Year: 2018

Last year, Mozilla made its first acquisition by snatching up Pocket, the Instapaper competitor that helps you save longer articles for later reading. Today, this popular reading app is getting a major update that gives its app a visual makeover, including a new dark mode, and most importantly, a better way to listen to the content you’ve saved.

Pocket had added a text-to-speech feature several years ago, so you could listen to an audio version of your saved articles, instead of reading them. Instapaper today offers a similar option.

But these text-to-speech engines often sound robotic and mangle words, leading to a poor listening experience. They’ll work in a pinch when you really need to catch up with some reading, and can’t sit down to do it. But they’re definitely not ideal.

Today, Pocket is addressing this problem with the launch of a new listening feature that will allow for a more human-sounding voice. On iOS and Android, the listen feature will be powered by Amazon Polly, Mozilla says.

First introduced at Amazon’s re:Invent developer event in November 2016, Polly uses machine learning technologies to deliver more life-like speech. Polly also understands words in context. For example, it knows that the word “live” would be pronounced differently based on its usage. (E.g. “I live in Seattle” vs. “Live from New York.”) The technology has evolved since to support speech marks, a timbre effect, and dynamic range compression, among other things.

To take advantage of the updated “Listen” feature, users just tap the new icon in the top-left corner of the Pocket mobile app to start playing their articles. It’s like your own personalized podcast, Mozilla notes.

In addition, the app has been given a redesign that gives it a clean, less cluttered look-and-feel, and introduces a new app-wide dark mode and sephia themes, for those who want a different sort of reading experience.

The redesign includes updated typography and fonts, focused on making long reads more comfortable, as well.

“At Mozilla, we love the web. Sometimes we want to surf, and the Firefox team has been working on ways to surf like an absolute champ with features like Firefox Advance,” said Mark Mayo, Chief Product Officer at Firefox, in a statement about the launch. “Sometimes, though, we want to settle down and read or listen to a few great pages. That’s where Pocket shines, and the new Pocket makes it even easier to enjoy the best of the web when you’re on the go in your own focused and uncluttered space,” he said.

The updated version of Pocket is live on the web, iOS and Android, as of today.

Email continues to be a tempting target to entrepreneurs. After all, email is nearly ubiquitous, and yet almost no one loves the experience of using it.

June.ai today joins a long list of startups that looked to change up the way we use email, but this latest company is taking a different approach.

Co-founder and CEO Allie Sutton said that the team didn’t look at the way people use email as a starting point, but rather looked at the way people deal with communication and information flow on the whole. That then led June to build a platform that doesn’t necessarily replace email, but is rather backwards compatible with email services.

Here’s how it works:

First and foremost, June recognizes the difference between an email conversation with another person and an email from a brand, platform, etc. June separates those conversations into two separate inboxes. For informational emails, like “Your Amazon Order has Shipped” and “Check In For Your Flight,” June puts those messages in an easy-to-browse feed.

Communication-based messages, on the other hand, are arranged in an inbox that looks much closer to an iMessage or IM interface than an email interface. Conversations are also organized by people and not by thread or subject, letting users get a clear picture of their full conversation history with an individual without worrying about particular threads. As part of this person-based organization, June also organizes files based on who sent them.

Another feature from June is ‘gatekeeper’, letting users quickly unsubscribe, approve or block new companies or people that are sending them emails.

With $1.5 million in funding, June isn’t immediately concerned with revenue but rather looking to spread the word about the platform and promote adoption.

June works with a number of the biggest email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook.

Sutton said that adoption will be the biggest challenge.

“Folks have built the way in which they process emails,” said Sutton. “Some over a few years and some over decades. We’ve built a more efficient way for them to process that information, but giving users enough explanation and information that they can adopt this new way of gathering and executing on information communication is our biggest challenge. We need to prove it’s more efficient for them.”

Email continues to be a tempting target to entrepreneurs. After all, email is nearly ubiquitous, and yet almost no one loves the experience of using it.

June.ai today joins a long list of startups that looked to change up the way we use email, but this latest company is taking a different approach.

Co-founder and CEO Allie Sutton said that the team didn’t look at the way people use email as a starting point, but rather looked at the way people deal with communication and information flow on the whole. That then led June to build a platform that doesn’t necessarily replace email, but is rather backwards compatible with email services.

Here’s how it works:

First and foremost, June recognizes the difference between an email conversation with another person and an email from a brand, platform, etc. June separates those conversations into two separate inboxes. For informational emails, like “Your Amazon Order has Shipped” and “Check In For Your Flight,” June puts those messages in an easy-to-browse feed.

Communication-based messages, on the other hand, are arranged in an inbox that looks much closer to an iMessage or IM interface than an email interface. Conversations are also organized by people and not by thread or subject, letting users get a clear picture of their full conversation history with an individual without worrying about particular threads. As part of this person-based organization, June also organizes files based on who sent them.

