Year: 2018

If you think that Flash, the once-popular web plugin, couldn’t die fast enough, even those annoying fake Flash installers riddled with malware aren’t going anywhere any time soon. In fact, they’re getting even sneakier.

New research out of Palo Alto Networks found a recent spike of fake Flash installers not only dropping cryptocurrency mining malware on vulnerable computers — but actually installing Flash while it’s there.

The researchers said that this new technique is a way to deceive the user by tricking them into thinking that it’s a legitimate Flash installer.

Once the installer opens, it quietly implants XMRig, an open source cryptocurrency miner that uses the computer’s processor and graphics card to start mining. All the generated funds are siphoned off to a Monero wallet — making it near impossible to trace. When the mining malware is implanted, the installer downloads a legitimate Flash installer from Adobe’s website and installs it.

Since March, the researchers found over a hundred fake Flash updaters alone.

It’s a little ironic that Flash, one of the buggiest plugins and most attack prone over the years, is still causing headaches. When Flash wasn’t used as a way to used as a way to push malware on users, hackers were imitating it and using the plugin as a springboard to launch their own fake attacks. Flash became so much of a problem that Google began sandboxing Flash (and other plugins) in Chrome almost a decade ago because Flash-based malware was so prevalent.

But since the rise of the more universally supported and easier to use HTML5, Flash use has rapidly been on the decline.

Adobe is set to retire Flash in 2020. Maybe at its demise, we’ll see fewer fake Flash installers too?

Shimon is a marbima-playing robot with some real soul. This crazy little robot, created by Gil Weinberg at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, can listen to the other players around it and play out little ditties in response to the music. In short, it’s the world’s best jazz and hip hop collaborator because, unlike humans, Shimon can never get drunk and forget the van keys back at that Taco Bell in Fresno.

“Most of what Shimon is playing is generated using a new process where he creates hundreds of melodies off line based on deep learning analysis of large musical data sets,” said Weinberg. “Then us humans (me and my students) choose melodies we like and orchestrate / structure them into songs. It’s a new form of robot-human collaboration, at least for us.”

In this video Shimon and crew play along to Dash Smith, an Atlanta-based rapper who freestyles while Shimon and you’ll also notice another Georgia Tech product, a robotic drumming prosthesis that gives the drummer the power of four Neil Perts.

Weinberg, Shimon’s human, is excited by the new developments.

“Still under development is the other new element – we are working letting Shimon analyze in real time the rhythm, melodies and semantic meaning of the free style rapper lyrics and use this analysis to drive Shimon’s improvisation. As you know we have explored mostly improvised music, starting with drum circles moving to Jazz, rock jam-bands, and African marimba bands,” said Weinberg. “We are now ready to move to the next frontier of real time collaborative improvisation – free style rapping, where the hope is that the rapper will be influenced by what Shimon is coming up with and vice versa.”

GoFundMe, the social fundraising platform that has raised over $5 billion from over 50 million donors for causes, today is taking a big step into fundraising for charities and other non-profit organizations, and specifically helping charities dedicated to adolescent girls in the process. The startup is partnering with former First Lady Michelle Obama and the Obama Foundation to launch the Global Girls Alliance Fund, a platform within GoFundMe designed for fundraising specifically for grassroots organizations that work on girls education initiatives.

The new platform is being rolled out as part of a bigger effort that Obama and the Obama Foundation are announcing today called the Global Girls Alliance, a program to empower adolescent girls through education.

Obama has been a strong supporter of the general cause, which — even with the advances we have seen in education and women’s rights — has been a persistent one globally. An estimated 98 million adolescent girls — that is, mostly-teenage females of secondary school age — are currently not in school, working out to one out of every five females in this age bracket, according to research from Unesco.

“I’m thrilled to announce the Obama Foundation’s launch of the Global Girls Alliance,” said Obama in a statement. “We want to lift up the grassroots leaders in communities all over the world who are clearing away the hurdles that too many girls face. Because the evidence is clear: educating girls isn’t just good for the girls, it’s good for all of us.”

