A number of top executives are out at ZTE as the phone maker works to fulfill the requirements of U.S.-imposed restrictions. Among the big changes up top is new CEO Xu Ziyang, who formerly headed up the company’s operations in Germany. A new CFO, CTO and head of HR have been named, as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The move comes a few days after company slowly began to resume some business operations on a one-month waver, following a seemingly D.O.A. seven-year export ban. The ban was announced back in April, after the company failed to appropriately punish top employees over Iran/North Korean trade violations.

Trump, however, was quick to toss the company a lifeline, citing potential job loss in China. The President’s willingness to bail out ZTE has been met with staunch criticism by many, including members of his own party. A bipartisan push in Congress to reinstitute the ban began in Congress last month. Many of the issues appear to stem from ties to the Chinese government that also put Huawei in hot water with U.S. security orgs.

For now, however, the company appears to be springing back to life, as it rushes to comply with the most recent laundry list of restrictions. The moves come in the wake of a $1 billion fine and the effective freeze on operations as the company mulled a way forward without relying on products from U.S. businesses like Google and Qualcomm.

In that time, ZTE has lost billions, and grappled with other…inconveniences. Of course, even with these changes, the company isn’t out of the woods just yet. In addition to on-going financial issues, security and other concerns could be enough to put consumers in the U.S. and other countries off the company altogether.

Uber’s exit from Southeast Asia may be done and dusted, but the deal — which saw Grab take over its local operations in exchange for a 27.5 percent stake — is coming under pressure in Singapore where the country’s antitrust regulator has threatened to unwind the deal because it has reduced competition.

The Competition and Consumer Commission Singapore (CCCS) today announced the result of a three-month investigation into the deal and its provisional findings offer some fairly scathing conclusions.

Primarily, CCCS said that Uber and Grab “have not been able to show that the transaction gives rise to efficiencies that would outweigh the harm to competition.”

In more specific detail, it said that “taxi booking services pose an insufficient competitive constraint.” The organization voiced concern that new ride-hailing entrants are significantly disadvantaged because require a “significant amount of upfront capital” to compete and, even then, they must battle existing networks that favor larger organizations.

The commission claimed Grab has already taken advantage of its dominant position by raising prices, although that’s something that Grab denies doing. Furthermore, CCCS also expressed concern that Grab’s service will stagnate if it is not challenged by competitors in the ride-hailing space.

“Without sufficient competition post-transaction, Grab would be able to raise fares for riders and commission rates for drivers, lower the quality of its services and reduce innovating its product offerings,” CCCS wrote in its findings.

Grab criticized the report for taking “a very narrow approach in defining competition.”

“While we are one of the most visible players in transport, we are not the only player in the market. CCCS has not taken into account the dynamic developments and intense competition going on over the past few months, from both new and incumbent taxi and ride-hailing players,” the company addd in a statement.

As a next step, CCCS has asked Grab to restore its pre-deal pricing and commission rates, cut exclusivity agreements with taxi operators, and remove lock-in for drivers that use its rental partners or Uber’s Lion City Rentals business.

The deal is, of course, long-since closed but the organization has threatened that it could unwind the transaction in Singapore or hit both Uber and Grab with fines.

The initial Singapore investigation pushed the closure of Uber’s Southeast Asia service back by one month, while it was extended by a week in the Philippines. Uber’s service covered a total of seven markets, but this action from CCCS would only impact Singapore.

Here’s Grab statement in full:

We have considered the CCCS’ Proposed Infringement Decision and disagree with their analysis. The CCCS appears to have taken a very narrow approach in defining competition. While we are one of the most visible players in transport, we are not the only player in the market. CCCS has not taken into account the dynamic developments and intense competition going on over the past few months, from both new and incumbent taxi and ride-hailing players.

Even though not required by the law, we had informed the CCCS that we were making a voluntary notification, as well as proactively engaged with the CCCS before the transaction was signed. We conducted the acquisition legally and in full compliance with Singapore’s applicable competition laws.

We fully cooperated with the CCCS throughout the course of their review, and had proactively proposed voluntary commitments over and above the Interim Measures Directions (IMDs), to ensure consumers’ and drivers’ interests are taken care of, which the CCCS had rejected. Grab has complied with all areas of CCCS’ IMDs including maintaining base fare levels, surge factor and driver commission rates.

