Month: August 2018

Facebook this morning announced the launch of a new set of educational resources focused on helping young people think critically and behave thoughtfully online. The Digital Literacy Library, as the new site is being called, is aimed at educators of children aged 11 to 18, and address topics like privacy, reputation, identity exploration, security, safety, wellbeing and more.

There are 830 million young people online, the company notes, which is why digital literacy is necessary. We’ve seen the results what can happen when people are lacking in digital literacy – they’re susceptible to believing hoaxes, propaganda and fake news is true; they risk their personal data by using insecure apps; they become addicted to social media and its feedback loop of likes; they bully and/or are bullied; and they don’t take steps to protect their online reputation which can have real-world consequences, to name a few things.

However, many teachers today lack the educational resources that would allow them to teach a digital literacy program in their classroom, or in other less formal environments.

Facebook says the lesson plans in the new library were drawn from the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where they were released under a Creative Commons license. In other words, the company itself did not design the lessons, it’s only making them more broadly available by placing them on Facebook where they can be more easily discovered and used.

The lessons themselves are based on over 10 years of academic research from the Youth and Media team, who also took care to reflect the voices of young people from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, geographies, and educational levels, Facebook says. Initially, the 18 lessons are launching in English, but they’ll be soon available in 45 additional languages.

For educators, the lessons are ready-to-use as free downloads, and state how long each lesson will take. Outside the classroom, parents could use them to teach children at home, or they could be used in after-school programs. Teachers can also modify the lessons’ content to meet their own needs, if they choose.

The courses will be made available in Facebook’s Safety Center and Berkman Klein’s Digital Literacy Resource Platform for the time being. Facebook says it’s also working with other non-profits worldwide to adapt the lessons and create new ones.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has offered educational resources aimed at young people.

The company also recently launched its Youth Portal, which provides educational material directly to teens, not their teachers. However, those resources are focused more on Facebook itself, providing guidance on things like how to navigate the service, how to stay secure, and how to understand how people’s data is used. (Arguably, this sort of information is something a large number of adults could use a refresher on, as well.)

In addition, Facebook has begun to roll out educational guidance into its new app, Messenger Kids, aimed at the under-13 crowd. The app encourages children to be kind and respectful online, by promoting empathy and positive messaging through things like the “Messenger Kids Pledge,” kindness stickers, and other in-app challenges.

At the root of all this is the fact that Facebook, along with most social media, has corrupted the way people interact and navigate the online world. And it is now belatedly is waking up to its role and its responsibilities on that front. These large platforms were built by optimistic engineers who for years only saw the positive side of connecting the online world, and not the potentially negative outcomes – like data theft and misuse, fake news, hacking, attempts to disrupt democracy, bullying, targeted harassment, and even genocide. A literacy program could help the next generation of users, but it has arrived too late for many of Facebook’s users.

Below, are the lesson plans’ description, for reference:

Apple has been performing incredibly well on the stock market for the past few days (NASDAQ:AAPL). While Yahoo Finance says that Apple is now worth over $1 trillion, this hasn’t yet happened. The company sent a filing to the SEC with an updated share count.

While everyone thought the magic number was $203.45, it was based on an outdated number. According to the filing, there are 4,829,926,000 Apple shares in circulation. Apple is going to hit $1 trillion when shares are worth $207.043 — so let’s say $207.05.

That’s why I posted a post earlier today claiming that Apple already hit $1 trillion — I’m sorry for the confusion. Shares are currently trading at $205.62. So Apple shares still need to jump by 0.7 percentage point to reach the market capitalization of $1 trillion.

Public companies don’t always have the same number of shares over time. Some companies, such as Apple, frequently buy back some of its own shares. It’s a vote of confidence as it means that you think your shares are going to keep going up in the future. It also reduces the number of outstanding shares, which mechanically increases the value of each share. Executives at bigger companies also get paid in shares. Sometimes, companies also issue new shares to raise capital.

For all these reasons, public companies need to send updated share counts. And it can take a bit of time before websites, such as Yahoo Finance, update their data set. In all cases, you should keep an eye on Apple shares today and see if they hit $207.05.

