Month: July 2018

Ubisoft has implemented a new system in Rainbow Six Siege that bans players for using toxic language in the text chat, according to PC Gamer.

Yesterday, a number of players started whining about being temporarily banned from the game after using a racist or homophobic slur in the text chat. The first offense results in a 27 minute ban. Second and third offenses will cost players 2 hours of game time, and any following toxic language will result in an official investigation and potentially a permanent ban from the game.

Like most games, Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege has a Code of Conduct that forbids “any language or content deemed illegal, dangerous, threatening, abusive, obscene, vulgar, defamatory, hateful, racist, sexist, ethically offensive or constituting harassment.” However, most games do close to nothing to enforce these rules, which has led to an overwhelmingly toxic gaming community overall.

This new banning system doesn’t come out of the blue. Ubisoft has been talking about removing toxic language from the platform for a while. In fact, the dev team wrote in April that it has plans to add new features to limit the use of offensive language on the game.

From the April post:

Our team is working on the creation of an automated system that will censor text chat in game based on a chat filter list. This will replace words that have been identified as offensive and provide players with a notification that their language was found to be unacceptable. We will also be tracking the number of times players trigger this filter and will take action as necessary for players that are intentionally having a negative impact on other player’s gaming experience.

The current iteration of the banning system doesn’t censor the offensive words in text chat but rather goes straight to the 27-minute ban.

The gaming world has grown into an increasingly toxic environment, as there has been little to no policing of users’ behavior and communication. But eSports and Twitch are putting gamers in the spotlight, and brand endorsements are a huge piece of the upward trajectory of esports. But no brand is going to get behind a gamer that uses homophobic or racial slurs.

Ubisoft says on Twitter that the ban system is still being updated and the team is taking feedback from the community to continue refining it, as well as punishing players who are cheating.

Despite the massive glitches that prevented online shoppers from being able to browse and buy from Amazon’s Prime Day sale yesterday, the retailer is this morning claiming its Prime Day sales in the U.S. are “bigger than ever,” and grew faster than last year’s Prime Day within the first ten hours of the annual sales event. In addition, customers bought “millions” of Amazon devices, including Amazon’s top sellers Fire TV Stick, Echo Dot, Fire 7 tablet, as well as the Instant Pot 6 Qt, and the Lifestraw Personal Water Filter for Hiking, Amazon said.

While Amazon doesn’t tend to reveal hard numbers, a third-party report from Feedvisor backs up Amazon’s statement to some extent, saying that online shoppers spent 54 percent more in the first three hours of Prime Day this year, than the first three hours last year, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Amazon acknowledged the website’s struggles in a statement published on Twitter yesterday, saying it was “working to resolve this issue quickly.” But it also noted that customers had ordered more items in the first hour of Prime Day compared with the first hour the year prior.

The retailer this morning again referenced the site issues which prevented shopping (potentially to the tune of millions in lost sales) but has not offered details as to what, specifically, went wrong.

“It wasn’t all a walk in the (dog) park, we had a ruff start – we know some customers were temporarily unable to make purchases,” the company said in a statement released today. (The dog puns are references to the 404 pages featuring the dogs of Amazon that appeared when the site was non-functional.)

Though the Prime Day sale continues today through 11:39 PM PT, not everyone may be willing to give Amazon a second shot –  some angry customers were already threatening to cancel their Prime memberships and shop elsewhere, according to reports.

While Amazon’s site has experienced glitches on previous Prime Days due to the massive influx of traffic, yesterday’s downtime was unprecedented.

The problems with Amazon’s site began shortly after Prime Day kicked off at 3 PM ET on Monday, June 16.  The landing page for Prime Day didn’t work, and when links were clicked, visitors were often sent to error pages. The deal navigation page was also down for an extended period of time, which impacted shoppers’ ability to browse the items on sale. And when shoppers did manage to load items into a cart and checkout, they would sometimes get errors there, too.

Web performance monitoring firm Catchpoint began running detailed tests at 4 PM ET, which confirmed the site load times, on average, were far slower than usual.

Typically, users may wait 2 to 3 seconds for a website home page to load, but during the Prime Day outage, the home page was taking 6, 7 and even as high as 8 or 9 seconds to load on the desktop. And on mobile, webpage load times were even slower – reaching as high as 30 seconds at times across the U.S.

