Month: July 2018

Recruiting, hiring and retention can be one of the most costly parts of a company’s entire operation, and there’s a class of startups and companies that are increasingly getting funded to try to optimize one or more of those problems all at once — including a new big round for employee education platform Guild Education.

Guild Education is just one of an array of companies looking to capitalize on the opportunity to help employers educate their existing workforce and identify employees who might fill the talent gaps with a little bit of training — as well as having a nice retention perk as well. Guild Education helps employers work with nonprofit universities to provide employees with education across a variety of subject matter or credentials, ranging from high school completion and vocational programs to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. All this is designed to offer companies a way to ensure that employees feel like they have a vested interest in their future, and retain them with that kind of perk.

Guild Education said it has raised a $40 million financing round led by Felicis Ventures, with participation by Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Rethink Impact & Education, and Silicon Valley Bank. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Cowboy Ventures also participated in the round, and Felicis’ Wesley Chan will be joining the company’s board of directors. The company says its programs are currently available to 2.5 million working adults and gives access to classes, programs and degrees at more than 90 universities and learning providers.

“Most of our companies see an ROI on the employee investment within the first year or two,” CEO Rachel Carlson said. “Here’s why: on an incremental basis, our programs simply need to cost less than the cost of losing a high performing employee and hiring and training their replacement. We accomplish that by partnering with affordable, nonprofit universities and focusing with them on dual retention: helping employees succeed at school and at work… Companies with frontline workforces struggle with annual turnover rates well above 50%. So for our companies, a 4-year retention rate is a phenomenal outcome, and they’re thrilled to see that employee move on to their next job after completing a degree.”

If the model sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because there have already been a number of successful companies creating a lot of buzz in the area — and clearly a lot of appetite for a business like Guild’s. Pluralsight, for example, gives companies a way to courses to employees to help them pick up new software engineering skills and went public earlier this year. It isn’t exactly the same model as Guild, but it does indicate that there is a pretty substantial opportunity for tools that help workforces further educate their employees, getting more value out of them and helping them advance in their careers. Given that the hiring and recruiting process can be a time-intensive and expensive one (there are even startups focusing machine learning efforts for recruiting), it might make sense to see if the right person for a job is already within a company. That helps companies get the skills they need and build loyalty with that employee.

While Guild Education is going after the larger companies out there to offer those perks, there’s another one that’s already interesting enough: the wave of contract employees that work with companies like Lyft or Uber, who also might want a similar perk but operate on a different model that isn’t full-time. Carlson said the startup works with companies like Lyft to figure out how to offer those kinds of education benefits to “gig economy” employees as well, though the benefits are traditionally designed for W2 employees since the benefit is non-taxable on both ends.

There will certainly be some competition from online course marketplaces like Udacity or Coursera, which look to offer another way for employees to pick up new skills on their own time and charge a monthly fee for that. But by going through employers to offer that benefit (to be sure, some companies like Lynda.com already do this), Guild Education may be able to streamline the process in such a way that employees get access to already known entities like nonprofit universities in order to get the education they seek.

Most of the two million college students graduating this year will begin careers that will be unrecognizable to their parents and grandparents. The days of getting stable corporate jobs and single company careers are gone.

According to Harvard University Extension School Dean Hunt Lambert, recent graduates can expect to hold 30 jobs in three different careers over the course of their working lives. Many will be self-employed, or work as freelancers, without access to critical benefits such as health care, retirement plans, and training.

Workers already face the challenge of technology and artificial intelligence changing jobs and entire industries. E-commerce has transformed retail, and big data and automation continue to remake manufacturing. As for tomorrow, autonomous vehicles will revolutionize the transportation industry and drones could further change retail. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report estimates that by 2030, in about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of activities will be automated. As machines are increasingly capable of performing “human” tasks, workers will need to take on new and different responsibilities or find new jobs in different industries.

That is why we need to modernize our laws and regulations. As the nature of work continues to change, we can no longer rely on outdated systems and institutions to prepare and protect our workers. It is critical that we think and act now to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed in the changing economy. Recently, the New Democrat Coalition launched an Economic Opportunity Agenda focused on a future that works. In it, the Coalition lays out a vision for closing the skills and opportunity gap, rethinking the relationship between employers and workers, and empowering workers and entrepreneurs.

