Month: August 2018

A senator has confirmed that the use of cell site simulators for conducting real-time surveillance on cell phones may interfere with 911 calls.

In a letter to the attorney general, Sen. Ron Wyden said that devices, widely known as “stingrays,” can jam cell phones from sending or receiving phone calls and text messages, which may limit a phone from contacting the emergency services. Wyden said officials at Harris, which develops the surveillance device, told his office that a feature designed to prevent interference with 911 calls was neither tested nor confirmed to work.

Wyden said that not only do stingrays disrupt the communications of a targeted cell phone, other people’s devices nearby might also “experience a temporary disruption of service.”

Stingrays are controversial bits of tech — largely in part because almost nobody outside law enforcement has seen one or knows exactly how they work. These devices are held as a closely guarded secret by police and federal agencies who are bound by non-disclosure agreements — so much so that prosecutors have dropped court cases that might reveal confidential information about the devices.

What we do know is that police across the US use these suitcase-sized devices to mimic cell towers, which trick nearby cell phones into connecting to the device. Police can then identify someone’s real-time location and log all the phones within its range.

Some advanced devices are believed to be able to intercept calls and text messages.

Busting through the secrecy has become a challenge for hobbyists and hackers alike. As far back as 2015, researchers were building low-cost alternatives to cell site simulators as proof of concepts. Nowadays, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cell site simulators are “easy to acquire or build, with homemade devices costing less than $1,000 in parts.”

That’s going to become a problem for regulators and the authorities — if it’s not already a nationals security problem. Although cell site simulators are only available for purchase to law enforcement, Homeland Security recently warned that foreign spies have also obtained the technology — and are using the devices in the nation’s capital.

The EFF said that the “only way to stop the public safety and public privacy threats that cell-site simulators pose is to increase the security of our mobile communications infrastructure at every layer.”

“All companies involved in mobile communications from the network layer [cell carriers] to the hardware layer (chip and networking device makers], to the software layer [tech giants] need to work together to ensure that our cellular infrastructure is safe, secure, and private from attacks by spies, criminals, and rogue law enforcement,” said the rights group.

A fund affiliated with the Singaporean government has a great interest in making sure that American consumers are getting the tech support they need.

Temasek, the multi-billion dollar investment fund associated with the government in Singapore, has led a $50 million round for Puls Technologies, Inc., a San Francisco-based company aiming to be the tech support for American homes and offices.

Current investors Sequoia Capital, Red Dot Capital Partners, Samsung NEXT and Viola Ventures all participated in the new financing as well alongside additional new investors Hanaco Ventures and Hamilton Lane.

Founded only three years ago, Puls pitches a service that can match consumers with the appropriate technician in a little over an hour, any day of the week.

The company has built a network of 2,500 technicians in the top 50 cities in the United States, and will provide same-day installation and repair of over 200 products.

Some things the company’s technicians can service include smartphones, televisions, antennas, garage door openers, and smart home devices like voice-activated speakers, video doorbells, keyless locks, AI cameras, thermostats and security systems.

It’s the full circle of consumer electronics crap.

“As consumers depend on electronic devices for every aspect of daily life, the world needs a new service model,” said Eyal Ronen, Puls co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “No one should have to drive across town and stand in line to speak to an expert, or wait hours at home for a local repair van to show up.”

With the new funding, the company said it’s poised to take a large chunk of the $50 billion in home automation services around the world. By the end of 2018, the company predicts that there will be 11 billion connected devices globally (although that statistic likely includes connected equipment in factories and other technologies related to the internet of things that may not have a place in the home).

The company’s projections are also based on a forecast that predicts an average household will have 50 connected devices (to which I can only say… bless their hearts).

“We’re delighted to have Temasek leading this round,” said Ronen in a statement. “As investors in global online leaders, Temasek brings incredible expertise to our board. It’s a huge vote of confidence in our vision, team and execution, as we accelerate our direct-to-consumer business and expand strategic partnerships with big name retailers, insurance companies, and hardware OEMs.”

Puls raised a $25 million round last year as it completed its rebrand from the cell phone servicing business it had been running under the Cell Savers brand.

“You can’t hack what isn’t there,” Very Good Security co-founder Mahmoud Abdelkader tells me. His startup assumes the liability of storing sensitive data for other companies, substituting dummy credit card or Social Security numbers for the real ones. Then when the data needs to be moved or operated on, VGS injects the original info without clients having to change their code.

