Year: 2018

Spanish startup Glovo, whose platform lets app users summon a gig economy worker to shop on their behalf, be it for a takeaway burger or a multi-bag supermarket shop, has bagged a €115 million (~$134M) Series C round of funding. Spanish press are reporting the round values Glovo’s business at more than €300M.

The lead investors in the Series C are Rakuten, Seaya and Cathay, which had also invested in its Series B.

Also investing is AmRest — a publicly listed restaurant operator in Central Europe — as well as European funds Idinvest Partners and GR Capital, plus some other minor investments.

AmRest controls more than 1,650 restaurants in more than 16 countries — with brands such as KFC, La Tagliatella, Pizza Hut, Starbucks and Burger King, Blue Frog and KABB under its belt. So the strategic opportunities it’s spying to ply fast food fans with on-demand food at the tap of an app button are clear.

Glovo raised a €30M Series B last October. The startup was founded in Barcelona in 2015, and its delivery riders — with the distinctive yellow box bags strapped to their backs — are a common sight around the city, often to be spotted clustering in expectant groups at the entrance to McDonald’s and other fast food outlets.

The startup says the new funding will be put towards optimizing its platform and tech resources to improve the service to riders, users and associated stores.

Specifically, it’s planning to increase its tech team by adding more than 100 engineers in the coming months — saying it wants to become what it dubs “the most relevant technology hub in Southern Europe”.

It also plans to use the funds to fuel its momentum, noting it’s opened up six countries and 20 cities around the world in just three months. Its regions of focus are Latin America and EMEA areas (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), and its app is available in 61 cities in 17 countries in all at this stage.

While Europe is a core region, and Spain alone accounts for a major chunk of its business — where it’s now operating in 21 cities — the legal risk for gig economy companies operating there is rising as political pressure grows to reform employment law to bolster workers’ rights against erosions by app platforms that are in turn reliant on huge armies of so-called ‘self-employed’ workers to power their businesses.  

In the UK, for example, the government is consulting on a package of labor market reforms, saying in February that it wanted to be “accountable for good quality work as well as quantity of jobs” — and putting gig economy platforms on watch for changes.

Glovo’s other regional focus — of Latin America — suggests the startup is hedging its bets where this type of employment law legal risk is concerned.

And indeed where competitive risk is concerned, given the space it’s playing it is a very crowded one on the food delivery front (with the likes of Deliveroo, UberEats and JustEast competing to conveniently serve consumers’ stomaches in Europe), and the likes of Postmates having established a shop-on-your-behalf business in the US.

Also today Glovo announced the nomination of Niall Wass as chairman. It said that Wass, a former Uber SVP for the EMEA & APAC region, has been working for it as advisor for the past year and helping with its expansion strategy.

Prizes of up to £1,000 are up for grabs at Great British Hack-Off summer festival hackathon, an event designed to supercharge the campaign to lobby for a ‘people’s vote’ on Brexit with the option to remain in the EU.

The event is aimed at engineers, designers, UX experts, data scientists, social media influencers and experts. Anyone interested can apply to attend the event via this form.

In a 2-day intensive, overnight “hackathon” on the weekend of July 21-22, the aim will be to connect people with their decision makers and MPs about their concerns for jobs, services and the economy, and put pressure on MPs to back
‘people’s vote’ using democratic tech tools.

The event is being held by Tech For UK (Twitter, Hashtag:#GBhackoff, Instagram,
Facebook) the tech industry body and anti-Brexit group Best For Britain.

There will be a £1,000 first prize for the best product produced by a team, and a £500 second prize for the second-placed team. Participants will also get exclusive merchandise like T-shirts. All products will need to be open source and may be progressed later with other vendors by Best For Britain.

Tech For UK says the ultimate goal will be to engage the tech community to help Best for Britain connect people in local communities to the information they need on Brexit and, in turn, connect them to their decision makers and MPs. Attendees to the Hackathon will also be able to work on their own projects and ideas related to Brexit.