This provisional decision and proposed remedies are overreaching and go against Singapore’s pro-innovation and pro-business regulations in a free market economy. We note that the provisional decision is not final nor effective yet, and we will submit our written representations to the CCCS before the deadline. We will take all appropriate steps to appeal against this decision.

The Model 3 can now park itself. Called Summon, the feature is now available on the company’s new sedan.

It’s a clever feature that takes advantage of the vehicle’s connectivity and autonomous driving capabilities. With Summon owners can command their Model 3 to pull into a parking spot and power down. It can even control garage doors — all without a driver behind the wheel or controlling the vehicle remotely. Tesla added the feature to Model S and Model X vehicles last year.

This is the latest feature Tesla added to the Model 3 after its launch. The company is in a frenzy to keep up with production goals and the nature of the Model 3’s connected platform allows the company to added features to already-built vehicles.

The European Parliament has been making its presence felt today. As well as reopening democratic debate around a controversial digital copyright reform proposal by voting against it being fast-tracked, MEPs have adopted a resolution calling for the suspension of the EU-US Privacy Shield.

The parliamentarians’ view is that the data transfer mechanism does not provide the necessary ‘essentially equivalent’ data protection for EU citizens — and should therefore be suspended until US authorities come into compliance.

The resolution states that the parliament:

Takes the view that the current Privacy Shield arrangement does not provide the adequate level of protection required by Union data protection law and the EU Charter as interpreted by the European Court of Justice;

Considers that, unless the US is fully compliant by 1 September 2018, the Commission has failed to act in accordance with Article 45(5) GDPR; calls therefore on the Commission to suspend the Privacy Shield until the US authorities comply with its terms

The mechanism is currently used by more than 3,300 organizations to authorize transfers of personal data from the EU to the US, including the likes of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter, to name just a few of the well-known tech names making use of the framework to authorize EU to US personal data transfers.

The EU-US Privacy Shield is not yet two years old but has always been controversial, given the mass surveillance/Snowden disclosure-related reasons for the demise of its predecessor (Safe Harbor).

Privacy Shield has looked especially precarious since the election of a US president with an openly privacy-hostile, anti-foreigner agenda. And reforms to US laws that EU lawmakers had hoped would be enacted have not come to pass.

On the contrary, US lawmakers dug in entirely on warrantless surveillance (aka Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), giving it six more years — and offering nothing in the way of the sought for reforms.

In today’s resolution the parliament writes that it “regrets that the US did not seize the opportunity of the recent reauthorisation of FISA Section 702 to include the safeguards provided in PPD 28” — referring to an Obama era Presidential Policy Directive that backed extending privacy protections to non-US nationals (when a very different US president wrote that US signals intelligence activities “must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside, and that all persons have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information”).

EU lawmakers have always wanted a more formal, robust and lasting commitment than a PPD, though, and privacy provisions for foreigners’ data being included in FISA was their preferred outcome. Safe to say, Trump has not picked up that baton.

The parliament is also calling for “evidence and legally binding commitments” to ensure that data collection under FISA Section 702 is not “indiscriminate and access is not conducted on a generalised basis (bulk collection)” — which would be in contravention of the EU’s Charter on Fundamental Rights.

Specifically it’s backing calls by the EU’s influential WP29 group, which is comprised of Member State data protection chiefs (aka what’s now known as the European Data Protection Board; EDPB) for an updated report from its rather less influential US counterpart, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (which still only has one active board member listed on its website; yet another bone of contention for Privacy Shield compliance) to provide definition and detail on how US intelligence agencies are actually handling ‘bulk data’.

The parliament writes that it wants the PCLOB to report on “the definition of ‘targets’, on the ‘tasking of selectors’ and on the concrete process of applying the selectors in the context of the UPSTREAM [aka the NSA’s Internet and telephone data collection program] to clarify and assess whether bulk access to personal data occurs in that context”.

The parliament is also angry that EU individuals have been excluded from additional protection provided by the reauthorisation of FISA Section 702 — saying it contains “several amendments that are merely procedural and do not address the most problematic issues” — with MEPs amping up pressure on the Commission, urging the EU’s executive body to “take the forthcoming WP29 analysis on FISA Section 702 seriously and to act accordingly”.

