Year: 2018

Yesterday The Europas, the European Tech Startup Awards and Unconference once again held its annual jamboree in London, throwing together an afternoon of deep-dive panel discussions on the hottest topics in tech, a “Pitch Roulette” session of early-stage startup pitches, and a glittering Awards ceremony, honouring the hottest startups, unicorns founders, investors and blockchain projects in the European ecosystem.

The awards are based on thousands of votes gleaned from a round of public voting, combined with industry judges drawn from founders and investors.

The photos from the night will shortly be up online.

To keep the conversations intimate and real, there was no live stream, but you can follow the coverage on Twitter here.

An annual celebration of Europe’s brightest and best tech companies, The Europas Unconference and Awards for European Tech Startups has been an established fixture on the European scene since 2009, when it was first held in a London bar. This year a block of free tickets were given away as part of “The Europas Diversity Matters Tech Pass”, to ensure that the event included more Seed or Pre-Seed-stage founders who are also women and people of colour.

Over 60 speakers were at the casual series if afternoon panel sessions, ahead of the industry Awards finale in the evening. There was also a pitch competition “Pich Roulette” where AiPod, BFF, Coinweb, PsycApps/Equoo, Frogology?, Tube Chat, Lookhealth.io, Blockchip and Loveshark pitched. PsycApps/Equoo was selected as the winner.

Over the last few weeks, startups had been able to either apply for an award or be nominated by a third-party. The winners of that round were combined with the top picks by an expert judging panel and the results combined to determine the hottest European startups across all categories. No fees were paid by entrants or winners to enter or accept the awards, marking this the only truly editorially independent tech startups awards in Europe.

The Europas is held in partnership with TechCrunch and all attendees, nominees and winners of the Europas Awards will get discounts to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin later this year.

The sponsors and event partners were:
Bizzabo
Isotoma
Blockchip
Malta Blockchain Summit
Barclays
Bayer
BlueArray
Coinweb
Columbus Capital
Ihorizon
JAG Shaw Baker
Orrick
Outlier Ventures
Fieldhouse Associates
aiPod
Burlington
CEW Communications
London Tech Week

Who were Awards judges? They were:
Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital
Stephanie Hospital, One Ragtime
Jason Ball, Qualcomm Ventures
Tugce Ergul, Angel Labs
Jeremy Yap, Angel
Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures
George McDonaugh, KR1
Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp
Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners
Candice Lo, Blossom Capital
Richard Muirhead, Fabric VC
Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Investor
Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital
Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker
Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners
Eze Vidra, Remagine Ventures
Saul Klein, LocalGlobe

The winners, selected from the finalists, were:

1. Hottest Media/Entertainment
Hatch Entertainment
Judges’ comments: Potentially “the Netflix of Mobile Games”

2. Hottest eCommerce/Retail
Deliveroo
Judges’ comments: Utterly ubiquitous! You can’t walk down a street without a Deliveroo rider rushing past you, and increasingly international.

3. Hottest Fintech sponsored by Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
Starling Bank
Judges comments: Huge growth in the last year, putting the heat on other challenger banks

4. Hottest Games Startup
Bossa Studios
Judges comments: Innovative new games which defy convention

5. Hottest Startup Accelerator sponsored by BlueArray
Founders Factory
Judges comments: Cleverly matching corporates with startups for wider distribution partnerships and collaborative innovation

6. Hottest Marketing/Adtech Startup
AppsFlyer – Now Europe’s leading platform for mobile attribution & marketing analytics.

7. Hottest Education Startup sponsored by Isotoma
Lingumi
Judges comments: Language learning platform for pre-school kids encouraging parent participation

8. Hottest Mobile Startup
Depop
Judges comments: GenZ’s eBay – A hit for ‘merch drops’ so teens can later “depop” their hot fashion.