Another feature from June is ‘gatekeeper’, letting users quickly unsubscribe, approve or block new companies or people that are sending them emails.

With $1.5 million in funding, June isn’t immediately concerned with revenue but rather looking to spread the word about the platform and promote adoption.

June works with a number of the biggest email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo!, and Outlook.

Sutton said that adoption will be the biggest challenge.

“Folks have built the way in which they process emails,” said Sutton. “Some over a few years and some over decades. We’ve built a more efficient way for them to process that information, but giving users enough explanation and information that they can adopt this new way of gathering and executing on information communication is our biggest challenge. We need to prove it’s more efficient for them.”

Last week, Amazon addressed growing backlash against unfair warehouse wages by announcing plans to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. The news was largely lauded as a positive step by critics including Senator Bernie Sanders, who had helped push the company in that direction with strongly worded legislation.

The move was still met with criticism by some, including Amazon workers who noted that, along with the wage increase, the retail giant would also be removing bonuses and stock grants. Employees vocalized their concern, causing Amazon to further address the move. The company sent a letter to Sanders insisting that employees would still come out on top.

“Again, all hourly operations and customer service employees will see an increase in their base pay, as well as in their total compensation,” Amazon SVP Jay Carney said in the letter, obtained by the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. “We are also proud to continue to provide our industry-leading benefits, including comprehensive healthcare, up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave and our Career Choice program, which pre-pays 95 percent of associates’ tuition for courses in high-demand fields.”

The letter does on to explain that the the increase in wages “more than compensates” for the workers’ loss of benefit. Of course, the impact on individual workers is dependent on a number of factors, including how much they made prior to the increase. Those making, say, $14 an hour prior to the increase may only receive a $1 raise, which fails to make up for the loss of benefits.

The move appears to have a larger averse impact on long time employees of the company, though Amazon has vowed to reach out to workers to better explain the changes.

As  MoviePass continues to fumble, Sinemia just keeps on rolling. This morning, the movie ticket subscription service announced one of it its most compelling offerings to date. In addition to all of its proprietary ticket tiers, the startup is launching Sinemia Enterprise, a white-labeled service that essentially lets theaters build their own custom plans.

The service is aimed specifically at theater chains — small to mid-size, one assumes, given that AMC has already launched its own competing offering. Sinemia provides all of the backend support, including the iOS/Android app, payment processing, fraud detection and various other management tools.

Sinemia says it’s already working with a number of different “major” theater chains in the U.S. and internationally, though it doesn’t mention any by name in the press release. The company pitches its approach toward ticket sales as theater agnostic.

“When we launched Sinemia, our mission was to help as many moviegoers as possible enjoy an affordable and better experience at the movies by providing a subscription app that integrates an offline and online experience,” CEO Rifat Oguz says in the release. “By partnering with theaters around the globe, we believe we can help more moviegoers, which will help us create a bigger economy for the entire industry.”

What the partnership really afford Sinemia, however, is an alliance with theaters that might otherwise ahun the company. After all, AMC and MoviePass have already come to blows, causing the service to pull out of the chain’s top theaters. Providing backend support for customized plans would surely help Sinemia avoid that manner of pushback.

FitMetrix, a fitness technology and performance tracking company owned by gym booking giant Mindbody, has exposed millions of user records because it left several of its servers without a password.

The company builds fitness tracking software for gyms and group classes — like CrossFit and SoulCycle — that displays heart rate and other fitness metric information for interactive workouts. FitMetrix was acquired by gym and wellness scheduling service Mindbody earlier this year for $15.3 million, according to a government filing.

Last week, a security researcher found three FitMetrix unprotected servers leaking customer data.

It isn’t known how long the servers had been exposed, but the servers were indexed by Shodan, a search engine for open ports and databases, in September.

The servers included two of the same ElasticSearch instances and a storage server — all hosted on Amazon Web Service — yet none were protected by a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access the data on millions of users.

Bob Diachenko, Hacken.io’s director of cyber risk research, found the databases containing 113.5 million records — though it’s not known how many users were directly affected. Each record contained a user’s name, gender, email address, phone numbers, profile photos, their primary workout location, emergency contacts and more. Many of the records were not fully complete.

The storage server, hosted in an Amazon S3 bucket, stored user profile pictures, but remained open at the time of writing. For that reason, we’re not linking to it.

Diachenko, who wrote up his findings, contacted the company via the email address a week ago but the company only secure the server after TechCrunch reached out.

“We recently became aware that certain data associated with FitMetrix technology stored online may have been publicly exposed,” said Jason Loomis, Mindbody’s chief information security officer. “We took immediate steps to close this vulnerability,” he added. “Current indications are that this data included a subset of the consumers managed by FitMetrix, which was acquired by Mindbody in February 2018, and did not include any login credentials, passwords, credit card information or personal health information,” he said.