Privacy Shield was only officially adopted in July 2016, but EU lawmakers have been getting increasingly unhappy because core components of the framework have been left hanging by US authorities. Such as the ongoing lack of a permanent appointment to an ombudsperson role that’s intended to act as a key arbiter for any data-related complaints from EU citizens, given the data controllers in question are in the US.

The parliament also raises concerns about the executive order signed by Trump in January 2017 — aka the ‘Enhancing Public Safety’ order, which stripped away privacy protections from non-U.S. citizens — saying that while Privacy Shield did not directly rest on the US Privacy Act related to this order, the substance of the order  indicates “the intention of the US executive to reverse the data protection guarantees previously granted to EU citizens and to override the commitments made towards the EU during the Obama Presidency”.

So, as we wrote at the time, the trajectory of Trump’s administration vis-a-vis privacy and foreigners did not — and does not — bode well for smooth data flows between the two regions; aka the lifeblood of business — not just tech business.

It’s also unhappy about the recent adoption of the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (aka the Cloud Act), writing that this “expands the abilities of American and foreign law enforcement to target and access people’s data across international borders without making use of the mutual legal assistance (MLAT) instruments, which provide for appropriate safeguards and respect the judicial competences of the countries where the information is located”.

“The Cloud Act could have serious implications for the EU as it is far-reaching and creates a potential conflict with the EU data protection laws,” it adds — saying a more balanced solution would have been to strengthen the existing international system of MLATs “with a view to encouraging international and judicial cooperation”.

And, well, you can’t imagine treaty-ripping Trump getting cosy with that idea.

Pressure has especially stepped up on Privacy Shield in recent months, ahead of the mechanism’s second annual review — which is due to take place in October — as the review process should, in theory, provide some leverage for the EU over its US counterparts, as the Commission can hold up the threat of suspension for compliance failures.

Although, once the EC declares the annual review has passed, the lever arguably flips the other way — and Privacy Shield seemingly gets another year’s grace, with critics fobbed off with talk of ‘improvements to be made’, as happened at the first annual review last year.

Hence why EU parliamentarians are amping up the pressure now, ahead of the review, much like  the WP29 did last year.

The Libe committee also called for a suspension last month, raising pointed concerns about the adequacies of protection around EU citizens’ data in light of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal. Europeans’ data was among the up to 87M compromised accounts related to that scandal. Though there have been many other recently emerging instances of Facebook failing to lock down user data.

The company remains an active participant in the EU-US Privacy Shield framework, although it is now under investigation by the FTC — as a consequence of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Several other federal agencies are also reportedly examining related statements Facebook has made. So it’s facing rising heat. Even as it remains listed as an active participant in Privacy Shield for now.

Any sanction or removal from the framework depends on US authorities judging an entity to have breached its obligations under the framework — and taking action.

Notably SCL Elections — a US subsidiary of the now defunct Cambridge Analytica — is now listed as inactive (it was still active just under a month ago).

The continued presence of any entity on the Privacy Shield list that has demonstrably failed to safeguard EU citizens’ personal data must raise serious questions over how much actual protection the framework affords.

In a statement on the parliament resolution today, Libe committee chair and rapporteur Claude Moraes said: “This resolution makes clear that the Privacy Shield in its current form does not provide the adequate level of protection required by EU data protection law and the EU Charter. Progress has been made to improve on the Safe Harbor agreement but this is insufficient to ensure the legal certainty required for the transfer of personal data.

“In the wake of data breaches like the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is more important than ever to protect our fundamental right to data protection and to ensure consumer trust. The law is clear and, as set out in the GDPR, if the agreement is not adequate, and if the US authorities fail to comply with its terms, then it must be suspended until they do.”

Suspending the mechanism entirely would certainly concentrate minds in the US administration — given the thousands of US companies signed up to rely on it simplifying their business operations.

Were that to happen, many of these companies would be left scrambling to put in place alternative legal arrangements to authorize data transfers — or even have to suspend data flows altogether, depending on their threshold for legal risk. (Remember the EU also now has a tough new data protection framework.)

However only the European Commission can suspend the Privacy Shield mechanism itself.

