Year: 2018

Walt Disney Animation Studio is set to debut its first VR short film, Cycles, this August in Vancouver, the Association for Computing Machinery announced today. The plan is for it to be a headliner at the ACM’s computer graphics conference (SIGGRAPH), joining other forms of VR, AR and MR entertainment in the conference’s designated Immersive Pavilion.

This film is a first for both Disney and its director, Jeff Gipson, who joined the animation team in 2013 to work as a lighting artist on films like Frozen, Zootopia and Moana. The objective of this film, Gipson said in the statement released by ACM, is to inspire a deep emotional connection with the story.

“We hope more and more people begin to see the emotional weight of VR films, and with Cycles in particular, we hope they will feel the emotions we aimed to convey with our story,” said Gipson.

Cycles centers around the meaning of creating a home and focuses on the ups and downs of a family as they create a life in theirs.

“Every house has a story unique to the people, the characters who live there,” says Gipson. “We wanted to create a story in this single place and be able to have the viewer witness life happening around them.”

While VR is a perfect candidate for this kind of emotionally driven story, the process of bringing an idea like this to life is no simple task. Apart from the technical feats involved (the short took about four months with 50 collaborators) even the notion of storyboarding is new when designing films like these. When working on Cycles, the team used both Quill VR animations and motion capture to bring their idea into a 3D space.

While this film is Disney’s first foray into VR films, it is terrain that its subsidiary Pixar Animation Studios explored this past winter in a VR trailer for the award-winning film Coco. And, according to a statement Pixar studio executives gave The Washington Post in December, it’s an area the studio would like to explore further through possible VR spin-offs.

Films like Cycles are far from mainstream, but as influential companies like Disney and Pixar continue to experiment in this space the distant future of widespread VR cinema may be beginning to finally approach.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is still reviewing the 12 applications from companies to operate electric scooters in the city. In early June, companies like Uber, Lime, Bird, Lyft and others applied for permits to operate electric scooter-share services in San Francisco. San Francisco’s permit process came as a result of Bird, Lime and Spin deploying their electric scooters without permission in the city in March. As part of a new city law, which went into effect June 4, scooter companies are not able to operate their services in San Francisco without a permit.

The SFMTA initially said it expected to make a decision about which five, if any, companies would receive permits by the end of June. Well, it’s now July and still no decision. The SFMTA expects to finalize its recommendations and documentation “in the coming weeks,” the SFMTA wrote in a blog post today. Once that’s done, the agency says it will work with companies to finalize and clarify the terms and conditions of the permit. The goal, according to the blog post, is to issue permits sometime in August.

As part of the 24-month pilot program, electric scooter companies selected to operate in the city will need to provide user education and insurance, share its detailed trip data with the city, have a privacy policy that protects user data, offer a low-income plan and operate in a to-be-approved service area. The city will allow no more than 2,500 electric scooters on the streets at any one time.

Despite the standstill in San Francisco, scooter companies are moving full force ahead, snatching up venture funding and partnering with larger players. Last week, Lime raised a $335 million round led by GV with participation from Uber. Late last month, Spin announced it’s closing a $125 million security token offering. That came shortly after electric scooter startup Bird raised a $300 million round led by Sequoia Capital.

For a breakdown of the ongoing scooter wars, be sure to read TC’s overview.

You would think that Amazon, Reddit, Wikipedia and other highly popular websites would by now tell you that “password1” or “hunter2” is a terrible password — just terrible. But they don’t. A research project that has kept tabs on the top sites and their password habits for the last 11 years shows that most provide only rudimentary password restrictions and do little to help users.

Steven Furnell, of the University of Plymouth, first did a survey of websites’ password practices in 2007, repeating the process in 2011 and 2014 — and then once more this week. His conclusions?

It is somewhat disappointing to find that the overall story in 2018 remains largely similar to that of 2007. In the intervening years, much has been written about the failings of passwords and the ways in which we use them, yet little is done to encourage or oblige us to follow the right path.

Although the university writeup notes that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo had the best password practices and Amazon, Reddit and Wikipedia had the worst, it diplomatically declined to go into specifics. Fortunately, I acquired the paper for myself and am prepared to name and shame.

The top 10 unique sites in English (as measured by Alexa; the lineup has changed somewhat over the years) were evaluated: Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Microsoft Live and Netflix.

