Year: 2018

ClassPass today announced the close of an $85 million Series D financing round led by Temasek, the same firm that led the startup’s Series C financing. L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also invested in the likes of Peloton, Equinox, and Pure Barre, also participated in the round.

As part of the deal, L Catterton’s Michael Farello will join the ClassPass board.

It’s also worth noting that CEO Fritz Lanman confirmed that the share price dropped as part of the $70 million Series C round, but that the valuation didn’t. Both share price and valuation went up during this latest round. That said, Lanman stayed mum on any actual numbers around valuation.

This latest round brings ClassPass’s total funding to $255 million.

ClassPass first launched in 2012 out of TechStars. Back then, it was called Classtivity, and it operated under a very different business model. Users could search for a la carte classes from dance and fitness studios, book an appointment and complete the transaction all from their website.

Turns out, gym memberships exist for a reason. Without a monthly up front investment, most people don’t have the motivation to go workout.

After a number of iterations, ClassPass rebranded and switched up the business model to become the subscription studio fitness plan we have come to know today.

But that didn’t mean the startup was done adapting.

In 2016, ClassPass ditched its unlimited tier and raised prices to produce healthier margins. Before this, some casual ClassPass users were subsidizing the unlimited users who were going to classes four or five times a week. Though it caused a bit of an uproar, and ultimately lost ClassPass around 10 percent of its userbase, the move gave the company much stronger unit economics to allow for further expansion.

Another switch came in the fall of 2017 when ClassPass moved to a credit-based payment system, allowing the company to offer variable pricing to its studio partners to account for peak times and high-quality classes.

It took a hell of a lot of tweaking, but ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman believes that the company is finally in a place where it can worry first, second, and last about expansion.

“[Founder and Chairman Payal Kadakia] and I are most excited about this round because it validates what we did months ago,” said Lanman. “We went through a huge business model evolution and a number of iterations, but this round was led by the same firm who led our Series C and includes one of the most prominent private equity firms in the studio fitness and consumer space.”

In May, ClassPass announced its intention to launch in nine international cities by the end of this year, with a focus on Southeast Asia. The company already has a strong foothold in the U.S., with operations in Canada, Australia, and a strong and growing market in the UK.

“It feels like we can take over the world,” said founder and Chairman of the board Payal Kadakia. “We’ve seen people compete and replicate our model, but we own our category, and we have the ammunition and the right model to tackle the world. Now, our focus is to make sure ClassPass works everywhere. Once we get the behavior working for customers in other markets, we earn the right to offer new categories.

The first category on the list? Wellness. But first, the company is focused on owning every market where studio fitness is already present.

As far as the funding is concerned, it will be used to continue adding to the team — ClassPass currently has 335 employees, and plans to add over 100 in the coming months — as well as fuel international expansion. The funding will also be used, in part, to start marketing ClassPass Live, a live at-home video workout akin to Peloton’s product. ClassPass Live was first launched in March, but the company has spent the time since then working out the bugs and making small iterations to ensure the service is ready for primetime.

Netflix is giving its profile icons a long overdue makeover. The company announced this morning it’s replacing the icons it launched five years ago with a new set of updated icons – including those from Netflix’s own shows. Unfortunately, Netflix hasn’t entirely abandoned its old icons, which were never really all that fun. If you still want to be a masked superhero lady or a frowning guy with glasses, have at it. These have just been updated with a little more color. What’s more appealing is being able to choose an icon of a character from one of your favorite Netflix shows.

Shows like Orange is the New Black, Luke Cage, Queer Eye, Stranger Things, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and others are represented among the over 100 new icons rolling out soon.

The change isn’t just about Netflix updating a key feature of its app – it’s also a way for the service to subtly promote its own original programming to users, and help them feel more connected with the shows they do like. After all, when you make your own profile image Eleven from Stranger Things, you’ll be regularly reminded how much you like that show – and watching Netflix in general.

The company regularly experiments with new ways to promote its programming like this – just recently, it begin testing full-screen images from its shows instead of the black background on the login screen, for example. (At the time, we had noted that updated profile icons would be a better choice. Score!)

Netflix also rolled out screensavers last year, and introduced Stories-inspired mobile previews this spring to help better showcase its originals.

Netflix may spend up to $13 billion on original programing this year, according to Fortune. So it makes sense that it would look for any means to introduce its shows to Netflix users in order to get then hooked on its exclusive content, and then keep them subscribed.