Diachenko rebuffed Mindbody’s claim, saying that there was “some” health information in the data, based on his analysis of the data. TechCrunch also found several records including height, weight and shoe sizes.

When asked to clarify, Mindbody spokesperson Jennifer Saxon would not comment further.

It’s not known how many people accessed the database, but Diachenko said that he wasn’t the first to find the exposed database.

A ransom note was buried in one of the tables by a scammer who claimed to have downloaded the database’s contents and would only restore it for bitcoin. But the scammer wasn’t so successful and failed to delete the data. Although the scammer asked for 0.1 bitcoin — some $650 at today’s rate — their bitcoin address received only 0.13 bitcoin at its most.

Mindbody said that it will “comply with all applicable legal obligations” in reporting the data exposure to U.S. and European authorities, but wouldn’t say if it will inform customers of the security lapse.

The company may also face action from European authorities under GDPR, the new data protection regulation, which can fine a company up to four percent of its global worldwide revenue for data breaches and negligent data exposures.

Walmart and PayPal this morning announced a partnership that will see the two collaborating on financial services and products, including new PayPal cash in and cash out services at Walmart stores, as well as the ability for PayPal Cash MasterCard customers to access their cash balance in-store at service desks, ATMs and cash registers.

The PayPal cash in and cash out money services will cost customers a $3 service fee, the companies say, as will the ability to pull cash out from MasterCard while in store. The companies declined to say how that fee is being shared.

Customers are also able to load cash into their PayPal balance while at Walmart, but this is not a new service as of today, we’re told.

The deal marks the first time that PayPal mobile app users will be able to take cash out from their PayPal balance while in a brick-and-mortar environment, though PayPal several years ago had partnered with retailers like Home Depot for integrations at the register.

In the years since, PayPal’s brick-and-mortar ambitions have died down, as Apple Pay and other tap-to-pay solutions grew to become the more popular way to pay via mobile devices at checkout.

In more recent months, PayPal has chosen to form closer ties with its earlier payment rivals, including through tighten integrations with Apple’s iOS, Samsung Pay, Android Pay, and other major stakeholders like Visa and MasterCard.

The Walmart partnership could be seen through the same lens, as Walmart, too, had once backed its own mobile payment platform, Current C, along with Target, CVS, Best Buy, and many other large retailers. It abandoned those efforts a couple of years ago and today, just offers Walmart Pay, its own scan-to-pay payments service that connects with customers’ saved credit, debit and gift cards.

With the PayPal deal, Walmart customers aren’t necessarily able to “check out” with PayPal, but they can go into the store, and get cash from PayPal – which can then be used to make purchases.

“Today’s news is the first time our two companies are working together to build products for our shared customers,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO, PayPal, in a statement. “We consider this a key collaboration for both PayPal and Walmart. We are committed to working together to make it simple and easy for people to use PayPal cash in and cash out money services at every Walmart location in the U.S. We look forward to working hand-and-hand to help people and families with their financial services needs,” he added.

PayPal cash is available immediately at Walmart, while PayPal cash out will be available at all U.S. stores by early November.

With its regulatory woes behind it — and the acqui-hire of fintech startup Pariti — Tandem‘s product roadmap appears to be picking up pace.

The challenger bank founded by Ricky Knox has launched its second credit card today, this time targeting people in the U.K. who have yet to build up a credit history at all. Credit cards are already one of the most effective ways of improving your credit score (presuming you are approved for one and always repay on time, of course) and it seems that Tandem wants a piece of that action.

Dubbed the “Journey Card,” Tandem says the new credit card is “a way for those who haven’t had credit before to build up a strong credit profile”. The upstart bank says it is tapping into a climate where people are realising the importance of credit scores for building a better future and how essential a decent credit score is when taking out further credit such as a car loan, mortgage and other longer-term financial products.

However, although the new Journey Card shares the same low FX fees when spending abroad, there are some key differences compared to the original Tandem Cashback Card. These include no cash back, for starters, and what appears to be a higher APR in recognition of the higher risk Tandem is taking on.

With that said, both cards integrate with the Tandem mobile banking app, which acts as a Personal Finance Manager (PFM), including letting you aggregate your non-Tandem bank account data from other bank accounts or credit cards you might have. Very recently the app has released a plethora of updates (including digital statements, at last!), and these include some useful budgeting tools, which sits well alongside a credit card designed to help you build your credit score.

Meanwhile, it is becoming clearer that Tandem sees consumer credit as its “attack vector” in the consumer banking space, as apposed to offering a current account or pre-paid/debit card, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see the challenger bank go there eventually. It already offers a fixed-saver account, after all.

Says Ricky Knox, CEO of Tandem: “The integration of credit products into our app is a game-changer for the industry. Our competitors have launched some great pre-loaded and debit cards, but we will own credit in this space”.

