Year: 2018

Apple has released a handful of new ads promoting the iPad’s portability and convenience over both laptops and traditional paper solutions. The 15-second ads focus on how the iPad can make even the most tedious things — travel, notes, paperwork, and ‘stuff’ — just a bit easier.

Three out of the four spots show the sixth-generation iPad, which was revealed at Apple’s education event in March, and which offers a lower-cost ($329 in the U.S.) option with Pencil support.

The ads were released on Apple’s international YouTube channels (UAE, Singapore, and United Kingdom).

This follows another 90-second ad released yesterday, focusing on FaceID. The commercial shows a man in a gameshow-type setting asked to remember the banking password he created earlier that morning. He struggles for an excruciating amount of time before realizing he can access the banking app via FaceID.

There has been some speculation that FaceID may be incorporated into some upcoming models of the iPad, though we’ll have to wait until Apple’s next event (likely in September) to find out for sure.

This week Samsung is opening what it’s calling the world’s largest mobile phone factory in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Expansion, which will be fully complete in 2020, is expected to nearly double Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), India’s current phone producing capabilities from 68- to 120 million phones per year.

The electronics giant has been producing phones in the country for well over a decade (while the original factory dates back to 1996), while much of the competition has mostly been dabbling. Earlier this year, for instance, Apple started a manufacturing trial run of the iPhone 6S, after having previous done a small batch of the iPhone SE.

Along with bringing jobs, such localized manufacturing could also go a ways toward helping bring the cost of devices down. India’s government, naturally, is excitedly embracing the announcement as art of its “Make in India” initiative. As such, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on-hand for the opening ceremony, along with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, repping his home country’s largest company.

“Our Noida factory, the world’s largest mobile factory, is a symbol of Samsung’s strong commitment to India, and a shining example of the success of the Government’s ‘Make in India’ program,” Samsung India CEO HC Hong said in a release tied to the news. “Samsung is a long-term partner of India. We ‘Make in India’, ‘Make for India’ and now, we will ‘Make for the World’. We are aligned with Government policies and will continue to seek their support to achieve our dream of making India a global export hub for mobile phones.”

India represents a massive — and growing — smartphone market. Last year the country passed the U.S., becoming the number two market after China. A commitment to local manufacturing will no doubt go a long way for Samsung, which currently ranks as the number two smartphone maker in the country, behind Xiaomi.

After promising up the feature for the better part of a year, Dish’s Hopper line just got Google Assistant functionality. The feature brings hands-free control to the receivers, allowing for the standard array of functionality like play, pause, fast forward and rewind, along with content search.

Here are a handful of examples from Google,

• “Turn on my Hopper”
• “Tune to channel 140”
• “Show me home improvement shows”
• “Open Game Finder on Hopper”
• “Rewind 30 seconds” “Pause” and “Resume”
• “Record Game of Thrones on Hopper”

You get the idea.

Dish announced the feature back at CES — I’m not sure eight months qualifies as “soon” in terms of software updates, but there you go. The feature works with Hoppers that are paired with Assistant-enabled devices like Google Home smart speakers and Android handsets. Apparently the company rolled the feature out to about one-percent of users last week as a kind of large-scale test. 

Dish has supported Alexa for some time, on the other hand. Last May, the company brought the hands-free skill to Hopper, and added support for its Joey receivers back in October. Amazon’s assistant also added DVR recording capability for Dish, TiVo, DIRECTV and Verizon this March.

It’s very hard to know what the effects of Brexit are “on the ground”. Local news no longer has much of a business model to concentrate on specific subjects or campaigns. Social media is a mess of local facebook groups which only locals can see. MPs often ignore email / online campaigns from constituents.

The Great British Hack-Off aims to address this. In a 2-day intensive, overnight “hackathon” on the weekend of July 21-22 it aims to get a groundswell of interest in helping to improve local communities and economies and connect people with their decision makers.