Error pages (the ones with the Amazon dogs) were also appearing more than usual, as indicated in the chart above.

The issues improved around 4:50 PM ET, but customers still experienced spotty problems with Amazon’s app as late as 8:17 PM ET, Catchpoint said.

In addition, even when the Amazon.com homepage became accessible to users, product search was not working and shoppers would see an error message (below) in some instances. This continued from 4:15 PM to 10 PM ET nationwide.

The situation this morning is resolved, according to Catchpoint’s tests, but if an influx of shoppers return to get the sales they couldn’t manage yesterday, it could impact the site again.

Prime Day was estimated to bring in $3.4 billion in sales, up over 40 percent from last year, Bloomberg had reported. It remains to be seen if Amazon will still meet those estimates, and what – if anything – it may do to placate brands whose limited-time deals passed by during the outage.

 

 

 

Let’s be real: you are most certainly never going to be as good as Steve Nash, Chris Paul, James Harden — or really any professional NBA player. But it probably won’t stop you from trying to practice or model your game around your favorite players, and spend hours upon hours figuring out how to get better.

And while there are going to be plenty of attempts to smash image recognition and AI into that problem, a company called NEX Team is hoping to soften the blow a bit by helping casual players figure out their game, rather than trying to be as good as a professional NBA player. Using phone cameras and image recognition on the back end, its primary app HomeCourt will measure a variety of variables like shot trajectory, jump height, and body position, and help understand how to improve a player’s shooting form. It’s not designed to help that player shoot like Ray Allen, but at least start hitting those mid-range jumpers. The company said it’s raised $4 million from Charmides Capital and Mandra Capital, as well as Steve Nash, Jeremy Lin, Sam “Trust The Process” Hinkie (sigh), Mark Cuban and Dani Reiss.

“We don’t call ourselves a basketball company, we think of ourselves as a mobile AI company,” CEO and co-founder David Lee said. “It happens that basketball is the first sport where we’re applying our tech. When you think about digitizing sports, as a runner or cyclist, you’ve had access to a feedback loop for a while [on treadmills and other tools]. But for basketball and other sports like basketball, that loop didn’t exist. We believed with computer vision, you can digitize a lot of different sports, one of which is basketball. We’re not just building an app for the professional basketball athletes, we’re focused on building an app where value can be generated across the basketball community.”

The app starts off with an iPhone. Players can boot up their camera and begin recording their shots, and the app will go back and track what worked and what didn’t work with that shot, as well as where the player is making and missing those shots.It’s not tracking every single motion of the player, but once a player makes a shot, it will track that trajectory and shooting form, like where his or her feet are planted. That kind of feedback can help players understand the kinds of small tweaks they can make to improve their shooting percentage over time, such as release speed or jump hight. And while it’s not designed to be hugely robust like the kinds of advanced tracking technology that show up in advanced training facilities at some larger sports franchises, it aims to be a plug-and-play way of getting feedback on a player’s game right away.

Still, that doesn’t necessarily stop the app from showing up in slightly more professional situations, like recruiting or in athletic centers on college campuses, Lee said. Each college is looking for the next DeAndre Ayton or Ben Simmons, as well as new ways to try to find those recruits. While not every college will end up with the top recruits in the country and get bounced in the second round of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament, it offers an additional way for younger players to refine their game to the point they potentially get the attention of those universities — or the NBA, should the one-and-done rule that requires athletes to play a year in college end up disappearing.

“A lot of these coaches are looking at a lot of evaluation tools,” Lee said. “If Alex is waking up at 5 a.m. to put in work, it’s not just about makes and misses, it’s about work ethic. It’s harder to evaluate and digitize a sport. Only [a fraction] of the basketball happens in their practice facilities. How do they help their players evaluate their workout sessions when they’re in those situations? That opens up the doors to do that as well.”

In order to appeal to those broader audiences, the startup is rolling out bite-sized challenges as a way to try to attract the more casual consumers that want to dip their toes into HomeCourt. You see these kinds of challenge-based activities in apps like Strava as a way to try to attract users or keep them engaged in a lighter and more competitive way without having to go into a full-on event like a race or a tournament. It’s one way to try to wrangle the competitive elements of sports like basketball without a ton of competitive pressure as users get more and more comfortable with the way they play and their shooting style.

