Month: July 2018

The new MacBook Pro has a thermal issue. YouTuber Dave Lee found out that the top-performing MacBook Pro can’t operate at full speed for a long time because it gets too hot.

According to him, a video export in Adobe Premiere Pro is taking longer on a brand new MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 CPU than on a 2017 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 CPU (previous Intel generation).

Sure, if you look at benchmarks, the new MacBook Pro destroys previous models, and even many iMacs. But Apple is throttling the speed of the CPU so that it doesn’t get too hot under heavy load.

Apple Insider tested the performance of the new MacBook Pro with a Core i7 and Core i9 model. In both instances, the clock speed of the CPU started to drop drastically after a while.

For the i9, the CPU dropped from 4.17 GHz to 2.33-2.9 GHz after some tests. The i7 dropped from 3.8 GHz to 2.3-2.6 GHz under load.

Some users on Reddit also got a new laptop and noticed the same issue:

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and didn’t hear back.

If all those benchmarks are true, the MacBook Pro might have a ventilation problem. You will never get perfect CPU performances on a laptop compared to a desktop computer due to size contraints. But it becomes an issue when you buy a laptop expecting great performances and it doesn’t deliver.

Insight Venture Partners that it has raised $6.3 billion for its latest (and largest ever) fund as technology investors continue to amass increasingly large war chests.

In the wake of SoftBank’s massive $100 billion Vision Fund, investors in technology companies have said that capital has become weaponized as a way to create a competitive moat around a startup’s business — ostensibly giving it so much money that investors become de facto kingmakers for the companies they back. rather than simply enablers for success.

That redefinition of the investors’ role — in a way trying to circumvent competition in a market by fiat — has led funds to follow Softbank’s lead and try to raise increasingly large funds. That’s why there’s Sequoia juiced its fund to a whopping $8 billion (and has already closed on $6 billion for it).

However, Deven Parekh says Insight Venture Partners isn’t simply following the herd with its latest raise. The firm is staying true to its mission of investing in companies, and continuing to commit the same amount of capital it always has, Parekh says.

“Our fund size has gone up and our portfolio size has gone up,” says Parekh. “The competitive dynamics is not the driver here as much as the types of companies we invest in.”

Still, the pace of investment has been pretty blistering. It was only three years ago that the company closed its ninth fund with $5 billion in capital commitments.

As technology commands an increasingly large share of the economy, it makes sense for the firm to raise more cash because there are simply more opportunities to deploy it, according to Parekh.

But competition is also something the firm is wary of — especially as technology becomes more popular for generalist investors.

“It’s hard to argue that the market is not more competitive today,” he says. “There’s significant growth in firms focusing on tech investing.” 

However, many of the growth capital and private equity investors that are beginning to invest more heavily in technology don’t have experience in the industry which is creating upward pricing pressure on deals, says Parekh.

“You have a lot of generalists going after software who don’t have a point of view on these assets,” he says. “The multiples are being paid without having a point of view.”

Since it was founded in 1995, Insight has always had a point of view on the software industry. The firm was one of the early pioneers in growth capital investing into technology companies and has always been more of a later stage investor — writing larger checks for companies that it backs once they’ve found traction in the markets that they’re serving.

That strategy has served the firm well through deals in companies like Pluralsight, Smartsheet, Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, Yext, and Alteryx (to name a few of the firm’s recent wins).

“The closing of Fund X is a historic moment in Insight Venture Partners’ 20 plus year history, demonstrating continued confidence by our global investors in our ability to invest in industry-leading software companies,” said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners, in a statement.

Facebook and Instagram will more proactively lock the accounts of users its moderators suspect are below the age of 13. Its former policy was to only investigate accounts if they were reported specifically for being potentially underage. But Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that an ‘operational’ change to its policy for reviewers made this week will see them lock the accounts of any underage user they come across, even if they were reported for something else, such as objectionable content, or are otherwise discovered by reviewers. Facebook will require the users to provide proof that they’re over 13 such a government issued photo ID to regain access. The problem stems from Facebook not requiring any proof of age upon signup.

A tougher stance here could reduce Facebook and Instagram’s user counts and advertising revenue. The apps’ formerly more hands-off approach allowed them to hook young users so by the time they turned 13, they had already invested in building a social graph and history of content that tethers them to the Facebook corporation. While Facebook has lost cache with the youth over time and as their parents joined, Instagram is still wildly popular with them and likely counts many tweens or even younger children as users.