“I think the mistake everyone made was to think that Stories was a photography product” says Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom. “If you look at all these interactivity features we’ve added, we’ve really made Stories something else. We’ve really innovated and made it our own.”

His version of the ephemeral slideshow format turns two years old today. By all accounts, it’s a wild success. Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, compared to 191 million on Snapchat which pioneered Stories. While the first year was about getting to parity with augmented reality filters and stickers, the two have since diverged. Instagram chose the viral path.

Snapchat has become more and more like Photoshop, with its magic eraser for removing objects, its green screen-style, background changer, scissors for cut-and-pasting things, and its fill-in paint bucket. These tools are remarkably powerful for living in a teen-centric consumer app. But many of these artistic concepts are too complicated for day-to-day Snapping. People don’t even think of using them when they could. And while what they produce is beautiful, they get tapped past and disappear just like any other photo or video.

Instagram could have become Photoshop. Its early photo-only feed’s editing filters and sliders pointed in that direction. Instead, it chose to focus not on the “visual” but the “communication”. Instagram increasingly treats Stories as a two-way connection between creators and fans, or between friends. It’s not just one-to-many. It’s many-to-one as well.

Instagram Stories arrived three years after Snapchat Stories, yet it was the first to let you tag friends so they’d get a notification. Now those friends can repost Stories you tag them in, or public posts they want to comment on. You could finally dunk on other Instagrammers like you do with quote-tweets. It built polls with sliders friends can move to give you feedback about “how ridiculous is my outfit today?” Music stickers let you give a corny joke a corny soundtrack or share the epic song you heard in your head while looking out upon a beautiful landscape. And most recently, it launched the Question sticker so you can query friends through your Story and then share their answers there too. Suddenly, anyone could star in their own “Ask Me Anything”.

None of these Instagram tools require much ‘skill’. They’re designed not for designers, but for normal people trying to convey how they feel about the world around them. Since we’re social creatures, that perception is largely colored by their friends or audience. Instagram lets you make them part of the Story. And the result is a product that grabs non-users or casual users and pulls them deeper into the Instagram universe, exposing people to the joy of creating something the last until tomorrow, not always forever.

Snap has been trying to get more interactive too, adding tagging for instance. It’s also got new multiplayer filter games called Snappables you play with your face and can then post the footage to your Story. But again, they feel overly involved and therefore less accessible than where Instagram is going.

Mimicking Photoshop reinforces the idea that everything has to look polished. That’s the opposite of what Systrom was going for with the launch of Instagram Stories. “There will always be an element in any public broadcast system of trying to show off” Systrom explains. “But what I see is it moving in the other direction. GIF stickers allow you to be way more informal than you used to be. Type mode means now people are just typing in thoughts rather than actually taking photos. Things like Superzoom with the TV effect or the beats — it’s anything but polished. If anything it’s a joke. Quantitatively people feel comfortable to post way more stories than to feed.”

Systrom is about to go on paternity leave, and has been using Stories from friends with kids to collect ideas about what to do with his own. When asked if he thinks Stories produces less of the dangerous envy inherent in the feeds of social media success theater we passively consume, Systrom tells me “Just personally, it’s inspired me rather than it’s created any sense that I’m missing out”. Of course, that might be related to the fact that his life of attending the Met Gala and bicycling through Europe doesn’t leave much to envy.

The sense of comfort powered by Instagram purposefully pushing Stories to diverge from its classy feed has contributed to its explosion in popularity — not just for Stories but Instagram as a whole. It now has over 1 billion users, in part driven by it introducing Stories to developing countries Snapchat never penetrated.

“Remember how at the launch of Stories, I said it was a format and we want to make it original? And there was a bunch of criticism around us adopting this format? My response was this is a format and we’re going to innovate and make it our own. The whole idea there is to make it not just about photography but about expression. It’s a canvas for you to express yourself.” Stories emerged as how Instagram expressed itself too, allowing it to break away from the staid perfection of the feed, becoming something much more goofy.