9. Hottest Enterprise, SaaS or B2B sponsored by Barclays
Signal Media
Judges comments: An amazing AI startup turning data into accessible business knowledge

10. Hottest Hardware
Kano Computing
Judges comments: With new funding secured, a powerhouse of European hardware

11. Hottest Platform Economy / Marketplace
Syft
Judges comments: The “Taskrabbit for hospitality industry”

12. Hottest Health sponsored by Bayer Digital Health
Ada Health
Judges comments: Definitely your future doctor

13. Hottest Cyber Security sponsored by ihorizon
Digital Shadows
Judges comments: A cyber security powerhouse straight out of Europe

14. Hottest Travel & Mobility Startup
Seatfrog
Judges comments: Making upgrades effortless for airlines and passengers, it’s on a roll with investors, press and consumers alike

15. Hottest Internet of Things
Smarter
Judges comments: Smarter kitchens of the future, but today

16. Hottest Technology Innovation
Ultrahaptics
Judges comments: Just wave your hand and you too can become a Jedi Knight with this amazing technology, which will probably end up in our homes and cars.

17. Hottest FashionTech Startup
21 Buttons
Judges comments: A fashion social and shopping network growing like a weed.

18. Hottest Tech for Good
BuffaloGrid
Judges comments: Bringing connectivity to the next 3 billion

19. Hottest AI Startup
Black Swan
Judges comments: The leading European startup in Smart Data and Predictive Analytics, making uncanny predictions on what we’ll buy.

20. Fastest Rising Startup of the Year
Revolut
Judges comments: A challenger bank that’s challenging the other challengers, and is now even a player in cryptocurrency

21. Hottest GreenTech Startup
Asperitas
Judges comments: The next wave in Greening datacentres – Crypto miners take note!

22. Hottest Startup Founders
Joel Gibbard + Samantha Payne, Open Bionics
Judges comments: These founders are changing people’s lives with futuristic prosthetics

23. Hottest CEO of the Year
Pieter van der Does, Adyen
Judges comments: van der Does has skilfully piloted his company to a smash hit IPO this year

24. Hottest Angel/Seed Investor
Reshma Sohoni and Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp
Judges comments: Still hungry for Seed startups, and has even raised a new EU-backed fund in tough political times.

25. Hottest VC Investor sponsored by JAG Shaw Baker
Pär-Jörgen Pärson, Northzone
Judges comments: A popular industry player and an early backer of the powerhouse that is Spotify and many other European unicorns

26. Hottest Blockchain/Crypto Startup Founder
Mona El Isa, Melonport
Judges comments: El Isa is considered a blockchain industry thought leader and Melonport is poised to change the game in crypto asset management and governance

27. Hottest Blockchain Protocol Project, sponsored by Outlier Ventures
Polkadot.io
Judges comments: Straight outta Berlin – The biggest project out there to link the world’s blockchains

28. Hottest Blockchain DApp, sponsored by Blockchip
Verisart
Judges comments: A real-world blockchain application taking the art world by storm

29. Hottest Corporate Blockchain Project sponsored by Coinweb
Billon
Judges comments: Billon is using blockchain to reimagine the flow of regulated money and data.

30. Hottest Blockchain Investor Europe sponsored by Malta Blockchain Summit
KR1
Judges comments: An pioneering blockchain and token investment player doing big things under the radar

31. Hottest Blockchain ICO Europe sponsored by Columbus Capital
Bancor
Judges comments: Bancor has created new standard for cryptocurrencies convertible directly through their smart contracts, and managed an amazing public ICO.

32. Hottest Financial Crypto Project
BlockEx
Judges comments: BlockEx’s digital asset exchange platform has made positive waves in the crypto assets world

33. Hottest Blockchain for Good Project
United Nations World Food Programme “Building Blocks’ Etherum Project (with Parity Technologies)
Judges comments: The combined United Nations, World Food Programme and Parity project on the Ethereum blockchain has changed the game for aid distribution to Syrian refugees in Jordan and is poised to be applied to other humanitarian projects globally.