The biggest failure is inarguably Amazon, which combines truly inadequate password controls with an incredibly valuable and personal service. Wikipedia and Reddit had fewer restrictions, but neither protects such important data; an Amazon account being accessed by malicious actors is a far greater danger.

Amazon accepted practically every password Furnell threw at it, including repeats of the username, the user’s own name and, of course, the all-time classic, “password.” (Netflix and Reddit also took “password,” though Wikipedia didn’t. Wikipedia, on the other hand, accepted single-character passwords like “b.”)

Even sites that do have restrictions, like requiring multiple character types or rejecting commonly used passwords, seldom explain themselves. Presented with no feedback at the start, users creating an account may enter a password, only to be told it must be longer… and then, again, that it can’t have a certain word (like the user’s last name)… and then, again, that it must include special characters. And some sites have different requirements when you sign up than when you set a new one!

Why not lay it all out at the start? And for that matter, why not explain the reasoning behind it? It’d be trivial to make a little info box saying “We require X because Y.” But hardly any of the top sites do.

The one bit of light in this dreary report is that two-factor authentication — arguably more important than a good password — is in fact making strides, and some of the worst offenders in password policy (looking at you, Amazon) allow it. Now they just have to move it off of SMS and onto a secure authenticator app.

The final word is pretty the same as it’s been for the last decade:

The basic argument here – as with the earlier versions of the study and the others referenced – is for provision of user-facing security to be matched with accompanying support. Passwords are a good example because we know that many people are poor at using them. And yet the lesson continues to go unheeded and we continue to criticise the method and blame the users instead.

Two-factor is a start, but:

Users arguably require more encouragement – or indeed obligation – to use them. Otherwise, like passwords themselves, they will offer the potential for protection, while falling short of doing so in practice.

In other words, quit talking about how bad passwords are and do something about it!

Farfetch — the e-commerce startup that works with some 900 high end fashion boutiques and labels to present and sell clothes, shoes, accessories and jewellery online, and we and others have heard is gearing up for a $6 billion IPO — is making an acquisition to double down China, one of the fastest-growing markets for luxury goods.

It’s acquiring Curiosity China, a marketing firm that specialises in leveraging social media — specifically, WeChat — to target users and sell goods. It already works with some 80 brands that are also customers of Farfetch to help them use WeChat channels and accounts to reach would-be customers. It also offers CRM and a few other services.

The plan will be to incorporate Curiosity China into Farfetch’s “Black & White” white-label API, which essentially allows boutiques to integrate their stock into Farfetch’s purchasing and logistics platform, or use that engine to sell its goods on their own sites. This will now give them the option also to use the API to run campaigns in China.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. This is Farfetch’s third acquisition, the other two being UK boutique Browns and Style.com. Farfetch also said it is buying all of the company’s tech and all of its employees and founders are coming on board.

Judy Liu, a co-founder of CuriosityChina, will become Farfetch’s managing director for China; another co-founder, Alexis Bonhomme, is taking on the role of VP commercial, China; and the third co-founder, Arthur Shui, will become head of technology for the Chinese operation.

Farfetch’s acquisition of CuriosityChina underscores a few interesting trends currently underway in the market: the rise of the Chinese consumer, the ongoing challenges to target those consumers if you are from outside China, and the rise of social media as a popular marketing and sales channel.

The luxury market was worth €262 billion in 2017, according to analysis from Bain, with customers from China accounting for 32 percent of that amount (shopping both in China and abroad). It turns out that among those buyers, social media — and specifically WeChat — is one of the most important routes to reach customers and for those customers to subsequently buy things, including directly in those social channels.

Curiosity China will fill a gap for Farfetch as it works on ways of expanding its revenues by tapping those two trends. Today, the Asia Pacific region already accounts for about one-third of the company’s sales (it doesn’t break out China) — a decent bedrock on which to build.

But most of those sales today are coming by way of people shopping on Farfetch.com, and so the idea is to tap into the popular channel of the moment to grow those numbers in a complementary way.

“WeChat is the most important channel for commerce in China, so we want to see where it will go,” said Giorgio Belloli, Farfetch’s chief commercial and sustainability officer. “It’s where brands are focusing at the moment. They understand Chinese consumers are using dedicated channels on there for marketing and purchasing.”