The new profile icons are rolling out on the website, mobile, and TV devices over the next few weeks.

SpaceX confirmed on Twitter this morning that it recovered the booster from the latest Falcon 9 launch. Shortly after launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California at 7:39AM ET this morning, the booster stage landed on the Just Read The Instructions drone ship. The company will now try to catch the rocket’s fairing with a giant net attached to the ship Mr. Stevens.

SpaceX has become more adept at landing its booster rockets but it’s still a spectacle every time it happens. This landing is extra special as the winds were gusting around the time of the launch.

The rocket company has so far been less successful with catching the payload shrouds. SpaceX’s high-speed recovery boat Mr. Steven took to the seas this time around with a larger net in the hopes of recovering the fairings. Reusing as much as possible is critical to SpaceX’s mission to lower the cost of space flight.

Today’s launch was SpaceX’s seventh mission for the company’s client Iridium who contracted with SpaceX to launch 75 satellites into orbit. According to SpaceX, today’s payload of Iridium satellites so far deployed without an issue. SpaceX is contracted for one more launch with Iridium.

This was SpaceX’s 14th launch of 2018.

Developing…

Recruiting, hiring and retention can be one of the most costly parts of a company’s entire operation, and there’s a class of startups and companies that are increasingly getting funded to try to optimize one or more of those problems all at once — including a new big round for employee education platform Guild Education.

Guild Education is just one of an array of companies looking to capitalize on the opportunity to help employers educate their existing workforce and identify employees who might fill the talent gaps with a little bit of training — as well as having a nice retention perk as well. Guild Education helps employers work with nonprofit universities to provide employees with education across a variety of subject matter or credentials, ranging from high school completion and vocational programs to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. All this is designed to offer companies a way to ensure that employees feel like they have a vested interest in their future, and retain them with that kind of perk.

Guild Education said it has raised a $40 million financing round led by Felicis Ventures, with participation by Salesforce Ventures, Workday Ventures, Rethink Impact & Education, and Silicon Valley Bank. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Harrison Metal, and Cowboy Ventures also participated in the round, and Felicis’ Wesley Chan will be joining the company’s board of directors. The company says its programs are currently available to 2.5 million working adults and gives access to classes, programs and degrees at more than 90 universities and learning providers.

“Most of our companies see an ROI on the employee investment within the first year or two,” CEO Rachel Carlson said. “Here’s why: on an incremental basis, our programs simply need to cost less than the cost of losing a high performing employee and hiring and training their replacement. We accomplish that by partnering with affordable, nonprofit universities and focusing with them on dual retention: helping employees succeed at school and at work… Companies with frontline workforces struggle with annual turnover rates well above 50%. So for our companies, a 4-year retention rate is a phenomenal outcome, and they’re thrilled to see that employee move on to their next job after completing a degree.”

If the model sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because there have already been a number of successful companies creating a lot of buzz in the area — and clearly a lot of appetite for a business like Guild’s. Pluralsight, for example, gives companies a way to courses to employees to help them pick up new software engineering skills and went public earlier this year. It isn’t exactly the same model as Guild, but it does indicate that there is a pretty substantial opportunity for tools that help workforces further educate their employees, getting more value out of them and helping them advance in their careers. Given that the hiring and recruiting process can be a time-intensive and expensive one (there are even startups focusing machine learning efforts for recruiting), it might make sense to see if the right person for a job is already within a company. That helps companies get the skills they need and build loyalty with that employee.

While Guild Education is going after the larger companies out there to offer those perks, there’s another one that’s already interesting enough: the wave of contract employees that work with companies like Lyft or Uber, who also might want a similar perk but operate on a different model that isn’t full-time. Carlson said the startup works with companies like Lyft to figure out how to offer those kinds of education benefits to “gig economy” employees as well, though the benefits are traditionally designed for W2 employees since the benefit is non-taxable on both ends.

There will certainly be some competition from online course marketplaces like Udacity or Coursera, which look to offer another way for employees to pick up new skills on their own time and charge a monthly fee for that. But by going through employers to offer that benefit (to be sure, some companies like Lynda.com already do this), Guild Education may be able to streamline the process in such a way that employees get access to already known entities like nonprofit universities in order to get the education they seek.

Most of the two million college students graduating this year will begin careers that will be unrecognizable to their parents and grandparents. The days of getting stable corporate jobs and single company careers are gone.