34. Hottest Blockchain Identity Project
Trunomi
Judges comments: If data rights are the furture, Trunomi is helping to unlock that future.

35. Hall of Fame sponsored by TechCrunch
Saul Klein and Robin Klein, LocalGlobe
Judges comments: An incredible long-time double-act of European venture & startups. Every startup needs a Batman and Robin to help them, and Saul and Robin keep delivering!

28. Grand Prix Unicorn Award, sponsored by Bizzabo
Adyen
Judges comments: Adyen’s IPO was one of the biggest of the year and shows that Europe can produce the next wave of global Tech Unicorns.

Damn. These are good looking headphones. The V-Moda Crossfade II Wireless could be the best looking headphones available. Better yet, they sound good, too.

As the name suggests, this is the second generation of this series of headphones from V-Moda. The drivers are different and the company improved on the build quality. The originals were already one of my favorite headphones and the followup is even better.

[gallery ids="1667954,1667951,1667952,1667950,1667953,1667955,1667956"]

Here’s what I like:

The build quality of these headphones is superb. The V-Moda Crossfade II Wireless headphones feel like they’ll last a lifetime. I have headphones from Bose, Definitive, Denon, Shinola, Audeze and more and none look or feel as good as these. They’re comfortable. Even on my large head, they fit nicely and I’m able to wear them for hours at a time without issue.

The headphones sound great, too. To be clear, they’re not the best sounding headphones available, but the sound is on par for the price. The sound stage is full and wide with great separation between the channels.

The V-Moda Crossfade II Wireless are most comfortable with the mid tones found in rock, country, jazz and pop. That’s not to say low and high tones are absent; they’re present but not noteworthy. The headphones are balanced nicely with a preference to sounds in the middle of the range.

I always use a few tracks to test headphones. Save Tonight by Eagle-Eye Cherry is one of them. The track is mixed in a way that produced a narrow soundstage. On headphones the audio can be either muddled or clean. On these headphones, it’s closer to clean but not perfect. The lyrics come across clear while the instruments are a bit blended. 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up sounds fantastics. You can hear the strumming of the guitars and feel the emotion of the band. The Cranberries’ Linger is more of the same. It’s just lovely on these headphones.

The wide soundstage is put on display for Look At Me Now. Busta sits in the middle and his lyrics flow in the middle while the beat comes in from the sides. Reproduced correctly, it’s an immersive experience and these headphones do it correctly. Meek Mill’s Dreams and Nightmares is another great example. These headphones put Meek in the center of the stage while the piano tracks sits on the side of the stage. The headphone’s tuning makes the track a stunning example of properly tuned headphones.

These headphones get loud. They’re among the loudest headphones I’ve tested. And since the headphones lack active noise cancelation, that’s a good thing. I’m pleased to report, there is very little distortion when the headphones are at their max volume.

Wireless battery life is excellent. V-Moda claims 14 hours. I used these headphones for several days and never found the bottom of the battery. That’s good enough for me.

Here’s what I don’t like:

The headphones lack on key feature: They keep playing when taken off. That’s a big no-no and an unfortunate miss from V-moda. It’s not a dealbreaker, though. These are wireless headphones and therefore they have a limited battery life even though they have great battery life. Such headphones need to have the ability to stop playing audio when removed from the head.

Bottom line:

The headphones are available in several colors through retailers or buyers can use V-Moda’s customizer to build a custom pair. Want a set of headphones with 14k gold plated side plates? That’s an option though it adds hundreds to the cost. Platinum headphones? That’ll cost $26,000.

I love the V-Moda Crossfade II Wireless headphones. These are great headphones and I whole heartily recommend them. At $350, they punch above their weight class. These are solid headphones with a build quality that seem like they’ll last longer than other options.

The European fintech wave can’t stop and won’t stop. That’s why I’m excited to announce that the founder and CEO of Starling Bank Anne Boden is joining us at Disrupt Berlin.