Tech For UK says this will be the first event in a series, to be continued at other cities around the UK, not just in London.

Structured like a “Hackathon” it will be held at a central London venue, bringing together engineers, designers, storytellers, marketers, data scientists, designers, artists, journalists / PR / media people, analytics experts and social media influencers to work on these problems.

Participants will be selected from applications and given full instructions about the event.

There will be capacity for 100 people and the opportunity to stay over-night at the hackathon. Food and beverages will be provided. The event will be an ’18s and over’ event.

A decision in a long running EU antitrust probe of Google’s Android OS is due to land shortly.

The case focuses on whether Google has abused its market dominance and crowded out rivals by taking steps to ensure its own-brand apps and services are pre-loaded on Android devices.

European Commission officials are trailing a press conference with competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager — to announce an “antitrust decision” at 1pm CET, with a link to watch the event streamed live.

Bloomberg is reporting the EU’s fine for Android will be in the region of $5BN — which would be the largest ever antitrust penalty handed down by the Commission.

In April, Reuters reported on a 2016 document it had reviewed which said the Commission planned to levy a large fine against Google and would also order the company to stop giving revenue-sharing payments to smartphone makers to pre-install only Google Search. Reuters also reported then that Google would be ordered to stop requiring its own Chrome browser and other apps to be installed alongside Google’s Play store.

The Commission will confirm the full details of its Android decision in the next few hours.

Stay tuned for more as we get it… 

If you’re an Apple customer living in China who didn’t already opt out of having your iCloud data stored locally, here’s a good reason to do so now. That information, the data belonging to China-based iCloud users which includes emails and text messages, is now being stored by a division of China Telecom, the state-owned telco.

The operator’s Tianyi cloud storage business unit has taken the reins for iCloud China, according to a WeChat post from China Telecom. Apple separately confirmed the change to TechCrunch.

Apple’s transition of the data from its own U.S.-based servers to local servers on Chinese soil has raised significant concern among observers who worry that the change will grant the Chinese government easier access to sensitive information. Before a switch announced earlier this year, all encryption keys for Chinese users were stored in the U.S. which meant authorities needed to go through the U.S. legal system to request access to information. Now the situation is based on Chinese courts and a gatekeeper that’s owned by the government.

Apple itself has said it was compelled to make the move in order to comply with Chinese authorities, and that hardly eases the mind.

It’s ironic that the U.S. government has pursued Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE on account of national security and suspected links to Chinese authorities, and yet one of America’s largest corporates is entrusting user data to a state-owned company in China.

The only plus for Apple users in China is that they can opt out of local data storage by selecting a country other than China for their iCloud account. Since it isn’t clear whether making that change today would see information migrated or deleted from the Chinese server, starting over with a new account is probably the best option at this point.

Hat tip @yuanfenyang

Google is continuing to test new strategies in China after the U.S. search giant released its first mini program for WeChat, the country’s hugely popular messaging app.

WeChat is used by hundreds of millions of Chinese people daily for services that stretch beyond chat to include mobile payments, bill paying, food delivery and more. Tencent, the company that operates WeChat, added mini programs last year and they effectively operate like apps that are attached to the service. That means that users bypass Google Play or Apple’s App Store and install them from WeChat.

Earlier this year, Tencent added support for games — “mini games” — and the Chinese firm recently said that over one million mini programs have been created to date. Engagement is high, with some 500 million WeChat users interacting with at least one each month.

WeChat has become the key distribution channel in China and that’s why Google is embracing it with its first mini program — 猜画小歌, a game that roughly translates to ‘Guess My Sketch.’ There’s no English announcement but the details can be found in this post on Google’s Chinese blog, which includes the QR code to scan to get the game.

The app is a take on games like Zynga’s Draw Something, which puts players into teams to guess what the other is drawing. Google, however, is adding a twist. Each player teams up with an AI and then battles against their friends and their AIs. You can find an English version of the game online here.