According to Harvard University Extension School Dean Hunt Lambert, recent graduates can expect to hold 30 jobs in three different careers over the course of their working lives. Many will be self-employed, or work as freelancers, without access to critical benefits such as health care, retirement plans, and training.

Workers already face the challenge of technology and artificial intelligence changing jobs and entire industries. E-commerce has transformed retail, and big data and automation continue to remake manufacturing. As for tomorrow, autonomous vehicles will revolutionize the transportation industry and drones could further change retail. A recent McKinsey Global Institute report estimates that by 2030, in about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of activities will be automated. As machines are increasingly capable of performing “human” tasks, workers will need to take on new and different responsibilities or find new jobs in different industries.

That is why we need to modernize our laws and regulations. As the nature of work continues to change, we can no longer rely on outdated systems and institutions to prepare and protect our workers. It is critical that we think and act now to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to succeed in the changing economy. Recently, the New Democrat Coalition launched an Economic Opportunity Agenda focused on a future that works. In it, the Coalition lays out a vision for closing the skills and opportunity gap, rethinking the relationship between employers and workers, and empowering workers and entrepreneurs.

As jobs and careers change, the United States continues to rely on an education and training system that was built in the 19^th century and is designed for the 20^th. In our parents’ generation, a high school or post-secondary degree could provide job security and a stable income. Today, even a four-year college degree is insufficient to provide the skills necessary for a successful career.

To keep pace with the rapid changes in technology and the American economy, the government, employers and employees must work together to create a more flexible system of skills-based, lifelong learning opportunities for workers to continuously acquire new skills throughout their careers. We must implement policies that modernize and expand access to both traditional and online education programs that provide career and technical education, and skills development so workers can advance in or change their occupations.

But it’s not just our education and training systems that need to be modernized. The 20^th century social contract between employer, employees and government helped build a strong middle class and established the foundation for the American economy to become the strongest in the world. But many of the laws and regulations governing the employee-employer relationship are increasingly obsolete.

For example, unemployment insurance was created in 1935 as a central pillar of the social insurance system for American workers. But the unemployment insurance system was designed for traditional workers in full-time jobs, so it’s unsurprising that the percentage of unemployed workers who receive unemployment benefits fell from about 50 percent in the 1950s to less than 30 percent since 2010. For the approximately 15 million workers who don’t work for a traditional employer, the 20^th century laws and regulations that were designed around the existence of an employer-employee relationship simply don’t apply.

There is no reason for these critical supports to be available only to a lucky few. Benefits should be fully portable, following workers throughout their careers.

The changing nature of work presents unique labor force and technological challenges that are exacerbated by stagnant wages and low rates of business formation. To grow the economy, these challenges require balanced legislative solutions that benefit workers and their ability to negotiate, and allow employers to develop and retain a skilled workforce.

With innovative policies that update our laws and regulations for the 21^st century, and employers who are willing to be part of the solution, we can prepare American workers with the tools they will need to succeed in a rapidly changing economy.

Line, the company best-known for its popular Asian messaging app, is doubling down on games after it acquired a controlling stake in Korean studio NextFloor for an undisclosed amount.

NextFloor, which has produced titles like Dragon Flight and Destiny Child, will be merged with Line’s games division to form the Line Games subsidiary. Dragon Flight has racked up 14 million users since its 2012 launch — it clocked $1 million in daily revenue at peak. Destiny Child, a newer release in 2016, topped the charts in Korea and has been popular in Japan, North America and beyond.

Line’s own games are focused on its messaging app, which gives them access to social features such as friend graphs, and they have helped the company become a revenue generation machine. Alongside income from its booming sticker business, in-app purchases within games made Line Japan’s highest-earning non-game app publisher last year, according to App Annie, and the fourth highest worldwide. For some insight into how prolific it has been over the years, Line is ranked as the sixth highest earning iPhone app of all time.

But, despite revenue success, Line has struggled to become a global messaging giant. The big guns WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have in excess of one billion monthly users each, while Line has been stuck around the 200 million mark for some time. Most of its numbers are from just four countries: Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. While it has been able to tap those markets with additional services like ride-hailing and payments, it is certainly under pressure from those more internationally successful competitors.

With that in mind, doubling down on games makes sense and Line said it plans to focus on non-mobile platforms, which will include the Nintendo Switch among others consoles, from the second half of this year.

Line went public in 2016 via a dual U.S.-Japan IPO that raised over $1 billion.