And the Commission continues to stand behind the framework it worked with the US to shape and negotiate. Christian Wigand, a Commission spokesperson, told us it intends to continue to work with the US administration on improving the implementation of Privacy Shield.

In a statement he said:

The Commission takes note of the European Parliament resolution on the EU- U.S. Privacy Shield. The Commission’s position is clear and laid out in the first annual review report. The first review showed that the Privacy Shield works well, but there is some room for improving its implementation.

The Commission is working with the US administration and expects them to address the EU concerns. Commissioner Jourová was in the U.S. last time in March to engage with the U.S. government on the follow-up and discussed what the U.S. side should do until the next annual review in October.

Commissioner Jourová also sent letters to US State Secretary Pompeo, Commerce Secretary Ross and Attorney General Sessions urging them to do the necessary improvements, including on the Ombudsman, as soon as possible.

We will continue to work to keep the Privacy Shield running and ensure European’s data are well protected. Around 4,000 companies are using it currently.

There’s a wild card here too though: Privacy Shield is now facing serious legal questions in Europe, having been looped into what began as a separate legal challenge to another data transfer mechanism — used by the likes of Facebook — to authorize transfers of EU users’ personal data to the US for processing.

That case recently resulted in a referral of various legal questions, including around Privacy Shield, to Europe’s top court — thereby posing what could be an existential threat to the whole arrangement. (Though Facebook is attempting to derail the referral, and has an appeal against set to be heard in Ireland’s Supreme Court later this month.)

While the Commission has a vested interest in defending and maintaining a framework it renegotiated so very recently, and which it can trumpet as as success given the number of businesses that have jumped on board, the CJEU will be looking at Privacy Shield’s adequacy protections purely from the legal perspective — and, as happened with Safe Harbor in 2015, the court could decide the mechanism is legally unsound and strike it down at the stroke of a pen.

At which point the scrambling and renegotiating would begin all over again.

In its second plenary meeting today, the EDPB notes that Privacy Shield was among the topics discussed. The group says it also met with the acting US ombudsperson responsible for handling national security complaints under the Privacy Shield, ambassador Judith Garber (who, nonetheless, is not a permanent appointee).

In a statement released after the plenary, it writes that the meeting with Garber was “interesting and collegial” but did not provide a conclusive answer to its ongoing concerns, including around the ombudsperson role; the lack of formal appointments to the PCLOB; the lack of additional information on the ombudsperson mechanism; and further declassification of the procedural rules, in particular on how the ombudsperson interacts with the intelligence services.

“These issues will remain on top of the agenda during the second annual review,” it writes. “In addition, it calls for supplementary evidence to be given by the US authorities in order to address these concerns. Finally, the EDPB notes that the same concerns will be addressed by the European Court of Justice in cases that are already pending, and to which the EDPB offers to contribute its view, if invited by the CJEU.”

It was already known that Facebook had set up a group within the company to “explore” blockchain tech, headed up by long time Messenger chief David Marcus. However, the latest executive reshuffle appears to point to the social networking behemoth getting more serious about developing on top of blockchain technology.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Evan Cheng, a director of engineering at Facebook, has moved to the position of Director of Engineering, Blockchain. A well-respected “low level” computer engineer, he was previously responsible for heading up Programming Languages & Runtimes at the company, a position he held for nearly three years.

Prior to that, Cheng spent nearly ten years working at Apple, most recently holding the position of Senior Manager, Low Level Tools. He also worked on compilation technology and other back end engineering.

He also tweets about blockchain and is reportedly an advisor to a number of blockchain startups/projects, including Zilliqa and ChainLink.

“It means it’s not just an exploratory project,” is how one source who tracks the blockchain space speculatively framed Cheng’s move to Facebook’s blockchain team. His reasoning was that in recruiting Cheng (who knows more than a thing or two about performance and scalability) to the blockchain group, it signals the importance of the project.

Meanwhile, Marcus and Cheng aren’t the only Facebook execs to be have been tasked with building out the social network’s burgeoning blockchain work. In a recent executive reshuffle, we reported that Instagram’s former VP of Product Kevin Weil has taken up the position of VP of Product, Blockchain at Facebook. See TechCrunch’s in-depth analysis of those moves and how Facebook could utilise blockchain.