It will be held by Tech For UK (Twitter, Hashtag:#GBhackoff, Instagram,
Facebook) the tech industry body calling for a meaningful people’s vote on Brexit, with the option to Remain, and anti-Brexit group Best For Britain .

Anyone interested can apply to attend the event via this form.

The Great British Hack-Off will ask a number of questions and try to build products to address the answers.

Are local community projects, some formerly funded by the EU, still going? Are they being replaced? What about local factories, businesses? What about health Services? Are local or central governments stepping in to help, or are people’s concerns being ignored? Is European and other foreign investment ebbing away from local communities or is it being replaced? Are local news sources sharing what is going on?

What are the human stories? How can social media and video be used to tell those stories best?

The Great British Hack-Off will be a festival of tech and creativity to address these issues.

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.

They say there will be capacity for 120 people and the opportunity to stay over-night at the hackathon. Food and beverages will be provided.

Make way for more money into the startup investing pool. Today, Index Ventures announced that it has closed a total of $1.65 billion in new funds — $1 billion that it plans to invest in later-stage, growth rounds, and $650 million that it plans to put into earlier rounds for smaller startups.

The venture fund is Index’s ninth; the growth round is its fourth since it was founded in 1996.

The funding is significant for a couple of reasons. Index is one of Europe’s (and America’s) more prominent venture capital firms, backing recent hits like Adyen, Dropbox, iZettle, and Zuora (all of which have now either gone public or, in the case of iZettle, been acquired), so its backing has become something of a signal for companies to watch (similar to a number of others, it should be noted), as well as setting a pace for investing choices (including who is doing the investing).

The funding is also notable because of the size of the funds. Index has raised $7.25 billion over the years, using that money to seed and grow hundreds of startups, and helping to fuel — alongside the growth of the internet and technologies like mobile — what has become a veritable tech boom over the last couple of decades. 

But even within that longer trend, more recent years have seen an even bigger infusion of venture funding into the tech ecosystem, with outsized backers like Softbank bringing together syndicates of tech titans to bring in tens (and even hundreds) of billions of dollars into the mix.

The strong returns that the very biggest startups deliver — the world’s most valuable companies today are dominated by tech names — has led to even more money pouring into the sector. This latest $1.65 billion from Index is a leap on its previous growth and venture fund close: in 2016 it raised $1.25 billion ($550 million for venture and $700 million for growth), which at the time seemed huge and now seems almost modest.

“The reason why it’s a larger amoung is because companies are raising more money earlier. There is more capital, [but also] the opportunities are larger,” said Martin Mignot, and investing partner with Index, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Startups are going after larger sectors and a greater percentage of the GDP, and we believe that the size of outcome will get larger.”

“Operating thousands of scooters would not have been thought of as a venture-backed opportunity in the past,” added Mike Volpi, another investing partner at Index, in reference to Index’s investment in the scooter startup Bird. “It is now.”

“We are still in the very early innings of this,” Mignot said of the wave of transportation startups.

This is also leading to a big shift in how startups are evolving. The most highly capitalised are staying private for longer, because private money is much easier to come by than it was before: this means large growth rounds, more secondaries for investors to get their returns, and longer cycles before “exits.” In that vein, it’s notable that Index has raised $1 billion for growth investments.

But while some VCs are now looking at strategies specifically around secondary sales, this will not be a route Index plans to take.

“There might be a sliver of secondary, but not much. We have no plans to do a secondary fund,” said Volpi. “That is not our focus at this point, nor for the foreseeable future.”

Index says that the growth money in this fund will be going to some of the biggest names in its stable already, which includes the likes of Aurora, Bird, Deliveroo, Elastic, Farfetch, Robinhood, Revolut and Slack. (Another way to look at this: if you didn’t already know about the startups in this list raising more money… you do now.) Some of that it seems will also involve helping its portfolio companies work more closely with others in the Index network and sphere of influence.

On Slack, for example, Volpi notes, “One of Slack’s key growth areas is Europe, and so we’re doing a number of things outside of traditional funding to help with those advances.”

Index now has 21 people on its investment team, but with only one woman among its nine investing partners — Sarah Cannon.