The change comes in response to an undercover documentary report by the UK’s Channel 4 and Firecrest Films that saw a journalist become a Facebook content reviewer through a third-party firm called CPL Resources in Dublin, Ireland. A reviewer there claims they were instructed to ignore users who appeared under 13, saying “We have to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind and that we don’t know what underage looks like.” The report also outlined how far-right political groups are subject to different threshholds for deletion than other Pages or accounts if they post hateful content in violation of Facebook’s policies.

In response, Facebook published a blog post on July 16th claiming that that high-profile Pages and registered political groups may receive a second layer of review from Facebook employees. But in an update on July 17th, Facebook noted that “Since the program, we have been working to update the guidance for reviewers to put a hold on any account they encounter if they have a strong indication it is underage, even if the report was for something else.”

Now a Facebook spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch that this is a change to how reviewers are trained to enforce its age policy for both Facebook and Instagram. This does not mean Facebook will begin a broad sweep of its site hunting for underage users, but will stop ignoring those it comes across.

Facebook prohibits users under 13 to comply with the US Child Online Privacy Protection Act that demands that requires parental consent to collect data about children. The change could see more underage users have their accounts terminated. That might in turn reduce the site’s utility for their friends over or under age 13, making them less engaged with the social network.

The news comes in contrast to Facebook purposefully trying to attract underage users through its Messenger Kids app that lets children ages 6 to 12 chat with those approved by their parents, which today expanded to Mexico, beyond the US, Canada, and Peru. With one hand, Facebook is trying to make under-13 users dependent on the social network while pushing them away with the other.

Child Signups Lead to Problems As Users Age

A high-ranking source who worked at Facebook in its early days previously told me that one repercussion of a hands-off approach to policing underage users was that as some got older, Facebook would wrongly believe they were over 18 or over 21.

That’s problematic because it could make minors improperly eligible to see ads for alcohol, real money gambling, loans, or subscription services. They’d also be able to see potentially offensive content such as graphic violence that only appears to users over 18 and is hidden behind a warning interstitial. Facebook might also expose their contact info, school, and birthday in public search results, which it hides for users under 18.

Users who request to change their birthdate may have their accounts suspended, deterring users from coming clean about their real age. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that in the US, Canada, and EU, if a user listed as over 18 tries to change their age to be under 18 or vice versa, they would be prompted to provide proof of age.

Facebook might be wise to offer an amnesty period to users who want to correct their age without having their accounts suspended. Getting friends to confirm friend requests and building up a profile takes time and social capital that formerly underage users who are now actually over 13 might not want to risk just to able to display their accurate birthdate and protect Facebook. If the company wants to correct the problem, it may need to offer a temporary consequence-free method for users to correct their age. It could then promote this options to its youngest users or those who algorithms suggest might be under 13 based on their connections.

Facebook doesn’t put any real roadblock to signup in front of underage users beyond a self-certification that they are of age, likely to keep it easy to join the social network and grow its business. It’s understandable that some 9- or 11-year-olds would lie to gain access. Blindly believing self-certifications led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as the data research firm promised Facebook it had deleted surreptitiously collected user data, but Facebook failed to verify that.

There are plenty of other apps that flout COPPA laws by making it easy for underage children to sign up. Lip-syncing app Musically is particularly notorious for featuring girls under 13 dancing provocatively to modern pop songs in front of audiences of millions — which worryingly include adults. The company’s CEO Alex Zhu angrily denied that it violates COPPA when I confronted him with evidence at TechCrunch Disrupt London in 2016.

Facebook’s Reckoning

The increased scrutiny brought on by the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Russian election interference, screentime addiction, lack of protections against fake news, and lax policy towards conspiracy theorists and dangerous content has triggered a reckoning for Facebook.

Yesterday Facebook announced a content moderation policy update, telling TechCrunch “There are certain forms of misinformation that have contributed to physical harm, and we are making a policy change which will enable us to take that type of content down. We will be begin implementing the policy during the coming months.” That comes in response to false rumors spreading through WhatsApp leading to lynch mobs murdering people in countries like India. The policy could impact conspiracy theorists and publications spreading false news on Facebook, some of which claim to be practicing free speech.

Across safety, privacy, and truth, Facebook will have to draw the line on how proactively to police its social network. It’s left trying to balance its mission to connect the world, its business that thrives on maximizing user counts and engagement, its brand as a family-friendly utility, its responsibility to protect society and democracy from misinformation, and its values that endorse free speech and a voice for everyone. Something’s got to give.

