Month: October 2018

Blockchain startup Blockchain shared its roadmap for the coming months. The company is launching a hardware wallet in partnership with Ledger. Blockchain is also launching a new trading platform called Swap — this platform will find the best trading prices across a variety of exchanges and liquidity pools so that you can exchange tokens at a fair price straight from your Blockchain account.

Blockchain is one of the most successful cryptocurrency wallets out there. The company has built a solid user base with a software wallet for Bitcoin, and now also Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.

Compared to traditional exchanges, you remain in control of your private keys. Blockchain can’t access your tokens, hackers can’t empty your wallet if Blockchain gets hacked. Blockchain currently manages 30 million wallets, which represent over $200 billion in transaction volume in the last two years.

But a software wallet isn’t as secure as a hardware wallet. There have been countless of phishing attempts and scams to take over your private keys. That’s why Blockchain is going to release its own hardware wallet, sort of.

The company is partnering with French startup Ledger to release the Blockchain Lockbox. It looks exactly like the Ledger Nano S, but with a Blockchain logo. It’ll feature a customer Blockchain firmware and integrate with Blockchain’s wallets.

Just like Ledger’s own app, you’ll be able to check your balance without connecting your hardware wallet to a computer. But as soon as you want to process a transaction, you’ll need to plug your Ledger wallet to confirm the transaction on the device itself.

It’ll be interesting to see how your Blockchain wallet and the one tied to your Blockchain Lockbox work together. The Lockbox could act as a sort of longterm vault while you could keep some coins on your standard Blockchain wallet for frequent transactions.

As for Swap, Blockchain is building its own trading product. It’s not going to be a separate exchange as the company plans to integrate with multiple sources. Eventually, Blockchain hopes to add support for decentralized exchange protocols so that you can exchange tokens without going through an exchange.

The Blockchain Lockbox will cost $99 and start shipping in November. I hope there will be other versions that support Bluetooth and mobile phones in the future as Blockchain is quite popular on mobile.

Thrills? Chills? iPads? Definitely yes on that last one, at least. The invites are out and the rumors have been pouring in, fast and furious. On Tuesday October 30, the company will be wrapping up hardware season with one final event, hitting all of the points that didn’t quite make it into September’s big iPhone event.

As ever, the company’s attempting to keep a tight seal on the news, but we’ve got plenty of clues to work from here. For starters, there’s the fact that the “special event” is being held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House. It’s a cool space. I saw Jeff Mangum do a bunch of shows there, NBD. 

Also, the company customized dozens (hundreds?) of designs for the event, sending out customized invites to everyone on its list. Thanks Apple! You really know how to make a tech blogger special. The through line, however, was the tag line, “There’s More in the Making.” All of which implies that the company is once again turning the camera back on creative pros.

That certainly comports with the rumors we’ve heard thus far, which largely focus on the iPad Pro and a slew of new MacBooks. So let’s start with the easy one.

A new iPad Pro is all but a given at this point. The device is expected to get a pretty thorough makeover, starting with some key design changes. The biggest news on that front borrows some cues from the last couple of iPhones, dramatically reducing the bezels on all sides (while keeping them present so there’s a place to put your hands).

That’s thanks, in part, to the elimination of the home bottom, a rumored change that would also anticipate the arrival of Face ID to unlock the handset. Inside, the device is expected to get the new A12 chip, which debuted on the iPhone XS. An update to the Pencil also appears to be in the works?

While the entry-level iPad was refreshed at an education event in Chicago this year, rumors of an iPad Mini 5 have been floated by human Apple crystal ball, Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo also predicts, get this, the long-awaited arrival of AirPower. Apple’s three-in-one iPhone/Watch/AirPod charging pad has been MIA since the company debuted it at WWDC of LAST YEAR. The mat is reported to finally be hitting later this year or early next, along with new AirPods. Among other things, the update to the popular Bluetooth earbuds will sport a new case with, naturally, wireless charging and a color indicator on the outside.

And then there are the Macs. Rumors have up to four new Apple computers hitting the stage on the 30th. The Mac Mini and iMac are the frontrunners here, along with the even longer-awaited MacBook Air refresh, sporting a Retina Display, priced at below the standard MacBook.

And for good measure, how about an update on the Mac Pro? Last we heard, it’s coming next year. So why not feature it as a “one more thing” at this creative pro-focused event? The event kicks off Tuesday October 30, at 10AM ET.

In a clever bit of sleuthing by Corin Faife at Breaker, we find that over half of the most popular crypto blogs offer pay-for-play posts including “CEO interviews” that are not labelled as sponsored. Further, many sites offer premium services in which blog writers will repost PR content without a sponsored tag.