As jobs and careers change, the United States continues to rely on an education and training system that was built in the 19^th century and is designed for the 20^th. In our parents’ generation, a high school or post-secondary degree could provide job security and a stable income. Today, even a four-year college degree is insufficient to provide the skills necessary for a successful career.

To keep pace with the rapid changes in technology and the American economy, the government, employers and employees must work together to create a more flexible system of skills-based, lifelong learning opportunities for workers to continuously acquire new skills throughout their careers. We must implement policies that modernize and expand access to both traditional and online education programs that provide career and technical education, and skills development so workers can advance in or change their occupations.

But it’s not just our education and training systems that need to be modernized. The 20^th century social contract between employer, employees and government helped build a strong middle class and established the foundation for the American economy to become the strongest in the world. But many of the laws and regulations governing the employee-employer relationship are increasingly obsolete.

For example, unemployment insurance was created in 1935 as a central pillar of the social insurance system for American workers. But the unemployment insurance system was designed for traditional workers in full-time jobs, so it’s unsurprising that the percentage of unemployed workers who receive unemployment benefits fell from about 50 percent in the 1950s to less than 30 percent since 2010. For the approximately 15 million workers who don’t work for a traditional employer, the 20^th century laws and regulations that were designed around the existence of an employer-employee relationship simply don’t apply.

There is no reason for these critical supports to be available only to a lucky few. Benefits should be fully portable, following workers throughout their careers.

The changing nature of work presents unique labor force and technological challenges that are exacerbated by stagnant wages and low rates of business formation. To grow the economy, these challenges require balanced legislative solutions that benefit workers and their ability to negotiate, and allow employers to develop and retain a skilled workforce.

With innovative policies that update our laws and regulations for the 21^st century, and employers who are willing to be part of the solution, we can prepare American workers with the tools they will need to succeed in a rapidly changing economy.

Line, the company best-known for its popular Asian messaging app, is doubling down on games after it acquired a controlling stake in Korean studio NextFloor for an undisclosed amount.

NextFloor, which has produced titles like Dragon Flight and Destiny Child, will be merged with Line’s games division to form the Line Games subsidiary. Dragon Flight has racked up 14 million users since its 2012 launch — it clocked $1 million in daily revenue at peak. Destiny Child, a newer release in 2016, topped the charts in Korea and has been popular in Japan, North America and beyond.

Line’s own games are focused on its messaging app, which gives them access to social features such as friend graphs, and they have helped the company become a revenue generation machine. Alongside income from its booming sticker business, in-app purchases within games made Line Japan’s highest-earning non-game app publisher last year, according to App Annie, and the fourth highest worldwide. For some insight into how prolific it has been over the years, Line is ranked as the sixth highest earning iPhone app of all time.

But, despite revenue success, Line has struggled to become a global messaging giant. The big guns WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have in excess of one billion monthly users each, while Line has been stuck around the 200 million mark for some time. Most of its numbers are from just four countries: Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. While it has been able to tap those markets with additional services like ride-hailing and payments, it is certainly under pressure from those more internationally successful competitors.

With that in mind, doubling down on games makes sense and Line said it plans to focus on non-mobile platforms, which will include the Nintendo Switch among others consoles, from the second half of this year.

Line went public in 2016 via a dual U.S.-Japan IPO that raised over $1 billion.

For the past few months, Facebook has been testing something it calls “Watch Party”. It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of pre-selected videos to make a sort of ad hoc video channel, and that’s a Watch Party.

Today the company is rolling the feature out to all Facebook Groups.

Here’s how it’ll work (screenshots borrowed from Facebook’s demo video):

1) Starting a watch party is just like posting anything else to a group’s wall. Give it a caption to catch people’s attention, maybe give it an image, and post away.

2) Add a few videos to start filling the queue

3) Once a few people have joined, the stream will start. The video will be synced up for all viewers, with hosts granted the ability to scrub back and forth in a video’s timeline. You can add more videos as you go.

For those who might’ve gotten early access to Watch Party back when it was in testing mode, they’ve added a few new features for the release:

• Viewers can suggest videos, with suggestions popping up in the host’s feed for approval (or not.)
• Each watch party can now have multiple co-hosts who can each add new videos to the queue

The feature is currently limited to Facebook Groups; the company says it’s testing support on Pages, but it’s not quite ready yet.