On the part of retailers and brands — the other side of Farfetch’s marketplace — they have found it traditionally hard to reach Chinese consumers, and the idea is that this will also help them do that.

For now, there are no plans to expand Curiosity China’s model to other markets beyond its home country. Belloli said that although Farfetch has been keeping its eye on messaging everywhere, and despite the efforts of Facebook to replicate the same commercial experience, so far no other messaging app has managed to break through as a strong channel for fashion commerce as WeChat has. It will be interesting to see whether and how that evolves over time.

Augmented reality tech is in this incredibly weird position where it has the world’s biggest tech companies cheerleading consumer-facing products highlighting it but there are some very base issues that haven’t been solved yet.

Jido Maps, which just graduated from Y Combinator’s most recent class, is another startup aiming to deliver the backend technologies needed to give a great fundamental AR experience. They have just raised a $2.1 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from GREE, Seraph Group, Outpost Capital and others.

Persistence is a big part of what current consumer technologies are lagging in. Jido sees itself as a “save button” for the digital AR world where after gaining an understanding of the space, it can recall where your augmented reality session ended and how the objects within that experience were left in the space.

So, more practically, if you are holding a digital banana and you put that on the table, Jido may enable that to remain in that space when you return at a later date or time. That process of relocalizing a device and helping it remember its former position is at the core of this technology.

What’s interesting about the rhetoric that Jido’s leadership is putting out there is that the company is less focused on the point clouds and seems to be more focused on underlying structure of a space and deciphering the relationship between objects and what fixtures are permanent. The company says that this approach will ultimately give the platform more strength in ignoring changes so if you’re scanning a space with people moving around, Jido can ignore them and focus on the static fixtures without everything breaking.

“To actually have a robust, integrated augmented reality experience you have to take a different approach,” Jido Maps CEO Mark Stauber told TechCrunch. “The reason why we’re excited about our higher level approach to semantic data is because when we go into a space, we’re not there to catch a couple of nice interesting points about the scene, we actually try to understand the structure of a space and the relationship between objects…”

The startup is aiming to get studios working with their lightweight API and is highlighting its simple multiplayer process which focuses on building the mesh as you play rather than pre-scanning an environment at the beginning to entice devs. Game studio Happy Giant is working on a title with Jido tech called QuasAR which will give users a simple setup multi-player laser tag experience.

As competition between Walmart and Amazon intensifies, the acquisition of Shopify’s merchant marketplace may be the boost that the Walton family’s juggernaut needs to move ahead.

In May this year, Amazon published its small business impact report, in which it disclosed there are 20,000 small and medium-sized businesses that make a million dollars or more in sales on its platform.

Amazon boasts about 5 million third-party sellers on its marketplace today, with an estimated 100,000 sellers hopping on-board every month.

At 100,000 sellers a month over the next five years, there could be an estimated 11 million sellers on Amazon’s marketplace by 2023.

E-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse estimates Amazon’s gross merchandise volume, or GMV, for 2018 at $280 billion, set to triple over a five-year period, concluding that the marketplace contribution to Amazon’s GMV would surpass 70 percent by 2023.

Combined with Prime and FBA, this high-level picture sounds like Amazon can afford to not worry about its marketplace. But an uneasy trend seems to simmer within its 5 million cohort. Looking at Feedvisor’s survey of Amazon marketplace merchants from 2017 and 2018 and some interesting trends surface. 

Marketplace merchants are looking to keep their advertising costs low and are worried about rising fees on the Seattle-based company’s e-commerce platform. They’re also concerned about competition coming from Amazon as it continues to launch its own brands. Indeed, 60 percent of merchants told Feedvisor in 2017 that they planned to diversify to other channels. Walmart emerged as the most preferred channel, followed very closely by Shopify and eBay. 

About 10 percent of those surveyed in 2017 were making a million dollars or more in annual sales. A year on, this figure is up to 19 percent. One can tell where these first-time millionaires are heading when we see that Walmart today supports 9 percent more Amazon merchants than it did in 2017.

In its pursuit for parity with Amazon, Walmart has clearly overtaken eBay in merchant preference. The latter supports 12 percent fewer Amazon merchants today than it did in 2017, and is closely trailed by Shopify and Jet.com.