For the past few months, Facebook has been testing something it calls “Watch Party”. It’s a feature that would let Facebook Groups host shared video streaming sessions, with everyone in the group being able to see/comment on the same videos at the same time. Take the Facebook Live concept and swap in a queue of pre-selected videos to make a sort of ad hoc video channel, and that’s a Watch Party.

Today the company is rolling the feature out to all Facebook Groups.

Here’s how it’ll work (screenshots borrowed from Facebook’s demo video):

1) Starting a watch party is just like posting anything else to a group’s wall. Give it a caption to catch people’s attention, maybe give it an image, and post away.

2) Add a few videos to start filling the queue

3) Once a few people have joined, the stream will start. The video will be synced up for all viewers, with hosts granted the ability to scrub back and forth in a video’s timeline. You can add more videos as you go.

For those who might’ve gotten early access to Watch Party back when it was in testing mode, they’ve added a few new features for the release:

• Viewers can suggest videos, with suggestions popping up in the host’s feed for approval (or not.)
• Each watch party can now have multiple co-hosts who can each add new videos to the queue

The feature is currently limited to Facebook Groups; the company says it’s testing support on Pages, but it’s not quite ready yet.

One other limitation to the current form: it’ll only work with videos hosted on Facebook (no YouTube, Twitter, etc), presumably due to all sorts of technical/licensing issues. (Plus, you know, competition.)

(On that note… Hey Netflix: if you could go ahead and officially build something like this so I can watch through The Office with my wife for the 400th time even when I’m traveling, that’d be great. )

I’m curious to see how different Facebook Groups use this. While it’s got its intended fun uses, plopping a big audience in front of the same video with a shared comment stream always has potential to backfire — hand a bunch of people on the Internet a microphone and an audience, and things can get rowdy fast. At the very least, it’s one more thing for Facebook to try to moderate at a time when its plate is already pretty full.

A group of computer vision researchers from ETH Zurich want to do their bit to enhance AI development on smartphones. To wit: They’ve created a benchmark system for assessing the performance of several major neural network architectures used for common AI tasks.

They’re hoping it will be useful to other AI researchers but also to chipmakers (by helping them get competitive insights); Android developers (to see how fast their AI models will run on different devices); and, well, to phone nerds — such as by showing whether or not a particular device contains the necessary drivers for AI accelerators. (And, therefore, whether or not they should believe a company’s marketing messages.)

The app, called AI Benchmark, is available for download on Google Play and can run on any device with Android 4.1 or higher — generating a score the researchers describe as a “final verdict” of the device’s AI performance.

AI tasks being assessed by their benchmark system include image classification, face recognition, image deblurring, image super-resolution, photo enhancement or segmentation.

They are even testing some algorithms used in autonomous driving systems, though there’s not really any practical purpose for doing that at this point. Not yet anyway. (Looking down the road, the researchers say it’s not clear what hardware platform will be used for autonomous driving — and they suggest it’s “quite possible” mobile processors will, in future, become fast enough to be used for this task. So they’re at least prepped for that possibility.)

The app also includes visualizations of the algorithms’ output to help users assess the results and get a feel for the current state-of-the-art in various AI fields.

The researchers hope their score will become a universally accepted metric — similar to DxOMark that is used for evaluating camera performance — and all algorithms included in the benchmark are open source. The current ranking of different smartphones and mobile processors is available on the project’s webpage.

The benchmark system and app was around three months in development, says AI researcher and developer Andrey Ignatov.

He explains that the score being displayed reflects two main aspects: The SoC’s speed and available RAM.

“Let’s consider two devices: one with a score of 6000 and one with a score of 200. If some AI algorithm will run on the first device for 5 seconds, then this means that on the second device this will take about 30 times longer, i.e. almost 2.5 minutes. And if we are thinking about applications like face recognition this is not just about the speed, but about the applicability of the approach: Nobody will wait 10 seconds till their phone will be trying to recognize them.

“The same is about memory: The larger is the network/input image — the more RAM is needed to process it. If the phone has small amount of RAM that is e.g. only enough to enhance 0.3MP photo, then this enhancement will be clearly useless, but if it can do the same job for Full HD images — this opens up much wider possibilities. So, basically the higher score — the more complex algorithms can be used / larger images can be processed / it will take less time to do this.”