“It’s a valid problem that many firms are trying to address,” Volpi said of lack of females at the top of Index’s pyramid. He said Index’s approach is to add more women at all levels. “Seven out of our last 12 hires have been women,” he said. “The pace of hiring means we will not change overnight, but we’re happy with the progress and eventually will see us shift to 50-50, as it should be.”

Fresh from Spotify’s unique direct listing in the U.S., another huge streaming service is about to follow suit and go public in America.

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) has nothing like the global profile of Spotify, but China’s top streaming service is heading for the U.S. public markets according to a filing made this weekend by parent company Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese internet giant which plans to spin the music business out.

At this point, specific financial details around the listing aren’t being released, but past reports have suggested that it could raise as much as $1 billion and give TME a valuation of $30 billion. That would be quite a jump from its most recent $12 billion valuation and certainly not guaranteed given that others from China, including Xiaomi, has fallen short of ambitious IPO valuation targets.

But there’s precedent here since Tencent made a similar move last year when it broke off China Literature, its digital books business unit, and listed it in Hong Kong with some success. Hong Kong had also been mooted as a destination for TME, but the Tencent filing stated the firm’s intention to “spin-off by way of a separate listing… on a recognized stock exchange in the United States.”

While it seems unlikely that Tencent will follow Spotify and adopt a direct listing — which ditches with the conventional process of an IPO price and engaging banks — it may well call on its rival for pointers since they are both mutual investors.

The duo announced an equity swap deal in December that could see them team up on business in the future. At the time it was certainly a sign that both sides were getting into shape to go public, and TME’s IPO would wrap that up.

Remittances and the process of transferring money between people and organizations continues to be a huge business — worth some $613 billion globally, according to the latest figures from the World Bank. Now one of the bigger players in the world of B2B payments is itself changing hands. EQT — the investment and private equity firm — is buying Banking Circle from its previous majority owner Denmark’s Saxo Bank. A Banking Circle spokesperson told TechCrunch that the deal is valued at 2 billion Danish kroner, or $300 million.

Banking Circle’s co-founders and co-CEOs, Anders la Cour and Laust Bertelsen, will stay on and keep leading the company. EQT said that it plans to invest in the business to expand its product offerings and also help it move into more geographies. For now it will stay focused on B2B although it has also some sights on extending to consumer by way of its clients (in other words, B2B2C).

Banking Circle currently processes about €60 billion in payments annually for its clients, which include banks, card entities, and payment gateways that choose. It also has partnerships with a number of them and other banks to provide direct clearing access, making the payments faster and cheaper.

La Cour told TechCrunch that Banking Circle was essentially started under the wing of Saxo “because it’s very hard to build this without the help of a major partner.” Similarly, now that it has grown, it’s time to grow under a different structure with less ties to a single bank. “We see this as the right partner at the right time,” he said.

Banking Circle, he said, is ‘close to profitability’ Ebitda-wise. “We’ll keep investing heavily over the next couple of years.”

EQT says it plans to invest more in the company itself, but it’s also going to be leveraging its holdings in other businesses, as well as its own platform that includes “deep TMT sector expertise, local presence and EQT’s global network of Industrial Advisors,” it said.

“We are excited to partner with EQT,” said the co-CEOs in a joint statement. “With their support, we will be ideally positioned to continue innovating to serve our customers even better and continue our rapid growth.”

Saxo Bank’s payments division will also continue working with Banking Circle under its new owner.

“We are proud of Saxo Payments Banking Circle’s development and growth. As investor and incubator, we have supported the company with our core competencies in foreign exchange as well as developing and managing global fintech solutions,” said Kim Fournais, founder and CEO of Saxo Bank, in a statement. “It is not an easy task to build fintech solutions that create value and are long-term sustainable, but the company has done what few succeed in.”