Last week when Facebook announced its revenue was decelerating as users shifted attention from its lucrative News Feed to Stories where it’s still educating advertisers, its share price tanked, deleting $120 billion in market cap. Yet imagine how much further it would have dropped if Systrom hadn’t been willing to put his pride aside, take Snapchat Stories, and give it the Insta spin? Instead, it led the way to Facebook now having over 1.1 billion (duplicated) daily Stories users across its apps. The poises Facebook and Instagram to earn a ton off of Stories.”

“There was a long time that desktop advertising worked really really well but we knew the future was mobile and we’d have to go there. There was some short term pain. Everyone was worried that went wouldn’t monetize as well” Systrom remembers. “We believe the future is the combination of feed and Stories, and it just takes time for Stories to get to the same level or even exceed feed.”

So does he feel vindicated in that once-derided decision to think of Stories not as Evan Spiegel’s property but a medium meant for everyone? “I don’t wake up everyday trying to feel vindicated. I wake up everyday trying to make sure our billion users have amazing stuff to use. I just feel lucky that they love what we produce” Systrom says with a laugh. “I don’t know if that fits your definition of vindicated.”

The Surface Go is an odd thing. Not because of the device itself, so much as how Microsoft ultimately arrived at it. The tablet was reverse-engineered, the low-end addition to the premium Surface line.

What the company ultimately arrived at was the closest thing it’s offered to an iPad/iPad Pro competitor, to date. For its part, however, Microsoft is positioning the product as a portable, low-cost alternative to its other Surface devices.

It’s a bit of branding confusion, to be sure, but that’s never stopped Microsoft before. That’s basically the Surface line in a nutshell. The company has the resources and infrastructure to throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks — and for the most part, that’s worked well with the Surface line, which has effectively transformed from proof of concept into the Windows flagship line.

In a lot of ways, the Surface Go is a strange sort of in-between device. The form factor is essentially that of the Surface Pro, shrunk down to 10 inches, with rounded corners. The smaller footprint comes with some sacrifices, of course, including the dual-core Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y, which is a notable downgrade from the Intel Core m3/i5/i7 found on the Surface Pro. The battery, rated at nine hours, is smaller than the one you’ll find on the iPad Pro.

The port situation more closely mirrors what you’ll find on a tablet, versus a full-fledge computer, with a single USB-C, a headphone jack and the proprietary Surface Connect port. That latter bit seems like an odd choice, given the limited real estate here (not to mention the fact that you can charge via USB-C), but Microsoft’s clearly as interested in keeping existing Surface owners on board here as it is converting new ones. Part of that means making sure the system is backward-compatible with old accessories, for the multiple Surface-owning power users out there.

The keyboard is an additional $99 on top of the $400 asking price. Pretty standard with this sort of device, really. It’s a sort of Sophie’s Choice for manufacturers when building these kinds of convertibles — go the full swiveling keyboard, à la the Pixelbook, or add it as an accessory.

The latter decision is better for those devices primarily intended to be used in slate mode, but ultimately keyboard cases just aren’t going to provide the same manner of typing experience as a devoted keyboard. The Surface line has long offered one of the best keyboard cases around, but it’s just not a proper replacement if you plan on using the product primarily as a word processing device. That said, it still beats the hell out of attempting to file a story using a touchscreen.

I’ve been using it a bit in meetings and still finding it tough to get used to it. The keys are soft and necessarily lack the sort of tactile impact I’m used to on my full-time laptop. There’s also the inarguable point that these kinds of devices really remove the “lap” part from the laptop equation.

Microsoft has press shots of happy users sitting cross-legged, with the device and keyboard nestled warmly in their lap. During my initial briefing, I asked a rep whether he thought that was a reasonable use case. He gingerly attempted to recreate the pose — which is to say, it’s possible, but not particularly convenient.

You end up tensing your muscles so the whole thing doesn’t split apart. This is one category where Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S4 has the competition beat. Seems it would be easy enough to build a keyboard case that sticks together after a good jostle — but then, I’ve never attempted to make one myself.

The lovely fabric covers that have been a hallmark of the service line are here on the 10-inch model. That, coupled with multiple matching peripherals, means the Go can pass as a pretty decent fashion accessory to slip in and out of a hand bag. The device itself is a bit on the chunky side, however, which has also been something of a hallmark with the Surface line.