That bite-sized style of activity also serves pretty well when it comes to creating content, as has been proven popular by apps like Overtime that specialize in highlights of certain players. HomeCourt hopes to add a social layer on top of that to, once again, increase that kind of stickiness and build a community around what would otherwise be a purely technical tool — and one that might scare off more casual players with a very sabermetrics-feeling approach.

Lee also said he hopes the app will eventually broaden into other sports, like Golf or Tennis, where tracking the ball might be more complicated or the motions considerably different from basketball. That’s based on building technology that tracks the movement of the player, and not just the ball, in order to determine the trajectory or success of that specific shots. The hope is that basketball is a first step in terms of achieving that.

“For golf, seeing your whole form as going into your swing is more important — that’s the input in terms of getting where the ball goes,” Lee said. “We’re trying to think about how to reduce as much friction as possible. Imagine being able to use the app to track makes or misses, but also tracking your player movement and form, measuring it, and comparing it to another player’s backswing. We’re hoping to do that in basketball [first].”

Investor Connie Chan has made such an impact on her colleagues at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) since joining the firm in 2011 that today, they’re announcing Chan’s appointment to general partner.

It’s a big deal for the Sand Hill Road venture firm for numerous reasons. First, Chan becomes just the second woman in the firm’s nine-year history to be appointed to the role of general partner. As readers may recall, a16z announced the first female general partner in its history late last month, bringing aboard former federal prosecutor Katie Haun to help lead its new cryptocurrency fund.

According to Jeff Jordan — himself an a16z general partner and the former CEO of OpenTable — the nine-year-old firm has also never before promoted someone from within to the post of general partner, instead pulling in people like Jordan himself with senior operating experience. (Jordan also distantly held posts as the president of PayPal, the CFO of Hollywood Entertainment, and the CEO of Reel.com.)

The “policy was not to promote internally,” says Jordan. Yet such thinking has changed recently as 16z has grown and the operating functions that it uses to support its portfolio companies have matured. Indeed, when it came to Chan, a Stanford alum who logged four years with the private equity firm Elevation Partners and another two years in product management roles at HP and Palm, a lack of direct experience in scaling a business was eventually outweighed by her ability to identify and support talented founders, Jordan says.

He credits Chan, for example, with the firm’s initial investment in the digital scrapbook site Pinterest. “It wasn’t a contentious discussion, but Connie really pounding the table is what led to our investment in the company,” he says.

Pinterest was most recently valued at more than $12 billion. When a16z led a $27 million round in the company back in 2011, it was reportedly valued at $200 million.

Chan also brings to the table two other things desperately needed at Andreessen Horowitz: an understanding of China’s market and key contacts there. From her earliest days with the firm, Chan has spearheaded its Asia network, helping the firm’s portfolio companies navigate regional opportunities through quarterly visits to the country, as well as gaining a “one- to four-year advantage in [understanding] consumer mobile” trends in the U.S., which often start first in China, she notes.

Consider that Chan pushed a16z to invest in the electric bike and scooter company Lime last year after studying the unit economics of Lime’s China-based predecessors Ofo and Mobike. (She calls Lime’s very recent funding, which was led by Uber and GV and will see Lime more closely integrated with Uber, a “big, big positive.”)

Chan, who’d worked for HP in Beijing, also introduced the a16z portfolio company, Lyft, to the China-based ride-hailing giant Didi back in 2015. Didi wound up investing $100 million investment in Lyft as a result and announcing a ride-sharing, cross-country collaboration as part of the tie-up.

If you’re wondering if Chan’s new role suggests in any way that Andreessen Horowitz might begin making direct investments in China, she says it will not, that the “focus will still be on the U.S., with most of our deals in Silicon Valley.”

We separately ask if the firm might be gearing up to announce a new fund, given the recent appointments of both Chan and Haun — who bring the number of general partners at a16z to 12 — and the fact that the firm announced its most recent, flagship fund a little more than two years ago. The answer we are given: “There’s nothing to announce at this time.”

Congress may soon vote on a new bill that would set net neutrality down as a matter of law rather than a set of rules to be changed every few years by the FCC. The “21st Century Internet Act,” introduced by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), would ban blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and eliminates all questions of jurisdiction.