Google’s first WeChat mini program is a sketching game that uses AI

The main news here isn’t the game, of course, but that Google is embracing mini programs, which have been christened as a threat to the Google Play Store itself.

‘When in China… play by local rules’ and Google has taken that to heart this year.

The company recently introduced a Chinese version of its Files Go Android device management app which saw it join forces with four third-party app stores in China in order to gain distribution. This sketching game has lower ambitions but, clearly, it’ll be a learning experience for Google that might prompt it to introduce more significant apps or services via WeChat in the future.

Indeed, Google has been cozying up to Tencent lately after inking a patent deal with the Chinese internet giant, investing in its close ally JD.com and combining on investment deals together, including biotech startup XtalPi.

That’s one side of a new initiative to be more involved in China, where it has been absent since 2010 after redirecting its Chinese search service to Hong Kong in the face of government pressure. In other moves, it has opened an AI lab in Beijing and a more modest office in Shenzhen while it is bringing its startup demo day event to China for the first time with a Shanghai event in September.

Finally, in a touch of irony, Google’s embrace of WeChat’s ‘app store-killing’ mini programs platform comes just hours before the EU is expected to levy a multibillion-euro penalty onit for abusing its dominant position on mobile via Android.

There are roughly 45 million unpaid eldercare providers in the United States, according to the 2016 U.S. Census Bureau. It’s tough on these family caregivers, many of whom are working women who are also raising their own children.

There are alternatives. For example, there’s no shortage of agencies willing to place a rotating cast of caregivers into the homes of the elderly, though they can be prohibitively expensive for many families. There are also upstarts trying to address the challenge — and opportunity — that an aging American population presents. One startup, Honor, places full-time employees in the homes of seniors with an eye on maintaining a consistent experience for the seniors with whom they work. Another, HomeHero, partners with hospitals to connect home care providers to patients.

Now, another startup in the space, three-year-old, San Francisco-based Kindly Care, is taking more of a marketplace approach, pairing vetted caregivers with families who need them, then helping both sides manage their financial and tax arrangements by acting as their back-office provider.

The company, as with many similar companies, was born of the need of its founder and CEO, Igor Lebovic, a native of Croatia who’d moved to the U.S. to nab two aerospace engineering degrees, and never moved home, instead starting a company with a college co-founder.

They later sold their startup to About.com, then a property of The New York Times. Despite the happy outcome for Lebovic, however, he worried about his parents, thousands of miles away, as the realization set in that he might never again be as available to them as he was when they lived in close proximity.

“Like a lot of people who leave their parents behind, it’s one of those things that I’ve wondered about over time. We don’t have a lot of plans for our parents, and there’s this guilt.”

Whether the 12-person company eventually expands into Europe is a distant unknown, but Kindly Care seems to be resonating with caregivers in the U.S. According to Lebovic, more than 100,000 caregivers have registered with the platform in hopes of finding an assignment through it, and 20,000 have been fully vetted and are now available to contact through the platform and who can help with everything from memory care; to specialized nursing; to dressing, bathing and personal care; to transportation.

How it works: Based on a family’s specific needs, they scan interviews and videos of caregivers in their area, before settling on an individual and establishing an hourly wage that’s acceptable on both sides. Most families pay between $15 and $18 an hour, says Lebovic. After that, Kindly Care essentially sets up a payroll for the family that ensures that payments and tax withholdings are compliant based on the state of operation.

What Kindly Care gets in exchange is a commission based on the dollars spent on its platform. Families who pay for live-in help are essentially providing the company with 20 percent of the hourly wages they give their caregivers; for caregivers who don’t live with their clients, Kindly Care takes a 25 percent cut.

It may sound steep, but Lebovic argues that it has to do the heavy lifting required on the front end to ensure that caregivers are who they say they are, and that they operate in a way that’s compliant with local labor laws. That Kindly Care provides payroll and other back office functions presumably help many families, and caregivers, rationalize the cost, too.