Shopify is one of Canada’s biggest tech success stories

Can Walmart afford to be conservative?

Walmart’s marketplace has 18,000 sellers, 36 percent of whom make at least $2 million in sales — all of whom sell on Amazon!

With its e-commerce business struggling to see gains since 2016, when it acquired Jet.com, Walmart has recently been making the waves with its string of partnerships and acquisitions. In May, it announced that it was partnering with Postmates and DoorDash for expanding its last-mile delivery of online groceries.

In what seemed to be a rebuttal to Amazon’s private label push, Walmart acquired Bonobos, Shoebuy, ModCloth and Moosejaw. It also announced in May that it was adding four fashion brands to its kitty.

While it continues to be hard-fisted about who sells on its marketplace, a trend seems to be emerging wherein Walmart is not just competing with Amazon but is also striving to bring reputed retail brands under its banner and is attempting to re-shape consumer perception of it being low-price and inexpensive.

Walmart may be second in line to Amazon, but it has its cons. Its process to qualify a third-party seller is more stringent. Sellers need to request an invitation to join and must fulfill certain quality requirements pertaining to product mix, price point and fulfillment.

Unable to differentiate among millions of sellers on Amazon and faced with rigorous screening from Walmart, the best bet for Amazon’s third-party sellers to diversify seems to be to set up their own store.

They can either create their own website or set up a store on an e-commerce platform like Magento or Shopify .

Shopify — the network is bigger than the software

Shopify, the e-commerce platform for small and medium-sized businesses, isn’t too far behind eBay and Walmart in merchant preference.

A seller can set up her own store on Shopify’s basic version for as little as $29 a month. It also has a premium version (for a $2,000 monthly fee) called Shopify Plus aimed at enterprise-level sellers and wholesalers. An estimated 3,600 merchants have already bought into Shopify Plus; among them are popular logos such as Tesla, Kylie Cosmetics and Budweiser.

Shopify has an estimated 600,000 merchants on its e-commerce platform and has seen its merchant base grow annually in excess of 100 percent since 2014.

What particularly makes Shopify attractive — and gives it an upper hand over marketplaces like Walmart — is its third-party network of developers, photographers, digital marketers and designers that merchants can leverage for their business. Shopify today is a more turnkey platform than Walmart! Of all digital commerce revenues in 2017 — totaling $2.3 trillion — Shopify sellers’ GMV was 1 percent, worth $26 billion, which shows just how important Shopify is next to Walmart.

Analysts are betting big for the next 10 years despite its recent volatility in stock price.

Around the same time, when Amazon published its small business impact report, Shopify announced that it would open a brick-and-mortar store in the U.S. by the end of summer this year to provide in-person advice and consulting services to its customers.

Such a showroom would also provide Shopify the opportunity to cross-sell its hardware products to merchants who are looking to go brick-and-mortar.

For these reasons, Shopify will continue to attract more merchants and will become more important in the days to come and, as it does, it will get noticed by the big players — Amazon and Walmart.

Shopify and Amazon share history

Shopify partnered with Amazon in 2015 as its preferred migration partner for webstore merchants. Many Shopify merchants already sell on Amazon; they have the option to use Amazon’s FBA and Payment gateway. And more than 50 percent of Shopify’s 3,600-odd “Plus” merchants sell on Amazon, as opposed to less than 1 percent who sell on Walmart.

Clearly, the preference for Walmart.com is abysmal among Shopify merchants.

At a market cap of $17 billion, Shopify can be acquired by Amazon without much hassle. While this may not be in Amazon’s cards considering the call it took four years ago to shut its webstore business and the ease with which it gets inbound interest from the long-tail e-commerce companies (which forms 90 percent of the independent e-commerce companies base), Walmart should start figuring Shopify into its strategic plans.

When your competition is Amazon, nothing is enough

In its SEC filings for the fiscal year ended January 2018, Walmart said that it is looking to increase investments in grocery and technology. Much of Walmart’s moves in these spaces continue to come across as reactive responses to Amazon:

• Recently, in its overseas battle against Amazon, Walmart acquired a 77 percent stake in India’s Flipkart for $16 billion.
• In what could be seen as a long overdue answer to AWS, it revealed its own cloud network.
• It has also kickstarted efforts to take on Amazon Go. With FBA and Prime seeming invincible, Walmart will never be able to catch up to the giant. But, it can prove to be a serious rival if it decides to acquire Shopify.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Why Shopify?

