo has always tried to articulate. We hope you feel similarly empowered when you hold the OnePlus 6 Red this summer.

The OnePlus 6 debuted in May with a starting price of $529. Specs include a 6.28-inch display at a 19:9 aspect ratio, a Snapdragon 845 chip, 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, and Oxygen OS on the front-end.

OnePlus has impressed with its ability to remain competitive in a landscape where Apple and Samsung reign supreme. Even HTC, the old king of the smartphone castle, has today announced that it’s cutting 1,500 jobs.

The OnePlus 6 Red will be available starting July 10, with sales in India beginning on July 16. The price will be the same as other OnePlus 6 variants.

Gather around, campers, and hear a tale as old as time.

Remember the HTC Dream? The Evo 4G? The Google Nexus One? What about the Touch Diamond? All amazing devices. The HTC of 2018 is not the HTC that made these industry-leading devices. That company is gone.

It seems HTC is getting ready to lay off nearly a quarter of its workforce by cutting 1,500 jobs in its manufacturing unit in Taiwan. After the cuts, HTC’s employee count will be less than 5,000 people worldwide. Five years ago, in 2013, HTC employed 19,000 people.

HTC started as a white label device maker giving carriers an option to sell devices branded with their name. The company also had a line of HTC-branded connected PDAs that competed in the nascent smartphone market. BlackBerry, or Research in Motion as it was called until 2013, ruled this phone segment, but starting around 2007 HTC began making inroads thanks to innovated touch devices that ran Windows Mobile 6.0.

In 2008 HTC introduced the Touch line with the Touch Diamond, Touch Pro, Touch 3G and Touch HD. These were stunning devices for the time. They were fast, loaded with big, user swappable batteries and microSD card slots. The Touch Pro even had a front-facing camera for video calls.

HTC overplayed a custom skin onto of Windows Mobile making it a bit more palatable for the general user. At that time, Windows Mobile was competing with BlackBerry’s operating system and Nokia’s Symbian. None were fantastic, but Windows Mobile was by far the most daunting for new users. HTC did the best thing it could do and developed a smart skin that gave the phone a lot of features that would still be considered modern.

In 2009 HTC released the first Android device with Google. Called the HTC Dream or G1, the device was far from perfect. But the same could be said about the iPhone. This first Android phone set the stage for future wins from HTC, too. The company quickly followed up with the Hero, Droid Incredible, Evo 4G and, in 2010, the amazing Google Nexus One.

After the G1, HTC started skinning Android in the same fashion as it did Windows Mobile. It cannot be overstated how important this was for the adoption of Android. HTC’s user interface made Android usable and attractive. HTC helped make Android a serious competitor to Apple’s iOS.

In 2010 and 2011, Google turned to Samsung to make the second and third flagship Nexus phones. It was around this time Samsung started cranking out Android phones, and HTC couldn’t keep up. That’s not to say HTC didn’t make a go for it. The company kept releasing top-tier phones: the One X in 2012, the One Max in 2013, and the One (M8) in 2014. But it didn’t matter. Samsung had taken up the Android standard and was charging forward, leaving HTC, Sony, and LG to pick from the scraps.

At the end of 2010, HTC was the leading smartphone vendor in the United States. In 2014 it trailed Apple, Samsung, and LG with around a 6% market share in the US. In 2017 HTC captured 2.3% of smartphone subscribers and now in 2018, some reports peg HTC with less than a half percent of the smartphone market.

Google purchased a large chunk of HTC’s smartphone design talent in 2017 for $1.1 billion. The deal transferred more than 2,000 employees under Google’s tutelage. They will likely be charged with working on Google’s line of Pixel devices. It’s a smart move. This HTC team was responsible for releasing amazing devices that no one bought. But that’s not entirely their fault. Outside forces are to blame. HTC never stopped making top-tier devices.

The HTC of today is primarily focused on the Vive product line. And that’s a smart play. The HTC Vive is one of the best virtual reality platforms available. But HTC has been here before. Hopefully, it learned something from its mistakes in smartphones.

In a major Friday night data dump, Facebook handed Congress a ~750-page document with responses to the 2,000 or so questions it received from US lawmakers sitting on two committees in the Senate and House back in April.

The document (which condensed into a tellingly apt essence — “people data… Facebook information” — above, when we ran it through Word It Out‘s word cloud tool) would probably come in handy if you needed to put a small child to sleep, given Facebook repeats itself a distressing amount of times.

TextMechanic‘s tool spotted 3,434 lines of duplicate text in its answers — including Facebook’s current favorite line to throw at politicians, where it boldly states: “Facebook is generally not opposed to regulation but wants to ensure it is the right regulation”, followed by the company offering to work with regulators like Congress “to craft the right regulations”. Riiiiight.

While much of what Facebook’s policy staffers have inked here is an intentional nightcap made of misdirection and equivocation (with lashings of snoozy repetition), one nugget of new intel that jumps out is a long list of partners Facebook gave special data access to — via API agreements it calls “integration partnerships”.