Either way, Kindly Care remains more affordable than traditional live-in-care, Lebovic says, and it’s a far better alternative to posting an ad on Craigslist and hoping for the best. Investors appear to agree, too. Kindly Care just completed a $5.4 million Series A funding round led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from MHS Capital and Jackson Square Ventures . Altogether, the company has now raised $9.5 million.

Asked what Kindly Care will do with its fresh capital, Lebovic is clear. “Right now we’re geographically spread out across five states,” including California and Ohio. “Now, with the help of our new funding, we plan to expand to all 50.”

Google gave us a hardware blitzkrieg at CES. Among other things, the company announced a new smart display category, aimed at taking on the Echo Show through sheer, brute force. The new Show Mode Dock isn’t a direct response, but it’s a clever one.

Two years ago, Amazon introduced Alexa for the Fire tablet line. Last year, the feature went hands-free. In June, all of those additions finally paid off with the addition of Show Mode for the Fire HD 8 and 10, along with the dock, which effectively turns the tablets into an Echo Show. It’s a perfect bit of stream-crossing synergy for the company.

When I met with Amazon prior to release, I asked if the company was afraid of cannibalizing the Show. They seemed unconcerned. Not surprising, really. Hardware has always been secondary to its strategy. The more Alexa devices in the world, the better. That’s really the bottom line here.

For consumers, the form factor makes sense. You can pick up the 8- and 10-inch bundle for  $110 and $190, respectively, putting it considerably below the Show’s $230 MSRP (though Amazon sale prices do tend to fluctuate a fair bit). That cost is getting you not only a smart display, but a Fire tablet that can be unhooked and used in all of the standard tablet ways.

In fact, the more I talk about it, the less compelling the Show becomes. It was never a particularly attractive piece of hardware for one that’s meant to be displayed in your home at all times. In fact, it’s got a bit of an unintentional retro RadioShack vibe. It’s also unnecessarily big and bulky — that’s part of what made the much smaller Spot that much more appealing.

Given the new product category and some of the deep discounts it’s been getting in recent months, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see a new Show on the way in the not so distant future. In the meantime, however, the device does have a few things going for it versus the tablet/dock combo.

Chief among them are better mics and speakers. Of course, you can always connect the tablet to a Bluetooth speaker (through the app, not over voice yet) to address the latter issue. But for now, if you’re looking for a screen-enabled device that can also double as a small entertainment hub, the Show is probably still a better bet.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that neither the Fire Tablet nor the dock are what anyone would classify as premium devices. Amazon’s efforts to compete on the high end of the tablet market evaporated years ago. The new Fires have decent screens, but otherwise mostly fit the bill of content delivery devices. It’s a strategy that has worked quite well for Amazon, as much of the rest of the tablet category has dried up.

There isn’t a lot to the dock itself. It’s a small bit of plastic with a kickstand that swivels out. There’s a plastic tablet case with two metal pads on the back that snap onto the dock with magnets. A small micro-USB module plugs into the tablet’s port, connecting the two, for data transfer and power, so it can charge while docked.

The key to the whole thing is the addition of Show Mode to the tablet, bringing the same UI you get on the smart display. You can enable it manually on the device by swiping down on the home menu (strangely, this doesn’t seem to be enabled through voice yet). The Mode does away with all of the details of the standard Fire OS, instead defaulting to a large, card-based system.

The Mode is also enabled when the tablet is docked. When you remove it, it reverts back to the standard tablet. Simple.

It all works as advertised. Though again, the speakers aren’t great, and it’s not as good at picking up sounds across the room. Although $40 and $55 for the 8- and 10-inch dock, respectively, is a bit steep, taken together, it’s ultimately a better deal than the Show — and either way, you’re getting a screen larger than the smart display’s 7-inch.

The Show Mode Dock/Fire Tablet combo is really just the all-around better deal. It also starts shipping next week — no word yet on when those Google displays are finally arriving. 