Discussing the idea for the benchmark, Ignatov says the lab is “tightly bound” to both research and industry — so “at some point we became curious about what are the limitations of running the recent AI algorithms on smartphones”.

“Since there was no information about this (currently, all AI algorithms are running remotely on the servers, not on your device, except for some built-in apps integrated in phone’s firmware), we decided to develop our own tool that will clearly show the performance and capabilities of each device,” he adds. 

“We can say that we are quite satisfied with the obtained results — despite all current problems, the industry is clearly moving towards using AI on smartphones, and we also hope that our efforts will help to accelerate this movement and give some useful information for other members participating in this development.”

After building the benchmarking system and collating scores on a bunch of Android devices, Ignatov sums up the current situation of AI on smartphones as “both interesting and absurd”.

For example, the team found that devices running Qualcomm chips weren’t the clear winners they’d imagined — i.e. based on the company’s promotional materials about Snapdragon’s 845 AI capabilities and 8x performance acceleration.

“It turned out that this acceleration is available only for ‘quantized’ networks that currently cannot be deployed on the phones, thus for ‘normal’ networks you won’t get any acceleration at all,” he says. “The saddest thing is that actually they can theoretically provide acceleration for the latter networks too, but they just haven’t implemented the appropriated drivers yet, and the only possible way to get this acceleration now is to use Snapdragon’s proprietary SDK available for their own processors only. As a result — if you are developing an app that is using AI, you won’t get any acceleration on Snapdragon’s SoCs, unless you are developing it for their processors only.”

Whereas the researchers found that Huawei’s Kirin’s 970 CPU — which is technically even slower than Snapdragon 636 — offered a surprisingly strong performance.

“Their integrated NPU gives almost 10x acceleration for Neural Networks, and thus even the most powerful phone CPUs and GPUs can’t compete with it,” says Ignatov. “Additionally, Huawei P20/P20 Pro are the only smartphones on the market running Android 8.1 that are currently providing AI acceleration, all other phones will get this support only in Android 9 or later.”

It’s not all great news for Huawei phone owners, though, as Ignatov says the NPU doesn’t provide acceleration for ‘quantized’ networks (though he notes the company has promised to add this support by the end of this year); and also it uses its own RAM — which is “quite limited” in size, and therefore you “can’t process large images with it”…

“We would say that if they solve these two issues — most likely nobody will be able to compete with them within the following year(s),” he suggests, though he also emphasizes that this assessment only refers to the one SoC, noting that Huawei’s processors don’t have the NPU module.

For Samsung processors, the researchers flag up that all the company’s devices are still running Android 8.0 but AI acceleration is only available starting from Android 8.1 and above. Natch.

They also found CPU performance could “vary quite significantly” — up to 50% on the same Samsung device — because of throttling and power optimization logic. Which would then have a knock on impact on AI performance.

For Mediatek, the researchers found the chipmaker is providing acceleration for both ‘quantized’ and ‘normal’ networks — which means it can reach the performance of “top CPUs”.

But, on the flip side, Ignatov calls out the company’s slogan — that it’s “Leading the Edge-AI Technology Revolution” — dubbing it “nothing more than their dream”, and adding: “Even the aforementioned Samsung’s latest Exynos CPU can slightly outperform it without using any acceleration at all, not to mention Huawei with its Kirin’s 970 NPU.”

“In summary: Snapdragon — can theoretically provide good results, but are lacking the drivers; Huawei — quite outstanding results now and most probably in the nearest future; Samsung — no acceleration support now (most likely this will change soon since they are now developing their own AI Chip), but powerful CPUs; Mediatek — good results for mid-range devices, but definitely no breakthrough.”

It’s also worth noting that some of the results were obtained on prototype samples, rather than shipped smartphones, so haven’t yet been included in the benchmark table on the team’s website.

“We will wait till the devices with final firmware will come to the market since some changes might still be introduced,” he adds.

For more on the pros and cons of AI-powered smartphone features check out our article from earlier this year.

Market research firm GlobalWebIndex, which provides consumer insight data for marketing purposes for customers including Google, Spotify, WPP, IPG and Omnicom Group, has closed a $40 million Series A round. The funding is its first VC raise, almost a decade after the business was founded.

The investment comes from New York-based growth fund Stripes Group, along with a number of other unnamed data, software and consumer technology companies. GWI says it will be used to accelerate product development and for international expansion, including in the U.S. and Asia. 

The company is based in London but has recently opened offices in New York City and Los Angeles, as well as having technology hubs in locations across Europe.