Some names on the list have previously been reported by the New York Times. And as the newspaper pointed out last month, the problem for scandal-hit Facebook is these data-sharing arrangements appear to undermine some of its claims about how it respects privacy because users were not explicitly involved in consenting to the data sharing.

Below is the full list of 52 companies Facebook has now provided to US lawmakers — though it admits the list might not actually be comprehensive, writing: “It is possible we have not been able to identify some integrations, particularly those made during the early days of our company when our records were not centralized. It is also possible that early records may have been deleted from our system”. 

The listed companies are also by no means just device makers — including also the likes of mobile carriers, software makers, security firms, even the chip designer Qualcomm. So it’s an illustrative glimpse of quite how much work Facebook did to embed into services across the mobile web — predicated upon being able to provide so many third party businesses with user data.

Company names below that are appended with * denote partnerships that Facebook says it is “still in the process of ending” (it notes three exceptions: Tobii, Apple and Amazon, which it says will continue beyond October 2018), while ** denotes data partnerships that will continue but without access to friends’ data.

Following last week’s launch of its low-cost streaming TV service, Watch TV, AT&T is now raising prices on its original over-the-top offering, DirecTV Now, by $5 per month. That means instead of starting at $35 per month for its basic “Live a Little” tier with 60+ channels, the new service will start at $40 per month. The other tiers are going up by $5 per month, as well.

That means the “Just Right” 80+ channel package will be $55/month, the “Go Big” 100+ channel package will be $60/month, and the “Gotta Have It” 120+ channel package will be $70/month.

The news was first spotted by Cord Cutters News over the weekend. There was also a discussion of the price changes occurring on Reddit.

While there are concerns about AT&T’s price hikes elsewhere in its business, it’s not the first TV streaming service to raise its prices in recent months. YouTube TV also upped the cost of its service by $5/month, going from $35/month to $40/month back in March. And only days ago, Dish’s Sling TV revamped its service with a price change of its own, going up $5/month to $25/month instead of $20/month for its base package without add-ons.

Meanwhile, $40/month is in line with Sony’s PlayStation Vue’s least expensive plan as well as with Hulu’s Live TV service.

AT&T attributed its decision to these shifts in the market for streaming TV.

“In the 18 months since our launch, we have continued to evolve our DirecTV Now products to serve this new customer set and compare favorably with our competitors. To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, we’re bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point,” a spokesperson said.

The changes were announced via email to existing subscribers, and may see some of DirecTV Now’s early adopters fleeing, as a result. Commenters on Reddit complained about the quality of AT&T’s service, including issues with its streams and DVR, for example. Others, meanwhile, felt that AT&T’s channel lineup was still a good value for the money, even with the increase.

Above: DirecTV Now email – source: Cord Cutters News

As a result of price hike, there are now few services left offering low-cost streaming TV. Sling TV, even at now $25/month remains one of the most affordable, along with AT&T’s far more limited Watch TV, and Philo’s $16/month service lacking sports and locals.

The new prices will go into effect on July 26 for new customers based on their billing date, AT&T tells us.

Update, 7/2/18, 11 AM ET: posted updated with effective date pricing from AT&T

Struggling smartphone maker HTC continues to struggle.

After offloading 2,000 engineers to Google as part of a $1.1 billion deal with the search giant, HTC is now laying off 1,500 staff, or nearly one-quarter of its total headcount, to cut more costs. That’s according to a report from Reuters which claims that the cuts are part of a move manage its resources more efficiently.

“Today HTC announces plan to optimize the manufacturing organizations in Taiwan. This plan will allow more effective and flexible resource management going forward,” HTC said in a statement to Reuters.

HTC representatives did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

The cuts will be completed before October and they are said to be part of a move to centralize the leadership of HTC’s smartphone and Vive VR business.

The layoffs follow another poor quarter of business for the company. Back in May for its Q1 results, HTC posted a NT$5.2 billion ($170 million) operating loss as revenue dropped by 40 percent year-on-year to reach NT$8.8 billion ($290 million) during the three-month period. That followed a miserable quarter which continued a torrid stretch of poor financial results.

The all-you-can watch movie theatre subscription service MoviePass, now with 3 million paying users, continues to burn through cash, and today its majority owner announced one more way it might continue to finance operations and its growth as some investors and observers raise questions about its financial future. Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. (HMNY), which owns 92 percent of the shares of MoviePass, has filed an S-3 universal shelf registration statement to sell up to $1.2 billion in equity and debt securities over three years from the statement’s approval by the SEC.

This comes on the heels of the company issuing $164 million in convertible notes last month through the issuance of 20,000 extra shares.

To be clear, this is not a $1.2 billion raise. A shelf registration does not tie HMNY to any specific offerings, but it gives the group another flexible way of raising cash to finance operations and to invest in growth.

