Year: 2018

Both Facebook Watch and Instagram’s IGTV have yet to become superstar video platforms, leaving Facebook at risk as more people seek streaming entertainment instead of status updates. So today Facebook is trying to build some buzz for Watch with new stats and rollouts. The free video hub that combines original content, sports, and cult favorite TV shows like Firefly now has 400 million users watching at least one minute per month. That’s not a ton of engagement amongst a wide audience. But on the brighter side there are 75 million users watching at least one minute per day with a much more promising average of 20 minutes per day.

Though that’s just 5 percent of Facebook’s 1.5 billion daily users, it indicates that if Facebook can get people hooked on its ad-supported shows, it could squeeze serious viewing time out of them. Just four months ago, Facebook was saying that only 50 million people spent at least 1 minute per month on Watch, so it’s making strong progress.

Watch is now available worldwide on desktop and Facebook Lite as well as the main Facebook app. And it’s rolling out ad breaks to 40 countries after an initial launch in 5 in August. It’s also renewing four shows for a second season: Huda Boss, Five Points, Sacred Lies & Sorry For Your Loss.

But The Information reports that news media executives feel that while some shows are getting satisfactory viewership, ad revenue has been underwhelming. Six months ago, Facebook commissioned news programs from outlets like CNN and Buzzfeed. Facebook reportedly now plans to pay news video content producers less per show as it seeks to spread the same $90 million budget across more programs, potentially with a greater focus on international markets. That cut-back could make producing some shows tough, but at least the execs believe Facebook understands it must prioritize monetization for its content partners.

To the end, Facebook plans to offer more options for advertisers like more targeting capabilities, and expanding its In-Stream Reserve premium ad inventory inside the top quality Watch shows. For individual video creators, Ad Breaks will become more widely available including within game streams from eSports stars. Facebook is also planning to expand its Brand Collabs Manager to additional countries so creators can get hooked up with sponsorship deals, and let more creators sign up fans for Patreon-style subscription payments.

The viewing stats have likely been bolstered by the addition of all episodes of Joss Whedon’s old TV shows Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly that users can binge watch for hours on end. 12 million Watch Party group video sessions have been launched to date, helping shows go viral. Facebook is now testing live picture-in-picture commentating that could let actors host viewing parties that feel like you’re sitting in the living room beside them. Facebook’s VP of video Fidji Simo writes that “With Facebook Watch, we set out to demonstrate what it looks like to build deep bonds through watching online video, instead of just having a passive viewing experience.”

Simo also notes that “People can find videos on Facebook in a number of different places — Watch, News Feed, Search, Pages and more — and all of these can feel different. We want to make the experience of watching video feel immersive no matter where you discovered it. As part of this effort, we’ll be testing a few things in the coming months, like creating a darker background whenever you immerse yourself into a video on mobile.”

Facebook has yet to concentrate its funding on a blockbuster tentpole video series — its Game Of Thrones or House Of Cards. The closest thing it has is the Elizabeth Olsen show Sorry For Your Loss, though viewership has been somewhat weak. Next year Facebook Watch will debut a revived and social media-infused web version of MTV’s Real World. But tapping its deep pockets to pay for one must-see original scripted series could help wedge Watch into people’s lives.

Both Facebook Watch and Instagram’s IGTV have yet to become superstar video platforms, leaving Facebook at risk as more people seek streaming entertainment instead of status updates. So today Facebook is trying to build some buzz for Watch with new stats and rollouts. The free video hub that combines original content, sports, and cult favorite TV shows like Firefly now has 400 million users watching at least one minute per month. That’s not a ton of engagement amongst a wide audience. But on the brighter side there are 75 million users watching at least one minute per day with a much more promising average of 20 minutes per day.

Though that’s just 5 percent of Facebook’s 1.5 billion daily users, it indicates that if Facebook can get people hooked on its ad-supported shows, it could squeeze serious viewing time out of them. Just four months ago, Facebook was saying that only 50 million people spent at least 1 minute per month on Watch, so it’s making strong progress.