The non-Amazon destination

Today, eBay has more Amazon merchants on its platform than Walmart does. However, Walmart is picking up pace and is evidently becoming more attractive.

Between 2017 and 2018, the percentage of Amazon sellers on eBay reduced from 65 percent to 52 percent. At the same time, Walmart and Jet.com combined saw an increase from 17 percent to 25 percent.

Given 2018’s stats, if Shopify were to become Walmart-owned, about 42 percent of Amazon’s sellers today, would be selling via either Walmart, Jet or Shopify. This would bring the difference between eBay and Walmart (Jet and Shopify included) down to 10 percent, in turn narrowing the competition gap between Walmart and Amazon.

Interestingly, there were rumors in 2017 that eBay was planning to acquire Shopify. The stocks reacted positively but there were no signs that eBay was interested in such an acquisition.

The perfect complement

The fundamental difference between Walmart and Shopify is that the former is a marketplace while the latter is an e-commerce platform.

It is hard for a seller with no distinct brand identity to differentiate herself on a marketplace unlike on a platform. As revenue channels, they are both necessary for a merchant’s omnichannel strategy.

While Amazon will rule the roost in the marketplace arena for a long time to come, merchants should start betting on Shopify. This acquisition will be an opportunity for Walmart to write its story in a market that Amazon tried and quit.

Shopify does not get you shoppers and Walmart does not get you the support services. As a combined entity, their value proposition becomes very compelling.

The apparent weakness is an actual strength

Shopify is not without faults. As with all e-commerce platforms, the majority of their e-commerce merchants are long-tail with little to no revenue. But critics, including Andrew Left of Citron Research, fail to understand that long-tail is sort of a deal pipeline to identify sellers who are likely to grow and contribute significantly to the revenue.

A study of Shopify’s marketplace will validate their claim that the merchants are there for the value of a “one-stop platform and extended services” and not just for Facebook data of their shoppers.

As Brian Stoffel put it in his article, “The moat is strong and growing, even as recent protests have tested the company.”

Shopify’s long-tail merchant base isn’t a weakness. It’s the pipeline that Walmart should value. It could be Walmart’s answer to Amazon’s merchant acquisition spree.

The neighborhood store is actually a Shopify Store

Shopify is an e-commerce platform provider but that’s no reason to dismiss it as a competitive threat to Walmart. Both target merchants are focused on making them sell online, albeit differently.

Walmart handpicks merchants. Shopify doesn’t.

Walmart is a legacy brand and has a perception problem in the market. Shopify is a born millennial, like Jet.

Walmart is competing with Amazon on multiple fronts. Amazon closed its webstore business and switched to an integration with Shopify!

Walmart has no equivalent to FBA. Shopify’s merchants can opt to have their merchandise fulfilled by Amazon.

Brett Andress of KeyBanc Capital Markets drives home the importance of Shopify — “Emerging brands on Shopify are getting larger, and more established brands are gravitating to Shopify to be more nimble.”

While Walmart continues to shop for private label brands in a bid to throw a new spin on its brand identity, it needs to look a few yards away. There are 600,000 of them. Either Walmart could hope for them to come list on its marketplace someday or make itself the very technology that powers their business.

Shopify is known for its ability to attract e-commerce merchants. Its tools — like the name generator, domain name generator, to name a few — are subtle retention hacks to get intending sellers hooked onto its platform. Should a seller decide to sell her business, Shopify has an exchange on which she can list her store for sale. On the partner front, developers, marketers and designers have helped create many success stories, while writing their own. Overall, it seems like the stickiness is here to stay.

With e-commerce still 12 percent of global retail trade and with an expected growth rate of 47 percent over the next three years, Shopify is well-positioned to capture a lot of the e-commerce upside. The neighborhood grocer is now more likely to open on Shopify or sell on Amazon than at the neighborhood. This is also why it makes sense for Walmart to acquire one of the two default portals of entry into e-commerce.

To compete with Amazon, it needs to make moves that shift the ground beneath the foot and a Shopify acquisition could be one of those bets still open.

Can Walmart afford it?