One other limitation to the current form: it’ll only work with videos hosted on Facebook (no YouTube, Twitter, etc), presumably due to all sorts of technical/licensing issues. (Plus, you know, competition.)

(On that note… Hey Netflix: if you could go ahead and officially build something like this so I can watch through The Office with my wife for the 400th time even when I’m traveling, that’d be great. )

I’m curious to see how different Facebook Groups use this. While it’s got its intended fun uses, plopping a big audience in front of the same video with a shared comment stream always has potential to backfire — hand a bunch of people on the Internet a microphone and an audience, and things can get rowdy fast. At the very least, it’s one more thing for Facebook to try to moderate at a time when its plate is already pretty full.

A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They’ve created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks.

They’re hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also to chipmakers (by helping them get competitive insights); Android developers (to see how fast their AI models will run on different devices); and, well, to phone nerds — such as by showing whether or not a particular device contains the necessary drivers for AI accelerators. (And, therefore, whether or not they should believe a company’s marketing messages.)

The app, called AI Benchmark, is available for download on Google Play and can run on any device with Android 4.1 or higher — generating a score the researchers describe as a “final verdict” of the device’s AI performance.

AI tasks being assessed by their benchmark system include image classification, face recognition, image deblurring, image super-resolution, photo enhancement or segmentation.

They are even testing some algorithms used in autonomous driving systems, though there’s not really any practical purpose for doing that at this point. Not yet anyway. (Looking down the road, the researchers say it’s not clear what hardware platform will be used for autonomous driving — and they suggest it’s “quite possible” mobile processors will, in future, become fast enough to be used for this task. So they’re at least prepped for that possibility.)

The app also includes visualizations of the algorithms’ output to help users assess the results and get a feel for the current state-of-the-art in various AI fields.

The researchers hope their score will become a universally accepted metric — similar to DxOMark that is used for evaluating camera performance — and all algorithms included in the benchmark are open source. The current ranking of different smartphones and mobile processors is available on the project’s webpage.

The benchmark system and app was around three months in development, says AI researcher and developer Andrey Ignatov.

He explains that the score being displayed reflects two main aspects: The SoC’s speed and available RAM.

“Let’s consider two devices: one with a score of 6000 and one with a score of 200. If some AI algorithm will run on the first device for 5 seconds, then this means that on the second device this will take about 30 times longer, i.e. almost 2.5 minutes. And if we are thinking about applications like face recognition this is not just about the speed, but about the applicability of the approach: Nobody will wait 10 seconds till their phone will be trying to recognize them.

“The same is about memory: The larger is the network/input image — the more RAM is needed to process it. If the phone has small amount of RAM that is e.g. only enough to enhance 0.3MP photo, then this enhancement will be clearly useless, but if it can do the same job for Full HD images — this opens up much wider possibilities. So, basically the higher score — the more complex algorithms can be used / larger images can be processed / it will take less time to do this.”

Discussing the idea for the benchmark, Ignatov says the lab is “tightly bound” to both research and industry — so “at some point we became curious about what are the limitations of running the recent AI algorithms on smartphones”.

“Since there was no information about this (currently, all AI algorithms are running remotely on the servers, not on your device, except for some built-in apps integrated in phone’s firmware), we decided to develop our own tool that will clearly show the performance and capabilities of each device,” he adds. 

“We can say that we are quite satisfied with the obtained results — despite all current problems, the industry is clearly moving towards using AI on smartphones, and we also hope that our efforts will help to accelerate this movement and give some useful information for other members participating in this development.”

After building the benchmarking system and collating scores on a bunch of Android devices, Ignatov sums up the current situation of AI on smartphones as “both interesting and absurd”.

For example, the team found that devices running Qualcomm chips weren’t the clear winners they’d imagined — i.e. based on the company’s promotional materials about Snapdragon’s 845 AI capabilities and 8x performance acceleration.

“It turned out that this acceleration is available only for ‘quantized’ networks that currently cannot be deployed on the phones, thus for ‘normal’ networks you won’t get any acceleration at all,” he says. “The saddest thing is that actually they can theoretically provide acceleration for the latter networks too, but they just haven’t implemented the appropriated drivers yet, and the only possible way to get this acceleration now is to use Snapdragon’s proprietary SDK available for their own processors only. As a result — if you are developing an app that is using AI, you won’t get any acceleration on Snapdragon’s SoCs, unless you are developing it for their processors only.”

