Year: 2018

Apple will allow iOS users to gift in-app purchases, not just paid apps, according to a change to the company’s App Store Review Guidelines spotted this week. This means developers may soon have the tools to allow users to purchase virtual goods or even subscriptions through their app, which can then be gifted to others.

The changes to the company’s App Store guidelines were first discovered on Wednesday by MacRumors, which confirmed both the prior and current wording as follows:

Before: “Apps should not directly or indirectly enable gifting of in-app purchase content, features, or consumable items to others.” 

After: “Apps may enable gifting of items that are eligible for in-app purchase to others. Such gifts may only be refunded to the original purchaser and may not be exchanged.”

It’s unclear at this time how the change will be implemented, from the developer’s side. It’s likely Apple will soon share more information with its developer community to inform them of how to get started.

The move makes a lot of sense, given the App Store’s larger shift away from paid apps towards in-app purchases and more recently, subscriptions, as a way for developers to monetize their businesses.

Gamers would often like to receive in-app currency or other virtual goods as gifts. Meanwhile, subscriptions have become so popular they’re expected to contribute heavily to both iOS and Android app stores’ growth next year. Combined, the app stores are forecast to pass $122 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie.

However, some subset of apps have been abusing subscriptions, by making it difficult for consumers to even use their “free” app without committing to a subscription, or tricking users into free trials that convert in just days, among other things. Apple will need to get a good handle on the bad actors before rolling out in-app gifting of subscriptions more broadly.

After attempting to access his own voice history per GDPR rules, an Alexa user in Germany suddenly found he was able to listen to some 1,700 voice recording from a stranger via a link sent by Amazon. The company is chalking the security snafu up to human error.

“This was an unfortunate case of human error and an isolated incident,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We have resolved the issue with the two customers involved and have taken steps to further improve our processes. We were also in touch on a precautionary basis with the relevant regulatory authorities.”

The Alexa user who was mistakenly given access reported the error to Amazon, but didn’t hear back initially. Amazon deleted the files from the link, but not before he’d downloaded them to his computer. A man and woman can be heard speaking in the recordings, according to the report. A local publication who was given access to the files was able to determine the identity of the user based on details from the recordings.

This is, of course, is precisely the kind of news Amazon is hoping to avoid, just ahead of the holidays. Alexa devices have been big sellers for the last few years, are aren’t likely to slow down any time soon. The increasing prevalence of such connected devices, however, has continued to fuel concerns around these always-on recording (and in some case filming) devices.

Autodesk announced this morning that it intends to buy construction software platform, BuildingConnected for $275 million (net of the startup’s cash on hand). It comes on the heels of the company’s PlanGrid purchase for $875 million just last month.

With BuildingConnected, the company gets a network of 700,000 construction-related professionals that help real estate companies and construction firms find qualified workers for their projects and manage the bidding process. Much like PlanGrid, which took huge paper plan books and digitized them for construction sites, BuildingConnected is doing that with the planning and management part of the construction process.

Prior to a tool like BuildingConnected, companies managed their construction projects in large and complex Excel spreadsheets. This approach offers a way to simplify project management and improve communication between the different project participants.

AutoDesk CEO Andrew Anagnost sees this addition as another key piece in the company’s growing construction management portfolio. “We are investing in digitizing and automating construction workflows. Autodesk’s goal is to connect construction processes across design, build and operations. BuildingConnected has proven to customers the tremendous value in moving from traditional rolodexes, whiteboards, emails and spreadsheets to an easy-to-use digital bidding platform,” he said in a statement.

In fact, BuildingConnected joins other products including Autodesk BIM 360, Revit, AutoCAD, PlanGrid and Assemble Systems.

As with any deal of this sort, BuildingConnected CEO and co-founder Dustin DeVan sees the acquisition as a way to grow faster under the Autodesk corporate umbrella and all of the resources that brings the company. “Together with Autodesk, we can expand the platform’s capabilities and scale globally,” he said in a statement. It likely would have been much harder to do that had they stayed independent.

The deal is expected to close by the end of next month. The company also announced that the PlanGrid acquisition announced last month is now officially closed.

Building Connected was founded in 2012 and has raised over $52 million across 4 rounds, according to Crunchbase data.

Twitter and Facebook announced this morning they’ve removed a combined total of 30 accounts that were working to spread misinformation in Bangladesh, ten days before the country’s general elections. According to Facebook, the company removed nine Facebook Pages and six Facebook accounts that were engaging in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” Twitter said it removed 15 accounts that were doing the same. Both companies said the accounts had government ties.