The Fund is designed to be the a way for girls’ education charities to get donations through crowdsourcing, alongside whatever other routes they are using to raise money, whether it be through other fundraising efforts, via NGOs or other support.

Crowdfunding of the sort that has been built out by groups like GoFundMe provides a degree of transparency to donors beyond what they might have traditionally seen when making donations to charities. Donors can see who else is contributing money, and how much; and the organizations can provide more details about their progress and how they are using the money.

These organizations could have, of course, alwaysb gone directly to GoFundMe (or indeed other causes-oriented crowdfunding sites, such as Facebook or others), and some might already have done so.

The benefit of the Global Girls Alliance Fund is that it gives these causes a degree of economy of scale: together they have more visibility and virality potential (campaigns going viral being a major component of why they can do so well on these platforms). With the Obama machine behind it, they might get more firepower too by way of the Obama Foundation’s own outreach efforts. A single girls’ education charity may never find its way to the Today Show — a very popular breakfast show in the US — but Michelle Obama has. She’s announcing the news today on the program, to coincide with the International Day of the Girl.

GoFundMe has set up the Funding site so that people who are interested in giving money to the cause can donate either to a general GGA Fund, or to a specific grassroots project, which will be listed on the landing page. It’s kicking off with six funding options, five projects and the general GGA Fund, and more will be added and changed over time.

This is breaking new ground for GoFundMe in a couple of ways. For starters, this is the first time that GoFundMe has worked with a foundation to essentially provide a micro-site of sorts for funding a specific subset of charities around a single cause. GoFundMe’s work with charities versus individuals is a relatively new chapter for the startup — it really moved into the field in earnest in March this year after it integrated and relaunched CrowdRise, a charity-focused fundraising startup that it had acquired in 2017.

It’s also a new step ahead for GoFundMe in terms of how it works with organizations globally. Some of the groups that are falling under the Global Girls Alliance are coming from developing countries. Payments globally is a very fragmented space, and different countries have their own preferred methods for paying, and for drawing down funds people pay for goods and services. That situation is compounded in developing countries by the fact that is a high proportion of people who are “unbanked” — that is, without bank accounts, without payment cards, and without credit histories — three of the basic fundamentals that you need to make payments in developed countries.

That has meant that GoFundMe will be integrating with a wider variety of payment solutions globally in order to enable them to use its platform, both to raise money from the widest number of people, and to be able to eventually draw down and use funds. We’ve asked for GoFundMe to provide more details of who it’s working with on this front and will update as we learn more. For now, it looks like anyone with a credit card can join and donate to the Global Girls Alliance, and it will be interesting to see how and if they extend that to people without credit cards. (There are services like M-Pesa in Kenya that have bypassed traditional card infrastructure, and so alternatives do indeed exist.)

Hopefully, the transparency of fundraising on GoFundMe will also let us stay up to date on this initiative to see how it develops and if it and the Obama Foundation can pull it off. On a more personal note, I do hope it does.

Shopify, the provider of payment and logistics management software and services for retailers, has opened its first physical storefront in Los Angeles.

The first brick and mortar location for the Toronto-based company, is nestled in a warren of downtown Los Angeles boutique shops in a complex known as the Row DTLA.

For Shopify, Los Angeles is the ideal place to debut a physical storefront showing off the company’s new line of hardware products and the array of services it provides to businesses ranging from newly opened startups to $900 million juggernauts like the Kylie Cosmetics brand.

The city is one of the most dense conglomerations of Shopify customers with over 10,000 merchants using the company’s technologies in the greater Los Angeles area. 400 of those retailers have each earned over $1 million in gross merchandise volume.

In the Los Angeles space, which looks similar to an Apple store, patrons can expect to see demonstrations and tutorials of how Shopify’s tools and features work. Showrooms displaying the work that Shopify does with some of its close partners will also show how business owners can turn their product visions into actual businesses.

Like Apple, Shopify is staffing its store with experts on the platform who can walk new customers or would-be customers through whatever troubleshooting they may need. While also serving as a space to promote large and small vendors using its payment and supply management solution.