Whereas the researchers found that Huawei’s Kirin’s 970 CPU — which is technically even slower than Snapdragon 636 — offered a surprisingly strong performance.

“Their integrated NPU gives almost 10x acceleration for Neural Networks, and thus even the most powerful phone CPUs and GPUs can’t compete with it,” says Ignatov. “Additionally, Huawei P20/P20 Pro are the only smartphones on the market running Android 8.1 that are currently providing AI acceleration, all other phones will get this support only in Android 9 or later.”

It’s not all great news for Huawei phone owners, though, as Ignatov says the NPU doesn’t provide acceleration for ‘quantized’ networks (though he notes the company has promised to add this support by the end of this year); and also it uses its own RAM — which is “quite limited” in size, and therefore you “can’t process large images with it”…

“We would say that if they solve these two issues — most likely nobody will be able to compete with them within the following year(s),” he suggests, though he also emphasizes that this assessment only refers to the one SoC, noting that Huawei’s processors don’t have the NPU module.

For Samsung processors, the researchers flag up that all the company’s devices are still running Android 8.0 but AI acceleration is only available starting from Android 8.1 and above. Natch.

They also found CPU performance could “vary quite significantly” — up to 50% on the same Samsung device — because of throttling and power optimization logic. Which would then have a knock on impact on AI performance.

For Mediatek, the researchers found the chipmaker is providing acceleration for both ‘quantized’ and ‘normal’ networks — which means it can reach the performance of “top CPUs”.

But, on the flip side, Ignatov calls out the company’s slogan — that it’s “Leading the Edge-AI Technology Revolution” — dubbing it “nothing more than their dream”, and adding: “Even the aforementioned Samsung’s latest Exynos CPU can slightly outperform it without using any acceleration at all, not to mention Huawei with its Kirin’s 970 NPU.”

“In summary: Snapdragon — can theoretically provide good results, but are lacking the drivers; Huawei — quite outstanding results now and most probably in the nearest future; Samsung — no acceleration support now (most likely this will change soon since they are now developing their own AI Chip), but powerful CPUs; Mediatek — good results for mid-range devices, but definitely no breakthrough.”

It’s also worth noting that some of the results were obtained on prototype samples, rather than shipped smartphones, so haven’t yet been included in the benchmark table on the team’s website.

“We will wait till the devices with final firmware will come to the market since some changes might still be introduced,” he adds.

For more on the pros and cons of AI-powered smartphone features check out our article from earlier this year.

Market research firm GlobalWebIndex, which provides consumer insight data for marketing purposes for customers including Google, Spotify, WPP, IPG and Omnicom Group, has closed a $40 million Series A round. The funding is its first VC raise, almost a decade after the business was founded.

The investment comes from New York-based growth fund Stripes Group, along with a number of other unnamed data, software and consumer technology companies. GWI says it will be used to accelerate product development and for international expansion, including in the U.S. and Asia. 

The company is based in London but has recently opened offices in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as having technology hubs in locations across Europe.

With the new funding it says it’s planning to open more international offices across the Americas and Asia Pacific to support a client base which spans more than 80 countries.  

But why take VC now? “After nine years with no funding and seeing phenomenal growth and expansion, we are still seeing an increasing demand for our data, especially from companies that we haven’t traditionally sold to,” says CEO Tom Smith.

“The new funding will support our product development and hiring efforts so we can establish ourselves as the go to platform for digital consumer insights for the marketing industry.”

The company believes it’s positioned itself on the right side of digital history, having chosen an opt-in, survey-based route for gathering a chunk of its consumer data for market research purposes — putting detailed questions to its global panel of 22 million web users from whom it’s gaining up front consent to their data being processed.

Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, is explicit on the need for consent to be informed, specific and freely given if that’s your legal basis for processing people’s personal data.

On the product development front, GWI says it’s working to develop new ways of collecting consumer data — having developed a proprietary, device-agnostic “messenger-style survey tool” which Smith says allows respondents to “answer questions at times and in formats which suit them”.

“It’s about putting the consumer first — not just in how their data is used, but how you run the survey itself. With this new approach we hope to be able to return survey results faster to our clients, so they can make quick business decisions based on insights retrieved from our tried and tested methodology,” he adds.