While it feels like everybody is talking about challenger banks, Boden started thinking about building a new bank back in 2014. She ditched a carrer in traditional banks to start her own thing.

Starling provides a current account specifically designed for your phone. You can open an account in just a few minutes using the company’s mobile app.

Whenever you use your card or send money, you can instantly see the transaction in the app — there’s no delay. You can also receive push notifications instantly. When it comes to your card, you can lock it when you can’t find it, and there’s no exchange fee when you use your card abroad. Starling supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Fitbit Pay and, yes, even Garmin Pay.

Starling is even better with multiple people. For instance, if your roommate or significant other also has a Starling account, you can create a joint account for shared bills. You can also send money instantly to other Starling accounts.

The startup has been building a marketplace to become the only banking app you need. There are already a handful of fintech companies leveraging the Starling API. You’ll find savings, investment and mortgage products. You can centralize your paper receipts and more from the Starling app.

The startup already has its own banking license and has been raising a funding round of more than $100 million.

Starling operates in a very competitive market, with well-funded startups such as Monzo, Revolut and N26 all iterating quite quickly. That’s why it’s going to be interesting to hear Boden’s take on challenger banks, the fintech industry and her experience with Starling.

TechCrunch is coming back to Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted cup.

Tickets to the show, which runs November 29-30, are available here.

Ride-hailing giant Uber is officially relaunching in Finland today, a year after suspending its primary service in the market — when it said it would wait for taxi laws to be deregulated.

Among the changes it was waiting for are the removal of taxi permit caps and fare restrictions. Most parts of the Act came into effect on July 1.

The Finnish government said its intention is to modernize the rules to “significantly enhance the implementation of new technology, digitalisation and new business concepts”, promoting competition and working towards the creation of what it dubbed “seamless, multimodal travel chains” — thanks also to a push in the act for data and systems interoperability and open interfaces.

“This Act will give us a genuine opportunity to make mobility a comprehensive service for customers,” said transport minister Anne Berner last year.

From 3pm CET today Uber says two services that use professional drivers — uberX and UberBLACK — will operate in the Helsinki capital region in Finland, which it notes will includes Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen.

Uber is not restarting its unlicensed peer-to-peer service (UberPOP) in the market.

That unlicensed driver option has essentially been outlawed in Europe after the region’s top court ruled in December that Uber is a transport service, not a platform, thereby locking its business into being regulated by existing taxi licensing regimes.

And locking Uber into lobbying city authorities to ‘modernize’ and deregulate taxi rules in its favor — such as by removing permit caps and making it easier for more people to become taxi drivers.

“In the vast majority of the European countries we have been operating under existing transportation laws for years now and were able to scale our business with licensed drivers,” an Uber spokesman told us.

Blogging about the Finland relaunch, Uber talks up the different course it says it’s seeking to chart under new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, writing: “We’ve set a course for more responsible growth with a new approach to building long-term partnerships with cities and regulators.”

In truth Uber has had its course reset after a series of scandals rocked the company and, in Europe, after myriad legal challenges led to regulatory blowback and ramped up public and political pressure on the company to change.

Those external forces are continuing to reconfigure Uber’s business — and in Europe at least to make it better mesh with local civic values.

For example in London, the company has made a series of changes to how it operates — such as introducing safety caps on the hours drivers can work — changes it made following a shock decision by the transport regulator to withdraw its license to operate in September 2017.

Last month the company won an appeal against TfL’s withdrawal of its license based on changes it had made since September 2017, though the judge only granted it a provisional 15-month license — with UK regulators set to continue to scrutinize its conduct closely.

Another example of Uber’s regional reconfiguration: An announcement in May that it would expand accident insurance cover for its drivers and delivery workers across Europe.

Last month the company also said it will bring its Jump e-bike service to Europe — with Khosrowshahi claiming the company wants to help cities tackle traffic-related problems such as air pollution and congestion by increasing access to “cleaner transportation solutions”.