“Our new space in downtown LA is a physical manifestation of our dedication and commitment to making commerce better for everyone. We’re thrilled to be able to take our proven educational, support, and community initiatives and put them to work in an always-on capacity,” said Satish Kanwar, VP of Product at Shopify, in a statement. “We know that making more resources available to entrepreneurs, especially early on, makes them far more likely to succeed, and we’re happy to now be offering that through a brick-and-mortar experience in LA.”

Kanwar and Shopify chief operating officer, Harley Finkelstein, envision the new Los Angeles space as another way to support new and emerging retailers looking for tips on how to build their business in the best possible way.

“The path to being your own boss doesn’t need to be lonely or isolating,” said Finkelstein, in a statement. “With Shopify LA we wanted to create a hub where business owners can find support, inspiration, and community. Most importantly, entrepreneurs at all stages and of all sizes can learn together, have first access to our newest products, and propel their entrepreneurial dreams.”

After holding a series of hearings in the wake of the Facebook -Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal this summer, and attending a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg himself in May, the European Union parliament’s civil liberties committee has called for an update to competition rules to reflect what it dubs “the digital reality”, urging EU institutions to look into the “possible monopoly” of big tech social media platforms.

Top level EU competition law has not touched on the social media axis of big tech yet, with the Commission concentrating recent attention on mobile chips (Qualcomm); and mobile and ecommerce platforms (mostly Google; but Amazon’s use of merchant data is in its sights too); as well as probing Apple’s tax structure in Ireland.

But last week Europe’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli, told us that closer working between privacy regulators and the EU’s Competition Commission is on the cards, as regional lawmakers look to evolve their oversight frameworks to respond to growing ethical concerns about use and abuse of big data, and indeed to be better positioned to respond to fast-paced technology-fuelled change.

Local EU antitrust regulators, including in Germany and France, have also been investigating the Google, Facebook adtech duopoly on several fronts in recent years.

The Libe committee’s call is the latest political call to spin up and scale up antitrust effort and attention around social media. 

The committee also says it wants to see much greater accountability and transparency on “algorithmic-processed data by any actor, be it private or public” — signalling a belief that GDPR does not go far enough on that front.

Libe committee chair and rapporteur, MEP Claude Moraes, has previously suggested the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal could help inform and shape an update to Europe’s ePrivacy rules, which remain at the negotiation stage with disagreements over scope and proportionality.

But every big tech data breach and security scandal lends weight to the argument that stronger privacy rules are indeed required.

In yesterday’s resolution, the Libe committee also called for an audit of the advertising industry on social media — echoing a call made by the UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, this summer for an ‘ethical pause‘ on the use of online ads for political purposes.

The ICO made that call right after announcing it planned to issue Facebook with the maximum fine possible under UK data protection law — again for the Cambridge Analytica breach.

While the Cambridge Analytica scandal — in which the personal information of as many as 87 million Facebook users was extracted from the platform without the knowledge or consent of every person, and passed to the now defunct political consultancy (which used it to create psychographic profiles of US voters for election campaigning purposes) — has triggered this latest round of political scrutiny of the social media behemoth, last month Facebook revealed another major data breach, affecting at least 50M users — underlining the ongoing challenge it has to live up to claims of having ‘locked the platform down’.

In light of both breaches, the Libe committee has now called for EU bodies to be allowed to fully audit Facebook — to independently assess its data protection and security practices.

Buttarelli also told us last week that it’s his belief none of the tech giants are directing adequate resource at keeping user data safe.

And with Facebook having already revealed a second breach that’s potentially even larger than Cambridge Analytica fresh focus and political attention is falling on the substance of its security practices, not just its claims.

While the Libe committee’s MEPs say they have taken note of steps Facebook made in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal to try to improve user privacy, they point out it has still not yet carried out the promised full internal audit.

Facebook has never said how long this historical app audit will take. Though it has given some progress reports, such as detailing additional suspicious activity it has found to date, with 400 apps suspended at the last count. (One app, called myPersonality, also got banned for improper data controls.)