An undercover reporter with the UK’s Channel 4 visited a content moderation outsourcing firm in Dublin and came away rather discouraged at what they saw: queues of flagged content waiting, videos of kids fighting staying online, orders from above not to take action on underage users. It sounds bad, but the truth is there are pretty good reasons for most of it and in the end the report comes off as rather naive.

Not that it’s a bad thing for journalists to keep big companies (and their small contractors) honest, but the situations called out by Channel 4’s reporter seem to reflect a misunderstanding of the moderation process rather than problems with the process itself. I’m not a big Facebook fan, but in the matter of moderation I think they are sincere, if hugely unprepared.

The bullet points raised by the report are all addressed in a letter from Facebook to the filmmakers. The company points out that some content needs to be left up because abhorrent as it is, it isn’t in violation of the company’s stated standards and may be informative; underage users and content has some special requirements but in other ways can’t be assumed to be real; popular pages do need to exist on different terms than small ones, whether they’re radical partisans or celebrities (or both); hate speech is a delicate and complex matter that often needs to be reviewed multiple times; and so on.

The biggest problem doesn’t at all seem to be negligence by Facebook: there are reasons for everything, and as is often the case with moderation, those reasons are often unsatisfying but effective compromises. The problem is that the company has dragged its feet for years on taking responsibility for content and as such its moderation resources are simply overtaxed. The volume of content flagged by both automated processes and users is immense and Facebook hasn’t staffed up. Why do you think it’s outsourcing the work?

By the way, did you know that this is a horrible job?

Facebook in a blog post says that it is working on doubling its “safety and security” staff to 20,000, among which 6,500 will be on moderation duty. I’ve asked what the current number is, and whether that includes people at companies like this one (which has about 650 reviewers) and will update if I hear back.

Even with a staff of thousands the judgments that need to be made are often so subjective, and the volume of content so great, that there will always be backlogs and mistakes. It doesn’t mean anyone should be let off the hook, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate a systematic failure other than, perhaps, a lack of labor.

If people want Facebook to be effectively moderated they may need to accept that the process will be done by thousands of humans who imperfectly execute the task. Automated processes are useful but no replacement for the real thing. The result is a huge international group of moderators, overworked and cynical by profession, doing a messy and at times inadequate job of it.

Niantic — the company behind Pokémon GO — is back at it with another acquisition.

After acquiring Escher Reality back in February and Matrix Mill back in June, this morning the company announced it’s acquiring Seismic Games.

Seismic Games is probably best known for its work on Marvel: Strike Force, a mobile, turn-based RPG that has players build battle teams made up of all the big names from the Marvel comic universe.

Niantic’s two biggest games of the foreseeable future — Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite — both rely heavily on licensed IP. So acquiring a team that already has a wealth of experience with licensed IP — specifically, a team that can walk that fine line of building enough new content to keep the players happy without doing something that sets off the IP owners — makes sense.

No terms of the deal were disclosed.

Five months ago, Google decided to rein Nest in. After 4 years as a mostly independent division of the company, Nest was rolled into Google’s hardware team.

Today, more big changes: Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz is stepping down, according to a report by CNET. The reason? Employees at Nest had reportedly been pushing for a change, hoping for someone who had more leadership experience.

This news comes just a little over two years after Fawaz took over the role after the departure of co-founder Tony Fadell.

Fawaz is said to be staying on in an advisory role, with Nest pushing forward under Rishi Chandra, who’s been overseeing most of Google’s hardware efforts (Home, Chromecast, Google WiFi, etc) as VP of Home Products for over 3 years.

So what does all this mean for Nest? Further integrations between Nest’s hardware and Google’s other offerings are likely; in the past few months alone (since Google brought Nest back under its roof) Nest’s cameras have picked up support for Google’s voice-powered “Hey Google” Assistant, and its video doorbell can announce who’s at the door via Google Homes around your house.

As they confirmed to us back in February: the Nest brand itself will continue to live on at Google, and the company isn’t expecting any layoffs.

We’ve reached out to Google and Nest for more details, and will update accordingly if we hear back.