Windows 10 S is back, as well. The locked-down operating system has certainly found its share of critics, but Windows RT it’s not. There are a bunch of implications for using the hobbled version of Microsoft’s operating system, but chief among them is the barring of apps not downloaded from the Windows app store. That puts the device at a decided disadvantage against the iPad, which apparently boasts around 1.3 million apps optimized specifically for the tablet form factor.

The tweaks are in place for security purposes, so the systems with lower specs can handle the workload — the latter certainly makes sense here.

More than anything, however, the inclusion betrays Microsoft’s broader intentions with the device. The 10 S has two distinct targets: students and older, less-savvy users who don’t want to be bogged down with the nuances and demands of a fully open operating system.

The first category is the tell here. Microsoft has been struggling to find the right way back into education in this post-Chromebook world. Like so much of what the company does, it’s taken an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach that includes everything from the $1,000 Surface Laptop to a new category of $189 third-party devices. There’s a lot to be said for that approach. After all, no two schools/students/teachers are alike. When you’ve got the scope and resources of a Microsoft, why the heck not just make something for as broad a user base as possible?

In the realm of education, the Surface Go represents a kind of middle-ground. It’s somewhere between a Chromebook and full-fledged tablet. Like the vast majority of convertibles, it doesn’t get the balance exactly right. But, then, no device is going to be everything to everyone. The price point will certainly make it too costly for a lot of classrooms, however.

For those schools who prefer to go with the Windows camp, due to its more mainstream usage beyond the classroom, it will ultimately be difficult to justify the premium when you can go out and pick up a Windows 10 S laptop for $189. After all, the main selling point of convertible functionality is the ability switch to tablet mode for entertainment purposes. Kids these days have enough distractions already, right?

What Windows does afford users that you won’t get on the iPad, however, is the ability to switch over into desktop mode. Apple’s mobile-only tablet approach is a pretty big roadblock toward becoming a full-fledge laptop replacement. That’s precisely why Samsung is going all-in on DeX desktop mode with the Tab S4.

Windows can do both, which is why these sorts of convertible devices are the sweet spot for Microsoft’s operating system. The company has also brought some nice additions over the years, like Windows Hello face login and a number of features for Pen input. Microsoft’s magnetic pen snaps onto the side of the device magnetically, which is good news for those of us who regularly misplace peripherals.

Of course, Microsoft’s always had some of the strongest productivity offerings around. Given the relative limitations here, however, I don’t think I’d want to rely on the Surface Go (or any other tablet-first convertible, for that matter) as my primary work device. As a supplemental portable device for the meetings when you don’t want to lug a bigger laptop around, on the other hand, it could certainly make some sense.

It’s easy to see why Microsoft made the Go. Convertibles are a rare bright spot in an otherwise stagnating tablet category. That’s part of what’s made the Surface line something of a surprise hit for the company. It’s hardware cache that the company hopes will finally propel Microsoft into more mainstream tablet success.

And the Surface Go isn’t a bad little device, at the end of the day. At $400, it’s on the pricier side for a tablet, and certain sacrifices have been made for the sake of keeping the price down versus the souped up Surface Pro. And unlike other Surface devices, the Go is less about pioneering a category for Windows 10 than it is simply adding a lower-cost, portable alternative to the mix. As such, the product hits the market with a fair bit of competition. Acer and Lenovo have a couple, for starters, most of which fall below the Go’s asking price.

For Windows devotees looking for something smaller and portable with nice fashion sense, the Go is worth a look. It’s also worth having a look around at the competition. A better deal shouldn’t be too tough to find.

Cisco today announced its intent to buy Ann Arbor, MI-based security firm, Duo Security. Under the terms of agreement, Cisco is paying $2.35 billion in cash and assumed equity awards for Duo.

Duo Security was founded in 2010 by Dug Song and Jonathan Oberheide and went on to raise $121.M through several rounds of funding. The company has 700 employees with offices throughout the United States and in London though the company has remained headquartered in Ann Arbor, MI.

Co-founder and CEO Dug Song will continue leading Duo as its General Manager and will join Cisco’s Networking and Security business led by EVP and GM David Goeckeler.