Chinese bike-sharing company Ofo is entering a new phase. After a period of aggressive growth, the company is looking back at its international markets and focusing on the most promising ones.

A couple of weeks ago, the company issued a press release highlighting some of the priorities outside of China. As part of this move, Ofo co-founder and CEO Dai Wei is going to be directly in charge of international markets.

“It’s a new strategical phase on the international front,” Ofo France General Manager and Head of EMEA Laurent Kennel told me. “The company wants to focus on the most mature and promising markets.”

So it means that Ofo will stop altogether in some countries, such as Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, India and Israel.

At the same time, there are some markets that work quite well. In particular, the press release highlights Singapore, the U.S., the U.K., France and Italy. But even if you look at a more granular level, Ofo is going to focus on some specific cities in particular going forward.

As Quartz and Forbes highlighted, Ofo hasn’t been a massive success in smaller American cities. “In the U.S., some markets work better than others, and they’re going to focus on that,” Kennel said. Instead of operating in dozens of American cities, the company is going to scale back and focus on the most important ones.

In France, Ofo has only been available in Paris for instance. Numbers are encouraging as the company handles 5,000 to 10,000 rides a day with 2,500 bikes.

“[In Paris,] We crossed an important milestone to prove that our business model is sustainable,” Kennel said. “Our revenue covers all our operational and maintenance costs.” That doesn’t include occasional investments to purchase new bikes.

Overall, Kennel was quite optimistic about those remaining markets. By focusing on a limited number of cities, the company can invest properly on each of those markets. In Europe, Ofo is going to focus on the U.K., France and Italy.

Just like in the U.S., Ofo is also reducing the number of cities in the U.K. and Italy. The company recently shut down its service in Norwich and Sheffield. In Italy, there was an internal reorganization and the company stopped operating in the mid-sized city of Varese.

Following Mobike’s acquisition by Meituan, Mobike recently announced that it would stop requiring deposits in China. Ofo still asks for a refundable deposit when you sign up in China, but not in Europe.

Mobike’s deep pockets increase the pressure on Ofo. Ofo needs to find a sustainable business model to become a viable independent company in the long term. “It has an impact on international markets, but also on the internal organization in China,” Kennel said.

Ofo doesn’t want to comment on the situation market-by-market. So it’s hard to know for sure where Ofo still operates and where it plans to scale back. On Ofo’s website, you can find a map with all the markets where it claims to operate. I looked at this map, listed the 21 countries and tried to find out what’s happening at a local level.

This isn’t a perfect list, but it gives a good overview of what’s happening at the company.

Still operating normally as far as I know:

• China
• France (Paris)
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Portugal (small operation)
• Singapore
• Thailand

Scaling back operations:

• Italy: internal reorganization, shut down in Varese to focus on Milan
• Spain: available in a handful of cities (Madrid, Valencia, Marbella, Granada) but recently scaled back in Madrid with fewer bikes and a smaller area of service
• United Kingdom: focusing on London (and potentially Cambridge and Oxford) while shutting down operations in Norwich and Sheffield
• United States: scaling back to some key cities, such as New York, Seattle and San Diego

Shutting down:

• Australia
• Austria
• Czech Republic
• Germany
• India
• Israel
• Netherlands: dockless bikes are temporarily banned

Unclear:

Hungary: service is unavailable in the app

Kazakhstan: service is unavailable in the app

Russia: service is unavailable in the app

Making sense of DNA data is a two-step process, namely the biochemical-sequencing of the DNA and the analyzing and extracting insights from the sequenced DNA data. As of today in 2018, the first part of this process is now almost fully automated requiring minimal human intervention. Even sequencing costs have dropped below $1,000 and soon they will reach $100, according to the industry. The second part of the process, however, is a long way from being automated because it’s very complex, time-consuming and requires highly specialized experts to analyze the data.

Now a startup plans to address this problem.

London-based Lifebit is building a cloud-based cognitive system that can reason about DNA data in the same way humans do. This offers researchers and R&D professionals, with limited-to-no computational and data analysis training, and their corresponding organisations (ie. pharmaceutical companies), a highly scalable, modular and reproducible system that automates the analysis processes, learns from the data and provides actionable insights.