Update: Facebook has confirmed Evan Cheng’s new position as Director of Engineering, Blockchain.

Australia is a step closer to replacing passport check-ins with more face scans. The plan, which was announced early last year, is being trialed by Qantas on passengers for select flights into the Sydney Airport starting this week. The move is an attempt to replace the “inconvenience” of relying on more traditional paper passports.

“We’ve worked with Qantas from the outset and are delighted to be partnering with them as we trial this technology,” Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert said in a statement provided to the press. “In the future, there will be no more juggling passports and bags at check-in and digging through pockets or smartphones to show your boarding pass,” he added. “Your face will be your passport and your boarding pass at every step of the process.”

It’s still very early stages in a process that isn’t exactly being rolled out overnight. After all, implementing such technology for Sydney’s 43 million annual passengers is pretty large undertaking, even without myriad security and privacy concerns to contend with.

Some are understandably skeptical about such implementations on-behalf of the government and other large institutions with underlying security concerns.

“[I]f the security rationale is about preventing terrorism, why not extend it to other locations like shopping malls, public squares or stadiums like the MCG. It could be anywhere that people gather together,” University of Canberra assistant professor Bruce Baer Arnold said in a statement to The Financial Review. “The concern there is that this is ultimately disproportionate. Biometrics are very powerful and can produce real social benefits, or it can product real harm. Just because you have a hammer, doesn’t mean everything is a nail.”

To start with, the technology will be utilized for select international flights, to help automate check-in, boarding, lounge access and bag drop. Moving forward, the airport also hopes to implement it for mobile check-in and customs processing.

When Mitra Raman went off to college, all she wanted was a bowl of her mother’s homemade rasam. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Raman grew up eating traditional South Indian cuisine almost every day, but didn’t quite know how to make it just like mom when she left home.

On her next visit back home, she told her mom she missed her cooking. And, being a mom, Mrs. Raman simply packed all the ingredients for rasam in a plastic bag and told her daughter to heat up some water and add it in. It’s that simple.

That’s how Buttermilk was born.

The YC-backed company offers a variety of Indian dishes at a low price that can be cooked up by simply adding hot water.

Based in Seattle, Buttermilk launched in 2017 to the local market and has since expanded to serve their products across the country.

Buttermilk dishes include Sambar, Daal, Khichdi, Rasam, and Upma, all of which cost $6 each. Buttermilk also sells Basmati Rice for $1.50.

While users can buy Buttermilk meals individually, they can also purchase one of Buttermilk’s “suites,” which pack a handful of meals into one shipment. The suites, including the High Protein Pack, Buttermilk Suite, North Indian Favorites and South Indian Favorites, cost $39.

Last week, Buttermilk introduced an option called Subscribe and Save, which offers the chance to buy monthly subscriptions of pre-set packs for 10 percent off. The company is also launching new meals, including Chana Masala, Coconut Chutney, and Quina and Brown Rice options, starting on July 12. Pre-orders for the new meals start tomorrow.

Buttermilk has plans to add other cuisines to the platform eventually, with the same idea of bringing mom’s home cooking to people who don’t have the money or time to recreate those meals from scratch. The company is also interested in potentially selling their products in grocery stores or coffee shops beyond the existing online channel.

After making its stage debut at TC Sessions Robotics in Boston last year, the third iteration of MIT’s Cheetah robot is back with some impressive new tricks. Associate Professor Sangbae Kim will officially demonstrate the Cheetah 3’s new capabilities at Madrid’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots in October, but in the meantime, we’ve got a sneak peek via laboratory video.

The “Blind Climb on Stairs” portion starts around 1:48. It’s not exactly graceful, but it’s still probably a lot better than most of could do attempting to walk up a flight a with our eyes closed. Complicating matters are the small pieces of wood littering the steps, approximating some of the non-ideal circumstances the robot will have to grapple with during the search and rescue missions for which it’s designed.

The Cheetah is doing all of this without any cameras or other visual on-board sensors, using what the team refers to as “blind locomotion,” essentially feeling its way up the stairs. So, why rob such a sophisticated robot of something as seemingly essential as computer vision?