Watch is now available worldwide on desktop and Facebook Lite as well as the main Facebook app. And it’s rolling out ad breaks to 40 countries after an initial launch in 5 in August. It’s also renewing four shows for a second season: Huda Boss, Five Points, Sacred Lies & Sorry For Your Loss.

But The Information reports that news media executives feel that while some shows are getting satisfactory viewership, ad revenue has been underwhelming. Six months ago, Facebook commissioned news programs from outlets like CNN and Buzzfeed. Facebook reportedly now plans to pay news video content producers less per show as it seeks to spread the same $90 million budget across more programs, potentially with a greater focus on international markets. That cut-back could make producing some shows tough, but at least the execs believe Facebook understands it must prioritize monetization for its content partners.

To the end, Facebook plans to offer more options for advertisers like more targeting capabilities, and expanding its In-Stream Reserve premium ad inventory inside the top quality Watch shows. For individual video creators, Ad Breaks will become more widely available including within game streams from eSports stars. Facebook is also planning to expand its Brand Collabs Manager to additional countries so creators can get hooked up with sponsorship deals, and let more creators sign up fans for Patreon-style subscription payments.

The viewing stats have likely been bolstered by the addition of all episodes of Joss Whedon’s old TV shows Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly that users can binge watch for hours on end. 12 million Watch Party group video sessions have been launched to date, helping shows go viral. Facebook is now testing live picture-in-picture commentating that could let actors host viewing parties that feel like you’re sitting in the living room beside them. Facebook’s VP of video Fidji Simo writes that “With Facebook Watch, we set out to demonstrate what it looks like to build deep bonds through watching online video, instead of just having a passive viewing experience.”

Simo also notes that “People can find videos on Facebook in a number of different places — Watch, News Feed, Search, Pages and more — and all of these can feel different. We want to make the experience of watching video feel immersive no matter where you discovered it. As part of this effort, we’ll be testing a few things in the coming months, like creating a darker background whenever you immerse yourself into a video on mobile.”

Facebook has yet to concentrate its funding on a blockbuster tentpole video series — its Game Of Thrones or House Of Cards. The closest thing it has is the Elizabeth Olsen show Sorry For Your Loss, though viewership has been somewhat weak. Next year Facebook Watch will debut a revived and social media-infused web version of MTV’s Real World. But tapping its deep pockets to pay for one must-see original scripted series could help wedge Watch into people’s lives.

French startup Tempow has been working on software solutions to improve the Bluetooth protocol. The company just unveiled the Tempow True Wireless Bluetooth profile so that anybody can create AirPods clones.

Many companies have tried creating a pair of earbuds with absolutely no wire. But none of them are as good as Apple’s AirPods. Manufacturers can’t quite recreate the same experience because Apple has developed its own chip and software solution.

Putting aside the magical Bluetooth pairing process, AirPods leverage normal Bluetooth audio (A2DP) to communicate with your device. That’s why they work with iPhones, Android phones, old Windows laptops, etc.

But A2DP normally only lets you connect one device with one headphone. And that’s also what’s happening with AirPods. Your phone establishes a link with one of the earbuds. The second earbud then sniffs the first link.

Other manufacturers have tried to create wireless earbuds by establishing a second connection between the second earbud and the main earbud. They often use Near Field Magnetic Induction. This uses a lot of battery and creates latency issues.

Tempow has been rewriting the Bluetooth stack so that manufacturers can use normal Bluetooth chipsets and pair a single device with multiple speakers. Using this solution for wireless earbuds seems like a natural fit.

Yesterday TechCrunch held its first-ever event in Nigeria — our second in Sub-Saharan Africa. The day was packed with Battlefield presentations from 15 different startups from across the region, along with panels featuring some of Africa’s best known tech entrepreneurs and executives.

It was an incredible day and offered a fascinating peak into an absolutely vibrant tech community. For those unable to make the trek through the standstill Lagos traffic, have no fear. We’ve included footage from the day’s event below. And for those who were lucky enough to join, you can relive the highlights right here.