EQT is a prolific investor in tech startups, as well as an acquirer of them. Just last week, its private equity division EQT Partners picked up the commercial Linux distributor Suse from Micro Focus for $2.5 billion. EQT Ventures, which is also partly financing this deal, describes itself as “half VC, half startup” and aims to put in more than just money to the companies that it backs or acquires.

In the case of Banking Circle, the company is tapping into a huge market that spans developed and emerging markets, as well as individuals and businesses, and taps into new tech innovations to speed up the process, make it less costly and more easy to do, and overall disrupt those who have traditionally been the gatekeepers for remittances — the Western Unions and large banks of the world.

It’s not the only one trying to do so, of course: the focus on using new digital rails for payments, and instruments like mobile phones and the internet to facilitate money transfers means that a number of startups have entered the fray. Some of the biggest that started out initially working with individuals, such as TransferWise, are now also building up substantial B2B businesses, too. This is one reason why EQT, with an eye on smaller startups, saw an opportunity to invest in, and supercharge, Banking Circle.

“We have followed Banking Circle for several years and are impressed by the company’s management team and unique innovation capabilities,” says Mads Ditlevsen, Responsible Deal Partner and Partner at EQT Partners, Investment Advisor to the majority owner EQT VIII. “Saxo Bank and Banking Circle’s management team have built an innovative, secure, and highly automated platform to make competitive, faster, and more transparent payments across borders. EQT is looking forward to supporting Banking Circle and the management team on their continued growth journey and in building a leading global payments infrastructure player.”

“We’re excited to partner with the entrepreneurs behind Banking Circle and support them in building the next generation infrastructure for cross-border payments,” says Hjalmar Winbladh, partner at EQT Partners who has a prolific record as a founder himself, having started VoIP company Rebtel, the picture messaging pioneer SendIt that was eventually acquired by Microsoft, and the social shopping and rewards app Wrapp. “Cross-border payments is a large and rapidly growing market dominated by traditional players. Banking Circle has built a disruptive solution with a strong value proposition. The customer feedback is excellent and the company’s traction is evident looking at the triple digit growth of the business.”

The deal is expected to close in Q4.

China’s Xiaomi, the world’s fifth biggest seller of smartphones, made an underwhelming public debut after it hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange amid concerns around an ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

Media reports in the lead up to today’s bell ringing suggested that eight-year-old Xiaomi was shooting for a valuation of as much as $100 billion. In the end, it had to settle for a more modest $54 billion valuation as it raised $4.7 billion from the IPO.

CEO Lei Jun acknowledged that “global capital markets are in constant flux” thanks to tensions between Beijing and the White House, which has seen trade tariffs levied on each side. However, Lei — one of China’s most successful technology entrepreneurs — said that the situation doesn’t diminish his belief in his business.

“Although the macroeconomic conditions are far from ideal, we believe a great company can still rise to the challenge and distinguish itself,” he said in a speech at the listing ceremony.

Xiaomi enjoyed an understated debut. The stock opened at HK$16.60, below the list price of HK$17, and it quickly fell to HK$16 before later recovering. Its closing share price for the first day of trading was HK$16.78.

Data via Hong Kong Stock Exchange

Aside from global market concerns, investors are said to have been unsure of Xiaomi’s ecosystem story. The company pitches itself as going beyond devices to offer internet services, such as video streaming, although it has yet to see significant revenue in the services category.

Prior to listing, Xiaomi pledged to keep its gross margin to just five percent to ensure that its products are well priced for consumers, but that requires the company to find other ways to monetize and that’s where the services play is aimed. Xiaomi also offers a long-tail of products developed by third parties, such as tech like smart speakers and non-tech items that include bags and pens, which it sells directly to its consumer base using its e-commerce sites and ‘Mi’ brand.

Finally, another core push is its international expansion plan.

China continues to account for the bulk of its revenue, although that is dropping. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent in 2015 and 2016, respectively. One market it has made significant progress in is India, where it was recently ranked the top smartphone seller thanks to a strong brand.