In addition to its majority ownership of MoviePass, HMNY has a movie investment subsidiary called MoviePass Ventures, an original content production operation called MoviePass Films, and Moviefone, which it acquired from TechCrunch’s parent Oath for up to $23 million (making Oath a shareholder in the company).

“HMNY will have the flexibility to publicly offer and sell from time to time common stock, preferred stock, debt securities, warrants, subscription rights, units or any combination of such securities,” the company notes in a statement.

“HMNY may periodically offer one or more of these securities in amounts, at prices and on terms announced, if and when the securities are ever offered. The specific terms of any potential future offerings, along with the intended use of proceeds of any such securities offered by HMNY, will be described in a prospectus supplement at the time of any such offering.”

It notes that it will still need to get stockholder approval for increasing its authorized common stock, or combining any outstanding common stock.

MoviePass and its owner have been through a rollercoaster in the last many months, with HMNY stock dropping precipitously on the back of negative prognostications about its finances. From a 52-week high of $38.86/share, it’s currently at $0.31 — a 99.2 percent drop.

Notwithstanding the economics of the all-you-can-eat business model — which providers users with movie passes to some 91 percent of all US cinemas in exchange for a flat fee, a model that has proven challenging for margins in many industries — the company’s flagship business, MoviePass, has also been through the ringer for how it handles user privacy.

Still, at a time when many consumers are opting to watch movies at home through services like Netflix and others, MoviePass represents a potential route for driving more people back into cinemas. The company says that it’s on track to pass 5 million users by the end of this year, and that it currently accounts for five percent of all U.S. box office receipts on average, with peaks of eight percent in some weeks, and 30 percent for specific movies when they are advertised on the company’s app.

Oden Technologies, the Industrial IoT startup that provides manufacturing data analytics, has closed $10 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by European venture capital firm Atomico, which appears to be revving up its “Industry 4.0” investment strategy following a recent investment in CloudNC. A number of existing investors also participated including EQT Ventures, and Inbox Capital. Noteworthy, Atomico founder and CEO Niklas Zennström, who also co-founded Skype, has joined the Oden Technologies board.

Originally founded in London but now based in New York, Oden Technologies pitches itself as an Industry 4.0 company that has built its own industrial IoT hardware and “big data architecture” to offer a platform for manufacturers of any size to analyse and optimise factory production via the cloud.

Put simply, the Oden device plugs into almost any kind of manufacturing machine, while its “software adaptors” integrate data from existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and quality control software on the manufacturing line. This data is then uploaded to Oden’s cloud analytics platform in real-time to give manufacturers the full production picture, including real-time factory floor monitoring.

So, why is this significant? Essentially, the retrofittable Oden device and resulting data analytics makes the existing factory floor smarter. This includes the ability to spot manufacturing defects or aspects of a machine’s degrading performance that could lead to defects, and more broadly, ways to further optimise production throughput and uptime.

The result is a reduction in waste (think: products that need be discarded or are ultimately returned by customers), and an increase in efficiency more generally, helping tech-driven factories retain their competitive edge.

In a call with Oden Technologies co-founder and CEO Willem Sundblad, he said that the company’s mission is to help manufacturers achieve “perfect production,” in terms of not only making better products but also making them faster, cheaper and with much less waste.

Traditionally manufacturers haven’t had access to the right data and insights to make factories more efficient and productive. However, with the collision of big data, cloud services and new industrial IoT hardware, this is quickly changing and is the exact space that Oden operates in.

In terms of what data Oden’s device captures, Sundblad explained that it typically consists of metrics that relate to machine process, health, the processing of the part/product, and quality. “The raw data is mostly available in the machines but then we analyse it to provide answers,” he says.

In addition, Oden captures things like the melt pressure of the material, the temperature profile when the material melted, dimensional read outs to understand the quality of the product, and water temperatures from cooling tanks. Other data points include revolutions per minute on moving parts inside of a machine, the motor load of the motors, and the speed of production, to name just a few.

“We analyze and process that data so customers understand how much excess material they are putting on the product, was the quality Ok, and if not why, alerting for when things are bad or will be bad, and [doing] trends analysis for how the product can be optimised. It all comes back to ROI for customers, which always comes from more uptime, less scrap and more good quality output”.

Atomico’s Zennström echoes these sentiments, arguing that manufacturing has until now remained “relatively untouched” by digital technology. As a result, it still has major areas of inefficiency. “The combination of IIoT, Big Data analytics, cloud computing and machine learning marks a new era for industry,” he says. This will see Industry 4.0 technologies not only increase efficiency and reduce waste, but also enable smaller batch sizes, more personalised products and greater product innovation.

Meanwhile, Oden says it will use the new funding to further expand its R&D and engineering teams in New York, and to accelerate customer growth with new sales teams in the manufacturing hubs of Illinois, Ohio and Texas.

The company also recently hired Deepak Turaga, Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, as its VP of Data Science. He’ll be helping Oden with its machine learning and AI efforts, and has previously worked at IBM as the Distinguished Research Staff Member and Manager of the AI First ML and Planning Group.