The Libe committee is now urging Facebook to allow the EU Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) and the European Data Protection Board, which plays a key role in applying the region’s data protection rules, to carry out “a full and independent audit” — and present the findings to the European Commission and Parliament and national parliaments.

It has also recommended that Facebook makes “substantial modifications to its platform” to comply with EU data protection law.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the recommendations — including specifically asking the company whether it’s open to an external audit of its platform.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to our question but we’ll update this report with any response.

Commenting in a statement, Libe chair Moraes said: “This resolution makes clear that we expect measures to be taken to protect citizens’ right to private life, data protection and freedom of expression. Improvements have been made since the scandal, but, as the Facebook data breach of 50 million accounts showed just last month, these do not go far enough.”

The committee has also made a series of proposals for reducing the risk of social media being used as an attack vector for election interference — including:

• applying conventional “off-line” electoral safeguards, such as rules on transparency and limits to spending, respect for silence periods and equal treatment of candidates;
• making it easy to recognize online political paid advertisements and the organisation behind them;
• banning profiling for electoral purposes, including use of online behaviour that may reveal political preferences;
• social media platforms should label content shared by bots and speed up the process of removing fake accounts;
• compulsory post-campaign audits to ensure personal data are deleted;
• investigations by member states with the support of Eurojust if necessary, into alleged misuse of the online political space by foreign forces.

A couple of weeks ago, the Commission outted a voluntary industry Code of Practice aimed at tackling online disinformation which several tech platforms and adtech companies had agreed to sign up to, and which also presses for action in some of the same areas — including fake accounts and bots.

However the code is not only voluntary but does not bind signatories to any specific policy steps or processes so it looks like its effectiveness will be as difficult to quantify as its accountability will lack bite.

A UK parliamentary committee which has also been probing political disinformation this year also put out a report this summer with a package of proposed measures — with some similar ideas but also suggesting a levy on social media to ‘defend democracy’.

Meanwhile Facebook itself has been working on increasing transparency around advertisers on its platform, and putting in place some authorization requirements for political advertisers (though starting in the US first).

But few politicians appear ready to trust that the steps Facebook is taking will be enough to avoid a repeat of, for example, the mass Kremlin propaganda smear campaign that targeted the 2016 US presidential election.

The Libe committee has also urged all EU institutions, agencies and bodies to verify that their social media pages, and any analytical and marketing tools they use, “should not by any means put at risk the personal data of citizens”.

And it goes as far as suggesting that EU bodies could even “consider closing their Facebook accounts” — as a measure to protect the personal data of every individual contacting them.

The committee’s full resolution was passed by 41 votes to 10 and 1 abstention. And will be put to a vote by the full EU Parliament during the next plenary session later this month.

In it, the Libe also renews its call for the suspension of the EU-US Privacy Shield.

The data transfer arrangement, which is used by thousands of businesses to authorize transfers of EU users’ personal data across the Atlantic, is under growing pressure ahead of an annual review this month, as the Trump administration has failed entirely to respond as EU lawmakers had hoped their US counterparts would at the time of the agreement being inked in the Obama era, back in 2016.

The EU parliament also called for Privacy Shield to be suspended this summer. And while the Commission did not act on those calls, pressure has continued to mount from MEPs and EU consumer and digital and civil rights bodies.

During the Privacy Shield review process this month the Commission will be pressuring US counterparts to try to gain concessions that it can sell back home as ‘compliance’.

But without very major concessions — and who would bank on that, given the priorities of the current US administration — the future of the precariously placed mechanism looks increasingly uncertain.

Even as more oversight coming down the pipe to rule social media platforms look increasingly certain.

Want to make your music more interesting? Add a subwoofer. That’s what Amazon did and, suddenly, the entire Echo smart speaker lineup is more interesting. If you were not impressed with the sound of an Echo, consider trying again when the Echo is paired with an Echo Sub. The subwoofer changes the game.