In Helsinki, Uber had intended to keep its UberBlack service going for the past year but a spokeswoman told us it did not have enough drivers to provide a reliable service — so UberBlack has not been operational since the suspension. But will restart later today.

Since last August, Uber says more than 250,000 people in the Helsinki area have opened its app despite there being no service in operation — which it touts as showing “clear demand” for its service.

It also notes that Finnish Uber users have taken more than 200,000 Uber trips abroad during the local market pause.

“We’re excited to use our technology to complement existing public and private transport options and to offer an affordable, safe and reliable alternative to personal car ownership. We hope that other countries, where local people are not currently able to use apps like Uber either to get around or to make money on their terms, will soon follow suit,” Uber adds.

Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups  — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.

This is the moment that early-stage startup founders across Europe have been waiting. We’ve flung open the application window for Startup Battlefield, which takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. No more reason to wait — take the plunge and apply today.

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is where Yammer, Mint, Dropbox, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others companies launched their products to the world. If you need a refresher, here’s how Startup Battlefield works.

Our experienced team of TechCrunch editors reviews every application in a highly competitive vetting process. Our acceptance rate is typically around 3%. Ultimately, we’ll choose around 15 early-stage startups to compete. Prior to their time on stage, each team receives expert pitch coaching from seasoned TechCrunch Startup Battlefield editorial team.

All competing teams have six minutes on the Disrupt Main Stage to pitch their company and demo their product to a panel of judges — consisting well-known investors, and entrepreneurs. Then they have 6 minutes to answer any follow-up questions the judges may have. Notable judges from last year’s Battlefield included Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital), Sonali De Rycker (Accel), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital) and Carlos Eduardo Espinal (SeedCamp), and you can be sure that this year’s crop will possess equally impressive bonafides.

The judges winnow the field down to around five teams that go on to a second and final round of pitching. And from that elite group comes one champion who will hoist the Disrupt Cup, bag a $50,000 equity-free cash prize and become the investor-and-media darling of Disrupt Berlin.

All of this non-stop action takes place in front of a live and riveted audience — filled with thousands of startup fans, media outlets and potential investors and customers. What’s more, we live-stream the entire event around the world (and make it available later on-demand) on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Winning certainly has its privileges, but you don’t even have to win to reap significant rewards. Take Aircall for example. This French startup — a cloud-based call center solution — competed in the first round of Startup Battlefield San Francisco in 2015. Even though the company never made it to the finals, it just received a second round of funding. We’re talking $29 million. In the three years since it competed in Startup Battlefield, Aircall has raised a total of $40.5 million. That’s a mighty fine consolation prize.

Plus, all Startup Battlefield teams join the ranks of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This community consists of nearly 800 companies that have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits and IPOs. Companies like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Getaround and Cloudflare. Imagine the networking possibilities that await you in this elite group.

This is as good a time as any to remind you that applying to and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. TechCrunch does not charge any fees or take any equity from startups.

Startup Battlefield goes down at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30 at Arena Berlin. This is your chance to launch your early-stage startup to the world. It could be a life-changing event. What are you waiting for? Apply today.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu have partnered with Softbank subsidiary SB Drive and manufacturer King Long to deploy a self-driving mini bus service to Japan early next year.

The agreement was announced at Create Baidu, the company’s annual AI developer conference in Beijing. Under the agreement, a version of Baidu’s Apolong autonomous mini bus will be exported to Japan from China in early 2019. This agreement, which for now includes an order of 10 buses, marks the first time autonomous vehicles will be exported from China.

Apolong, co-developed with King Long, is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

Baidu announced earlier at the conference that it has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan.

Baidu is preparing to launch a driverless service in China — and elsewhere — with another update to its Apollo autonomous driving platform and the mass production of Apolong, an autonomous mini bus that seats up to 14 people.