“Working with our industry peers we identified and suspended a very small number of accounts originating from Bangladesh for engaging in coordinated platform manipulation,” Twitter explained in a tweet. “Based on our initial analysis, it appears that some of these accounts may have ties to state-sponsored actors,” it said.

Facebook, in a blog post, said it was first alerted to the fake news posts, in part, based on a tip from Graphika, a threat intelligence company it works with. The Facebook Pages in question were designed to look like news outlets, and had posted pro-government and anti-opposition content.

The company also confirmed that the activity was linked to individuals associated with the Bangladesh government.

In some example images Facebook shared, you can see the Pages had been designed to look like BBC’s Bangla news service and the online news site bdnews24.com, among others.

In its own reporting, bdnews24 noted the fake news Page had used an almost identical logo, except that it added an extra letter in the URL and the logo.

Facebook didn’t say how many total followers these Pages and accounts had, but claimed one of the Pages had around 11,9000 people tracking its updates. The network of accounts and Pages had spent around $800 USD on Facebook ads, beginning in July 2017 and continuing through last month.

“We are continuously working to uncover this kind of abuse,” wrote Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity Policy,  Nathaniel Gleicher. “Today’s announcement of the removal of these Pages is just one of the many steps we have taken to prevent bad actors from misrepresenting themselves to manipulate civic discourse. We will continue to invest heavily in safety and security in order to keep bad actors off of our platform and provide a place for people to connect meaningfully about the things that matter to them.” he said.

Twitter, meanwhile, said its investigations are still ongoing and its enforcement actions may expand later on.

For now, however, it has taken action on a total of 15 accounts, all of which had a very small number of followers. Most of the accounts had under 50 followers, it noted. Twitter said it will release more information about the accounts when the investigation completes, as it has before.

A recent New York Times investigation into how smartphone-resident apps collect location data exposes why it’s important for industry to admit that the ethics of individuals who code and commercialize technology is as important as the technology’s code itself.

For the benefit of technology users, companies building technologies must make efforts to raise awareness of their potential human risks – and be honest about how people’s data is used by their innovations. People developing innovations must demand commitment from the C-suite – and boardrooms – of global technology companies to ethical technology. Specifically, the business world needs to instill workforce ethics champions throughout company ranks, develop corporate transparency frameworks and hire diverse teams to interact with, create and improve upon these technologies.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Responsible handling of data is no longer a question

Our data is a valuable asset and the commercial insight it brings to marketers is priceless. Data has become a commodity akin to oil or gold, but user privacy should be the priority – and endgame – for companies across industries benefiting from data. As companies grow and shift, there needs to be an emphasis placed on user consent, clearly establishing what and how data is being used, tracking collected data, placing privacy at the forefront and informing users where AI is making sensitive decisions.

On the flip side, people are beginning to realize that seemingly harmless data they enter into personal profiles, apps and platforms can be taken out of context, commercialized and potentially sold without user consent. The bottom line: consumers are now holding big data and big tech accountable for data privacy – and the public scrutiny of companies operating inside and outside of tech will only grow from here.

Whether or not regulators in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and elsewhere act, the onus is on Big Tech and private industry to step up by addressing public scrutiny head-on. In practice, this involves Board and C-Suite level acknowledgement of the issues and working-level efforts to address them comprehensively. Companies should clearly communicate steps being taken to improve data security, privacy, ethics and general practices.

Image courtesy of TechCrunch/Bryce Durbin

People working with data need to be more diverse and ethical

Efforts to harvest personal data submitted to technology platforms reinvigorates the need for ethics training for people in all positions at companies that handle sensitive data. The use of social media and third party platforms raises the importance of building backend technologies distributing and analyzing human data, like AI, to be ethical and transparent. We also need the teams actually creating these technologies to be more diverse, as diverse as the community that will eventually use them. Digital equality should be a human right that encompasses fairness in algorithms, access to digital tools and the opportunity for anyone to develop digital skills.

Many companies boast reactionary and retrospective improvements, to boost ethics and transparency in products already on the market. The reality is that it’s much harder to retrofit ethics into technology after the fact. Companies need to have the courage to make the difficult decision at the working and corporate levels not launch biased or unfair systems in some cases.