The bill, announced online and at an event in Washington, DC today, would modify the Communications Act of 1934 (greatly built upon by the 1996 Telecommunications Act) and add a new “Title VIII” full of stipulations specific to internet providers.

This would settle the decades-long dispute over whether internet access is an “information service” or a “telecommunications service,” a legal distinction that either reins in (the former) or unleashes (the latter) the FCC on ISPs.

Instead of quibbling over whether the FCC has authority to write the rules or not, and then quibbling over the rules themselves, the act just codifies the rules as law and sets the FCC as the official watchdog.

The Commission shall have the authority to initiate investigations, bring enforcement actions, issue declaratory rulings, conduct rulemakings, and take other such actions… necessary to implement the requirements of this title.

It would no longer be a question of whether the FCC wants to have net neutrality rules or not — net neutrality would be the law and it would unequivocally be the Commission’s job to enforce it.

The basic blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization bans are very similar to the 2015 rule’s, and the law even institutes the “general conduct” rule that many complained was too vague. This catch-all rule says an ISP “may not unreasonably interfere with or disadvantage” users or edge providers from accessing or providing lawful content and services.

Because it isn’t specific, it means practices that may or may not be legal, such as zero rating, have to be evaluated case by case. That can be a lot of work — but it’s hard to think of a better way to provide against the shifting tactics of crafty ISPs.

Interestingly the act would require the FCC to investigate “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” something that is frequently on the FTC’s plate — false advertising, misrepresenting the product, that kind of thing. Presumably this is to settle any jurisdictional dispute there, though the FTC may still come into play here and there.

Broadband providers would be eligible to receive money from the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which it uses to help fulfill its mainline duty of making sure communications infrastructure is up to snuff. And while it could ask ISPs to contribute to the fund, the FCC is barred from rate regulation — telling providers what they can and can’t charge for their services. It was a worry that under the 2015 rules, the only thing stopping the Commission from doing so was voluntary forbearance (the technical term for opting out of statutory authority) from the capability to do so.

They also wouldn’t count as “common carriers,” a designation that comes with other responsibilities and oversight. This choice is practical if not, some may argue, completely correct: internet providers really do seem to qualify as common carriers as they are generally defined. But before the main reason for designating them as such was to justify the application of Title II, which granted the FCC authority to enforce the 2015 rules.

It’s all very confusing, right? This law, however, really cuts through a lot of the cruft of the past few decades and clearly establishes the “bright line” rules consumers know and understand.

Who will oppose it and why? Broadband providers will of course say first that the act is unnecessary because they’ve pledged to follow the rules voluntarily, and second that it will prevent them from innovating with services that technically break rules but are in fact beneficial to consumers. Don’t be fooled — these services don’t exist and never did. The only one that comes close is zero rating, and it’s a sham.

Remember, broadband providers also loudly called for “regulatory certainty” instead of the seesawing rules of the last five years. Be careful what you wish for!

Conservatives may oppose it because it expands regulations rather than reduces them, which is at least a valid position to take, as little as consumers may agree with it. The rules also have their origins in the Obama administration, which makes them burn partisan politicians at the touch.

It’s always hard to say whether a bill will be a success, and the processes are so slow anyway that it might be a year or more before we see this on the floor of the House. As for the President, it’s hard to say what he’ll do, as with so many other issues. That it would be difficult to cast the bill in partisan terms, practical as it is and introduced by a Republican Congressman, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be vetoed anyway.

Notably Rep. Coffman is lighting the candle under the FCC at both ends (if you’ll permit the confused metaphor) by supporting the House’s Congressional Review Act petition to undo the current administration’s rules: “While my bill moves through the Congress, I am taking an ‘all of the above’ approach by simultaneously signing the discharge petition on the CRA, and introducing my bill.”

At the very least the bill seems a good example of a law that takes the short path to providing consumers with net neutrality protections: direct and to the point, with no sweetheart clauses or funny business as far as I can tell. That said, it may yet be butchered in committee. We’ll follow its progress carefully.

As Amazon looks to increasingly expand its cashier-less grocery stories — called Amazon Go – across different regions, there’s at least one startup hoping to end up everywhere else beyond Amazon’s empire.