As I noted a few weeks ago, the crypto industry is awash with money and “journalists” are taking advantage of the naivety and dishonesty of the marketers tasked with pushing another me-too crypto product in front of an unreceptive audience. Faife received multiple emails like this one asking him to accept payment for placing articles at the places he worked, including Motherboard and Coindesk:

“I know that I would never take money for coverage, nor would any serious journalist. But covering the cryptocurrency industry, I read content on a daily basis that comes from a large number of outlets that I can’t vouch for. If these offers of pay-for-post are out there, can we rely on all of the journalists and editors to turn them down? Can we believe in the objectivity of the coverage we see every day, or has it simply been paid for by a company flush with cash?” he wrote. “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like there was a simple way to find out. As a BREAKER investigation, we’d ask to pay for coverage of an ICO, and see who said yes.”

Faife reached out to 28 cryptocurrency news sites and received 22 definitive responses. Posing as a Russian PR professional, Faife first asked for rates for posting information on the site. When he received a response, he asked if the posts would have a “sponsored” tag, a traditional signal that a post wasn’t explicitly written by the news organization’s reporters.

Of the 22 replies, he received 14 agreeable responses including an offer to remove the sponsored tag for $4,500. This helpful graph shows how quickly sites will abandon journalistic ethics to grab a little cash:

One site, NewsBTC, responded to Faife when pressed about payola:

Contacted about the story, Samuel Rae, CEO of NewsBTC, responded:

“It’s come to my attention that one of our sales team has mistakenly suggested that we could publish content without disclosure that it has been paid for (i.e. a sponsored article) to one of your undercover reporters posing as a PR agent. This is not our policy. The sales executive offering this has been removed from our company active immediately and won’t be dealing with/offering our advertising (or otherwise) services again, be it to a PR company, a reseller or anyone else.”

Pressed to offer evidence that the staff member had been removed, and to explain a second source quoting NewsBTC’s willingness to publish sponsored content without disclosure, Rae declined to give further comment.

The important thing to note here are the sums of money that many of these crypto and ICO organizations will raise thanks to a small investment in media. A solid blog post can move untrained “investors” to buy or sell crypto and tokens in an instant, creating situations ripe for pump and dump schemes where the actual level of interest in a company is clouded by payola. Most sane, mature news organizations see this problem and address it by refusing to accept paid content. That said, times are changing and the lines are blurring between paid and unpaid content. Ultimately, however, the behavior Faife uncovered is implicitly wrong.

There’s an old saying: fools and their money are soon parted. Uneducated and uninformed crypto investors are fools, but they visit crypto sites for a proper education. When news organizations create so-called fake news in order to drum up a little advertising cash, everyone loses.

Samsung’s foldable phone has been floating around the company under the codename “Winner” for some time now. That bit of info isn’t new. It’s understandably taken the company a while to get the thing just right.

After all, we’re talking a new paradigm here in terms of form factor. It’s an exciting process, indeed — and a code a LOT of companies have been trying to crack. According to a new report from Bloomberg, however, some of the heel dragging with regard to decision making on that front is really coming down to the wire here.

The Samsung Developer Conference, happening next month in San Francisco, could be the big debut for the long-awaited product. From the sound of the report, however, we’re going to see little more than a “conceptual image” of the product, rather than a retail device or even prototype.

That means, of course, that we can probably rule out any possibility that the company is going to attempt to jam this thing out for the holidays. The unveil would be more of a check in to let the world know that the product is, indeed, still in the works, and big innovation is just around the corner. Winners don’t just happen overnight, you know.

Screen orientation is reportedly a sticking point here, with the company ultimately opting for a design that opens like an old school flip phone. Samsung is said to be working with Google on a custom version of Android that can handle the new design language — similar to what LG did with Android wear on its new hybrid watch. There are also some concerns around mass production. The phrase “The screen, when it cracks, shatters like dried paper” doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence here.

As reported earlier, Samsung’s next flagship, the S10 will sport an in-screen fingerprint reader (a similar feature is also coming on the soon to launch OnePlus 6T). More surprisingly, the company is also “toying” with dropping the headphone jack on the device. While it’s true the decision feels like an inevitability, Samsung has roundly mocked Apple’s decision for years now.

Amazon is making it easier to use Alexa to do more than launch apps and streaming services on Fire TV devices, but to also navigate once inside them. The company confirmed it quietly launched an update specifically for Fire TV Cube devices that allows device owners to use Alexa instead of a remote control for doing things like making profile selections, moving up and down or left and right, as well as selecting items.

In other words, Fire TV Cube owners can now use Alexa to navigate their Fire TV, with no remote control required.

The feature began its rollout a few weeks ago, the company told TechCrunch, but reached all Fire TV Cube devices around a week ago. AFTVNews was the first spot the new navigation option in the wild. 

According to Amazon, the decision to enable Alexa to take place of a remote control was based on customer feedback.

“We got a deeper understanding that customers want the ability to use their voice to select, browse and navigate through their favorite apps, just like they can on the Fire TV home screen,” a spokesperson said.