[gallery ids="1757651,1757737,1757752,1757761,1757760,1757758,1757757,1757756,1757754"]

Expats, Repats and Africans

Kwame Acheampong (Mall for Africa), Eleni Gabre-Madhin (blueMoon) and Lexi Novitske (Singularity Investments) discuss the ups and downs of the influence repatriates and outside investors exert on the African startup community

Fireside Chat with Funke Opeke

Main Street Technologies founder and Main One Cable Company CEO Funke Opeke has led the charge to bring broadband internet to West Africa. She discusses the role of entrepreneurship in helping to scale business.

Investing in African Startups

Kola Aina and other area investors discuss the lessons that can be learned from Silicon Valley VC and which aspects of the model don’t apply to the African tech ecosystem.

Blockchain’s Potential in Africa

Olugbenga Agboola (Flutterwave), Omolara Awoyemi (SureGroup) and Nichole Yembra (Greenhouse Capital) and Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi (SureRemit) discuss the impact crypto has had on the African tech community and the different ways blockchain technology can help build a broad cross section of different categories.

The Winner of Startup Battlefield

The winner of the event was M-SCAN from Uganda, which develops portable mobile ultrasound devices (Ultrasonic probes) that are laptop, tablet and mobile phone compatible. The judges were impressed with its scalability potential to make many other medical access devices affordable for Africa, where mother and infant mortality is unforgivably high.

Procore Technologies, a provider of software to manage construction projects, is now worth $3 billion thanks to a new $75 million round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

The new funding shows just how completely software has eaten the world. Once considered an industry that was too analog to ever reap the benefits of technology’s management tools, software and services for the construction industry have seen some big exits and big money come in over the past three years.

Unicorns abound among the companies that are trying to serve various aspects of the construction industry. Softbank kicked off 2018 by investing $865 million in Katerra — one of many early mega-deals from the firm’s giant Vision Fund — which touts itself as a one-stop shop for everything from planning to permitting to filling new building construction. In November, another software developer which was contending for the construction market, Plangrid, was acquired by Autodesk in an $875 million transaction.

Taking new money from Tiger Global to expand makes sense given the competitive advantage that PlanGrid gained in the market by tying up with a $30 billion powerhouse in software development for the architecture, design and construction industry. Autodesk is the maker of AutoCAD — one of the fundamental tools that architects, designers and construction companies use for two and three dimensional renderings of buildings. By integrating the design management and construction planning toolkits Autodesk created a more integrated offering for customers.

Indeed, Procore said that it would use the cash to ramp up its partner expansion and to continue to invest in new products and services and hiring new talent.

Based in Carpinteria, Calif., Procore already has more than 1,300 employees working in 12 offices around the world and is working with over 5,000 different customers on projects.

Additional investors in Procore include Bessemer Venture Partners, Iconiq Capital, and Lumia Partners.

Social media has lately been linked to mental health issues, with a recent study showing a causal relationship between the use of social media and depression and loneliness. Wisdo, which just raised $11 million in seed funding from Intel Capital and a handful of angel investors, aims to connect and support people in some of their toughest moments.

Communities on Wisdo focus on topics around physical health, mental health, self-growth, sexuality, identity and family. The app works by connecting people seeking help with those who can offer help — often those who have been through similar experiences.

“Wisdo grew out of my own personal experience when my father was diagnosed with cancer – I had no experience with cancer and there was no ‘map’ for what I should do next, no one to give me direction,” Wisdo CEO Boaz Gaon said in a statement. “I also understood that this could not possibly be true: there had to be many millions of people who had lived through this exact situation and who could help guide me – I just needed to find them. This was the seed of Wisdo – connecting people around these experiences, finding the everyday wisdom that we all need, sharing the earned wisdom that we all have, building a map for life’s emotional challenges, and giving people insight into what happens next.”

Wisdo’s timeline feature enables people to lay out their experiences in the form of steps. Based on those steps, Wisdo develops an outline for each life experience. From there, users can engage with each other in one-on-one conversations. In beta, Wisdo grew to 500,000 users.

“Social networks are based on generalized groups of friends and acquaintances where you can’t share openly and honestly about anything,” Richard Klausner, an investor in Wisdo Board and founder of Juno Therapeutics, said. “Social networks can be a force for good by rewarding empathy and helpfulness, which is why we believe so much in Wisdo’s mission. We want users to not only be open and honest, but move from that to creating human connections, which can improve users’ lives in the long run.”