In practice, organizations must establish guidelines that people creating technologies can work within throughout a product’s development cycle. It’s established and common practice for developers and researchers to test usability, potential flaws and security prior to a product hitting the market. That’s why technology developers should also be testing for fairness, potential biases and ethical implementation before a product hits the market or deploys into the enterprise.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

The future of technology will be all about transparency

Recent events confirm that the business world’s approach to building and deploying data-consuming technologies, like AI, needs to focus squarely on ethics and accountability. In the process, organizations building technologies and supporting applications need to fundamentally incorporate both principles into their engineering. A single company that’s not careful, and breaks the trust of its users, can cause a domino effect in which consumers lose trust in the greater technology and any company leveraging it.

Enterprises need to develop internal principles and processes that hold people from the Board to the newest hire accountable. These frameworks should govern corporate practices and transparently showcase companies’ commitment to ethical AI and data practices. That’s why my company introduced The Ethics of Code to address critical ethics issues before AI products launch and our customers questions around accountability.

Moving into 2019 with purpose

Before Ram Palaniappan founded Earnin, he developed a system for employees at a payments company called UniRush, where he spent eight years as president. If you needed money before payday, he would write you a check from his checking account and when payday rolled around, employees would reimburse him.

Despite being paid what Palaniappan thought were fair wages, his workers often found themselves in a bind, needing access to wages they couldn’t expect to see in their own bank accounts for days.

“This is such a core pain point,” Palaniappan told TechCrunch. “Over three-fourths of the country live paycheck to paycheck … It’s an issue of fairness. We all have gotten used to getting paid every two weeks, but most employees would rather be paid before they work.”

Palaniappan decided to transform what he had been doing as a favor to employees into a real business with Earnin (formerly known as Activehours), a startup that helps hourly, gig and salary workers track their earnings and transfer them to their checking accounts in real time using a mobile application. Today, the company is announcing a $125 million Series C funding from top-tier investors DST Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Matrix Partners, March Capital Partners, Coatue Management and Ribbit Capital. Palaniappan declined to disclose the valuation.

Earnin founder and chief executive officer Ram Palaniappan

Here’s how it works: An employee signs up on the Earnin app and connects their bank account. Earnin infers the person’s pay cycle and debits their account the amount they’ve borrowed on their payday. Earnin charges no fees or interest; instead, it operates on a pay it forward revenue model some would balk at. Earnin users have the option to “tip” the app after each transaction and that tip, in turn, is used to fund the next user’s withdrawal. If a user tips more than Earnin thinks is reasonable for the given withdrawal, it will notify the user and give them the option to dial back the tip amount.

What the company has found is that users are usually more than happy to contribute to the Earnin community of workers.

“So often, people are trying to help each other out,” Palaniappan said. “That’s the most powerful piece — how much support the community is providing to each other.”

Earnin was launched in 2014 and has previously raised $65 million in venture capital funding. With the latest investment, it will expand its engineering and product teams across its offices in Palo Alto — where it’s headquartered — as well as in Cincinnati and Vancouver.

The app, often among the App Store’s top 10 financial apps, has more than 1 million downloads, the company says, and is used by employees at more than 50,000 companies — many of which check the app every day. Palaniappan says its users are working more than 15 million hours per week. If each user works an estimated 40 hours per week, that means the app has roughly 375,000 weekly active users.

He added that the startup’s growth in the last four years has been “quite remarkable.” Given the investor support it’s received, it’s likely to step into “unicorn” territory soon. Ribbit Capital, for example, is a leading fintech investing firm with capital invested in Coinbase, Revolut, Gusto, Wealthfront, NuBank, Brex and more.

Boosted has scored some serious cash as it looks to move beyond the world of electric skateboards to conquer new forms of personal transportation.

The startup announced today that it has closed a $60 million round of Series B funding co-led by Khosla Ventures and iNovia Capital. Stanford’s StartX and Bay Meadows also participated in the round. Boosted has now raised north of $70 million.

The company founded in 2012 is the most recognizable name in the quickly crowding field of electric skateboards, but Boosted is now looking to grow its ambitions to new personal transportation verticals in the “light vehicle type” category.

So, does this mean Boosted is building a scooter?

Well, that certainly seems like a serious possibility, though we mainly just have a statement from Khosla Ventures partner Samir Kaul to go off of at the moment.

“From day one, Boosted has been built as a scalable light electric vehicle company that can expand its portfolio to all kinds of vehicle form factors, including perfecting the vehicle types we see on the street today, and introducing others that are more novel,” Kaul wrote in a release. “We’re very much looking forward to 2019 and sharing what is coming next..”

The company’s bread-and-butter has long been their longboards, but they switched things up a little bit this year when they introduced the $749 Boosted Mini S. The shortboard shrunk the company’s form factor but more critically lowered the cost of entry to their line of products.