The Echo Sub is a small, round sub covered in the same fabric as the Echo speakers. Currently it’s only available in dark gray. It’s designed to be sat on the floor or a sturdy desk and serve up the low notes the Echo speakers are unable to reproduce. The Echo Sub does its job. When paired with an Echo speaker, the audio is more full and enjoyable, well-balanced and healthy. The Echo Sub is a must-have for Echo owners.

Review

Amazon provided TechCrunch with a pair of $99 Echo speakers and the $129 Echo Sub. This kit is available for $300, but Amazon also sells the Echo Sub bundle with two Echo Plus devices for $329 — that’s the bundle to get since the Plus models have larger speaker drivers. I suspect the difference will be worth the additional $30.

Setting up the system takes about 25 minutes. Each speaker is individually added to the Alexa smartphone app. Once all three speakers are installed, they have to be bundled in a virtual group. The app’s prompts make it easy, but I found the process buggy. When trying to combine the speakers into a group, the app would sometimes fail to locate one of the speakers. Other times, the two speakers were found, but the sub was not. Eventually, I got it configured and ended up with two Echo speakers running in stereo and a subwoofer handling the low-end sounds.

The difference an additional speaker and subwoofer makes is lovely. But it shouldn’t be surprising. Stereo is how music was supposed to be enjoyed.

Years ago the Jambox and its countless Bluetooth speaker clones convinced a generation that one speaker is all that’s needed for music. That’s a lie. One speaker gets the job done, but two, running in stereo will always be better. And in this case, with the addition of a subwoofer, it’s much, much better.

Des Rocs’ Let me Live takes full advantage of the newfound soundstage. The left and right speakers explode with activity, creating an immersive listening experience that’s not possible with any single speaker from an Amazon Echo to Apple HomePod. The stereo arrangement lets the music breath.

AKA George’s Stone Cold Classic comes alive with this setup. The Echo Sub provides dramatically more depth to the track while the stereo Echos offer a full experience. Need more proof? Turn to Van Halen’s Panama. A single speaker cannot give the same experience; the channels get muddled and mixed. But when played in true stereo with the backup of a woofer, the David Lee Roth comes alive.

I’m impressed with the sound quality of this $300 bundle. A lot of the heavy lifting is offloaded to the Echo Sub, allowing the Echo speakers to handle the mids and highs, which are clear and precise for the price point. At $300, it’s hard to find a better audio system than two Echo speakers and the Echo Sub. And the Echo’s smart features sweeten the deal.

Amazon provided two $99 Echo speakers, and they do the job. The Echo Sub can also be paired with two $149 Echo Plus speaker, which feature more significant drivers; I suspect using two of these speakers would result in even better sound and when purchased as part of a bundle, they’re only a few dollars more.

The Echo Sub works well in most situations. Compared to other subwoofers, it’s on the smaller side of the scale. It provides much-needed bass, but the woofer cannot shake walls. It does not pound, per se. It’s a great match for hard rock or pounding pop; it’s not for trunk-rattling rap. Think Arctics Monkeys instead of Post Malone.

The Alexa app allows users to adjust the amount of bass, mid and treble the subwoofer produces. I found the adjustments to be minor and unable to change the sound profile of the woofer drastically. Overall, the Echo Sub is an elegant, little sub that works well in conjunction with a pair of Echo speakers.

The Echo Sub can work with just one Echo speaker, too. Own just Echo smart speaker? Add an Echo Sub for an astounding upgrade in sound quality.

Amazon is not the only company pairing smart speakers for a new age of stereo sound. Sonos has long allowed owners to wirelessly connect speakers to create stereo and surround sound setups. Two Google Home Max can be paired to create a lovely stereo set. The same goes for Apple HomePods: Two $350 HomePods can be wirelessly tied together for a stereo kit. Each of the setups mentioned above provides great audio quality, but they’re more expensive than Amazon’s solution. Only Sonos sells a dedicated subwoofer, though.

Amazon, with the addition of the Echo Sub, now offers a great audio experience for much less than that of its closest competitors. The $129 Echo Sub is compact and capable and the best way to instantly upgrade an Echo smart speaker setup. If possible, add a second an Echo speaker to create a virtual set of stereo speakers.