Popular animated avatar creator app Boomoji, with more than five million users across the world, exposed the personal data of its entire user base after it failed to put passwords on two of its internet-facing databases.

The China-based app developer left the ElasticSearch databases online without passwords — a U.S.-based database for its international customers; and a Hong Kong-based database containing mostly Chinese users’ data in an effort to comply with China’s data security laws, which requires Chinese citizens’ data to be located on servers inside the country.

Anyone who knew where to look could access, edit or delete the database using their web browser. And, because the database was listed on Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases, they was easily found with a few keywords.

After TechCrunch reached out, Boomoji pulled the two databases offline. “These two accounts were made by us for testing purposes,” said an unnamed Boomoji spokesperson in an email.

But that isn’t true.

The database contained records on all of the company’s iOS and Android users — some 5.3 million users as of this week. Each record contained their username, gender, country, and phone type.

Each record also included a user’s unique Boomoji ID, which was linked to other tables in the database. Those other tables included if and which school they go to — a feature Boomoji touts as a way for users to get in touch with their fellow students. That unique ID also included the precise geolocation of more than 375,000 users that had allowed the app to know their location at any given time.

Worse, the database contained every phone book entry of every user who had allowed the app access to their contacts.

One table had more than 125 million contacts, including their names (as written in a user’s phone book) and their phone number. Each record was linked to a Boomoji’s unique ID, making it relatively easy to know whose contact list belonged to whom.

Even if you didn’t use the app, anyone who has your phone number stored on their device and used the app more than likely uploaded your number to Boomoji’s database. To our knowledge, there’s no way to opt out or have your information deleted.

Given Boomoji’s response, we verified the contents of the database by downloading the app on a dedicated iPhone using a throwaway phone number, containing a few dummy, but easy-to-search contact list entries. To find friends, the app matches your contacts with those registered with the app in its database. When we were prompted to allow the app access to our contacts list, the entire dummy contact list was uploaded instantly — and viewable in the database.

So long as the app was installed and had access to the contacts, new phone numbers would be automatically uploaded.

Yet, none of the data was encrypted. All of the data was all stored in plaintext.

Although Boomoji is based in China, it claims to follow California state law, where data protection and privacy rules are some of the strongest in the U.S. We asked Boomoji if has or plans to inform California’s attorney general of the exposure as it’s required to by state law, but the company did not answer.

Given the vast amount of European users’ information in the database, the company may also face penalties under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which can impose fines of up to four percent of the company’s global annual revenue for serious breaches.

But given its China-based presence, it’s not clear, however, what actionable repercussions the company could face.

This is the latest in a series of exposures involving ElasticSearch instances, a popular open source search and database software. In recent weeks, several high profile data exposures have been reported as a result of companies’ failure to practice basic data security measures — including Urban Massage exposing its own customer database, Mindbody-owned FitMetrix forgetting to put a password on its servers, and Voxox, a communications company, which leaked phone numbers and two-factor codes on millions of unsuspecting users.

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Twitter says the number of government demands for data on its users has shot up in the past year.

In its latest transparency report out Thursday, the social media giant said it received 10 percent more requests between January and June than on its previous reporting period — the largest percentage increase in three years.

According to the newly released data, Twitter received 6,904 government requests for information on 16,882 accounts. Twitter turned over at least some data in 56 percent of cases.

The U.S. took the lead with 2,231 requests for information on 9,226 accounts — representing about one-third of all Twitter’s demands for the first-half of the year, with Japan and the U.K. falling behind in second and third place.

Twitter also said it received 39 requests for 24 accounts relating to its Periscope live-streaming service, and one request its now-defunct Vine service.

In all, including governments requesting that data is removed, the number of global government demands went up by 80 percent, Twitter said, which had 336 million users as of its last earnings call. Most of the demands came from Russia and Turkey, where freedom of expression is limited.

The company said in its U.S.-specific report that it had notified users affected by five additional national security letters (NSLs) — issued by the FBI without any judicial oversight — after a court release Twitter from their gag orders.

Twitter said that it continues to litigate its case against the Justice Department in an effort to be allowed to reveal more about the secret demands it receives.