Standard Cognition aims to help businesses create that kind of checkout experience based on machine vision, using image recognition to figure out that a specific person is picking up and walking out the door with a bag of Cheetos. The company said it’s raised an additional $5.5 million in a round in what the company is calling a seed round extension from CRV. The play here is, like many startups, to create something that a massive company is going after — like image recognition for cashier-less checkouts — for the long tail businesses rather than locking them into a single ecosystem.

Standard Cognition works with security cameras that have a bit more power than typical cameras to identify people that walk into a store. Those customers use an app, and the camera identifies everything they are carrying and bills them as they exit the store. The company has said it works to anonymize that data, so there isn’t any kind of product tracking that might chase you around the Internet that you might find on other platforms.

“The platform is built at this point – we are now focused on releasing the platform to each retail partner that signs on with us,” Michael Suswal, Co-founder and COO said. “Most of the surprises coming our way come from learning about how each retailer prefers to run their operations and store experiences. They are all a little different and require us to be flexible with how we deploy.”

It’s a toolkit that makes sense for both larger and smaller retailers, especially as the actual technology to install cameras or other devices that can get high-quality video or have more processing power goes down over time. Baking that into smaller retailers or mom-and-pop stores could help them get more foot traffic or make it easier to keep tabs on what kind of inventory is most popular or selling out more quickly. It offers an opportunity to have an added layer of data about how their store works, which could be increasingly important over time as something like Amazon looks to start taking over the grocery experience with stores like Amazon Go or its massive acquisition of Whole Foods.

“While we save no personal data in the cloud, and the system is built for privacy (no facial recognition among other safety features that come with being a non-cloud solution), we do use the internet for a couple of things,” Suswal said. “One of those things is to update our models and push them fleet wide. This is not a data push. It is light and allows us to make updates to models and add new features. We refer to it as the Tesla model, inspired by the way a driver can have a new feature when they wake up in the morning. We are also able to offer cross-store analytics to the retailer using the cloud, but no personal data is ever stored there.”

It’s thanks to advances in machine learning — and the frameworks and hardware that support it — that have made this kind of technology easier to build for smaller companies. Already there are other companies that look to be third-party providers for popular applications like voice recognition (think SoundHound) or machine vision (think Clarifai). All of those aim to be an option outside of whatever options larger companies might have like Alexa. It also means there is probably going to be a land grab and that there will be other interpretations of what the cashier-less checkout experience looks like, but Standard Cognition is hoping it’ll be able to get into enough stores to be an actual challenger to Amazon Go.

Expense management software provider Certify is beefing up its artillery against rival Concur with the acquisition of Abacus, which enables companies to deal with expenses in real time. The deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. The addition of Abacus will help Certify, which includes other expense management solutions like Nexonia and ExpenseWatch under one umbrella, become a stronger rival to SAP-owned Concur by reaching new customer segments.

Founded by Omar Qari, Josh Halickman and Ted Power, Abacus says it was the first real-time expense reporting solution on the market when it launched in 2013. The Y Combinator alum, whose investors included General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Google Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, currently counts 1,000 customers. Its team will join Certify and the Abacus product will continue to be independent.

Expenses are a bane for everyone involved: the employees who need to turn in receipts, the managers who have to approve them and everyone in the finance department who needs to reconcile corporate credit cards and make sure company policy is followed. Abacus eases their pain with features like automatic expense suggestions and Slack integration for employees.

For companies, it lets them set prompts to enforce spending limits and make sure details, like client names, are filled in correctly. If expenses need to be approved by specific managers or departments, Abacus routes them to the right person. Real-time analytics also help companies make quick budget decisions.

Abacus’ clients include Betterment, Dropbox, GLG and North American Substation Services. In an email, Qari, the CEO of Abacus, told TechCrunch that Abacus is a good fit for “companies that need out-of-the-box flexibility in approval flows, spending controls and ERP sync.”

For example, he said North American Substation Services, which provides installation, repair and maintenance work for high-voltage stations, uses Abacus to speed up its account receivables by billing back expenses closer to when they actually happened, while Dropbox chose Abacus to reimburse interview candidates more quickly.