It’s essentially a data bank that allows businesses to stop storing confidential info under their unsecured mattress. Or you could think of it as Amazon Web Services for data instead of servers. Given all the high-profile breaches of late, it’s clear that many companies can’t be trusted to house sensitive data. Andreessen Horowitz is betting that they’d rather leave it to an expert.

That’s why the famous venture firm is leading an $8.5 million Series A for VGS, and its partner Alex Rampell is joining the board. The round also includes NYCA, Vertex Ventures, Slow Ventures and PayPal mafioso Max Levchin. The cash builds on VGS’ $1.4 million seed round, and will pay for its first big marketing initiative and more salespeople.

“Hey! Stop doing this yourself!,” Abdelkader asserts. “Put it on VGS and we’ll let you operate on your data as if you possess it with none of the liability.” While no data is ever 100 percent unhackable, putting it in VGS’ meticulously secured vaults means clients don’t have to become security geniuses themselves and instead can focus on what’s unique to their business.

“Privacy is a part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. We should be able to build innovative applications without sacrificing our privacy and security,” says Abdelkader. He got his start in the industry by reverse-engineering games like StarCraft to build cheats and trainer software. But after studying discrete mathematics, cryptology and number theory, he craved a headier challenge.

Abdelkader co-founded Y Combinator-backed payment system Balanced in 2010, which also raised cash from Andreessen. But out-muscled by Stripe, Balanced shut down in 2015. While transitioning customers over to fellow YC alumni Stripe, Balanced received interest from other companies wanting it to store their data so they could be PCI-compliant.

Now Abdelkader and his VP from Balanced, Marshall Jones, have returned with VGS to sell that as a service. It’s targeting startups that handle data like payment card information, Social Security numbers and medical info, though eventually it could invade the larger enterprise market. It can quickly help these clients achieve compliance certifications for PCI, SOC2, EI3PA, HIPAA and other standards.

VGS’ innovation comes in replacing this data with “format preserving aliases” that are privacy safe. “Your app code doesn’t know the difference between this and actually sensitive data,” Abdelkader explains. In 30 minutes of integration, apps can be reworked to route traffic through VGS without ever talking to a salesperson. VGS locks up the real strings and sends the aliases to you instead, then intercepts those aliases and swaps them with the originals when necessary.

“We don’t actually see your data that you vault on VGS,” Abdelkader tells me. “It’s basically modeled after prison. The valuables are stored in isolation.” That means a business’ differentiator is their business logic, not the way they store data.

For example, fintech startup LendUp works with VGS to issue virtual credit card numbers that are replaced with fake numbers in LendUp’s databases. That way if it’s hacked, users’ don’t get their cards stolen. But when those card numbers are sent to a processor to actually make a payment, the real card numbers are subbed in last-minute.

VGS charges per data record and operation, with the first 500 records and 100,000 sensitive API calls free; $20 a month gets clients double that, and then they pay 4 cent per record and 2 cents per operation. VGS provides access to insurance too, working with a variety of underwriters. It starts with $1 million policies that can be much larger for Fortune 500s and other big companies, which might want $20 million per incident.

Obviously, VGS has to be obsessive about its own security. A breach of its vaults could kill its brand. “I don’t sleep. I worry I’ll miss something. Are we a giant honey pot?,” Abdelkader wonders. “We’ve invested a significant amount of our money into 24/7 monitoring for intrusions.”

Beyond the threat of hackers, VGS also has to battle with others picking away at part of its stack or trying to compete with the whole, like TokenEx, HP’s Voltage, Thales’ Vormetric, Oracle and more. But it’s do-it-yourself security that’s the status quo and what VGS is really trying to disrupt.

But VGS has a big accruing advantage. Each time it works with a clients’ partners like Experian or TransUnion for a company working with credit checks, it already has a relationship with them the next time another clients has to connect with these partners. Abdelkader hopes that, “Effectively, we become a standard of data security and privacy. All the institutions will just say ‘why don’t you use VGS?'”

That standard only works if it’s constantly evolving to win the cat-and-mouse game versus attackers. While a company is worrying about the particular value it adds to the world, these intelligent human adversaries can find a weak link in their security — costing them a fortune and ruining their relationships. “I’m selling trust,” Abdelkader concludes. That peace of mind is often worth the price.