The retail analysts’ consensus is that Walmart needs to expand its e-commerce base, as the default for the younger demographic shopper is still Amazon. Walmart’s marketplace strategy, so far, hasn’t been about becoming that default.

Shopify is a credible option to expand its e-commerce base. Shopify was recently chided by activist investors like Andrew Left for being over-reliant on the top 10 percent of the merchant base.

There are about 4,500 e-commerce companies with $100 million-plus revenue out there and Shopify’s entry into the enterprise commerce market is a reactionary response to the inherent weakness in its own business model (of over-reliance on mid-market and long-tail e-commerce companies). The problem for Shopify and to an equal extent Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and PrestaShop is that the enterprise e-commerce is the territory of Hybris, Demandware, NetSuite etc.

The tough phase for Shopify would be when its mid-market cash cow customers migrate to Hybris or WebSphere or Demandware. It has to backfill from its growing long tail unless it competes head-on with IBM, Adobe, Oracle NetSuite, Demandware or Hybris. This is one of the reasons Magento aligned with Adobe.

The problem for Walmart in making this acquisition though is Wall Street’s view that it’s a mature business with steady returns. Amazon, on the other hand, continues to treat e-commerce as a business which is in its Day 1.

You could observe the pressures Walmart has had in the past. It took Walmart over two years to finally pull the lever on the Flipkart deal, which is going to drain billions from its cash reserves (notwithstanding the revolving credit of $5 billion it has raised to fund the deal).

With the current market cap of $17 billion, Shopify isn’t pocket change. But for reasons mentioned above, Shopify’s growth will be tested. Expanding GMV of existing merchants is easier than conquering the enterprise market, especially if it aligns with Walmart.

Walmart’s cash reserves are less than $10 billion, making it a relatively expensive pursuit likely needing a leveraged buyout, and the market isn’t new to such deals. Amazon, on the other hand, has $265 billion to deploy, but it’s a buy that it doesn’t need. And that sums up Walmart’s predicament as a challenger to Amazon.

Embark Trucks has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Sequoia Capital in its bid to be the first to develop and launch a commercially viable driverless truck.

Sequoia partner Pat Grady has joined Embark’s board. Existing investors including Data Collective, YCombinator, SV Angel and AME Cloud also participated in the round, Embark announced Thursday.

Embark, which was founded in 2016, has raised $47 million to date.

The autonomous trucking field is starting to become crowded. A number of companies, and more it seems every day, are all developing and testing autonomous trucks, including TuSimple, Starsky Robotics, Anthony Levandowski’s new company Kache.ai, Waymo, and Uber.

Each competitor in this emerging industry has a slightly different approach with the same general aim.

Embark, for instance, doesn’t want to replace the driver completely. The company, which emerged publicly in February 2017, envisions local drivers on the two tail ends of a long haul journey. A local driver would handle the piece from a warehouse to the interstate. From there, the driver would drop its freight and Embark’s self-driving system takes over, with a completely autonomous stint on the freeway. A local driver at the end of the trip would the freight to its final drop off point.

The company believes its tech, once deployed, will help decrease the number of drivers needed for long-haul trips.

Despite its relatively small size—there are just 35 employees—Embark has made considerable headway.

Embark has now added operations in Los Angeles suburb Ontario, according to co-founder and CEO Alex Rodrigues who published Thursday a post on Medium on its new funding. The added operations places Embark in the middle of the West Coast’s biggest freight hubs, Rodrigues wrote, adding that the company’s presence in the region was the key to hitting its milestones for the first half of 2018.

Embark is now running a daily service on its freight route from Los Angeles to Phoenix and now. “As of June, our system can complete the route end-to-end with no disengagements,” Rodrigues wrote. “This includes lane changes, merges, on-ramps, off-ramps and lots of LA-metro traffic.”

In February, Embark completed a 2,400-mile drive from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida. The drive, which included a safety driver on board behind the wheel, took five days because of schedule rest brakes. Embasrk contends that the same trip would take only two days once its tech is cleared to run on its own.

Huawei’s had a rough go of it here in the States, after concerns around ties to the Chinese government have left the company scrambling to gain a commercial toehold. Over the past several years, top U.K. security officials have also put the company under the microscope over potential security concerns. 

A new report issued by a government panel with the straightforward name “Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre” this week presents some fairly inconclusive findings.