Certify was acquired by K1 Investment Management last year and combined with expense management software providers Nexonia, ExpenseWatch and Tallie to serve a total of 10,000 businesses. Certify says this makes it the largest competitor to Concur.

Each brand operates independently, serving its own niche, like Abacus will. Qari said that “in a prospect overlap analysis, we found hardly any opportunities are common across the portfolio, highlighting how unique each brand’s segment is. The expense management industry’s typical customer profile is fairly fragmented, so it’s going to take multiple solutions approaching the space from multiple angles to fully satisfy market demand.”

Dialpad announced a $50 million Series D investment today, giving the company plenty of capital to keep expanding its business communications platform.

The round was led by Iconiq Capital with help from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amasia, Scale Ventures, Section 32 and Work-Bench. With today’s round, the company has now raised $120 million.

As technology like artificial intelligence and internet of things advances, it’s giving the company an opportunity to expand its platform. Dialpad products include UberConference conferencing software and VoiceAI for voice transcription applications.

The company is competing in a crowded market that includes giants like Google and Cisco and a host of smaller companies like GoToMeeting (owned by LogMeIn), Zoom and BlueJeans. All of these companies are working to provide cloud-based meeting and communications services.

Increasingly, that involves artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) to provide on the fly transcription services. While none of these services is perfect yet, they are growing increasingly accurate.

VoiceAI was launched shortly after Dialpad acquired TalkIQ in May to take this idea a step further by applying sentiment analysis and analytics to voice transcripts. The company plans to use the cash infusion to continue investing in artificial intelligence on the Dialpad platform.

CEO Craig Walker certainly sees the potential of artificial intelligence for the company moving forward. “Smart CIOs know AI isn’t just another trendy tech tool, it’s the future of work. By arming sales and support teams, and frankly everybody in the organization, with VoiceAI’s real-time artificial intelligence and insights, businesses can dramatically improve customer satisfaction and ultimately their bottom line,” Walker said in a statement.

Dialpad is also working with voice-driven devices like the Amazon Alexa and it announced Alexa integration with Dialpad in April. This allows Alexa users to make calls by saying something like, “Alexa, call Liz Green with Dialpad” and the Echo will make the phone call on your behalf using Dialpad software.

According to the company website, it has over 50,000 customers including WeWork, Stitch Fix, Uber and Reddit. The company says it has added over 10,000 new customers since its last funding round in September, 2017.

The UK’s Electoral Commission has published the results of a near nine-month-long investigation into Brexit referendum spending and has found that the official Vote Leave campaign broke the law by breaching election campaign spending limits.

Vote Leave broke the law including by channeling money to a Canadian data firm, AggregateIQ, to use for targeting political advertising on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with another Brexit campaign, BeLeave, it found.

Aggregate IQ remains the subject of a separate joint investigation by privacy watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia.

The Electoral Commission’s investigation found evidence that BeLeave spent more than £675,000 with AggregateIQ under a common arrangement with Vote Leave. Yet the two campaigns had failed to disclose on their referendum spending returns that they had a common plan.

As the designated lead leave campaign, Vote Leave had a £7M spending limit under UK law. But via its joint spending with BeLeave the Commission determined it actually spent £7,449,079 — exceeding the legal spending limit by almost half a million pounds.

The June 2016 referendum in the UK resulted in a narrow 52:48 majority for the UK to leave the European Union. Two years on from the vote, the government has yet to agree a coherent policy strategy to move forward in negotiations with the EU, leaving businesses to suck up ongoing uncertainty and society and citizens to remain riven and divided.

Meanwhile, Facebook — whose platform played a key role in distributing referendum messaging — booked revenue of around $40.7BN in 2017 alone, reporting a full year profit of almost $16BN.

Back in May, long-time leave supporter and MEP, Nigel Farage, told CEO Mark Zuckerberg to his face in the European Parliament that without “Facebook and other forms of social media there is no way that Brexit or Trump or the Italian elections could ever possibly have happened”.

The Electoral Commission’s investigation focused on funding and spending, and mainly concerned five payments made to Aggregate IQ in June 2016 — payments made for campaign services for the EU Referendum — by the three Brexit campaigns it investigated (the third being: Veterans for Britain).