Spotinst, the startup that helps companies purchase and manage excess cloud infrastructure capacity, announced a hefty $35 million Series B today led by Highland Capital.

Existing investors Leaders Fund, Intel Capital and Vertex Ventures also participated. Today’s round brings the total investment to over $52 million.

Cloud infrastructure vendors like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform run massive data centers to have enough capacity at any given moment to respond to customer demand. That means there are always going to be some machines sitting idle. To make use of this excess capacity, the vendors offer deep discounts of up to 80 percent, but there’s a catch.

If the vendor needs that virtual machine at any given moment, the discount customers are going to get kicked off. That leaves developers wary of putting anything critical on the discounted servers, no matter how much they are saving.

That’s where Spotinst comes in. “With machine learning and artificial intelligence, Spotinst can predict trends of availability. We know how long an instance will live and we can smoothly move our customers from one instance to another, allowing them to run complex or mission critical applications,” Spotinst co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar told TechCrunch.

He sees the two trends of developers moving toward serverless and containerization really helping to drive his business growth. The company announced support for Lambda, AWS’s serverless product, last fall and they are also seeing a big rise in the use of containers. “What we’ve seen in the past six months is that our containers offering is growing exponentially month over month. And as customers are deploying containers we’re able to run them on excess capacity, and save them huge amounts of money,” he explained.

Shachar is clear that they are not offering a brokerage service here. Instead, his customers sign up for Spotinst as a cloud service, and his company makes money by taking a percentage of the money customers save by using this spot capacity.

The company began by working with AWS spot instances, but has since expanded its market to include Google and Microsoft extra capacity as well. In the future, depending on their requirements, customers could potentially move across clouds seamlessly if they wish, moving to wherever the best available price is at any given moment, using Spotinst to manage the transitions. While that’s not something they offer now, it is on the roadmap, he says.

It’s worth noting that just yesterday, VMware bought CloudHealth Technologies, a company that helps customers manage a multi-cloud environment from a single console. Shachar acknowledges that a company like his could be also be an attractive target for a large company, but he and his co-founders are only looking toward building the business and continuing to improve the product.

The company currently has 100 employees, but with the additional investment, Shachar expects to double that in the next year between their U.S. office in San Francisco and their engineering office in Tel Aviv.

As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.

The new Firefox Public Data Report will include information about yearly and monthly active users, how many hours per day those users spend with Firefox, how long it takes users to upgrade to the latest version, how many Firefox users install add-ons, which add-ons are the most popular and more. That data can be segmented by region and by the top 10 countries where Firefox is most popular.

The data that’s available in the report today goes back just over a year and Mozilla plans to update the site at least once per week. Mozilla stresses that this data doesn’t come from some kind of real-time monitoring system but that it’s aggregated and anonymized data from a subset of its users. Indeed, if you are a Firefox user, you can simply go to about:telemetry and see what data is sent to Mozilla.

You can find a few examples of what kind of data Mozilla is publishing in the gallery below.

[gallery ids="1699818,1699819,1699820,1699822"]

Right now, these new reports only focus on desktop users. Mozilla noted that getting data from mobile users is a bit harder, but that it plans to include data from mobile users in the next version of this tool. That hardware report hasn’t been updated since May, though.

This launch builds upon another Firefox data project at Mozilla that launched about two years ago, the Firefox Hardware Report, which provides some insights into what processors and graphics card Firefox users use, for example.

Africa has been one of the least-developed regions globally when it comes to technology and being on the less advanced side of the so-called digital divide. But with a huge population and a set of nations whose economies are rapidly changing, we are seeing a significant knock-on effect in tech. Today, one of the more interesting startups, in the area of financial services, is announcing some funding that underscores that trend.

Paystack, a Stripe-like startup out of Lagos that provides online payment facilities to merchants and others by way of an API and a few lines of code, is announcing that it has raised $8 million in a Series A round of funding. The company is active today in Nigeria, where its payment API integrates with tens of thousands of businesses, and in two years it has grown to process 15 percent of all online payments; and the plan is to both continue to growing in its home country, as well as expand to more, starting with Ghana.

I describe Paystack as “Stripe-like”, and in an interesting twist, the round is being led by none other than Stripe itself — a mark not just of how the latter (once a YC startup itself) is eyeing up like-minded global founders and businesses as it continues to grow, but also how Stripe understands the challenges of breaking into a region like Africa, and therefore sees an opportunity to work with and support those who are.