With the new funding it says it’s planning to open more international offices across the Americas and Asia Pacific to support a client base which spans more than 80 countries.  

But why take VC now? “After nine years with no funding and seeing phenomenal growth and expansion, we are still seeing an increasing demand for our data, especially from companies that we haven’t traditionally sold to,” says CEO Tom Smith.

“The new funding will support our product development and hiring efforts so we can establish ourselves as the go to platform for digital consumer insights for the marketing industry.”

The company believes it’s positioned itself on the right side of digital history, having chosen an opt-in, survey-based route for gathering a chunk of its consumer data for market research purposes — putting detailed questions to its global panel of 22 million web users from whom it’s gaining up front consent to their data being processed.

Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR, is explicit on the need for consent to be informed, specific and freely given if that’s your legal basis for processing people’s personal data.

On the product development front, GWI says it’s working to develop new ways of collecting consumer data — having developed a proprietary, device-agnostic “messenger-style survey tool” which Smith says allows respondents to “answer questions at times and in formats which suit them”.

“It’s about putting the consumer first — not just in how their data is used, but how you run the survey itself. With this new approach we hope to be able to return survey results faster to our clients, so they can make quick business decisions based on insights retrieved from our tried and tested methodology,” he adds.

“Years before GDPR, we wanted to be respectful to those who take one of our surveys, meaning that they see consumer-centric privacy and consent notices which use easy-to-understand language to outline what we do, why it’s important to our clients, and what their responses will be used for.”

“We ask our respondents a wide range of questions relating to their digital lives and lifestyles,” he continues. “This covers everything from their social media, device, media consumption and online behaviors to their interactions with brands, their attitudes and their daily life. For us, it’s key to understand not just what people are doing online, but the attitudes, motivations and beliefs which drive this.”

GWI’s primary product offering is its core study — which is fielded in 44 countries, and which it says contains 25,000 data points on 22M+ “connected consumers”.

“Each year we interview hundreds of thousands of representative individuals about their digital lives. The aggregated results of this are made available on our industry-leading platform on a syndicated basis, where clients can build and then analyze any audience they like. For example, you could look at Older vs Younger Millennials, Mums vs Dads, Instagrammers vs Snapchatters — in each case, understanding which behaviors and attitudes are unique to each group,” explains Smith.

It also offers a range of custom services to supplement that core survey-based market intelligence data.

“Many clients use this offering to ask follow-up questions to our respondents, allowing them to overlay the answers to their bespoke questions with the 25,000 data points contained in the core data set,” he says, adding: “We also offer a wide range of other research solutions such as brand tracking, path to purchase journey, ad-effectiveness, concept testing, website analytics and more. Here the sheer scale of our panel — currently at 22M consumers — is a real differentiator.”

All survey respondents are compensated for their time, according to Smith — in different ways, depending on the market, but including via monetary payments, vouchers, loyalty points, charitable donations etc.

One thing to note is that GWI does also use cookie-based tracking to gather data less directly — including by working with partners. So it is also reliant on third parties obtaining consent to data processing, and must therefore rely on those partners to cleanly and fairly obtain consent for this portion of its market intelligence activity.

“In some instances, the cookies we use as part of our research are dropped by the research panels we work with, rather than by GlobalWebIndex itself. In these instances, all such panels are required to obtain consent in GDPR-compliant manners,” says Smith on this.

The company tells TechCrunch it uses cookie tracking to enrich its core survey data, and only uses cookies to track the behaviors of its panelists — and only those who have actively opted in to this type of tracking.

“Our analytics technology connects the data we collect through surveys to the behaviors of our panel on client websites and connected properties, as well as their exposure to digital advertising campaigns.  In this way, we can leverage the 25,000+ data points we collect through panelist interviews to their browsing behaviors and online activities, providing a unique connection between brand engagement and the attributes, motivations and interests of our clients’ target audiences.”

“The GDPR was welcome validation of the approach we have always adopted, whereby respect for the consumer is central,” adds Smith. “Given that we have a direct relationship with the individuals who complete our surveys, we have an amazing opportunity to outline there and then what we want to do with their responses, and to gain their explicit consent for the use of cookies.

“The nature of survey-based market research also means that the consumers know which types of data they are providing, and can decline to answer certain questions if they so choose.”

So why does a company like Google — which has access to vast, global consumer data stores of its own, gathered from its own products and via a network of online tracking cookies and pixels — need GWI’s market intelligence?