The acquisition feels like a good fit for Cisco. Duo’s security apparatus lets employees use their own device for adaptive authentication. Instead of issuing key fobs with security codes, Duo’s solution works securely with any device. And within Cisco’s environment, the technology should feel like a natural fit for CTOs looking for secure two factor authentication.

“Our partnership is the product of the rapid evolution of the IT landscape alongside a modernizing workforce, which has completely changed how organizations must think about security,” said Dug Song, Duo Security’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Cisco created the modern IT infrastructure, and together we will rapidly accelerate our mission of securing access for all users, with any device, connecting to any application, on any network. By joining forces with the world’s largest networking and enterprise security company, we have a unique opportunity to drive change at a massive scale, and reshape the industry.”

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2019.

Developing…

A national six-day taxi driver strike in Spain has ended after the government agreed to pass regulation that will allow the country’s autonomous communities to cap the number of private hire vehicle permits within their cities.

The VTC licenses are used by Uber and local ride-hailing rival Cabify to offer professional driver services in the country. So the government’s decision looks likely to limit the size of their businesses in regional markets which choose to uphold the cap.

Previous decisions by European courts have essentially closed down Uber’s p2p (non-professional driver) ride-hailing services in the region. So lobbying cities to deregulate and reform taxi laws in its favor is Uber’s game now.

But it’s a long game, and one that may not work in every market — underlining the drivers behind the company repositioning itself as a multimodal transport platform, after buying its way into e-bikes.

Spain’s Development Ministry issued the news the taxi industry had been pressing for yesterday, in a press release, following a meeting of the National Transport Conference that had been forward as a result of the strikes. It said measures to enable the country’s regional governments to regulate the VTC sector locally, allowing them to put in place their own urban mobility policies, will be implemented in September.

Taxi associations have parked their strike as a result — albeit, making it loud and clear on Twitter that they’ll be returning to keep up the pressure on legislators come September.

It was an attempt by the mayor of Barcelona to pass a law to locally enforce the 1:30 ratio — subsequently blocked by the courts — that triggered the latest strike.

A strike that — as Uber hyperbolically tells it — “paralyzed Spain”.

Of course the reality was rather closer to an inconvenience, and mostly for tourists, given the country has multiple, typically low cost urban public transport options. And locals love to scoot.

Spain’s taxi associations have been holding fierce strike protests for several years, ever since Uber re-entered the market with a licensed service offering — after some of same associations had successfully challenged its p2p service in the Barcelona courts and got UberPop banned.

Taxi drivers denounce Uber and another local ride-hailing player, Cabify, as exploitative and corrupt, and have been applying pressurize on local and national governments to protect their industry.

A judgement from the CJEU at the end of last year, deeming Uber a transport company — and therefore firmly subject to local transport laws — looked like the final nail in the coffin for ride-hailing platforms to circumvent taxi regulations in Europe.

Making lobbying for deregulation and (in the case of Uber) pushing into multi-modal transport options the regional long play for ride-hailing startups. Uber’s e-bikes are heading to Europe this summer.

In Spain the taxi industry’s anger has been focused on failure to uphold a 2015 reversion of a transport law which reinstated an earlier VTC license cap, dating back to 1990, that sets a ration of one VTC per 30 taxis.

However the provision has not been actively enforced, and has seemingly been easy (though not necessarily cheap) for ride-hailing firms to circumvent in practice — with the firms buying up VTC licenses from local operators and recruiting drivers via social media ads and job ad platforms like Jobandtalent.

Reuters reports there are currently 9,000 VTC permits granted to the online services vs 70,000 taxi permits. If the 1:30 ratio were to be upheld it would mean at least 6,600+ fewer permits — so likely thousands of Uber and Cabify contractors being put out of work.

 

VTC association, Unauto VTC, has sought to block attempts to enforce the cap — such as by challenging the Barcelona city authority’s attempt to enforce the ratio last month.

And ride-hailing companies appear to be seeking legal avenues to block the government’s latest move to devolve regulatory powers (for instance an Uber spokesperson pointed us to this report, in Mercado Financiero, which quotes a law professor questioning the constitutional validity of the government’s use of a decree to transfer the competency).