“There are many unexpected behaviors the robot should be able to handle without relying too much on vision,” Kim says in a release tied to the announcement. “Vision can be noisy, slightly inaccurate, and sometimes not available, and if you rely too much on vision, your robot has to be very accurate in position and eventually will be slow. So we want the robot to rely more on tactile information. That way, it can handle unexpected obstacles while moving fast.”

The robot utilizes a pair of new algorithms — contact detection and model-predictive control — which help it recover its balance in the case of slippage. The ability helps the robot determine whether to have a leg in the in air or on the ground at a given time, allowing it to tenuously but tenaciously ascend the stairs.

The ability, along with already showcased skills like leaping over objects and running up to 14 miles an hour, are all in service of Cheetah’s larger vision of aiding search and rescue missions. The robot is designed to enter areas that might otherwise be too dangerous for its human counterparts.

After less than a year in the role, the CEO of Tivo is leaving the troubled company and jumping to Liberty Global, where he will become its CTO. Enrique Rodriguez, who joined the maker of DVRs, interactive program guides and viewing analytics only November 2017, is stepping away from his role effective immediately, TiVo announced today. A separate announcement from Liberty Global noted that Rodriguez will be joining the broadband and pay-TV company as its EVP and CTO.

Raghu Rau, who is on TiVo’s board, has been named the interim president and CEO of the company. Rodriguez will keep an advisory role, TiVo said.

The sudden departure of the CEO comes amid some wider turmoil at TiVo. Formerly known as Rovi but rebranded after it acquired the DVR maker in 2016 for $1.1 billion, TiVo has been exploring strategic alternatives since February of this year, which could include going private or selling itself. It also lost its CTO in June this year to Hulu.

“My personal decision to pursue another opportunity was not easy,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited about what lies ahead for TiVo as I expect our performance through the second quarter of 2018, including our announced profit improvement actions, to be ahead of our internal plan. I am looking forward to continue my relationship with TiVo in my new role as a customer and partner. Until then, I am committed to working with the TiVo team to ensure a seamless transition.”

Tivo (and before it Rovi) had a strong early role in developing services that have led consumers to watch TV in different ways — by being able to record and “time-shift” linear programming, for example — a disruptive moment in the TV business because it ate into consumers’ advertising attention.

But as is the way in the world of tech, the disruptor has also become the disrupted. Today, streaming both live and on-demand video, often directly from the internet without any use of DVRs, has led to the rise of cord-cutting, where people opt out of taking traditional cable or satellite pay-TV services and instead pay for their services ‘over the top’ of their broadband connections.

And that has taken a toll on TiVo, it seems. Despite the launch of a plethora of other services such as Alexa voice controls and better controls for pay-TV providers to match the features they get with streaming services, the company’s stock has been slipping for the better part of a year. In its last earnings, its net revenues were $214.2 million, nearly $40 million off what analysts had expected.

In contrast, Rodriquez is joining a company whose market cap is currently over $22 billion, more than ten times as much as TiVO’s, with a fix-services customer base of 22 million, and a further 7 million mobile subscribers. But in the context of how TV media appears to be evolving away from traditional pay-TV and towards streaming and OTT, you could say that he’s jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Liberty earlier this year offloaded €18.4 billion of its European assets to Vodafone, after rumors first circulated that Vodafone might seek to acquire Liberty outright.

Liberty has also seen its stock price dip in the last six months, and it too is in the midst of trying to figure out what might be the best route forward for itself, considering its mix of businesses — albeit well short of anything like a strategic review. (It’s also a key customer of TiVo’s.)

Rodriguez is an interesting pick in that regard because of his experience across the range of players in the pay-TV ecosystem, with previous roles also at AT&T, Microsoft, Cisco and Thomson, with a specialty of trying to help tech and telco companies figure out how they can play more deeply in the media space.

“Enrique is a seasoned executive who will hit the ground running on day one. In today’s technology environment the best CTOs have worked across sectors, platforms and geographies. Enrique has C-level experience as an engineer, software developer and operator,” said Mike Fries, CEO of Liberty Global, in a statement.