“Years before GDPR, we wanted to be respectful to those who take one of our surveys, meaning that they see consumer-centric privacy and consent notices which use easy-to-understand language to outline what we do, why it’s important to our clients, and what their responses will be used for.”

“We ask our respondents a wide range of questions relating to their digital lives and lifestyles,” he continues. “This covers everything from their social media, device, media consumption and online behaviors to their interactions with brands, their attitudes and their daily life. For us, it’s key to understand not just what people are doing online, but the attitudes, motivations and beliefs which drive this.”

GWI’s primary product offering is its core study — which is fielded in 44 countries, and which it says contains 25,000 data points on 22M+ “connected consumers”.

“Each year we interview hundreds of thousands of representative individuals about their digital lives. The aggregated results of this are made available on our industry-leading platform on a syndicated basis, where clients can build and then analyze any audience they like. For example, you could look at Older vs Younger Millennials, Mums vs Dads, Instagrammers vs Snapchatters — in each case, understanding which behaviors and attitudes are unique to each group,” explains Smith.

It also offers a range of custom services to supplement that core survey-based market intelligence data.

“Many clients use this offering to ask follow-up questions to our respondents, allowing them to overlay the answers to their bespoke questions with the 25,000 data points contained in the core data set,” he says, adding: “We also offer a wide range of other research solutions such as brand tracking, path to purchase journey, ad-effectiveness, concept testing, website analytics and more. Here the sheer scale of our panel — currently at 22M consumers — is a real differentiator.”

All survey respondents are compensated for their time, according to Smith — in different ways, depending on the market, but including via monetary payments, vouchers, loyalty points, charitable donations etc.

One thing to note is that GWI does also use cookie-based tracking to gather data less directly — including by working with partners. So it is also reliant on third parties obtaining consent to data processing, and must therefore rely on those partners to cleanly and fairly obtain consent for this portion of its market intelligence activity.

“In some instances, the cookies we use as part of our research are dropped by the research panels we work with, rather than by GlobalWebIndex itself. In these instances, all such panels are required to obtain consent in GDPR-compliant manners,” says Smith on this.

The company tells TechCrunch it uses cookie tracking to enrich its core survey data, and only uses cookies to track the behaviors of its panelists — and only those who have actively opted in to this type of tracking.

“Our analytics technology connects the data we collect through surveys to the behaviors of our panel on client websites and connected properties, as well as their exposure to digital advertising campaigns.  In this way, we can leverage the 25,000+ data points we collect through panelist interviews to their browsing behaviors and online activities, providing a unique connection between brand engagement and the attributes, motivations and interests of our clients’ target audiences.”

“The GDPR was welcome validation of the approach we have always adopted, whereby respect for the consumer is central,” adds Smith. “Given that we have a direct relationship with the individuals who complete our surveys, we have an amazing opportunity to outline there and then what we want to do with their responses, and to gain their explicit consent for the use of cookies.

“The nature of survey-based market research also means that the consumers know which types of data they are providing, and can decline to answer certain questions if they so choose.”

So why does a company like Google — which has access to vast, global consumer data stores of its own, gathered from its own products and via a network of online tracking cookies and pixels — need GWI’s market intelligence?

“Many of our clients have their own proprietary sources of consumer data but turn to GlobalWebIndex because of the robust, global, independent view it offers on consumer behaviors,” Smith responds on this. “Our ability to give a 360-degree view on the consumer is particularly valuable, with our data providing a unique cross-device, cross-platform perspective.”

On the competition front, he names the likes of Nielsen, YouGov, Comscore, Kantar, GfK and Simmons. “We provide a global view which is consistent across countries, unlike some alternatives which operate different surveys at different times and then patch them together,” he argues.

He also touts the “incredibly rich view of the consumer’s digital life” the GWI consumer panel is able to generate, given the number of data points it’s gathering.

“We have this depth on all of our respondents, whereas some other sources will only have small pockets of data on each individual,” he claims. “We track behaviours and attitudes from the consumer’s perspective. There are no inferences, no modeling, no assumptions based on browsing. This is how the consumer acts and feels from their own point of view.

“We provide up-to-the minute data which tells you what people are doing in the here and now. Our quarterly releases will soon move to monthly, and from there we’ll develop a real-time version of our data set.”