At the same time they are making public noises about wanting to work with the taxi industry.

In a blog post responding to yesterday’s government announcement that VTC regulatory powers would be devolved, Uber holds out an olive branch to taxis, calling for all players in the urban mobility space, private and public, to work together — and arguing that if people are going to leave their cars at home “we must offer them more and more alternatives, not less”.

“If we have learned something these days, we should work together. All together. Because although some insist on presenting this problem as a war, the truth is that it is not so different from the crossroads that all the great cities of the world live,” it writes.

“And at this crossroads, it is in our hands to decide which path we want to take. We can restrict the new mobility alternatives, or we can start working to achieve the objective that we share with the Government, the City Councils, the taxi sector, the VTC and Uber: that fewer private vehicles circulate on our streets every day.”

The company also makes a direct plea to taxi drivers to work with it by backing deregulation of the taxi industry, instead of a cap on the number of VTCs.

“We firmly believe that the solution is not to restrict the VTC, but to make the taxi more flexible so that it can compete better. So you can compete with Uber, not against Uber. Uber and the taxi? It may sound weird, but it is not. We already do it in several cities around the world, and we want to do it in Spain,” it writes.

“It is not about VTC or taxi. It is about that, little by little, we learn to work together to fulfill the objective of all: that you leave your car at home.”

An Uber spokesperson we reached for comment also told us: “The ways people move around cities is changing around the world — we want to partner with all local stakeholders, including taxis, to build better cities in Spain together.”

A spokeswoman for Cabify said the company did not have anything to add beyond its statement last week when it also made a similar plea for stakeholders to unite around a multi-modal urban transport mix — writing then: “We believe that unilateral solutions are not the right solutions to build the mobility of the future and that all players must work together with the administration in order to find the way to ensure the market’s evolution and the protection of all of those who operate in it.”

However the taxi industry’s attacks on the ride-hailing companies include claims that their platforms create precarious ‘jobs’ and underpay their workers.

Neither Uber nor Cabify’s public statements have engaged with that critique.

The most recent taxi strikes started last month in major cities including Spain’s capital Madrid and in the capital of Catalonia, Barcelona.

The strikes were initially scheduled to run for two days but the drivers changed up a gear — announcing a huelga indefinido and going to on spend almost a week blocking streets and making life especially miserable for suitcase-laden summer tourists trying to make trips to and from airports.

There were also violent scenes witnessed on the first day of the strike in Barcelona — which drew widespread condemnation after cars were damaged and there were reports of drivers being attacked and threatened.

The violence was not repeated after appeals for calm, including from one of the main taxi associations organizing the protest action.

This same organization, the Elite Taxi association, has since tweeted that Barcelona taxis have been offering free trips to hospitals to improve relations with citizens.

Shedul, an online booking platform for salons and spas, has raised $5 million in funding. The round is led by Berlin’s Target Global, with participation from New York based FJ Labs. A number of individuals also invested personally, including Tom Stafford (Managing Partner at DST Global), Niklas Östberg (founder and CEO of Delivery Hero), and Hakan Koç (co-founder and co-CEO of Auto1 Group).

Launched in 2015, Shedul’s first product is a free SaaS designed to help salons and spas manage their day-to-day sales and operations. The platform’s features span managing appointment bookings, point-of-sale, customer records, inventory, and financial reporting. A second, more recent offering is the Fresha.com marketplace, and it here where the London-headquartered company generates revenue by charging merchants a small percentage fee on top of bookings.

“We’ve built the world’s best platform for beauty and wellness industry and given it to all businesses globally 100 percent subscription free,” says founder and CEO William Zeqiri. “Good free software has spread virally with users in the industry enabling us to acquire new merchants very fast”.

This has seen Shedul acquire salon and spa operator customers in more than 120 countries, primarily in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada. Around 6 million appointments are booked each month, growing at an average rate of 20 percent month-on-month, while the platform is on track to process $3.5 billion worth of appointment bookings by the end of 2018.

“Leveraging our existing pool of global merchants allowed us to bootstrap the consumer marketplace with a lot of liquidity,” explains Zeqiri. “This created additional value proposition for both merchants and marketplace customers. With our Free SaaS-enabled marketplace business model we are leveraging the critical mass of merchants and marketplace users to scale the platform exponentially”.