More from the report:

• Between January and June, more than 487,300 accounts were suspended for violating the company’s child sexual exploitation rules. Some 97 percent of those accounts were proactively flagged, including through its use of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA software, which helps detect child abuse content.
• More than 205,100 accounts were removed between January and June for posting terrorist content, with 91 percent proactively flagged by the company’s own tools.
• About 75 percent of accounts believed to be spam were challenged by its systems and were ultimately suspended.
• The number of spam reports declined from 868,349 in January to 504,259 in June.

As companies shift to CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery), they face a problem around monitoring and fixing problems in builds that have been deployed. How do you deal with an issue after moving onto the next delivery milestone? Harness, the startup launched last year by AppDynamics founder Jyoti Bansal, wants to fix that with a new tool called 24×7 Service Guard.

The new tool is designed to help companies working with a continuous delivery process by monitoring all of the builds, regardless of when they were launched. What’s more, the company claims that using AI and machine learning, it can dial back a problematic build to one that worked in an automated fashion, freeing developers and operations to keep working without worry.

The company launched last year with a tool called Continuous Verification to verify that a continuous delivery build got deployed. With today’s announcement, Bansal says the company is taking this to another level to help understand what happens after you deploy.

The tool watches every build, even days after deployment, taking advantage of data from tools like AppDynamics, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk, then using AI and machine learning to identify problems and bring them back to a working state without human intervention. What’s more, your team can get a unified view of performance and the quality of every build across all of your monitoring and logging tools.

“People are doing Continuous Delivery and struggling with it. There are also using these AI Ops kinds of products, which are watching things in production, and trying to figure out what’s wrong. What we are doing is we’re bringing the two together and ensuring nothing goes wrong,” Bansal explained.

He says that he brought this product to market because he saw enterprise companies struggling with CI/CD. He said the early messaging that you should move fast and break things really doesn’t work in enterprise settings. They need tooling that ensures that critical applications will keep running even with continuous builds (however you define that). “How do you enable developers so that they can move fast and make sure the business doesn’t get impacted. I feel that industry was underserved by this [earlier] message,” he said.

While it’s hard for any product to absolutely guarantee up-time, this one is providing tooling for companies who see the value of CI/CD, but are looking for a way to keep their applications up and running, so they aren’t constantly on this deploy/repair treadmill. If it works as described, it could help advance CI/CD, especially for large companies who need to learn to move faster and want assurances that when things break, they can be fixed in an automated fashion.

Ever wonder how much of your personal information is accessible to marketers? Well, there’s a new service called My Number Lookup that makes it easy (and free) for you to check the data that’s publicly available and tied to your mobile phone number.

The service was created by Keepsafe, maker of privacy-centric products. While there is a My Number Lookup website, the service actually operates over SMS — you just text HELLO to (855) 228-4539 and it will start sending you a report.

Keepsafe co-founder and CEO Zouhair Belkoura said that while marketers are able to access this information with relative ease, it’s difficult for consumers to check.

“We said, ‘Why don’t we make it super easy?'” he said. “Here’s a number you can text that tells you what information is publicly available.”

Specifically, My Number Lookup will tell you whether it was able to find a name, home address, age, gender, mobile carrier and associated people tied to your mobile number. It will even show you the data (several of the data points about me were missing, out-of-date or flat-out wrong), then point you towards Keepsafe Unlisted, a service for creating “burner” phone numbers (so you don’t have to share your real number widely), and also towards a Keepsafe blog post that outlines how someone can try to remove their personal information from various data brokers.

Belkoura admitted that even though you’ve got the report, you won’t necessarily be able to scrub the data from the Internet. Instead, he sees it as more of “a wakeup call” that people need to be more careful about giving out their phone numbers. And if it leads them to use Keepsafe Unlisted, even better.

“Once information is out there, it’s very difficult to delete,” he said. “The Internet is a place that just doesn’t forget.”

As for why the service operates over SMS, Belkoura said My Number Lookup will only provide data about the number you’re texting from. Hopefully that means users will only check on their own data, not someone else’s: “We don’t actually want to create a service where people who don’t have a legitimate interest can pay to look up information.”