“The Paystack founders are highly technical, fanatically customer oriented, and unrelentingly impatient,” says Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, in a statement. “We’re excited to back such people in one of the world’s fastest-growing regions.”

“It takes a lot of local nuances to build for African businesses,” said Shola Akinlade, the CEO of Paystack who co-founded the company with Ezra Olubi (who is the CTO) and are pictured above. “Paystack seems to be the only one doing this.”

In 2016, Paystack became the first startup from Nigeria to enter Y Combinator, and the incubator is doing some follow-on investing in this round. Other strategic investors in this Series A include Visa and the Chinese online giant Tencent, parent of WeChat and a plethora of other services. (Tencent also invested in Paystack’s previous round: the startup has raised $10 million to date.)

Stripe scored a big win in financial services in the West when it developed a very quick and easy way of integrating payments into any app or website, taking what used to involve a lot of integration and negotiation and reducing it into a few lines of code. It came just at a time when apps were starting to take off, and people were coming around to feeling more comfortable about making financial transactions online, as long as they were easy to do.

Paystack has followed a similar template, albeit much more localised.

Nigeria is one of the biggest economies in Africa and the largest in the sub-Saharan region, but even so, it is only just getting the ball rolling on digitising commerce. There have been other payment providers operating in the market — Interswitch being perhaps the biggest — but Akinlade describes Paystack’s focus as a more modern take on payments. Specifically, its focus is on integrating the wide range of payment options that Nigerians (and soon, those in other countries in Africa) use both to accept payments and make them and making each of them equally easy to use.

Ease of use belies the fact that the list of payment options across Africa is long and fragmented. Paystack makes it possible to make and take payments using payment cards, which is the norm in many Western markets, but also bank transfers, as well as a number of payment routes that have arisen out of the fact that many people are “unbanked” — that is, without bank accounts or credit histories built by using payment cards.

These include mobile money services, which essentially turn a user’s mobile calling account into a place to store and pay out money; and USSD-based services, which use an even more basic part of a phone’s communications infrastructure to send messages and money (USSD has been using by a number of other providers looking to provide more connectivity in emerging markets).

These newer routes tend to be more localised, but are also some of the most important to have in a payments service. According to the World Bank, mobile money is the fastest-growing route to financial inclusion across Africa: while the share of adults with bank accounts in sub-Saharan Africa has remained flat, the number of those using mobile money have increased by over 20 percent.

Integrating these options involves Paystack not only working with all major banks, but all major mobile carriers to cover the range of payment methods.

It’s a long list of potential partners, but one that the Paystack founders have been working with for more than just two years.

Akinlade, who had studied computer science at university, worked first for Heineken for two years before he “got bored” and decided to strike out as an entrepreneur.

His first stab was another “clone” of sorts: it was an emerging market version of Dropbox called Precurio, which grew to have over 200,000 customers. Some of those were Nigerian banks, who started to reach out to ask if Akinlade could help them with software projects. In doing so, he spotted a big gap in the market to build a startup around e-commerce payments covering multiple banks and multiple other players in the payments chain. “I quickly realised that payments here were not the same as in the US and UK,” he said.

Building a product that knits together a number of disparate services  those relationships is not only more challenging for those less familiar with the landscape, but potentially something that they are less interested in doing on their own when the market remains still relatively small. Akinlade said that the total amount processed monthly at Paystack is now at over $20 million — which in larger global terms is still a very small amount of money, and even less so when you consider that what Paystack makes on those transactions is just 1.5 percent.

Still, as the economy gets further up to speed, it’s a region that the big financial services businesses of the world cannot overlook.

“Africa is central to Visa’s long-term growth strategy, especially when you consider how cash is still a primary payment option for millions on the continent,” says Otto Williams, head for strategic partnerships, fintechs and ventures for Visa in Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA), in a statement. “Our investment in Paystack aligns with the kind of investments we look for – those that will help extend our reach into the global commerce ecosystem as it changes and grows, and that will provide mutually beneficial business opportunities.”

Not only is the economy slowly growing, but tech times are most definitely changing, too. Now there have been around nine startups out of Nigeria that have gone through YC. That’s probably still proportionately too few, considering the wider opportunity and number of developers across Africa, but it is a start.