However, it’s unclear how the firm has performed in other markets in Asia and whether it can succeed in Europe, where it has made a push in recent months. The U.S. market is another key challenge that Xiaomi has yet to find a solution for, despite Lei Jun and other executives claiming it’ll enter the country before the end of next year.

You can read more about the Xiaomi business and IPO plan in our review below:

Note: The original version of this article was updated to correct Xiaomi’s valuation and target valuation.

A team of top security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have come together to launch a new cryptographic project that combines secure software and hardware to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts under the banner of Oasis Labs.

That vision, which is being marketed as the baby of a union between Ethereum and Amazon Web Services, has managed to attract $45 million in pre-sale financing from some of the biggest names in venture capital and cryptocurrency investing.

The chief architect of the project (and chief executive of Oasis Labs) is University of Berkeley Professor Dawn Song, a security expert who first came to prominence in 2009 when she was named one of as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35. Song’s rise in the security world was capped with both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award for her work on security technologies. But it’s the more recent work that she’s been doing around hardware and software development in conjunction with other Berkeley researchers like her postdoctoral associate, Raymond Cheng, that grabbed investors attention.

Through the Keystone enclave hardware project, Song and Cheng worked with MIT researchers and professors like Srini Devadas and Ilia Lebedev on technology to secure sensitive data on the platform.

“We use a combination of trusted hardware and cryptographic techniques (such as secure multiparty computation) to enable smart contracts to compute over this encrypted data, without revealing anything about the underlying data. This is like doing computation inside a black box, which only outputs the computation result without showing what’s inside the black box,” Song wrote to me in an email. “In addition to supporting existing trusted hardware implementations, we are also working on a fully open source trusted hardware enclave implementation; a project we call Keystone. We also have years of experience building differential privacy tools, which are now being used in production at Uber for their data privacy initiatives. We plan to incorporate such techniques into our smart contract platform to further provide privacy and protect the computation output from leaking sensitive information about inputs.”

Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.

“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee. We use different mathematical and cryptographic methods to enable efficient verification of the correctness of the computation results. Once the verification succeeds, the state transition is committed to the distributed ledger by the consensus committee.”

By having the computation committee working in parallel with the consensus committee only needing to verify the correctness of the computation creates an easier path to scalability.

Other platforms have attempted to use sampling to speed up transactions over distributed systems (Hedera Hashgraph comes to mind), but have been met with limited adoption in the market.

“We use proof-of-stake mechanisms to elect instances of different types of functional committees: compute, storage and consensus committees,” Song explained. “We can scale each of the different functions independently based on workload and system needs. One of our observations of existing systems is that consensus operations are very expensive. our network protocol design allows compute committees and storage committees to process transactions without relying on heavy-weight consensus protocols.”

Song’s approach has managed to gain the support of firms including: a16zcrypto, Accel, Binance, DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain, and more.

In all, some 75 investors have rallied to finance the company’s approach to securing data and selling compute power on a cryptographically secured ledger.

“It’s exciting to see talented people like Dawn and her team working on ways to transition the internet away from data silos and towards a world with more responsible ways to share and own your data,” said Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and Oasis Labs investor, in a statement.

“The next step is getting our product in the hands of developers who align with our mission and can help inform the evolution of the platform as they build applications upon it,” said Oasis Labs co-founder and CTO Raymond Cheng in a statement.

For potential customers who’d eventually use the smart contracts developed on Oasis’ platform the system would work much like the method established by Ethereum.

“The token usage model in Oasis is very similar to Ethereum, where users pay gas fee to miners for executing smart contracts,” Song wrote. “One just needs one token to pay for gas fee for executing smart contracts. As with Ethereum, in our platform storage and compute have different pricing models but they both are paid with the same token.”

And Oasis’ leadership is looking ahead to a marketplace that incentivizes scale and makes fees accessible. “If the token price goes up, the amount of tokens needed to pay for operations can decrease (this is similar to Ethereum’s gas price, which is independent from the price of Ether). The number of tokens needed to pay for smart contract execution is not fixed.”