It’s now closed a $3m (£2.25m) Seed funding round led by Pentech and Connect Ventures, with participation from Beacon Capital and Tiny VC (AngelList). The company is simultaneously announcing the launch of its first product, Deploit, what it claims is the world’s first AI-powered genomic data analysis platform, and, says the company, is already being trialled by major pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The main “competitor” for Lifebit is the DIY process of analysing and getting actionable insights out of genomics and biodata. Organisations, both in industry and research, build custom software and hardware solutions to be able to analyse the huge volumes of genomic and biodata at scale. This leads to a large waste of resources since custom software and hardware is expensive and hard to scale and maintain.

A few platforms have been created like DNAnexus and SevenBridges. However, these platforms tend to lack flexibility, don’t integrate with the way the vast majority of bioinformaticians work, operate like black boxes which fail to provide the user with full control and transparency, can be very costly to use, and enforce lock-downs. All in all, if the user stops using these platform, all their past work is no longer accessible. And they are not designed for AI and advanced learning from previous analysis performed.

Lifebit’s Deploit platform is designed to address all these problems with a particular highlight on the machine learning functionalities that automate the process and on creating the next tool that will be used by everyone in the community who is trying to analyse and understand genomic and bio data, very much like GitHub changed software engineers’ lives.

In fact, Deploit will be priced with a pricing model similar to GitHub. It is free for individual, non-commercial, usage, and then you pay for team functionalities and for enterprise deployment and usage.

Lifebit was incorporated in April 2017 but founders Dr. Maria Chatzou (CEO) and Dr. Pablo Prieto only started working on it full-time in July when we moved to London to join Techstars.

“The problem these organizations face is no longer sequencing vast quantities of genomic data, but rather making sense of this data quickly and affordably,” says Chatzou. “This requires new data analysis technologies, which is where Lifebit comes in. Our mission as a company is to enable cloud-based real-time genomic analysis at scale, anywhere, by anyone.”

In other news bears shit in the woods. In today’s second day Trump news: President ‘The Donald’ has seized, belatedly, on the European Commission’s announcement yesterday that it had found Google guilty of three types of illegal antitrust behavior with its Android OS since 2011 and was fining the company $5 billion; a record breaking penalty the Commission’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said reflects the length and gravity of the company’s competition infringements.

Trump is not! at all! convinced! though!

“I told you so!” he has tweeted triumphantly just now. “The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google . They truly have taken advantage of the U.S., but not for long!”

Also not so very long ago, Trump was the one grumbling about tech giants. Though Amazon is his most frequent target in tech, while Google has been spared the usual tweet lashings. Albeit, on the average day he may not necessarily be able to tell one tech giant from another.

Vestager can though, and she cited Amazon as one of the companies that had suffered as a direct result of contractual conditions Google imposed on device makers using its Android OS — squeezing the ecommerce giant’s potential to build a competing Android ecosystem, with its Fire OS.

Presumably, for Trump, Amazon is not ‘one of our great companies’ though.

At least it’s only Google that gets his full Twitter attention — and a special Trumpian MAGA badge of honor call-out as “one of our great companies” — in the tweet.

Presumably, he hasn’t had this pointed out to him yet though. So, uh, awkward.

Safe to say, Trump is seizing on Google’s antitrust penalty as a stick to beat the EU, set against a backdrop of Trump already having slapped a series of tariffs on EU goods and Trump recently threatening the EU with tariffs on cars — in what is fast looking like a full blown trade war.

Even so, the tweet probably wasn’t the kind of support Google was hoping to solicit via its own Twitter missive yesterday…

#AndroidWorksButTradeWarsDon’t doesn’t make for the most elegant hashtag.

But here’s the thing: Vestager has already responded to Trump’s attack on the Android decision — even though it’s taking place a day late. Because the EU’s “tax lady”, as Trump has been known to vaguely refer to her, is both lit and onit.

During yesterday’s press conference she was specifically asked to anticipate Trump’s tantrum response on hearing the antitrust decision against Google, and whether she wasn’t afraid it might affect next week’s meeting between the US president and the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker.

“As I know my US colleagues want fair competition just as well as we do,” she responded. “There is a respect that we do our job. We have this very simple mission to make sure that companies play by the rulebook for the market to serve consumers. And this is also my impression that this is what they want in the US.”

Pressed again on political context, given the worsening trade relationship between the US and the EU, Vestager was asked how she would explain that her finding against Google is not part of an overarching anti-US narrative — and directly asked how would she answer Trump’s contention that the EU’s “tax lady… really hates the US”.