Zuora, the SaaS company helping organizations manage payments for subscription businesses, announced today that it had been selected as a Premier Partner in the Amazon Pay Global Partner Program. 

The “Premier Partner” distinction means businesses using Zuora’s billing platform can now easily integrate Amazon’s digital payment system as an option during checkout or recurring payment processes. 

The strategic rationale for Zuora is clear, as the partnership expands the company’s product offering to prospective and existing customers.  The ability to support a wide array of payment methodologies is a key value proposition for subscription businesses that enables them to service a larger customer base and provide a more seamless customer experience.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a deep-pocketed ally like Amazon in a fairly early-stage industry.  With omnipotent tech titans waging war over digital payment dominance, Amazon has reportedly doubled down on efforts to spread Amazon Pay usage, cutting into its own margins and offering incentives to retailers.

As adoption of Amazon Pay spreads, subscription businesses will be compelled to offer the service as an available payment option and Zuora should benefit from supporting early billing integration.

For Amazon Pay, teaming up with Zuora provides direct access to Zuora’s customer base, which caters to tens of millions of subscribers. 

With Zuora minimizing the complexity of adding additional payment options, which can often disrupt an otherwise unobtrusive subscription purchase experience, the partnership with Zuora should help spur Amazon Pay adoption and reduce potential friction.

“By extending the trust and convenience of the Amazon experience to Zuora, merchants around the world can now streamline the subscription checkout experience for their customers,” said Vice President of Amazon Pay, Patrick Gauthier.  “We are excited to be working with Zuora to accelerate the Amazon Pay integration process for their merchants and provide a fast, simple and secure payment solution that helps grow their business.”

The world subscribed

The collaboration with Amazon Pay represents another milestone for Zuora, which completed its IPO in April of this year and is now looking to further differentiate its offering from competing in-house systems or large incumbents in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space, such as Oracle or SAP.   

Going forward, Zuora hopes to play a central role in ushering a broader shift towards a subscription-based economy. 

Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, told TechCrunch he wants the company to help businesses first realize they should be in the subscription economy and then provide them with the resources necessary to flourish within it.

“Our vision is the world subscribed.”  said Tzuo. “We want to be the leading company that has the right technology platform to get companies to be successful in the subscription economy.”

The partnership will launch with publishers “The Seattle Times” and “The Telegraph”, with both now offering Amazon Pay as a payment method while running on the Zuora platform.

Zuora, the SaaS company helping organizations manage payments for subscription businesses, announced today that it had been selected as a Premier Partner in the Amazon Pay Global Partner Program. 

The “Premier Partner” distinction means businesses using Zuora’s billing platform can now easily integrate Amazon’s digital payment system as an option during checkout or recurring payment processes. 

The strategic rationale for Zuora is clear, as the partnership expands the company’s product offering to prospective and existing customers.  The ability to support a wide array of payment methodologies is a key value proposition for subscription businesses that enables them to service a larger customer base and provide a more seamless customer experience.

It also doesn’t hurt to have a deep-pocketed ally like Amazon in a fairly early-stage industry.  With omnipotent tech titans waging war over digital payment dominance, Amazon has reportedly doubled down on efforts to spread Amazon Pay usage, cutting into its own margins and offering incentives to retailers.

As adoption of Amazon Pay spreads, subscription businesses will be compelled to offer the service as an available payment option and Zuora should benefit from supporting early billing integration.

For Amazon Pay, teaming up with Zuora provides direct access to Zuora’s customer base, which caters to tens of millions of subscribers. 

With Zuora minimizing the complexity of adding additional payment options, which can often disrupt an otherwise unobtrusive subscription purchase experience, the partnership with Zuora should help spur Amazon Pay adoption and reduce potential friction.

“By extending the trust and convenience of the Amazon experience to Zuora, merchants around the world can now streamline the subscription checkout experience for their customers,” said Vice President of Amazon Pay, Patrick Gauthier.  “We are excited to be working with Zuora to accelerate the Amazon Pay integration process for their merchants and provide a fast, simple and secure payment solution that helps grow their business.”

The world subscribed

The collaboration with Amazon Pay represents another milestone for Zuora, which completed its IPO in April of this year and is now looking to further differentiate its offering from competing in-house systems or large incumbents in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space, such as Oracle or SAP.   

Going forward, Zuora hopes to play a central role in ushering a broader shift towards a subscription-based economy. 

Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of Zuora, told TechCrunch he wants the company to help businesses first realize they should be in the subscription economy and then provide them with the resources necessary to flourish within it.

“Our vision is the world subscribed.”  said Tzuo. “We want to be the leading company that has the right technology platform to get companies to be successful in the subscription economy.”

The partnership will launch with publishers “The Seattle Times” and “The Telegraph”, with both now offering Amazon Pay as a payment method while running on the Zuora platform.