Year: 2018

What3words, a startup that has divided the entire world into 57 trillion 3-by-3 meter squares and assigned three words to each one, has disclosed three new investors all from the automotive world.

What3words announced Thursday that the venture arm of China’s largest auto group SAIC Motor, Formula 1 champion Nico Rosberg, and audio and navigation systems company Alpine Electronics have invested in the London-based company. Existing investor Intel Capital also participated in the round.

The latest funding round will be used to expand into new markets and product developments.

The investment, which was not disclosed, illustrates interest in the industry for technology that simplifies the user experience in cars, can be easily used with voice commands, and prepares companies for the age of autonomous vehicles. Since, the addressing system gives a unique three-word combination to a location it fixes a major flaw with a lot of voice-operated navigation systems: duplicate street names.

The company has assigned these 57 trillion squares a unique three-word name using an algorithm that has a vocabulary of 25,000 words. The system, which anyone can use via the what3words app, is available in more than a dozen languages. For instance, if you want to meet a friend in a specific corner of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you can send the three-word address prices.slippery.traps. An Airbnb host might use a three word address to direct a guest to a tricky entrance. Someday, riders might be able to say or type in a three-word address to direct a self-driving car to drop them off a specific entrance at a large sports arena.

“This fund raise cements the direction this company is going,” What3words CEO Chris Sheldrick told TechCrunch. “Which is how, in the future, we are going to tell cars and devices and voice assistants where we’re going.”

Earlier this year, what3words disclosed that Daimler had taken 10% stake in the company. Daimler’s stake and these recently revealed investors are all part of its Series C funding round.

The company’s novel global addressing system has been integrated into in Mercedes’ new infotainment and navigation system—called the Mercedes-Benz User Experience or MBUX. The MBUX debuted on the new Mercedes A-Class, a hatchback that went on sale outside the U.S. in the spring. A sedan variant of the A-Class will come to the U.S. market in late 2018.

TomTom also announced plans last month to integrate what3words into its mapping and navigation products in the second half of this year. TomTom supplies its automotive navigation and traffic technology to car manufacturers, including Volkswagen, Fiat Chrysler, Alfa Romeo, Citroën and Peugeot.

The company is in talks with other automakers and suppliers to get what3words integrated into vehicle infotainment systems.

While denouncing the separation of migrant families as “inhumane,” chief executive officer Marc Benioff reportedly told employees that Salesforce will continue its contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) because it’s technology isn’t involved in the CBP’s U.S.-Mexico border policies. Benioff’s internal memo, obtained by Bloomberg News, was in response to a recent petition signed by more than 650 Salesforce employees asking him to reexamine the deal in response to the Trump’s administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border.

On Tuesday, a federal judge issued an order to reunite families and end most separations. Salesforce has worked with the CPB since March, providing it with tools to manage staff recruiting and communication.

Known for his outspoken public support of progressive causes, Benioff wrote in the memo that he is “opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral. I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border. I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.”

Though the contract will continue, Salesforce chief operating officer Keith Block said on Twitter that Salesforce will donate $1 million to organizations supporting separated families, while its non-profit, Salesforce.org, will match employee contributions.

Salesforce is one of several companies that have denounced the separations, but continue to do business with government agencies involved in border policies. These include Microsoft, which has a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Amazon, where employees reportedly asked chief executive officer Jeff Bezos to cancel contracts with government agencies that want to use its facial recognition tech. Google, on the other hand, reportedly decided not to renew a Pentagon contract after several employees resigned to protest its involvement with controversial AI research project Project Maven.

TechCrunch has contacted Salesforce for comment.

Media exits happen, but typically you don’t hear of tech events companies being sold. Well, that’s the case in Singapore where SingEx — a subsidiary of the country’s Temasek sovereign wealth fund — has forked out to buy a majority share in Unbound Innovations, a five-year-old UK-based business that runs technology events worldwide.

Details of the transaction were not made public, but TechCrunch understands from a source that SingEx bought a majority share in Unbound in a deal that values the company at £18 million, or around $23.5 million.

Unbound has been around since 2013 but it seems to have struck out with its Innovfest event series, which has focused on uniting governments with corporates and the startup world. That aside, it has run ‘Unbound’ events in London since 2016 and it works with corporates such as Unilever, HSBC and Accenture on innovation projects.