 

While several tech giants have found themselves in President Trump’s crosshairs since he took office, he has just unleashed what looks to be his most sustained attack on Google to date — firing off a couple of tweets at ~5.30am Washington DC time to rail against what he claims is algorithmic bias in the results the search engine serves up if someone types in “Trump News”.

No, the president did not use the four-syllable word “algorithmic”. But presumably he hadn’t even inhaled his first Coke of the day yet.

In his rage tweets, Trump makes the specific allegation that “96% of results on “Trump News” are from National Left-Wing Media”, without citing his source for the claimed datapoint. He then makes the further unsubstantiated claim that: “Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good.”

The Guardian suggests the 96% claim is a reference to an article posted at the weekend by the website PJ Media whose self-described “not-scientific” study of the top 100 Google News results for the search term “Trump” apparently suggested “a pattern of bias against right-leaning content”.

Trump ends the pair of tweets with a warning that the “situation will be addressed” — without specifying exactly what he plans to do. Which is pretty much trademark Trump Twitter policy-on-the-hoofing. Even as the wider political context around his administration, with whispers of impeachment in the air, implies that any loud public complaints by Trump about negative headlines related to himself are an attempt to distract attention from the legal hot waters now boiling around him. But whatevs.

Here are the tweets in all their rage-filled glory:

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Ironically, testing out a search for “Trump News” after Trump’s Google flaming tweets, I was served the below result, with the well-known right wing news organization Fox News bagging the very first result in the Top Stories slot, so er… 

It’s unclear whether Trump is aware that Google search results can vary depending on the individual doing the searching. And, well, if Trump is seeing lots of bad news about himself (when he searches for news about himself) let’s just say we’re sure that Freud would have had a field day unpicking the knotted implications of Trump having such navel-gazing obsession with news sources he continually professes to hate and claims are “fake”. But, again, whatevs.

Of course most of what Trump is claiming here is flagrant nonsense — especially as his cancerous catchphrase of ‘fake news’ gets liberally slapped on anything he disagrees with, regardless of whether it’s true or not.

But one thing he’s saying is more or less true: Google is arguably “controlling what we can & cannot see”, given the company has a dominant share of the search market in the West (and a massively dominant one in Europe), and that most Internet users will never click beyond page one of the search results it serves. Or even browse beyond the top few results.

So, essentially, the hierarchies of information that Google’s algorithms create can and do surface or sediment information. Or, in other words, if it’s not on page one of Google it’s barely there.

Another example of Google’s power over what can and cannot be seen: In Europe, in recent years, the company now selectively de-indexes certain search results related to individuals on request (after it has reviewed a request and made a decision), in order to comply with a legal ruling by the EU’s top court (the so-called ‘right to be forgotten‘) — making it less likely that a specific data-point about a non-public individual will be broadly visible in the region.

The fact that a single company has such power over the accessibility of information (and potential to shape opinion) should concern us.

Especially as Google’s algorithmic engines are proprietary black boxes and there is no or little independent oversight of whether its information shaping is fair or even appropriate. (Again in Europe the company has been charged with promoting its own products in shopping related searches over and above rivals — and has had to make changes to the product search results it displays to comply with the antitrust ruling, though it disputes and is legally appealing the regulator’s decision.)

So Trump has at least correctly identified that Google can and does wield huge power via the popularity of its information retrieval platform.

Even as the claim he’s also selectively, self-interestedly amplifying — i.e. ‘96% biased’ — is entirely unsubstantiated, having been based on a single non-scientific survey carried out by an American conservative news blog. So judge appropriately.

Above that, the notion that any commercial company in the West, let alone one so prominent and mainstream as Google, would knowingly and systematically embed political bias into its algorithms to make them less useful for a very large swathe of its potential users is, frankly, ridiculous.

If anything, tech platforms tend to have the opposite problem; They serve up too tightly personalized stuff, risking shrinking users’ ideological horizons by feeding people a political mono-diet. (Which may help explain the Trump phenomenon itself, but I digress.)

Nonetheless, the president has continued to make tech firms his Twitter punchbags. Just last month, for example, he accused Twitter of “shadow banning” Republican users. A claim the company quickly denied, writing: “We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.”

Safe to say, as the headlines about Trump get worse Trump’s rage will grow and the tweets will surely flow.

Simple, an Australia-based business that operates a platform for managing marketing strategies and campaigns, has pulled in $17 million to expand its business in the U.S. and other global markets.