“Many of our clients have their own proprietary sources of consumer data but turn to GlobalWebIndex because of the robust, global, independent view it offers on consumer behaviors,” Smith responds on this. “Our ability to give a 360-degree view on the consumer is particularly valuable, with our data providing a unique cross-device, cross-platform perspective.”

On the competition front, he names the likes of Nielsen, YouGov, Comscore, Kantar, GfK and Simmons. “We provide a global view which is consistent across countries, unlike some alternatives which operate different surveys at different times and then patch them together,” he argues.

He also touts the “incredibly rich view of the consumer’s digital life” the GWI consumer panel is able to generate, given the number of data points it’s gathering.

“We have this depth on all of our respondents, whereas some other sources will only have small pockets of data on each individual,” he claims. “We track behaviours and attitudes from the consumer’s perspective. There are no inferences, no modeling, no assumptions based on browsing. This is how the consumer acts and feels from their own point of view.

“We provide up-to-the minute data which tells you what people are doing in the here and now. Our quarterly releases will soon move to monthly, and from there we’ll develop a real-time version of our data set.”

“Our ability to re-interview our respondents is hugely important for clients, as it allows them to sync their bespoke questions with the 25,000 data points from the core study. It’s a hugely quick and efficient way to gain a rich understanding of your target audience,” he adds.

Facebook’s long-running effort to go into China got a boost this week after the U.S. company was handed a license to set up a subsidiary in the country. But quickly after news broke, the license was seemingly revoked.

The incident started when Reuters spotted a filing approved on China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System for a Facebook subsidiary that is registered in Hangzhou, the location of e-commerce giant Alibaba’s HQ. Records show the subsidiary is financed by $30 million in capital, with Facebook Hong Kong listed as the sole shareholder.

As word of the filing began to spread following the Reuters report, references to the news were blocked on some social media platforms in China were blocked and the filing itself from removed from the system, as The New York Times reported.

Facebook itself said in a statement that it intends to launch an innovation in Zhejiang, the province that counts Hangzhou as its capital, but the language used by the company suggests it hasn’t yet made progress on that plan.

“We are interested in setting up an innovation hub in Zhejiang to support Chinese developers, innovators and start-ups. We have done this in several parts of the world — France, Brazil, India, Korea — and our efforts would be focused on training and workshops that help these developers and entrepreneurs to innovate and grow,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch.

So what happened?

It’s hard to know with the Chinese government — and it certainly looks like Facebook is following developments as much as anyone else is.

It’s well reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a long-standing interest in entering China in some form — he has famously learned Mandarin and appeared at university events among other things — but exactly what that details has never been clear.

Facebook the service remains blocked in China. The company experimented by introducing a stealth app last year, while Zuckerberg has spent time with Chinese ministers, including the country’s internet minister and head of propaganda, but this filing is the most concrete developing for Facebook in China to date. And even that remains uncertain.

It stands to reason that as a late entrant to the country’s already-advanced social media space, and of course an overseas player, Facebook’s first task is to identify a local partner that it can lean on. That’s fairly common for most Western tech companies and it often sees them create local identities which are supported and funded by local investment firms, as has been the case for the likes of Uber, LinkedIn and Evernote.

Facebook previously held talks with Baidu a number of years ago, but an alliance wasn’t forthcoming. The filing in Hangzhou hints at a possible link with Alibaba given the ties that the e-commerce giant has with local authorities in its home province.

Among its many initiatives, Alibaba deployed City Brain — its data surveillance service for governments — in Hangzhou, and it has worked with visiting companies, such as 500 Startups, to help raise awareness of the location for startups and bring overseas visitors in. Outside of China, Alibaba has also invested heavily in startups, most notable Snap, to grow its networks and knowledge.

The link to Facebook is a small one, it could be circumstantial, but it certainly raises the question over whether a partnership might be brewing.

Both Facebook and Alibaba declined to comment when asked about their relationship with each other.

Like Facebook’s own future in China, it looks like time will tell whether there is anything of substance here.

While Facebook’s China journey may have taken one step forward but another ten back, rival Google has been testing out experiments as it figures out how to tackle China going forward. The search giant has opene an AI lab in Beijing, made investments in Chinese startups and released apps on third-party app stores in the country.

Just last week, it began dabbling on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging app, with the launch of its first mini program for the platform.