Currently in the initial rollout phase, Zeqiri says Fresha.com provides mobile apps for customers and real-time booking integrations through Instagram, Facebook and Google, along with in-app payment processing. It also incorporates intelligent features to help merchants grow revenues. This includes displaying price and availability options based on a customer’s purchase history and the merchant’s projected occupancy.

“With our two-sided Marketplace platform, we’re automating many processes of running a business in the beauty industry with powerful online booking features, marketing tools and access to our consumer marketplace to attract new clients,” adds the Shedul CEO. “This frees up merchants to do what they do best and spend more face time with customers.

“We have salons where 80 percent of their bookings are now made though our online marketplace Fresha.com. Our technology helps businesses optimize their schedule with real-time online availability; in some cases it has increased merchant revenues more than 30 percent”.

Shedul counts its main competitors in the U.S. as MindBody, Vagaro, and StyleSeat. In Europe, the startup competes most directly with marketplace TreatWell.

Meanwhile, Shedul says the new capital will be used for product development and to support the continued rollout of the new marketplace offering. It brings the total amount raised by the company to over $11 million to date and should see it through to an upcoming Series B round.

A mere sprinkling of autonomous vehicles exist in a few dozen cities today. A smattering in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. A dusting in the greater Phoenix area and Pittsburgh. A few drops in Boston, Detroit, Gothenburg, Shenzhen and Singapore.

And none of them—at least not yet—have been deployed as a true commercial enterprise.

While the bulk of this nascent industry fixates on the system of sensors, maps, and AI necessary for vehicles to drive without a human behind the wheel, the founders of startup RideOS are directing their efforts to the day when fleets of self-driving cars hit the streets.

It’s there, where human-driven and automated vehicles will be forced to mingle, that RideOS co-founders Chris Blumenberg and Justin Ho see opportunity. And so do investors.

The company, which has existed for all of 11 months, has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Next47, the venture arm of Siemens. Sequoia, an existing investor, and Singapore-based ST Ventures, also participated in the round.

The Series B round brings the company’s total funding to $34 million. RideOS announced in June that it was partnering with Ford Motor subsidiary Autonomic and had raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital.

In July, RideOS announced it had partnered with ST Engineering to accelerate the deployment of autonomous vehicles in Singapore.

What did they build anyway?

Blumenberg and Ho contend that unless there’s a coordinating layer that can communicate information between all automated vehicles—like say how air traffic control works in aviation—there will be traffic congestion and accidents.

The founders, who met at Uber Advanced Technologies Group, have developed a cloud-based fleet management platform that pulls mapping, traffic, and detection data to suggest to all self-driving vehicles operating in a given geography the safest, most efficient routes. The aim is to be an independent platform that can orchestrate communication between self-driving vehicle services that may be competitors.

RideOS is taking a similar approach to Waze, explained Blumenberg, the company’s CTO and a veteran of Apple. “Except we’re not relying on human input; we’re relying on things that can be detected automatically such as critical interventions or what is captured from computer vision or GPS data.”

Present-day platform

However, RideOS isn’t sitting around for a day when automated vehicles hit the road en masse. The company’s platform is designed to work for human-driven fleets too. RideOS has already signed partnerships with mobility companies, Ho said without naming them.

“We’re working on this grand future, but there are many, many use cases we can support prior to that,” Ho said.

RideOS plans to use the additional funds to expand its services to global transportation markets. It just so happens that a team within Next47 is dedicated to helping startups tap into Siemens’ global network. In other words, RideOS stands to benefit from Siemen’s global footprint and partnerships, in addition to its access to capital.

Next47 will also join the RideOS board and will be integral in guiding RideOS in European transportation markets, the company said.

“There’s a tremendous amount of innovation in AVs at the moment,” Mike Vernal, a new partner at Sequoia Capital who led the company’s Series A round, told TechCrunch. “There’s probably 50, 60,70 teams working on getting a single autonomous vehicle working. But no one is focused on what happens next.”

Musical.ly, the short video app that’s popular among teens and young people, is going away. Kinda.