“Well I’ve done my own fact checking on the first part of that sentence. I do work with tax and I am a woman. So this is 100% correct,” she replied. “It is not correct for the latter part of the sentence though. Because I very much like the US. And I think that would also be what you think because I from Denmark and that tends to be what we do. We like the US. The culture, the people, our friends, traveling. But the fact is that this [finding against Google] has nothing to do with how I feel. Nothing whatsoever. Just as well as enforcing competition law — well, we do it in the world but we don’t do it in a political context. Because then there would never, ever be a right timing.

“The mission is very simple. We have to protect consumers and competition to make sure that consumers get the best of fair competition — choice, innovation, best possible prices. This is what we do. It has been done before, we will continue to do it — no matter the political context.”

Maybe Trump will be able to learn the name of the EU’s “tax lady” if Vestager ends up EU president next year.

Or, well, maybe not. We can only hope so.

Uber has teamed up with Cargo, a startup that makes it easy for rideshare drivers to sell goods to their passengers. Cargo works by giving drivers free boxes, filled with goods like gum, phone chargers and snacks, to sell to passengers from the center of the car console.

Cargo, which has partnered with brands like Kellogg’s, Starbucks and Mars Wrigley Confectionery, provides these boxes to drivers for free. The only requirement is that drivers must have at least a 4.7 rating and be relatively active on the platform, Cargo founder and CEO Jeff Cripe told TechCrunch.

Each Cargo box comes with both free samples and items for purchase. Drivers earn at least $1 per order, even if what the rider gets is free.

Starting today, Uber drivers in San Francisco and Los Angeles can pick up Cargo boxes at one of Uber’s driver support locations, called Greenlight Hubs. While this is an exclusive business partnership, Cargo will continue to let drivers sell its goods even if they don’t drive for Uber. 

Since launching in 2017, about 7,000 drivers have made more than $1 million. On an annual basis, drivers can earn between $1,500 – $3,000 in additional income. This seems like a great deal for drivers and also a way for Uber to attract and retain drivers.

As it stands today, customers request and pay for goods via Cargo’s mobile site, but down the road, Uber envisions integrating Cargo’s functionality into its app. To date, Cargo has raised $7.3 million in funding.

The working class of the United States doesn’t get many breaks these days. It’s not just a function of low pay and long hours, but also the incredible uncertainty of income and expenses that makes surviving week-to-week so challenging. One in five Americans have a negative net wealth, even in an economy where the unemployment rate is the lowest in almost two decades. Banks, meanwhile, are actively dissuading the working class from banking with them, creating a permanent class of unbanked and underbanked citizens.

For Jon Schlossberg, CEO and co-founder of Even.com, improving the plight of ordinary Americans and their finances is a deeply personal and professional mission. And now that mission has a huge new bucket of capital behind it, with Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures leading a $40 million Series B round into the Oakland-based startup. Rabois is a return investor, having previously backed the company in its late 2014 seed round. With this latest round of capital, Even.com has now raised $50.5 million.

When Even.com first launched its eponymous app, the goal was to offer income smoothing for workers, helping them avoid usurious payday loans to make ends meet. Since that first launch several years ago, Schlossberg and his team learned that the only way to improve the finances for the working class is to help them budget better — ending the need for loans in the first place. “To do anything with your life, unless you are just born to the right family, you need to spend your money wisely, but we never teach you how to do that,” Schlossberg explained to me.

Last year, Even.com announced that it had stopped evening through its Pay Protection product. Instead, Schlossberg said that Even.com has evolved and wanted to “build a new kind of financial institution with products that fit your life.” It still has a feature it brands as Instapay, which allows users to request their earned pay in advance of their payday.

But Even.com is increasingly focused on improving the quality of its intelligent budgeting feature. Using artificial intelligence models honed over the past few years, the company now gives users of its Even app an “Okay to spend” figure that helps them think through their cash flow. By giving a predictive figure rather than a checking account balance, Even can help its users avoid sudden surprise expenses that can trigger the kind of financial death spiral that has become a familiar story in America. The company will also soon launch an automatic savings feature similar to Digit or Acorns that helps people build up regular savings.

While the company offers an increasingly comprehensive suite of financial tools, it has decided to avoid charging users specific use fees, opting instead for a subscription model. Schlossberg explained that “We are a mission-oriented company, but talk is cheap and where the rubber hits the road, it’s how you make money.” Even is free for users participating through partner employers, or $2.99 a month for individuals without a sponsor.