“He has managed multi-billion dollar businesses for companies like AT&T, Microsoft, Cisco and Thomson, and has a long history in digital television as well as the European broadband sector. As head of Microsoft’s Connected TV business, he launched IPTV solutions for telecommunication companies around the world, including many of our competitors. More recently, at AT&T, he was responsible for the teams that developed and launched DIRECTV’s successful OTT service, DIRECTV Now. I’m particularly excited to tap into Enrique’s knowledge of video products and platforms as we ramp up innovation in our TV business. He’s the right leader at the right time for Liberty Global.”

The evidence is increasingly clear: 2018 is the year of the Chinese venture deal.

With half of the year now complete, China is driving ahead of Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States on venture capital dollars invested into startups, according to a number of data sources including Crunchbase, China Money Network, and Pitchbook.

These sorts of top line numbers are always driven by large deals, and the Chinese VC market is no exception. Monster rounds this year have included a $1.9 billion investment from Softbank Vision Fund into Manbang Group, a truck hailing startup formed from the merger of two competitors, Yumanman and Huochebang, as well as Ant Financial, which raised a whopping $14 billion from investors.

While China hasn’t overtaken the U.S. in terms of total VC rounds, it has seen spectacular growth in deal volume. Crunchbase’s analysis shows an almost four-fold increase in the number of venture capital rounds completed last quarter in China compared to the same quarter last year. That’s in comparison to a dismal seed funding market in Silicon Valley, where seed volume has dropped off of a cliff over the past few years, down by 60% or more by some estimates.

That’s a rather linear look, though, of an industry that is facing extreme flux. Venture capital today is being wholly redefined by new crowdsourcing models and of course, the rise of blockchain and the world of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). On the latter, billions of dollars have been raised by blockchain projects, perhaps most notoriously in recent weeks by EOS and Telegram. Institutional capital still matters, but it isn’t the sole source of funding anymore, even at the growth stage. That makes VC aggregate data much less compelling than it might have been in the past.

However, what these aggregates do show is the changing power dynamics between the U.S. and China, particularly in critical future growth markets in the emerging world.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the burgeoning strength of China’s high-flying tech companies. While venture firms are of course widely present in China, it is the country’s largest tech companies that are driving much of the venture investment in the mainland ecosystem. As China Money Network noted recently, “Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu … ranked as the first, fourth and eighth most active investors in [April], inking 11, 5 and 4 deals respectively.”

The aggressive investment strategies of Chinese tech firms was recently observed by Sequoia partner Mike Moritz in the Financial Times. In his analysis, Moritz wrote, “Between 2015 and 2017, the five biggest US tech groups (especially Apple and Microsoft) spent $228bn on stock buybacks and dividends, Bloomberg data shows. During the same period, the top five Chinese tech companies spent just $10.7bn and ploughed the rest of their excess cash into investments that broaden their footprint and influence.“

Context can explain some of this behavior, but there is also an outlook difference across the Pacific that is important to appreciate. American venture firms are robust, and Google and other tech companies don’t feel as compelled as their Chinese counterparts to step into the game themselves in order to finance the innovation industry.

Yet, one can’t help but feel that a different concept of ambition is being adopted by American companies — one that looks internally for growth rather than externally in new markets.

That’s certainly not the case in China, where companies are looking in both directions. Moritz again: “Most Chinese activity is outside the US, with Tencent and Alibaba building vast constellations of satellites. Tencent has more than 600 investments, while Alibaba has around 400 — totals that almost make Japan’s SoftBank look like a penny-pinching slowpoke.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, we see a complete pull back from much of the emerging world. The drastic reported cutback in Facebook’s efforts in the emerging world is just the latest example of this myopia.

The old line about venture capitalists still holds true: most don’t want to invest more than 40 miles from their house. While many Silicon Valley-based VCs have since extended that geography to the rest of the United States, only an extraordinary few have invested in more than a handful of companies in the developing world. That has left open opportunities for investment in countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, where the next set of internet users are coming online.

For founders, focusing on aggregate numbers is useless. Investors are either interested in a startup or not, and while macro factors can provide context for a fundraise, they don’t typically drive the outcome. But when it comes to evaluating the corporate strategy of tech giants, they are far more impactful. The U.S. can’t continue to look inward and expect the high rates of growth we have seen in the tech sector over the past two decades. Only new, global markets are going to be the driver of prosperity, and right now, China has its money where the action is.