The app and all user data and accounts is being merged with Toktok, a sister app that’s owned by ByteDance, the Chinese company that acquired Musical.ly for around $1 billion last year.

The switch-over happens today (Thursday) and it should be relatively seamless. Users of Musical.ly will see their app switch to TikTok once they update the app, and they should find their account, videos and personal settings inside the new app as per usual.

One notable new addition is a setting that alerts a user when they have been active in the app for two hours that day. Its addition comes just a day after Facebook added similar ‘well-being’ features to its core social network and Instagram.

ByteDance is making the move to consolidate its audiences on both apps. Four-year-old Musical.ly, which is particularly popular in the U.S., has around 100 million users while TikTok, which was created in 2016 and operates worldwide minus China, claims 500 million monthly active users. In China, the sister product is Douyin, while the company also offers news apps Toutiao in China and TopBuzz across the rest of the world.

“TikTok, the sound of a ticking clock, represents the short nature of the video platform. We want to capture the world’s creativity and knowledge under this new name and remind everyone to treasure every precious life moment. Combining musical.ly and TikTok is a natural fit given the shared mission of both experiences,” said Alex Zhu, co-founder of Musical.ly and Senior Vice President of TikTok, in a statement.

The app merger follows the closure of Musical.ly’s standalone live-streaming app Live.ly in June. That was part of the deal agreed to for the Musical.ly acquisition, and the company directed its users to Live.me, an app that counts ByteDance among its investors.

It makes sense that ByteDance is consolidating its sibling apps since Facebook is stalking out the short video space. The social network giant has tested a Musical.ly style app and just this week we found hints that it is planning to launch “Talent Show,” which would allow users to compete by singing popular songs then submitting their audition for review.

There’s also the revenue side. A global platform plays better for advertisers rather than forcing them to pick either Musical.ly or TikTok, or going through the added rigmarole of working on both.

Can Google’s week get any worse? Less than a day after the revelation that it is planning a censored search engine for China, so comes another: the U.S. firm is said to be developing a government-friendly news app for the country, where its search engine and other services remain blocked.

That’s according to The Information which reports that Google is essentially cloning Toutiao, the hugely popular app from new media startup ByteDance, in a bid to get back into the country and the minds of its 700 million mobile internet users. Like Toutiao, the app would apparently use AI and algorithms to serve stories to readers — as opposed to real-life human editors — while it too would be designed to work within the bounds of Chinese internet censorship.

That last part is interesting because ByteDance and other news apps have gotten into trouble from the government for failing to adequately police the content shared on their platforms. That’s resulted in some app store suspensions, but the saga itself is a rite of passage for any internet service that has gained mainstream option, so there’s a silver lining in there. But the point for Google is that policing this content is not as easy as it may seem.

The Information said the news app is slated for release before the search app, the existence of which was revealed yesterday, but sources told the publication that the ongoing U.S.-China trade war has made things complicated. Specifically, Google executives have “struggled to further engage” China’s internet censor, a key component for the release of an app in China from an overseas company.

There’s plenty of context to this, as I wrote yesterday:

The Intercept’s report comes less than a week after Facebook briefly received approval to operate a subsidiary on Chinese soil. Its license was, however, revoked as news of the approval broke. The company said it had planned to open an innovation center, but it isn’t clear whether that will be possible now.

Facebook previously built a censorship-friendly tool that could be deployed in China.

While its U.S. peer has struggled to get a read on China, Google has been noticeably increasing its presence in the country over the past year or so.

The company has opened an AI lab in Beijing, been part of investment rounds for Chinese companies, including a $550 million deal with JD.com, and inked a partnership with Tencent. It has also launched products, with a file management service for Android distributed via third-party app stores and, most recently, its first mini program for Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging app.

As for Google, the company pointed us to the same statement it issued yesterday:

We provide a number of mobile apps in China, such as Google Translate and Files Go, help Chinese developers, and have made significant investments in Chinese companies like JD.com. But we don’t comment on speculation about future plans.

Despite two-for-one value on that PR message, this is a disaster. Plotting to collude with governments to censor the internet never goes down well, especially in double helpings.