The company’s highest expense feature is Instapay due to underwriting, and so the company makes higher profits when fewer of its customers need access to payday credit. In other words, the better that its users budget, the fewer loans it will underwrite, and the more money the company makes. We are “directly incentivized to help people with their financial health,” Schlossberg noted.

Even has proven attractive to corporate customers, including Walmart, which partnered with the startup last December to offer its service to all 1.4 million employees at the retailer. Since the launch of that partnership, more than 200,000 Walmart employees regularly use the app, according to Even, and the typical active user checks their Okay to spend balance four times a week. A majority of active users have also taken out an Instapay through Even.

More interestingly, salaried employees at Walmart used the app slightly more than hourly workers, proving that just having a guaranteed income isn’t necessarily a panacea to financial trouble for many American households.

Even.com’s Series B round is all about expansion and growth for the company. Even intends to open an East Coast office this year, and intends to expand its product further into the Fortune 500 with partnerships similar to its Walmart deal. The company currently has 37 employees. In addition to Khosla, the startup raised funding from Valar Ventures, Allen & Company, Harrison Metal, SV Angel, Silicon Valley Bank and others.

IBM Watson Health and the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) announced today their continued partnership to use Watson’s artificial intelligence to support Veterans suffering from late stage cancer.

While perhaps better known as a Jeopardy! winner than an oncologist, Watson joined the VA’s Precision Oncology program in 2016 following the Obama administration’s introduction of the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative to promote cancer research in the country. Together, Watson and VA oncologists analyze tumor samples submitted by patients and look for mutations in the cancer’s genome. With that information, they can better target specific drugs and treatments to fight the cancer.

Since their partnership began, Watson and the VA have worked with over 2,700 veterans, and the announcement today will enable VA oncologists to use Watson’s genomics technology through at least 2019.

“It is incredibly challenging to read, understand and stay up-to-date with the breadth and depth of medical literature and link them to relevant mutations for personalized cancer treatments,” said Dr. Kyu Rhee, chief health officer for IBM Watson Health, in a statement. “…AI can play an important role in helping to scale precision oncology, as demonstrated in our work with VA, the largest integrated health system in the U.S.”

Before the initial partnership in 2016, IBM trained Watson for two years in the oncology departments of over 20 cancer institutes and early results found it made decisions that matched a team of scientists and clinicians.

While two years hardly awards the AI a degree in medicine, Watson does eclipse human professionals in one aspect: consuming data. Which is particularly important when you consider that the veteran population alone accounts for 3.5 percent of the nation’s cancer patients. (According to the National Cancer Institute, an estimated 1,735,350 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in 2018).

In many ways, providing care and treatment for these patients is a numbers game, and one that Watson just might be able to help with.

Messenger Kids, Facebook’s parent-controlled messaging app that lets kids text, call, video chat, and use face filters, has now arrived in Mexico. The launch follows Messenger Kids’ recent expansion outside the U.S., where in June it first became available to users in Canada and Peru. The app in Mexico works the same as it does elsewhere – parents have to approve all the contacts the child is allowed to talk to – whether that’s family members the child knows, like grandma and grandpa, or the child’s friends.

Facebook has consulted with paid advisor Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and others on the development of Messenger Kids’ features focused on principles of social and emotional learning. For example, it recently introduced a section of guidelines that remind kids to “be kind” and “be respectful” and rolled out “kindness stickers” which are meant to encourage more positive emotions when communicating online.

These approaches are meant to help kids learn, from the beginning, better ways of communicating when online. However, it’s still advisable for parents to sit with kids as they practice texting for the first time, in order to talk about what’s appropriate behavior. As kids gets older, parents should continue to spot check their conversations and have discussions about what the child may have done right or wrong.

For example, we use Messenger Kids in our home, and I recently had a conversation about when it’s too early or too late to be placing a video call, after reviewing the chat history. I then adjusted the app’s “bedtime hours” to limit calls to certain daytime hours. This isn’t something you can do with other social apps.

While the app continues to be controversial because of its maker – Facebook is using it to get kids hooked on its products at a young age – there aren’t any real alternatives for parents who want texting apps for kids with parental controls and friend approvals built in. And even if a startup came up with a similar service, it would be hard to compete with Facebook’s scale.

Today, Messenger Kids has over half a million users across iOS and Android, and is continuing to grow with these international expansions.