Veterans for Britain’s spending return included a donation of £100,000 that was reported as a cash donation received and accepted on 20 May 2016. But the Commission found this was in fact a payment by Vote Leave to Aggregate IQ for services provided to Veterans for Britain in the final days of the EU Referendum campaign. The date was also incorrectly reported: It was actually paid by Vote Leave on 29 June 2016.

Despite the donation to a third Brexit campaign by the official Vote Leave campaign being for services provided by Aggregate IQ, which was also simultaneously providing services to Vote Leave, the Commission did not deem it to constitute joint working, writing: “[T]he evidence we have seen does not support the concern that the services were provided to Veterans for Britain as joint working with Vote Leave.”

It was, however, found to constitute an inaccurate donation report — another offense under the UK’s Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

The report details multiple issues with spending returns across the three campaigns. And the Commission has issued a series of fines to the three Brexit campaigns.

It has also referred two individuals — Vote Leave’s David Alan Halsall and BeLeave’s Darren Grimes — to the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service, which has the power to instigate a criminal investigation.

Early last year the Commission decided not to fully investigate Vote Leave’s spending but by October it says new information had emerged — which suggested “a pattern of action by Vote Leave” — so it revisited the assessment and reopened an investigation in November.

Its report also makes it clear that Vote Leave failed to co-operate with its investigation — including by failing to produce requested information and documents; by failing to provide representatives for interview; by ignoring deadlines to respond to formal investigation notices; and by objecting to the fact of the investigation, including suggesting it would judicially review the opening of the investigation.

Judging by the Commission’s account, Vote Leave seemingly did everything it could to try to thwart and delay the investigation — which is only reporting now, two years on from the Brexit vote and with mere months of negotiating time left before the end of the formal Article 50 exit notification process.

What’s crystal clear from this report is that following money and data trails takes time and painstaking investigation, which — given that, y’know, democracy is at stake — heavily bolsters the case for far more stringent regulations and transparency mechanisms to prevent powerful social media platforms from quietly absorbing politically motivated money and messaging without recognizing any responsibility to disclose the transactions, let alone carry out due diligence on who or what may be funding the political spending.

The political ad transparency measures that Facebook has announced so far come far too late for Brexit — or indeed, for the 2016 US presidential election when its platform carried and amplifiedKremlin funded divisive messaging which reached the eyeballs of hundreds of millions of US voters.

Last week the UK’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, criticized Facebook for transparency and control failures relating to political ads on its platform, and also announced its intention to fine Facebook the maximum possible for breaches of UK data protection law relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, after it emerged that information on as many as 87 million Facebook users was extracted from its platform and passed to a controversial UK political consultancy without most people’s knowledge or consent.

She also published a series of policy recommendations around digital political campaigning — calling for an ethical pause on the use of personal data for political ad targeting, and warning that a troubling lack of transparency about how people’s data is being used risks undermining public trust in democracy

“Without a high level of transparency – and therefore trust amongst citizens that their data is being used appropriately – we are at risk of developing a system of voter surveillance by default,” she warned.

The Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal is linked to the Brexit referendum via AggregateIQ — which was also a contractor for Cambridge Analytica, and also handled Facebook user information which the former company had improperly obtained, after paying a Cambridge University academic to use a quiz app to harvest people’s data and use it to create psychometric profiles for ad targeting.

The Electoral Commission says it was approached by Facebook during the Brexit campaign spending investigation with “some information about how Aggregate IQ used its services during the EU Referendum campaign”.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the report and will update this story with any response.

The Commission states that evidence from Facebook indicates that AggregateIQ used “identical target lists for Vote Leave and BeLeave ads”, although at least in one instance the BeLeave ads “were not run”.

It writes:

BeLeave’s ability to procure services from Aggregate IQ only resulted from the actions of Vote Leave, in providing those donations and arranging a separate donor for BeLeave. While BeLeave may have contributed its own design style and input, the services provided by Aggregate IQ to BeLeave used Vote Leave messaging, at the behest of BeLeave’s campaign director. It also appears to have had the benefit of Vote Leave data and/or data it obtained via online resources set up and provided to it by Vote Leave to target and distribute its campaign material. This is shown by evidence from Facebook that Aggregate IQ used identical target lists for Vote Leave and BeLeave ads, although the BeLeave ads were not run.