Indeed, this investment news comes weeks after the conclusion of Unbound’s two-day Singapore-based event, Innovfest Unbound, which claimed to attract over 12,000 attendees. Innovfest began with events in Singapore and Miami last year; those two added to the recent event account for over 20,000 attendees, Unbound said.

Coming up next is a London event July, followed by the Miami return later this year and the first event in Bahrain planned for 2019. But that’s likely only just the start.

Unbound said that this new capital will go towards doubling its operations and expanding into new verticals and geographies through a mix of acquisition and organic expansion. Right now, there’s no word on what those expansions might look like.

It stands to reason that expanded reach is good for Temasek, too. The fund has a big position on tech within its $275 billion portfolio — which added UST Global via a $250 million deal yesterday — and having a majority stake in Unbound will likely increase its exposure to tech ecosystems, companies and more. Not to mention that the events business is actually pretty lucrative in itself.

Times Internet, the digital arm of Indian media firm Times Group, is getting into the digital content space, but not in the way you might think.

The company’s previous venture — an OTT called BoxTV.com — shut down in 2016 after an underwhelming four-year period. Now it is taking a radically different strategy by buying video playback app MX Player for Rs 1,000 crore, or around $140 million. The company didn’t disclose its stake but said it is a majority percentage.

The service originates from Korea but it has become hugely popular in India as a way to play media files, for example from an SD card, on a mobile device. It is a huge hit India, where the app claims 175 million monthly users — while the country accounts for 350 million of its 500 million downloads.

From here, Times Internet plans to introduce a streaming content service to MX Player users which Karan Bedi, MX Player CEO, expects to go live before August. The plan is to introduce at least 20 original shows and more 50,000 content across multiple local languages in India during the first year. The duo said the lion’s share of that investment money would go into developing content.

Bedi, a long-time media executive who took the job at MX Player eight months ago, said the service will be freemium and very much targeted at the idea of providing an alternative to television in India. He added that the deal had been in negotiation for the past year, which validates a January report from The Ken which first broke news of acquisition.

There are plenty of video streaming services in India. Beyond Netflix and Amazon Prime, Hotstar (from Rupert Murdoch-owned Star India) is making waves alongside Jio TV from Reliance Jio, but data from App Annie suggests MX Player is way out ahead. The analytics firm pegs MX Player at nearly 50 million daily users, as of June, well ahead of Hotstar (14.1 million), JioTV (7.4 million) and others.

Both Bedi and Times Internet MD Satyan Gajwani explained to TechCrunch in an interview that a big focus is differentiation and building a digital channel for India’s young since the average viewer demographics for MX player are hugely different to Indian TV audiences. Some 80 percent of the app’s users are aged under 35 (70 percent is aged under 25), while the gender balance is skewed more towards men.

“A lot of people aren’t happy with Indian TV,” Bedi said. “There are a lot is soaps and it is not focused on young people. [The MX PLayer audience] is exactly the opposite of the Indian tv demographic.”

That not only plays into growing a place for ‘millennial’ content, but it also means the streaming service may find success with advertisers if it can offer a gateway to young Indians. Beyond audience, there’s also flexibility. Gajwani explained further that unlike traditional TV and even YouTube, the Times Internet-MX Player service will offer different options for advertisers who “work with content creators to create stuff, sponsor a show, or find various different ways to reach scale.”

“India has a $6 billion TV ad market and we think this could unlock some of the money going to TV,” he said.

“This audience on here is genuinely different, [rather than cord-cuttters] they’re almost cord-nevers,” Bedi added. “This is a big new audience that’s never been tapped by broadcasters.”

The idea is to gently introduce programming that is accessible to a large audience in India, who might not be open to paying, and then test other revenue models later.

“Further down the line, we might include subscriptions to scale,” Gajwani added. “Subscription is growing but it’s much much smaller today, what excites us is the idea we’ll have 100 million people streaming a show.”

MX Player might not be well known, but scale is one thing it certainly has in spades. The company just crossed 500 million downloads on Android, but Bedi pointed out that many are not counted because they are side-loaded, which doesn’t register with the Google Play Store.

All told, he said, the app picks up 1.2 million downloads per day with around 350,000 coming from the official Android app store, he said. Bedi said that, among other things, the app is typically distributed by smartphone vendors in tier-two and three Indian cities to help phone buyers get the essential apps for their device right away.

The question now is whether Times Internet can leverage that organic growth to build another business on top of the basic demand for video playback. This is certainly a unique approach.