The company also pushed further into the high-end with the $1,599 Boosted Stealth. More interestingly, the new line of hardware started being built entirely in-house. The wheels, the decks and the trucks are all Boosted-built.

With $60 million in fresh funding, investors are obviously channeling some of their newfound excitement in bike and scooter transportation platforms into the Boosted brand. While the on-demand platforms have largely been the ones gathering venture cash to date, Boosted has developed a pretty solid brand name for itself in the electric skateboard space, one that can probably step into new vehicle verticals with a certain level of prestige already attached.

After a long year fighting underage use of its products, Juul Labs has today struck a deal with Altria Group, the owners of Philip Morris USA and makers of Marlboro cigarettes.

The deal values Juul at $38 billion, according to Bloomberg, and injects the company with a fresh $12.8 billion in exchange for a 35 percent stake in Juul Labs.

Here’s what Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns had to say in a prepared statement:

We understand the controversy and skepticism that comes with an affiliation and partnership with the largest tobacco company in the US. We were skeptical as well. But over the course of the last several months we were convinced by actions, not words, that in fact this partnership could help accelerate our success switching adult smokers. We understand the doubt. We doubted as well.

He goes on to explain the strict criteria Juul Labs had for a potential investor, particularly one from the Big Tobacco space. For one, Altria entered into a standstill agreement that limits the company’s ownership in Juul to 35 percent. Altria must also use its database and its distribution network to get the message of Juul out to current smokers.

For the past year, many have seen Juul as a dangerous toy for teenagers. In November, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced new measures for the e-cig industry meant to keep the products out of the hands of teens. One of those measures includes restricting the sale of flavored non-combustible tobacco products beyond the usual cigarette flavors of tobacco and menthol.

But after nearly a year of playing defense, this new deal marks a bit of an offensive push from Juul Labs. The company has always stressed that its main goal is to give smokers a meaningful alternative to combustible cigarettes. Partnering with Big Tobacco may not seem like the best way to do that, optically speaking. But Altria has agreed to a few measures that would get information about Juul into the hands of actual smokers, including:

• providing Juul with access to its retail shelf space, meaning that Juul’s tobacco and menthol products will be merchandized right alongside Altria combustible cigarettes
• Altria will include direct communications about Juul to adult smokers through cigarette pack inserts and mailings via Altria companies’ databases
• Altria will support Juul via its logistics and distribution networks, as well as its sales team which works with more than 230,000 retail locations

In the release, Altria said that part of the reason for the investment is simply that the organization understands change is coming to the tobacco industry.

Howard Willard, Altria’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, had this to say in a prepared statement:

We are taking significant action to prepare for a future where adult smokers overwhelmingly choose non-combustible products over cigarettes by investing $12.8 billion in JUUL, a world leader in switching adult smokers. We have long said that providing adult smokers with superior, satisfying products with the potential to reduce harm is the best way to achieve tobacco harm reduction. Through JUUL, we are making the biggest investment in our history to achieve that goal. We strongly believe that working with JUUL to accelerate its mission will have long-term benefits for adult smokers and our shareholders.

Altria has made a few big moves lately, including acquiring a 45 percent stake in cannabis company Cronos earlier this month. The company also announced this month that it would discontinue its own e-cig products, including all MarkTen and Green Smoke e-vapor products, and VERVE oral nicotine products.

“This decision is based upon the current and expected financial performance of these products, coupled with regulatory restrictions that burden Altria’s ability to quickly improve these products,” read the press release. “The company will refocus its resources on more compelling reduced-risk tobacco product opportunities.”

Now we know that those opportunities look like an extra-long thumb drive called Juul.

Uber Advanced Technologies Group has officially resumed on-road testing of its self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh, nine months after the company halted its entire autonomous vehicle operation after one of its vehicles struck and killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe.

The relaunch follows the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation decision to authorize Uber ATG to put its autonomous vehicles on public roads.

It also marks a notable turnaround —at least so far — for a program that less than a year ago appeared destined to end for good. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, a proponent of autonomous-vehicle technology who invited Uber to the state, suspended the company from testing its self-driving cars following the accident, the company let go all 100 of its self-driving car operators in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, and rumors circulated that the company wanted to sell its self-driving unit.

Now Uber is back, slowly wading back into the the self-driving vehicle waters. And not just in Pittsburgh. Uber ATG head Eric Meyhofer said the company will resume manual driving in San Francisco and Toronto, a sign that the company is preparing to launch its public autonomous vehicle testing in those cities.