“We also asked for copies of the adverts Aggregate IQ placed for BeLeave, and for details of the reports he received from Aggregate IQ on their use. Mr Grimes replied to our questions,” it further notes in the report.

At the height of the referendum campaign — at a crucial moment when Vote Leave had reached its official spending limit — officials from the official leave campaign persuaded BeLeave’s only other donor, an individual called Anthony Clake, to allow it to funnel a donation from him directly to Aggregate IQ, who Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummins dubbed a bunch of “social media ninjas”.

The Commission writes:

On 11 June 2016 Mr Cummings wrote to Mr Clake saying that Vote Leave had all the money it could spend, and suggesting the following: “However, there is another organisation that could spend your money. Would you be willing to spend the 100k to some social media ninjas who could usefully spend it on behalf of this organisation? I am very confident it would be well spent in the final crucial 5 days. Obviously it would be entirely legal. (sic)”

Mr Clake asked about this organisation. Mr Cummings replied as follows: “the social media ninjas are based in canada – they are extremely good. You would send your money directly to them. the organisation that would legally register the donation is a permitted participant called BeLeave, a “young people’s organisation”. happy to talk it through on the phone though in principle nothing is required from you but to wire money to a bank account if you’re happy to take my word for it. (sic)

Mr Clake then emailed Mr Grimes to offer a donation to BeLeave. He specified that this donation would made “via the AIQ account.”

And while the Commission says it found evidence that Grimes and others from BeLeave had “significant input into the look and design of the BeLeave adverts produced by Aggregate IQ”, it also determined that Vote Leave messaging was “influential in their strategy and design” — hence its determination of a common plan between the two campaigns. Aggregate IQ was the vehicle used by Vote Leave to breech its campaign spending cap.

Providing examples of the collaboration it found between the two campaigns, the Commission quotes internal BeLeave correspondence — including an instruction from Grimes to: “Copy and paste lines from Vote Leave’s briefing room in a BeLeave voice”.

It writes:

On 15 June 2016 Mr Grimes told other BeLeave Board members and Aggregate IQ that BeLeave’s ads needed to be: “an effective way of pushing our more liberal and progressive message to an audience which is perhaps not as receptive to Vote Leave’s messaging.”

On 17 June 2016 Mr Grimes told other BeLeave Board members: “So as soon as we can go live. Advertising should be back on tomorrow and normal operating as of Sunday. I’d like to make sure we have loads of scheduled tweets and Facebook status. Post all of those blogs including Shahmirs [aka Shahmir Sami; who became a BeLeave whistleblower], use favstar to check out and repost our best performing tweets. Copy and paste lines from Vote Leave’s briefing room in a BeLeave voice”

Didi Chuxing, China’s largest ride-hailing company, has pulled in some strategic capital after Booking Holdings invested $500 million into its business.

The deal will see Booking Holdings — which was formerly known as Priceline — work closely with Didi to offer its on-demand car services through its Booking.com apps via an integration. Likewise, Didi customers will have the option to book hotels through Booking.com and its sister site Agoda.

The deal isn’t about money. Didi has said publicly that it has multiple billions of US dollars on its balance sheet, thanks to a gigantic $4 billion funding round that closed at the end of 2017 and a history of raising big in recent years.

Instead, the tie-in helps on a strategic level.

Besides Booking.com and Agoda, Booking also operates Kayak, Priceline.com, Rentacars.com and OpenTable, all of which makes it a powerful ally for Didi. That’s particularly important since the Chinese firm is in global expansion mode, having launched services in Mexico, Australia and Taiwan this year. Beyond those three, it acquired local ride-hailing company 99 in Brazil and announced plans to roll into Japan.

Beyond boosting a brand and consumer touchpoints, linking up with travel companies makes sense as ride-hailing goes from simply ride-hailing to become a de facto platform for travel between both longer haul (flights) and short distance (public transport) trips. That explains why Didi has doubled down on dock-less bikes and other transportation modes.

“Building on its leadership and expertise in the global online travel market, Booking is championing a digital revolution of travel experience. We look forward to seamlessly connecting every segment of the journey and improving everyone’s traveling experience through more collaborative innovation with the Booking brands on product, technology and market development,” said Stephen Zhu, VP of strategy for Didi, in a statement.