French startup Oh BiBi raised $21 million from Atomico with Korelya Capital also participating. Oh BiBi is a team of mobile gaming veterans trying to build the next big thing when it comes to mobile gaming.

The company has already released a handful of games, such as LoL Kart, Motor World Car Factory, Dino Factory and SUP Multiplayer Racing. But the company’s next big bet is Frag.

Frag is an online first-person shooter. You’ll fight against other players in one-on-one matches. There’s a metagame element as well — you’ll need to put together your team of characters as you can swap between multiple characters in the middle of a match.

Each character has a cartoonish design and some special powers. Oh BiBi keeps comparing it to Fortnite in its press release, but it sounds more like 1 vs. 1 Overwatch.

Frag will be available as an open beta next month on iOS and Android. Oh BiBi is taking a freemium approach and distributing its games as a free download with in-app purchases.

Building a mobile gaming startup is incredibly hard. It’s not just about building engaging games. You also need to tweak paid acquisition strategies, retention numbers, in-app purchase triggers and improve the lifetime value of your players.

This is Atomico’s first investment in a French startup as a lead investor. Atomico has invested in Rovio and Supercell in the past. So the VC firm thinks the Oh BiBi team is well positioned to tackle this market.

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DVD and Blu-ray rental kiosk operator Redbox announced a deal with Warner Bros. today that allows it to begin offering new releases on the same day they go on sale in physical retail stores. Redbox’s former agreement with the studio meant they had to wait until seven days after the home-video release. In a statement, Redbox said this deal also maintains the availability of new releases in Redbox On Demand, its streaming rental service.

According to Variety, this means Redbox now has same-day deals with almost all of the major studios. In addition to Warner Bros., they include Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Lionsgate (its deal with 20th Century Fox is similar to its previous one with Warner Bros ., in that it allows Redbox to rent its movies seven days after their home-video release). One notable exception is Disney, which Redbox has not had a distribution deal with since 2012. This is likely due to an ongoing legal dispute involving digital download codes for Disney content.

Redbox now operates more than 41,500 kiosks, which it said in its announcement is “more locations than Starbucks and McDonalds in the U.S. combined.”

While the idea of waiting for DVD rentals might seem quaint in the age of on-demand and streaming everything, many Americans still rent discs. According to the NPD Group, nearly a third of people it surveyed in the United States last year said they rent DVDs and Blu-rays in addition to using a subscription service like Netflix. Despite reporting declining revenue before its parent company, Outerwall, agreed to be taken private in July 2016, Redbox doubled down on kiosks last year, adding 1,500 with plans to add more this year.

A Los Angeles jury has ruled that Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, the founders of Apple-owned Beats Electronic, owe $25.25 million in royalties to an early collaborator who helped create the first model of Beats Studio headphones. Founded in 2008, Beats was acquired by Apple in 2014.

The plaintiff, Steven Lamar, claims that he first proposed the concept behind the headphones to Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre (real name Andre Young) in early 2006 and continued working with the Beats founders until falling out with them later that year. This led to a settlement that Lamar claims stipulated he would receive royalties on all future releases in the Beats Studio line. Dre and Iovine argued, however, that they had fulfilled their end of the agreement by paying Lamar royalties for the original headphone model, which was released in 2008.

The jury decided that under the 2007 settlement, Lamar is indeed entitled to a percentage of the sales on all models of Studio headphones.

TechCrunch has sent requests for comment to Apple, Beats and Roam, the headphone company founded by Lamar.

Instagram’s future growth depends on the developing world, so it’s built a version of its app just for them. “Instagram Lite” for Android appeared today in the Google Play App Store without any announcement from the company. “The Instagram Lite app is small, allowing you to save space on your phone and download it quickly” the description reads.

At just 573 kilobytes, Instagram Lite is 1/55th the size of Instagram’s 32 megabyte main app. It lets you filter and post photos to the feed or Stories, watch Stories, and browse the Explore page, but currently lacks the options to share videos or Direct message friends.

Instagram Lite addresses many problems common amongst mobile users in the developing world who are often on older phones with less storage space, slower network connections, or who can’t afford big data packages. Users might not have to delete photos or other apps to install Instagram Lite, or wait a long time and pay more for it to download.