To use the feature inside an app, you can say things like “Alexa, go up,” “Alexa, move right,” or “Alexa, scroll down,” then pick what you want to watch by saying “Alexa, select” (or “select this” or “select that.”)

“Think of it like a d-pad for you voice,” the spokesperson added.

The voice navigation is already supported across a range of apps, including Hulu, Netflix, ESPN, HBO Go, HBO Now, FOX Now, FXNow, ABC, FilmStruck, Boomerang, Tubi TV, Red Bull TV, Cartoon Network, Hallmark Movies Now, DramaFever, The CW, and CW Seed, with more being added regularly.

While it could be a bit awkward to use Alexa to browse through many screens of content – the way you do when in search of something to watch – if you’re just moving down a couple of rows to resume a show on Netflix, for example, it’s less of a bother.

The feature could also be useful from an accessibility standpoint, as it provides a way to navigate through the Fire TV interface without having to grip a remote and use your fingers and/or thumb to press buttons. And it could help users with low vision, who have trouble seeing the correct buttons on the remote.

Fire TV Cube hands-free navigation demo, courtesy AFTVnews on YouTube

Unfortunately, the new voice navigation is a Fire TV Cube-only feature for now. The feature was enabled on Fire TV devices over the past few weeks, but a software update began to roll out on October 19 which includes an explanation to end users, so they’re aware of the new functionality. Amazon didn’t say if or when it would arrive on other Fire TV platforms.

After getting EU approval a week ago, today Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, the Git-based code sharing and collaboration service with 31 million developers, has officially closed. The Redmond, WA-based software behemoth first said it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock in June of this year, and after the acquisition closed it would continue to run it as an independent platform and business.

The acquisition is yet another sign of how Microsoft has been doubling down on courting developers and presenting itself as a neutral partner to help them with their projects.

That is because, despite its own very profitable proprietary software business, Microsoft also has a number of other businesses — for example, Azure, which competes with AWS and Google Cloud — that rely heavily on it being unbiased towards one platform or another. And GitHub, Microsoft hopes, will be another signal to the community of that position.

In that regard, it will be an interesting credibility test for the companies.

As previously announced, Nat Friedman, who had been the CEO of Xamarin (another developer-focused startup acquired by Microsoft, in 2016), will be CEO of the company, while GitHub founder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow to work on strategic software initiatives. (Wanstrath had come back to his CEO role after his co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned following a harassment investigation in 2014.)

Friedman, in a short note, said that he will be taking over on Monday, and he also repeated what Microsoft said at the time of the deal: GitHub will be run as an independent platform and business.

This is a key point because there has been a lot of developer backlash over the deal, with many asking if GitHub would become partial or focused more around Microsoft-based projects  or products.

“We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud,” he writes, noting that there will be more tools to come. “We will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love,” he added.

One of those, he noted, will be further development and investment in Paper Cuts, a project it launched in August that it hopes will help address some of the gripes that its developer-users might have with how GitHub works that the company itself hadn’t been planning to address in bigger product upgrades. The idea here is that GitHub can either help find workarounds, or this will become a feedback forum of its own to help figure out what it should be upgrading next on the site.

Of course, the need to remain neutral is not just to keep hold of its 31 million developers (up by 3 million since the deal was first announced), but to keep them from jumping to GitHub competitors, which include GitLab and Bitbucket.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week the normal band was together, with Connie Loizos, Danny Crichton, and myself on hand along with IVP investor Jules Maltz.

We had yet another episode of market turmoil, that was again reversed to some extent before we could even talk about it. Our questions are somewhat simple: when does all this public market mayhem begin to impact private markets? Maltz isn’t worried yet, but we wondered not only about what level of upheaval is enough to change things, but also how we’d be able to tell when things were changing.

But, in keeping with recent news, the venture world is still blasting along. This week we talked about three different billion-dollar-plus rounds, including:

• A new Thrive Capital fund (historical chart here), that tips the scale at $1 billion;
• A new Bessemer fund (historical chart here) that weighs in at $1.85 billion;
• And a new vehicle from Tiger Global (historical chart here) that covers a full $3.75 billion.

That’s a lot of new money charging into tech. If there’s going to be a downturn any time soon, it’s going to be a downturn that can afford a Bently. At least if the venture world keeps writing checks.

But not everything was doom, gloom and new cash. Yes, we had an IPO to go over. Qualtrics, one of the lesser-known but highest-quality companies out of the Utah scene is going public, and we like what we see.

How does solid revenue growth in the nine-figure range, effectively break-even GAAP profits, and strong cash flow sound? We’re guessing it’s going to sound pretty good to public market investors who have paid top dollar recently for tech IPOs that seem to be of, if we may, lesser quality.