The Echo Sub is an easy recommendation for homes where an Echo speaker is dedicated to music. If forced to pick between adding a second Echo or adding an Echo Sub, go for the subwoofer first.

Congressman Ro Khanna’s proposed Internet Bill of Rights pushes individual rights on the Internet forward in a positive manner. It provides guidelines for critical elements where the United States’ and the world’s current legislation is lacking, and it packages it in a way that speaks to all parties. The devil, as always, is in the details—and Congressman Khanna’s Internet Bill of Rights still leaves quite a bit to subjective interpretation.

But what should not be neglected is that we as individuals have not just rights but also moral obligations to this public good—the Internet. The web positively impacts our lives in a meaningful fashion, and we have a collective responsibility to nurture and keep it that way.

Speaking to the specific rights listed in the Bill, we can likely all agree that citizens should have control over information collected about them, and that we should not be discriminated against based on that personal data. We probably all concur that Internet Service Providers should not be permitted to block, throttle, or engage in paid prioritization that would negatively impact our ability to access the world’s information. And I’m sure we all want access to numerous affordable internet providers with clear and transparent pricing.

These are all elements included in Congressman Khanna’s proposal; all things that I wholeheartedly support.

As we’ve seen of late with Facebook, Google, and other large corporations, there is an absolute need to bring proper legislation into the digital age. Technological advancements have progressed far faster than regulatory changes, and drastic improvements are needed to protect users.

What we must understand, however, is that corporations, governments, and individuals all rely on the same Internet to prosper. Each group should have its own set of rights as well as responsibilities. And it’s those responsibilities that need more focus.

Take, for example, littering. There may be regulations in place that prevent people from discarding their trash by the side of the road. But regardless of these laws, there’s also a moral obligation we have to protect our environment and the world in which we live. For the most part, people abide by these obligations because it’s the right thing to do and because of social pressure to keep the place they live beautiful—not because they have a fear of being fined for littering.

We should approach the protection of the Internet in the same way.

We should hold individuals, corporations, and governments to a higher standard and delineate their responsibilities to the Internet. All three groups should accept and fulfill those responsibilities, not because we create laws and fines, but because it is in their best interests.

For individuals, the Internet has given them powers beyond their wildest dreams and it continues to connect us in amazing ways. For corporations, it has granted access to massively lucrative markets far and wide that would never have been accessible before. For governments, it has allowed them to provide better services to their citizens and has created never before seen levels of tax revenue from the creation of businesses both between and outside their physical borders.

Everyone — and I mean everyone — has gained (and will continue to gain) from protecting an open Internet, and we as a society need to recognize that and start imposing strong pressure against those who do not live up to their responsibilities.

We as people of the world should feel tremendously grateful to all the parties that contributed to the Internet we have today. If a short-sighted government decides it wants to restrict the Internet within its physical borders, this should not be permitted. It will not only hurt us, but it will hurt that very government by decreasing international trade and thus tax revenue, as well as decreasing the trust that the citizens of that country place in their government. Governments often act against their long-term interests in pursuit of short-term thinking, thus we have 2 billion people living in places with heavy restrictions on access to online information.

When an Internet Service Provider seeks full control over what content it provides over its part of the Internet, this, again, should not be allowed. It will, in the end, hurt that very Internet Service Provider’s revenue; a weaker, less diverse Internet will inevitably create less demand for the very service they are providing along with a loss of trust and loyalty from their customers.

Without the Internet, our world would come grinding to a halt. Any limitations on the open Internet will simply slow our progress and prosperity as a human race. And, poignantly, the perpetrators of those limitations stand to lose just as much as any of us.

We have a moral responsibility, then, to ensure the Internet remains aligned with its original purpose. Sure, none of us could have predicted the vast impact the World Wide Web would have back in 1989—probably not even Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself—but in a nutshell, it exists to connect people, WHEREVER they may be, to a wealth of online information, to other people, and to empower individuals to make their lives better.