Baidu made the announcements at Baidu Create 2018, the company’s annual AI developer conference. Baidu has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with Chinese manufacturer King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu’s Chairman and CEO Robin Li introduced the milestone while livestreaming the 100th bus rolling off of the production line to more than 6,000 attendees at Baidu Create 2018 in Beijing.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan. But the company has aspirations beyond China. Baidu is partnering with SB Drive, the  autonomous driving subsidiary of SoftBank Group, to bring Apolong autonomous mini buses in Japan early next year.

Apolong is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

“2018 marks the first year of commercialization for autonomous driving. From the volume production of Apolong, we can truly see that autonomous driving is making great strides, taking the industry from zero to one,”Robin Li said during his keynote address.

The autonomous buses are the physical embodiment of Baidu’s Apollo program, an open source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car—just the software that drives it. Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. Baidu is betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of self-driving vehicles.

And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistcs.

The latest upgrade to the Apollo platform —also announced at Baidu’s developer conference — aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses, and autonomous microcars. The aim is for this update to help its dozens of partners deploy volumes of autonomous vehicles, not just one or two.

A previous update, announced in January at CES 2018, included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services. At the time, Baidu also said it would offer support for the four main computing platforms: Nvidia, Intel, NXP and Renesas.

Baidu is preparing to launch a driverless service in China — and elsewhere — with another update to its Apollo autonomous driving platform and the mass production of Apolong, an autonomous mini bus that seats up to 14 people.

Baidu made the announcements at Baidu Create 2018, the company’s annual AI developer conference. Baidu has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with Chinese manufacturer King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu’s Chairman and CEO Robin Li introduced the milestone while livestreaming the 100th bus rolling off of the production line to more than 6,000 attendees at Baidu Create 2018 in Beijing.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan. But the company has aspirations beyond China. Baidu is partnering with SB Drive, the  autonomous driving subsidiary of SoftBank Group, to bring Apolong autonomous mini buses in Japan early next year.

Apolong is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

“2018 marks the first year of commercialization for autonomous driving. From the volume production of Apolong, we can truly see that autonomous driving is making great strides, taking the industry from zero to one,”Robin Li said during his keynote address.

The autonomous buses are the physical embodiment of Baidu’s Apollo program, an open source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car—just the software that drives it. Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. Baidu is betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of self-driving vehicles.

And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistcs.

The latest upgrade to the Apollo platform —also announced at Baidu’s developer conference — aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses, and autonomous microcars. The aim is for this update to help its dozens of partners deploy volumes of autonomous vehicles, not just one or two.

A previous update, announced in January at CES 2018, included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services. At the time, Baidu also said it would offer support for the four main computing platforms: Nvidia, Intel, NXP and Renesas.

You might think that the main selling point of an influencer marketing startup like Captiv8 is to help marketers find influencers and creators to work with. Maybe so, but that isn’t stopping the company from making its creator discovery product available for free.

“We felt that we really wanted to just open up that ecosystem, to provide brands access to find and research influencers without having to pay for it,” co-founder Krishna Subramanian told me.

Through the free product, marketers can look through the 1 million-plus influencers indexed on the platform — in some cases, those profiles are based entirely on public data, but influencers can also claim them and provide additional data.

Marketers can then search based on filters like personality archetype, content type, location, representation and much more. Plus, Captiv8 is offering demographic and brand affinity data about an influencer’s audiences.

Until now, Subramanian said that if you weren’t paying for a service like Captiv8, you could only find influencers in scattershot, ad hoc ways, like reading articles about the top influencers in various categories.

On Captiv8, meanwhile, marketers are apparently spending two hours per day on creator discovery, saving them 60 percent of the time they would have spent on the process.

So why make it available for free? While brands like Dr Pepper, Snapple, StubHub and Honda already use Captiv8, Subramanian said the goal is to “widen the funnel,” turning this into “the default place” where marketers go to learn about influencers.

And then, of course, the company can upsell you on Captiv8’s entire “end-to-end SaaS platform,” charging for additional audience data, as well as tools like campaign management, measurement and social listening.