“Our ability to re-interview our respondents is hugely important for clients, as it allows them to sync their bespoke questions with the 25,000 data points from the core study. It’s a hugely quick and efficient way to gain a rich understanding of your target audience,” he adds.

Facebook’s long-running effort to go into China got a boost this week after the U.S. company was handed a license to set up a subsidiary in the country. But quickly after news broke, the license was seemingly revoked.

The incident started when Reuters spotted a filing approved on China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System for a Facebook subsidiary that is registered in Hangzhou, the location of e-commerce giant Alibaba’s HQ. Records show the subsidiary is financed by $30 million in capital, with Facebook Hong Kong listed as the sole shareholder.

As word of the filing began to spread following the Reuters report, references to the news were blocked on some social media platforms in China were blocked and the filing itself from removed from the system, as The New York Times reported.

Facebook itself said in a statement that it intends to launch an innovation in Zhejiang, the province that counts Hangzhou as its capital, but the language used by the company suggests it hasn’t yet made progress on that plan.

“We are interested in setting up an innovation hub in Zhejiang to support Chinese developers, innovators and start-ups. We have done this in several parts of the world — France, Brazil, India, Korea — and our efforts would be focused on training and workshops that help these developers and entrepreneurs to innovate and grow,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch.

So what happened?

It’s hard to know with the Chinese government — and it certainly looks like Facebook is following developments as much as anyone else is.

It’s well reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a long-standing interest in entering China in some form — he has famously learned Mandarin and appeared at university events among other things — but exactly what that details has never been clear.

Facebook the service remains blocked in China. The company experimented by introducing a stealth app last year, while Zuckerberg has spent time with Chinese ministers, including the country’s internet minister and head of propaganda, but this filing is the most concrete developing for Facebook in China to date. And even that remains uncertain.

It stands to reason that as a late entrant to the country’s already-advanced social media space, and of course an overseas player, Facebook’s first task is to identify a local partner that it can lean on. That’s fairly common for most Western tech companies and it often sees them create local identities which are supported and funded by local investment firms, as has been the case for the likes of Uber, LinkedIn and Evernote.

Facebook previously held talks with Baidu a number of years ago, but an alliance wasn’t forthcoming. The filing in Hangzhou hints at a possible link with Alibaba given the ties that the e-commerce giant has with local authorities in its home province.

Among its many initiatives, Alibaba deployed City Brain — its data surveillance service for governments — in Hangzhou, and it has worked with visiting companies, such as 500 Startups, to help raise awareness of the location for startups and bring overseas visitors in. Outside of China, Alibaba has also invested heavily in startups, most notable Snap, to grow its networks and knowledge.

The link to Facebook is a small one, it could be circumstantial, but it certainly raises the question over whether a partnership might be brewing.

Both Facebook and Alibaba declined to comment when asked about their relationship with each other.

Like Facebook’s own future in China, it looks like time will tell whether there is anything of substance here.

While Facebook’s China journey may have taken one step forward but another ten back, rival Google has been testing out experiments as it figures out how to tackle China going forward. The search giant has opene an AI lab in Beijing, made investments in Chinese startups and released apps on third-party app stores in the country.

Just last week, it began dabbling on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, with the launch of its first mini program for the platform.

FinAccel, a Southeast Asia-based startup that offers a digital credit card service in Indonesia, has closed a $30 million Series B round as it begins to consider overseas expansion.

The Singapore company launched its Kredivo service two years ago to help consumers pay online in Southeast Asia, where credit card penetration is typically low, and it is essentially the combination of a digital credit card and PayPal. The service is available in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, where it uses a customer’s registered phone number — there is no physical credit card — and a dedicated checkout on online retail websites.

For consumers, the service offers a 30-day payback option and then more longer-term options of three, six and 12-month payback windows. The 30-day option is interest-free, but other plans come with a 2.95 percent per month charge on the reducing principle, which effectively makes it 25 percent flat.

FinAccel says it has credit scored close to two million consumers in Indonesia, while on the retail side it has partnered with 200 online sales platforms including large names such as Alibaba’s Lazada, Shopee (which is owned by U.S.-listed Garena), and unicorn Tokopedia, which counts SoftBank and Alibaba among its investors.