This is only possible with an open and free Internet.

Over the next five years, billions of devices—such as our garage door openers, refrigerators, thermostats, and mattresses—will be connected to the web via the Internet of Things. Further, five billion users living in developing markets will join the Internet for the first time, moving from feature phones to smartphones. These two major shifts will create incredible opportunities for good, but also for exploiting our data—making us increasingly vulnerable as Internet users.

Now is the time to adequately provide Americans and people around the world with basic online protections, and it is encouraging to see people like Congressman Khanna advancing the conversation. We can only hope this Internet Bill of Rights remains bipartisan and real change occurs.

Regardless of the outcome, we must not neglect our moral obligations—whether individual Internet users, large corporations, or governments. We all shoulder a responsibility to maintain an open Internet. After all, it is perhaps the most significant and impactful creation in modern society.

When Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, landed a $263 million investment earlier this year, CEO Bob Muglia speculated that it would be the last money his company would need before an eventual IPO. But just 9 months after that statement, the company announced a second even larger round. This time it’s getting $450 million, as an unexpected level of growth led them to seek additional cash.

Sequoia Capital led the round, joined by new investor Meritech Capital and existing investors Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Wing Ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to over $928 million with $713 million coming just this year. That’s a lot of dough.

Oh and the valuation has skyrocketed too from $1.5 billion in January to $3.5 billion with today’s investment. “We are increasing the valuation from the prior round substantially, and it’s driven by the growth numbers of almost quadrupling the revenue, and tripling the customer base,” company CFO Thomas Tuchscherer told TechCrunch.

At the time of the $263 million round, Muglia was convinced the company had enough funds and that the next fundraise would be an IPO. “We have put ourselves on the path to IPO. That’s our mid- to long-term plan. This funding allows us to go directly to IPO and gives us sufficient capital, that if we choose, IPO would be our next funding step,” he said in January.

Tuchscherer said in fact that was the plan at the time of the first batch of funding. He joined the company, partly because of his experience bringing Talend public in 2016, but he said the growth has been so phenomenal, that they felt it was necessary to change course.

“When we raised $263 million earlier in the year, we raised based on a plan that was ambitious in terms of growth and investment. We are exceeding and beating that, and it prompted us to explore how do we accelerate investment to continue driving the company’s growth,” he said.

Running on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which they added as a supported platform earlier this year, certainly contributed to the increased sales, and forced them to rethink the amount of money it would take to fuel their growth spurt.

“I think it’s very important as a distinction that we view the funding as being customer driven in the sense that in order to meet the demand that we’re seeing in the market for Snowflake, we have to invest in our infrastructure, as well as in our R&D capacity. So  the funding that we’re raising now is meant to finance those two core investments,” he stressed

The number of employees is skyrocketing as the company adds customers. Just eight months ago the company had around 350 employees. Today it has close to 650. Tuchscherer expects that to grow to between 900 and 1000 by the end of January, not that far off.

As for that IPO, surely that is still a goal, but the growth simply got in the way. “We are building the company to be autonomous and to be a large independent company. It’s definitely on the horizon,” he said.

While Tuchscherer wouldn’t definitively say that the company is looking to support at least one more cloud platform in addition to Amazon and Microsoft, he strongly hinted that such a prospect could happen.

The company also plans to plunge a lot of money into the sales team, building out new sales offices in the US and doubling their presence around the world, while also enhancing the engineering and R&D teams to expand their product offerings.

Just this year alone the company has added Netflix, Office Depot, DoorDash, Netgear, Ebates and Yamaha as customers. Other customers include Capital One, Lions Gate and Hubspot.

Chargify, the payment management service owned by Scaleworks, has launched a new tool for billing management. 

The new product is designed to remove limitations and allow payers to assign or reassign payment responsibility for subscriptions or groups of subscriptions, according to the company.

Called WhoPays, the new service is pitched to businesses as a way to consolidate and manage their payments with different subscribers in an organization.

According to the company, the launch of the product required the re-engineering of its underlying invoice architecture — centering it around the hierarchies of employees that can be involved in making purchasing decisions.