“Manual driving introduces new scenarios that our system will encounter and allows us to recreate them in a virtual world or on the test track to improve system performance,” Meyhofer wrote in a blog posted Thursday.  “This is an important step to self-driving operations. We will only pursue a return to road for self-driving in these cities in coordination with federal, state, and local authorities.”

The company has been creeping towards this moment since July, when it started manually driving a small fleet of its modified self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles on Pittsburgh’s city streets. That tiptoe back into the program came with a new set of stricter safety standards that included real-time monitoring of its test drivers, more robust training, and efforts to beef up simulation.

Uber says it has spent months testing its technology on a closed track as well as a lengthy internal review and subsequent change to its safety driver training practices. The company also hired former National Transportation Safety Board chair Christopher Hart an adviser to assess the company’s overall safety culture. 

New Rules of the Road

Uber ATG said it’s putting a “small handful” of self-driving vehicles on Pittsburgh’s public roads and only during daylight hours on weekdays. The self-driving tests will occur in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, an area where other companies such as Argo AI and Aurora are developing autonomous vehicle technology.

Uber will require two trained employees, which they call “mission specialists” to be in the test vehicles whether they’re being manually driven or in autonomous mode. These employees will be limited to four hours behind the wheel in a workday and must take a break and switch positions every two hours. The remainder of the workday will be spent on other responsibilities outside of the vehicle, an Uber spokesperson said.

Uber says its made technical changes to its self-driving software to improve detection and tracking of pedestrians and cyclists, and drive more defensively as well as the addition of a driver monitoring system, which detects a distracted operator, sounds an audible alert in the cabin, and immediately sends a notification to a remote monitoring team for review and escalation.

Uber has also said that the automated emergency braking system that comes standard in the Volvo XC90 will remain active.

California startup Fair.com is aiming to turn the car market on its head by providing price-friendly, easy options for people to lease vehicles instead of buying them, and today it’s taking the latest, big step in that ambition.

It has raised a huge Series B funding round of $385 million led by Softbank, with participation from Exponential Ventures, Munich Re Venture’s ERGO Fund, G Squared, and CreditEase, to take its business global. Requiring just a drivers license and a credit card (or bank details), Fair provides flexible leasing plans both to everyday users, and to people who use cars for work purposes. For example, it works closely with Uber, which sold Fair its $400 million leasing business earlier this year, to equip its drivers with vehicles.

“The plan is to scale the business ten-fold,” CEO and co-founder Scott Painter said in an interview. Fair is already in 15 states (26 markets) in the US and is adding a new city every week, he continued, leasing cars to more than 20,000 users to date. “Growth has been dramatic over the last year.”

This is the latest in a series of outsized investments Softbank has made across the tech world out of its Vision Fund, and it is a very strategic one. Softbank is already one of the biggest investors in the world in ride-sharing businesses, backing not just Uber but Didi in China, Grab in Southeast Asia, Ola in India, Getaround in the US. (It’s also involved in a number of other automotive and transportation plays such as the food delivery startup Doordash, the car dealer platform Auto1 in Germany, the self-driving company Cruise, mapping startup Mapbox, and many more.)

One long-term plan is to use Fair to help scale those ridesharing businesses by helping connect more drivers with vehicles, as Fair has already done with Uber, by providing a quick way for would-be drivers to get vehicles.

“We think Fair could help unlock ridesharing on a global scale,” said Lydia Jett, an investor with the Softbank Vision Fund. “We’re excited to see how this can add to Softbank’s portfolio and vice versa.”

Painter said Fair had been talking to Softbank for the last year leading up to today. One of the reasons Softbank decided to invest was because of Fair’s ability to turn around Uber’s leasing business.

“Uber became a case to prove out the team,” Jett said. “As an investor, you rarely get to see a singular asset operated by two different teams, and the Fair team was about to do something that Uber was not doing well. They have turned that asset around and proven that this is a tremendous value add.”

Painter would not comment directly on valuation, but he pointed out that this round puts the total raised in equity so far in Fair.com at around $500 million. And from what I understand, Fair’s valuation is now definitely over $1 billion as collectively those equity investors do not control the business.

Alongside the equity investments, Fair has up to now been able to secure up to $1 billion in debt, used to build up its fleet of vehicles. Painter noted to me that this latest equity round will help it grow that debt pot as and when it’s needed to meet demand. “In simple terms, for every dollar in equity we unlock $10 in debt, and we borrow that cash to buy cars.”