A team of top security researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and MIT have come together to launch a new cryptographic project that combines secure software and hardware to enable privacy-preserving smart contracts under the banner of Oasis Labs.

That vision, which is being marketed as the baby of a union between Ethereum and Amazon Web Services, has managed to attract $45 million in pre-sale financing from some of the biggest names in venture capital and cryptocurrency investing.

The chief architect of the project (and chief executive of Oasis Labs) is University of Berkeley Professor Dawn Song, a security expert who first came to prominence in 2009 when she was named one of as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35. Song’s rise in the security world was capped with both a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Award for her work on security technologies. But it’s the more recent work that she’s been doing around hardware and software development in conjunction with other Berkeley researchers like her postdoctoral associate, Raymond Cheng, that grabbed investors attention.

Through the Keystone enclave hardware project, Song and Cheng worked with MIT researchers and professors like Srini Devadas and Ilia Lebedev on technology to secure sensitive data on the platform.

“We use a combination of trusted hardware and cryptographic techniques (such as secure multiparty computation) to enable smart contracts to compute over this encrypted data, without revealing anything about the underlying data. This is like doing computation inside a black box, which only outputs the computation result without showing what’s inside the black box,” Song wrote to me in an email. “In addition to supporting existing trusted hardware implementations, we are also working on a fully open source trusted hardware enclave implementation; a project we call Keystone. We also have years of experience building differential privacy tools, which are now being used in production at Uber for their data privacy initiatives. We plan to incorporate such techniques into our smart contract platform to further provide privacy and protect the computation output from leaking sensitive information about inputs.”

Song says that her project has solved the scaling problem by separating execution from consensus.

“For each smart contract execution, we randomly select a subset of the computation nodes to form a computation committee, using a proof of stake mechanism. The computation committee executes the smart contract transaction,” Song wrote in an email exchange with TechCrunch. “The consensus committee then verifies the correctness of the computation results from the computation committee. We use different mathematical and cryptographic methods to enable efficient verification of the correctness of the computation results. Once the verification succeeds, the state transition is committed to the distributed ledger by the consensus committee.”

By having the computation committee working in parallel with the consensus committee only needing to verify the correctness of the computation creates an easier path to scalability.

Other platforms have attempted to use sampling to speed up transactions over distributed systems (Hedera Hashgraph comes to mind), but have been met with limited adoption in the market.

“We use proof-of-stake mechanisms to elect instances of different types of functional committees: compute, storage and consensus committees,” Song explained. “We can scale each of the different functions independently based on workload and system needs. One of our observations of existing systems is that consensus operations are very expensive. our network protocol design allows compute committees and storage committees to process transactions without relying on heavy-weight consensus protocols.”

Song’s approach has managed to gain the support of firms including: a16zcrypto, Accel, Binance, DCVC (Data Collective), Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Metastable, Pantera, Polychain, and more.

In all, some 75 investors have rallied to finance the company’s approach to securing data and selling compute power on a cryptographically secured ledger.

“It’s exciting to see talented people like Dawn and her team working on ways to transition the internet away from data silos and towards a world with more responsible ways to share and own your data,” said Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase and Oasis Labs investor, in a statement.

“The next step is getting our product in the hands of developers who align with our mission and can help inform the evolution of the platform as they build applications upon it,” said Oasis Labs co-founder and CTO Raymond Cheng in a statement.

For potential customers who’d eventually use the smart contracts developed on Oasis’ platform the system would work much like the method established by Ethereum.

“The token usage model in Oasis is very similar to Ethereum, where users pay gas fee to miners for executing smart contracts,” Song wrote. “One just needs one token to pay for gas fee for executing smart contracts. As with Ethereum, in our platform storage and compute have different pricing models but they both are paid with the same token.”

And Oasis’ leadership is looking ahead to a marketplace that incentivizes scale and makes fees accessible. “If the token price goes up, the amount of tokens needed to pay for operations can decrease (this is similar to Ethereum’s gas price, which is independent from the price of Ether). The number of tokens needed to pay for smart contract execution is not fixed.”