“Identification of shortcomings in Huawei’s engineering processes have exposed new risks in the UK telecommunication networks and long-term challenges in mitigation and management,” the report notes, early on. “The Oversight Board can provide only limited assurance that any risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated.”

Sure, it’s not as damning as the time the FBI, CIA and NSA issued a bold proclamation against buying from the company, but it certainly leaves the door open for further scrutiny. For its part, Huawei actually seems pretty pleased with the report.

The company offered TechCrunch the following statement in response:

Huawei welcomes the Oversight Board report. It confirms the collaborative approach adopted by Huawei, the UK Government and operators is working as designed, meeting obligations and providing unique, world class network integrity assurance through ongoing risk management. The report concludes that HCSEC’s operational independence is both robust and effective. The Oversight Board has identified some areas for improvement in our engineering processes. We are grateful for this feedback and committed to addressing these issues. Cyber security remains Huawei’s top priority, and we will continue to actively improve our engineering processes and risk management systems.

The report flags a pair of issues relating to testing and third-party software used in some Huawei hardware. The U.K. government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) says it is working with Huawei to address the concerns.

Event management software company Gather today announced the introduction of its Gather Booking Network, and inaugural partners Yelp and EVENTup. The network is designed to help party goers, venues and event planners connect more easily and start celebrating sooner.

Gather was founded in 2013 by CEO and co-founder Nick Miller, Alex Lassiter (SVP of Sales) and Tom Merrihew (VP of Engineering) after their experience organizing corporate events for a consulting group led them head-first into the dark, mostly disorganized world of event planning.

“We kind of fell into and uncovered what is a manual and disorganized process,” CEO and co-founder Nick Miller told TechCrunch. “On both sides of the table. For both the person planning the event but also for the folks who work at the restaurants and venues. We set out to fix the problem.”

Since its creation, Gather has teamed up with more than 12,500 venues and restaurants across the United States and expanded its three-person team to 95 Atlanta-based employees. The company helps coordinate a wide range of events, from corporate gatherings to full-blown weddings. As part of its expansion and to refine its services, Gather raised a $2.5 million Series A round in 2016 led by Ryan Floyd of Storm Ventures and a strategic investment and partnership with Vista Equity Partners in 2017.

Now, the company’s sights are on growing its booking network to provide a one-stop shop for event planning needs.

After the company acquired the venue and event space company EVENTup in June — a move that more than doubled the number of venues and restaurants in its roster — the announcement today of its collaboration with Yelp is bringing its services to the average party-goer as well.

“The Gather partnership gives Yelp users a single destination to search and book restaurants and venues, no matter the party size or timeframe,” Chad Richard, Yelp’s senior vice president of Business and Corporate Development, told TechCrunch in an email. “Diners on Yelp have been able to book reservations weeks in advance or snag a table at the last-minute using Yelp Nowait, but to date we haven’t had a solution for diners looking to reserve for large groups or special events.”

As Gather continues looking forward, Miller says that the company has plans in the coming weeks to announce further partnerships for its booking network, as well as work to develop more efficient services for the platform, including real-time booking.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars, an animated series that ran on Cartoon Network for five seasons, is coming back.

Created by George Lucas and overseen by Dave Filoni, the show depicted the adventures of Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, as well as new characters like Ahsoka Tano, during the titular Clone Wars. Fans praised its ability to showcase a wide range of stories, characters and even genres.

The Clone Wars was cancelled after Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, with a final batch of episodes known as “The Lost Missions” airing on Netflix. Characters and story elements were subsequently incorporated into the animated series Star Wars Rebels — and even into the latest film, Solo.

Today at San Diego Comic-Con, Lucasfilm held a panel celebrating the show’s 10-year anniversary, where Filoni announced that The Clone Wars will return for 12 more episodes, which will air on Disney’s upcoming streaming service. He also released the first trailer for the new season.

It sounds like these episodes are being pitched as the end of the Clone Wars story, with Filoni telling StarWars.com, “Any opportunity to put the final pieces of the story in place is meaningful as a storyteller.”

It’s not clear what this means for The Clone Wars‘ presence on Netflix. Meanwhile, Disney says it will launch its still-unnamed streaming service next year with exclusive Star Wars and Marvel shows — it already announced a live action Star Wars series written and produced by Jon Favreau.