This new investment, by the way, is a notable one for Southeast Asia, which has generally been considered to have a gap in Series B funding, so $30 million for a two-year-old business is quite something.

The round itself is led by Australia’s Square Peg Capital — in what is one of its highest-profile overseas deals to date — alongside new investors MDI Ventures, which is affiliated with Telkom Indonesia, and UK-based Atami Capital. Existing investors Jungle Ventures, Openspace Ventures, GMO Venture
Partners, Alpha JWC Ventures and 500 Startups also took part in the round.

FinAccel founders (left to right) Umang Rustagi (COO), Akshay Garg (CEO) and Alie Tan (head of product engineering)

The startup raised a seed round of over $1 million in 2016, before quietly raising a $5 million Series A last year, FinAccel co-founder CEO Akshay Garg revealed in an interview with TechCrunch.

Garg, who founded ad tech firm Komli, said the company is processing “hundreds of millions” in U.S. dollars per year and the immediate plan is to keep growing in Indonesia. Already, however, it is eyeing up potential expansions with its first move overseas is likely to be in Southeast Asia in early 2018, although he declined to provide more details.

“Our goal is to become the preferred digital credit card for millennials in Southeast Asia,” he told TechCrunch. “Those are consumers who are mobile-first and already bankable. The credit gap in this market is huge, there’s no electronic verification and other things that we take for granted in the West just don’t work here.”

FinAccel isn’t going after the unbanked in the region, but it also isn’t going after banks either. Garg said that it is possible that the company might try to work with banks in the future in order to grow its market share and offer new products.

One area it is looking at is financial products — such as loans for personal, educational and emergency purposes — but there could be ways to leverage its online presence and adoption among young people and work with existing financial institutions, which he believes simply aren’t equipped to reach out in the same way.

“We don’t see ourselves disrupting the banks, we are more partners,” he explained. “We could partner on balance sheet and on issuing credit cards to offer more efficient and seamless financial inclusion at best possible rates.”

Did you know Segway is making a pair of self-balancing roller shoes? It is! The company has been tinkering with all sorts of new form factors since it was acquired by Ninebot in 2015, from half-sized Segways to kick scooters. Next up: inline… shoe… platform things.

Called the Segway Drift W1s, they sorta look like what would happen if you took a hoverboard (as in the trendy 2016 hoverboard-that-doesn’t-actually-hover “hover”board, not Marty McFly’s hoverboard), split it in two and plopped one half under each foot.

It released a video demonstrating the shoes a few weeks back. Just watching it makes me feel like I’ve bruised my tailbone, because I’m clumsy as hell.

Pricing and availability was kept under wraps at the time, but the company has just released the details: a pair will cost you $399, and ship sometime in August. Oh, and they’ll come with a free helmet, because you’ll probably want to wear a helmet.

A new product page also sheds some light on a few other previously undisclosed details: each unit will weigh about 7.7lbs, and top out at 7.5 miles per hour. Riding time “depends on riding style and terrain,” but the company estimates about 45 minutes of riding per charge.

I look forward to trying these — then realizing I have absolutely no idea how to jump off and just riding forever into the sunset.

Just a month ago, Valve announced Steam Chat — an overhaul to its aging chat system, and the company’s answer to rapidly growing competition from apps like Discord. At the time, it was a beta limited only to those who were granted access.

Today it’s opening up to all.

As Devin put it when the beta features rolled out, the previous chat system “may as well be ICQ.” It was useful for a quick chats, but it felt much too limited for anything beyond that.

The new Steam Chat, meanwhile, takes a huge step toward being a modern chat offering. It groups contacts by the game they’re playing, shows whether or not they’re currently in-game or in a match, offers easy access to your “favorite” contacts and allows for big group chats and persistent channels. It supports inline media (GIFs! SoundCloud! YouTube!), encrypted voice chat and has both a browser-based client and a client built into Steam.

Will it kill Discord? Probably not.

While it might stymie the losses of the more casual players who might otherwise find their way over to Discord, it’ll be tough to sway anyone who has already come to call Discord home. Many Discord gaming groups have deep roots, with many of them having elaborate channel setups and relying on bespoke customizations like bots that help them schedule matches or raids.

If you want to check out the new chat system and already have Steam installed, just pop into Steam and tap the “Friends and Chat” button in the bottom right.