The round was led by BBRC Private Equity, the fund from multi-millionaire retailer Bretty Blundy, with participation from existing backer Perle Ventures.

Unlike most marketing services out there, Simple doesn’t involve itself in execution. It instead is “upstream planning,” which essentially means it helps teams to manage their campaigns by focuses on areas like planning, budgeting, organization, analysis and more. The primary idea is to increase efficiency and value for money from marketing, particularly across the complexity of large and global organizations.

Simple recently tie-up with Microsoft over the launch of its new ‘intelligent market platform’ which, unveiled at Microsoft’s Inspire partners’ conference in Las Vegas, is built on top of the tech giant’s Azure platform. It offers integrations with services like Microsoft Office that are handy for organizations that find themselves working deep in the Microsoft services burrow.

Simple CEO Aden Forrest told TechCrunch in an interview that Simple’s clients span a range of industries, including areas like banking, retail, insurance, gambling. That base is global, but Forrest wants to push on to exploit further opportunities in regional markets.

“This round is about how can we can take what we’ve learned and scale it up and take it global,” he said. “We feel there’s a phenomenal opportunity to take what we’ve learned and push it up through Asia, into the U.S. and across Europe.”

Forrest, who past stints include a spell as head of enterprise sales at Salesforce Australia/New Zealand, said Australia will remain HQ and tech center for Simple, but the firm plans to deploy local sales and marketing teams in markets were it spies opportunities to go deeper. That’s likely to include the U.S. for sure, although the company already operates a distributed customer service team to cater to its global clientele.

When a couple of long-established players are competing hard in any given market, one easy way to expand that market is to simply combine forces. That’s what SmartBear did today when it bought Zephyr, a fellow software testing firm with deep reach into the Atlassian Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zephyr gives SmartBear a tool that includes Zephyr for Jira. Jira is the popular issue tracking software from Atlassian favored by many developers. In fact, Zephyr is the top grossing app in the Atlassian Marketplace, boasting over 18,000 teams using the tool to execute over 40 million tests, according to information supplied by the company.

That kind of reach appealed to SmartBear CEO Justin Teague. The company claims the combined organizations will give them one of the most complete software testing product portfolios in the market. “The acquisition of Zephyr will establish SmartBear as a leader in test management and broaden our portfolio of high-impact, easy-to- use tools…,” he said in a statement.

For Zephyr, getting acquired gives them increased reach as a combined company that they simply couldn’t build on their own. “By leveraging the industry expertise and array of SmartBear solutions, our customers will continue to benefit from the tools they know and love, while now being able to solve additional software development challenges related to building, testing, and monitoring software applications across the UI and API layer,” Zephyr CEO Scott Johnson said in a statement. (In other words, their existing customers should have nothing to worry about after the transition.)

SmartBear launched in 2009 and was acquired by Francisco Partners, a private equity firm in May 2017. Leveraging additional players in a market to build more substantial marketshare is a typical private equity strategy after acquiring a company. It’s the two companies are better than one approach.

Zephyr launched in 2007 and has raised $31 million. Investors include Frontier Ventures, Cervin Ventures and WTI.

Blue is about to become a part of the much larger Logitech. For now, however, the company is going to keep focusing on what it does best: creating low-cost USB microphones for novice podcasters. This week, the California company just added another model to the line.

Yeti Nano shrinks the form factor of Blue’s most popular line into something for more economically accessible. At $99, the new microphone slots in between the Snowball ($49/$69) and the new and even smaller Raspberry ($199).

The price is certainly right on the new microphone. And the design language is great — it really does look exactly like a scale model of the Yeti. There’s a headphone input, so you can hear yourself in real-time and a swiveling stand to position it as you see fit. There are also buttons to toggle between pickup patterns so you can switch between single or omnidirection modes, in situations where you’re going for more of a room tone.

Blue sent me a microphone to try out, and honestly, I have to say I’m pretty disappointed with the thing. The sound quality is tinny and generally lacking, compared to other models I’ve used, including the smaller Blue Raspberry.I’d recommend going with the tried and true Snowball, if you don’t mind a larger model. If portability is the main thing, the Raspberry’s a solid enough selection for sticking in a backpack.

The Shadow Grey model is available now from various retailers. Vivid Blue, Red Onyx and Cubano Gold models are coming soon.