WhatsApp is finally adding stickers to its hugely popular messaging app. The company said today that support for stickers will roll out to Android and iOS users over “the coming weeks.”

Initially, the app’s 1.5 billion users will have a seemingly limited selection with the first packs provided by WhatsApp’s own design team and some “other artists” chosen by the company.

However, that’s likely to change in the future since WhatsApp will allow anyone to add stickers that can be used inside the app.

It’s taking an interesting route to enabling that. Would-be sticker artists will need to publish their packs as an app on the Google Play or Apple App Store. From there, users can download the apps and then make use of the packs inside WhatsApp. The company has provided a template that it claims requires “minimal development or coding experience.”

A full guide on the sticker submission process can be found here.

Other messaging apps have taken a different approach.

Line — which pioneered the concept of stickers — takes a very curated approach, with sticker packs approved by the company itself. That walled garden approach has helped it curate the best selection of stickers, many of which are paid. That’s nothing to be scoffed as since Line makes hundreds of millions of dollars from sticker purchases every year.

Telegram has the most open sticker platform. Anyone can make and publish stickers in just minutes, but that leads to its own problems such as plagiarism and differing levels of quality.

Either way, WhatsApp’s move into stickers is very much a Facebook -led move.

The service’s founders — Jan Koum and Brian Acton — have both left the social network under controversial terms, at least according to Acton himself.

Prior to the acquisition deal, both men were very vocally opposed to advertising, games and other functions. They deemed them trivial and believed that they detracted from the core focus of WhatsApp: simple and fast messaging.

At this point, their ethical ship has long since sailed with Facebook introducing features like a business service and ad integrations with Facebook, while there are plans to roll out payments and other features that Koum and Acton would no doubt have railed against. It’s enough to make you vomit over the side of your yacht in the Mediterranean.

We couldn’t put together a conference in Berlin without inviting Valentin Stalf from N26, the co-founder and CEO of one of Europe's most promising startups.

A few years ago, few people would have bet on a startup creating a bank from scratch. N26 now has over 1.5 million clients and a ton of funding.

N26 originally launched at TechCrunch Disrupt London back in 2014. The company didn't win the Startup Battlefield. At the time, the company was called Number26 and they had 0 client. It was probably too early and too risky for our panel of judges. But we wanted to bet on them and give them some stage time.

I’ve covered N26 relentlessly over the years. They let me test the product back when everything was in German. They’re now available all around Europe (including the U.K.). And it always feels great when Startup Battlefield companies graduate and come back to Disrupt as regular speakers.

But N26 also faces a lot of scrutiny — all eyes are on that young company that wants to manage your money. N26 isn’t the only challenger bank either. It’s still fine for now as they’re all converting customers from traditional banks. But at some point, they’ll compete directly with each other.

Up next, N26 wants to expand to the U.S. It’s an interesting market as it’s highly fragmented with inconsistent regulation across all 50 states. And let’s be honest, American banks suck. They’re riddle with fees and a bad customer experience.

If you want to hear how Stalf plans to go to the next level, come to Disrupt Berlin. The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

Valentin Stalf

CEO & Co-founder, N26

Born in Vienna, Valentin studied Accounting & Finance (M.A. HSG) at the University of St. Gallen, Sophia University in Tokyo and the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. During his studies he worked in a number of fields including Strategy Consulting and Investment Banking/Mergers & Acquisition. Before he founded N26 together with Maximilian Tayenthal, he was with the Internet Incubator Rocket Internet as Entrepreneur in Residence and involved in building different companies

Innovusion, a two-year-old startup developing LiDAR sensor technology for autonomous vehicles, has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Chinese firms Nio Capital and Eight Roads Ventures along with U.S.-based F-Prime Capital.

Other seed round and strategic investors joined the round, the startup said.

Nio Capital is the venture arm of Nio, the Chinese electric automaker aiming to compete with Tesla. Nio, which raised $1 billion when it debuted on the New York Stock Exchange in September, has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, although it only sells its ES8 vehicle in China.

Innovusion, which was founded in November 2016, says it will use the funding to scale up its operations, specifically to ramp up production of its light detection and ranging sensor system called Innovusion Cheetah. The company began shipping samples of the system in the second quarter of 2018 and is beginning to take customer orders.

The round of funding will allow the Los Altos, California-based company to expand its R&D team and manufacturing facilities to more quickly develop, market and deliver Innovusion Cheetah LiDAR to customers around the world, according to Junwei Bao, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The company primarily is targeting customers in China and the U.S.

LiDAR is used by companies developing autonomous vehicles to detect and measure objects on the road around them. Most of the companies testing AVs believe LiDAR is an essential sensor required to deploy self-driving vehicles safely on public roads. It’s what has propelled demand for LiDAR and, in turn, an array of startups to pop up and try capture market share away from Velodyne, the long-time dominant leader in the space.