“One of our customers sells API services primarily to developers. They noticed that there’d be multiple developers in different parts of their company… each with their own subscription. The customer didn’t know that the multiple subscriptions were connected and sometimes being paid by the same credit card,” said Chargify chief executive Tom Rotem. “They want to make sense of their own customer organizations and subscriptions and are having a hard time doing it. What we’re launching is exactly what they need to fix the pain around that chaos.”

Billers can model out their relationships with customers to create the hierarchies of decision-making so users can group subscriptions so the responsible payer receives one consolidated invoice that can be paid in one transaction.

“WhoPays is the capstone feature on the new invoice-first architecture we’ve been building to make subscriptions more relational,” said chief technology officer and co-founder Michael Klett in a statement.

On the heels of Apple this morning inking a $600 million deal to acquire IP, talent and licenses from Dialog Semiconductor in Europe, it has also confirmed another acquisition of a smaller startup in the region.

Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked segmentation technology, a more efficient way to “cut out” figures from their backgrounds in digital images and videos, reportedly for about $30 million.

This type of technology can be used, for example, to make quicker and more accurate/realistic cut-out images in augmented reality environments, but also for more standard applications like school photos (which was actually the first market the startup targeted, in 2015, although it appeared to shift strategy after that to build up IP and make deeper inroads into video).

Rumors of the deal started to surface yesterday, first in Danish financial newspaper Børsen, without confirmation from Apple. We reached out, and Apple has today finally confirmed the deal with its standard statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

From what we understand, the acquisition happened a while back — which lines up with a LinkedIn profile for Toke Jansen, who had been a co-founder of Spektral but now notes that as of December 2017 he has been a manager of computational imaging at Apple.

Others associated with the company — including the other co-founder, Henrik Paltoft — have not updated their profiles, so it’s unclear how many others have joined. Børsen reports that the deal includes the company’s engineers and was in the region of 200 million Danish kroner, which is equivalent to around $31 million.

Spektral started life as CloudCutout, built on algorithms from Jansen’s PhD. The startup initially pitched its product as a cheaper and more efficient “green screen” technology, to remove primary images from their plain (typically green) or standard-pattern backgrounds, with the early iteration of the product built by training the system on over 100,000 professional cutouts.

Spectral’s first application may have been the fairly retro world of school pictures, but what’s most notable here is what Spektral might contribute to Apple’s imaging business. That goes not just in applications that Apple has yet to launch, but to improve the quality of those that are already in the market, from legacy products like PhotoBooth through to ARKit, the company’s platform for mobile development.

Segmentation could help add live filters to human figures in a photo but can also be effective in occluding AR environments behind figures to make digital AR content appear interact with the position of humans.

Spektral’s segmentation technology is also able to run on mobile phones, making it potentially a quicker and more efficient way of processing AR images directly on devices.

“To provide high quality cutouts, the core of our engine exploits recent advances in spectral graph theory and neural networks. The computation of pixel transparencies (the alpha channel) for a single image involves solving multiple large-scale equation systems, as well as carrying out multiple feed-forward passes in our neural networks,” we reported the founders saying when the startup raised its seed round. (It raised more funding in 2017, $2.8 million from Litecap and Amp Ventures, to diver deeper into video.)

“We pose the problem of determining an alpha channel of an image as a machine learning task. Compared to usual chroma keying, this allows us to consider a much broader range of backgrounds since the model will learn, i.e., texture representations from existing training data.”

Computer vision has been a key focus (sorry!) for Apple for a while now. The iPhone and Mac giant has made more than 40 acquisitions in Europe in the last 10 years — I guess we may still have some hunting to do — and a number of its acquisitions both in Europe and elsewhere have been in the area of computer vision. They have included Akonia Holographics, InVisage Technologies, Regaind, Vrvana, SensoMotoric Instruments, Indoor.io, Flyby Media, Emotient, Faceshift, Metaio, Polar Rose and more.

Additional reporting Natasha Lomas.