The release follows Instagram’s revamped mobile website that launched last month, also designed for the developing world. At the time I wrote, “The launch begs the question of whether Instagram will release an Instagram Lite version of its native app.” The answer is yes. Mobile analytics service Sensor Tower tipped TechCrunch off to the release.

When asked for comment, an Instagram spokesperson confirmed that Instagram Lite began testing in Mexico this week, and provided this statement: “We are testing a new version of Instagram for Android that takes up less space on your device, uses less data, and starts faster.”

The “Lite” trend has picked up steam recently. Facebook launched Facebook Lite in 2015, and it had 200 million users by 2017. That paved the way for the launch of Messenger Lite in April 2018, and Uber glommed on to the strategy with the release of its own Lite app earlier this month.

Instagram announced last week at the IGTV unveiling that it had hit 1 billion monthly active users. It’s been growing at roughly 100 million users every four months, with much of that coming from the developing world. Snapchat neglected international markets to focus on US teens, leaving the door open for Instagram and WhatsApp’s clones of Snapchat Stories to grab big user bases in countries like India and Brazil.

With this new growth tool in its belt, Instagram may see even swifter adoption in emerging markets. It could score ad revenue straight from Lite, then as phones and networks improve, hope to shift users onto the full-fidelity version. Now, eyes will be on Snapchat to see if it builds its own Lite app. Otherwise it risks continuing to slip further behind the Instagram juggernaut.

Google is turning startup investor to further its goal of putting Google services like search, maps, and its voice assistant front and center for the next billion internet users in emerging markets. It has invested $22 million into KaiOS, the company that has built an eponymous operating system for feature phones that packs a range of native apps and other smartphone-like services. As part of the investment, KaiOS will be working on integrating Google services like search, maps, YouTube and its voice assistant into more KaiOS devices, after initially announcing Google apps for KaiOS-powered Nokia phones earlier this year.

“This funding will help us fast-track development and global deployment of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, allowing us to connect the vast population that still cannot access the internet, especially in emerging markets,” said KaiOS CEO Sebastien Codeville in a statement.

Our mobile world is dominated today by smartphones: there were about 1.6 billion of them sold last year. But feature phones have continued to move, too: it’s estimated that there were about 450 million-500 million of them shipped in 2017. And their sales are actually growing faster right now than their souped-up cousins.

KaiOS-powered phones play squarely in the latter category, and they are gaining traction in markets where feature phones still hold sway. In India, they have overtaken Apple’s iOS to become the second-most popular devices after Android handsets. KaiOS tells us that there have been more than 40 million KaiOS phones shipped to-date.

Google’s KaiOS investment could be seen as a way of introducing its services to feature phone users who might eventually graduate to smartphones. However, there is also scope for holding on to these users even as they stay in the feature phone category, which continues to evolve and become more functional.

“We’re excited to work with Google to deliver its services on more mobile devices,” said Codeville, the KaiOS CEO. “Having an intelligent voice assistant on an affordable mobile phone is truly revolutionary as it helps overcome some of the limitations a keypad brings.”

KaiOS is a U.S.-based project that started in 2017, built on the ashes of Mozilla’s failed Firefox OS experiment, as a fork of the Linux codebase. Firefox OS was intended to be the basis of a new wave of HTML-5, low-cost smartphones. And while those devices and the wider ecosystem never really took off, KaiOS has fared significantly better.

KaiOS powers phones made by OEMs including Nokia (HMD), Micromax and Alcatel, and it works with carriers including Sprint and AT&T — it counts offices in North America, Europe and Asia. But its most significant deployment to date has been with India’s Reliance Jio, the challenger telco that disrupted the Indian market with affordable 4G data packages.

Reliance Jio offers its own range of KaiOS handsets, and coupling that with its low-cost data packages, KaiOS’ share of India’s phone market has reportedly jumped to 15 percent — overtaking Apple’s iOS in the process and putting it second behind only Android. (Jio’s own devices have actually increased the number of feature phones in India, such has been its impact in the country.)

That market share alone in a high-growth market like India is likely enough to pique Google’s interest.

“We want to ensure that Google apps and services are available to everyone, whether they are using desktops, smartphones, or feature phones.” said Anjali Joshi, VP of Product Management for Google’s Next Billion Users division, in a statement. “Following the success of the JioPhones, we are excited to work with KaiOS to further improve access to information for feature phone users around the world.”

Beyond this, the Next Billion business unit works on customizing the Google experience and services to fit the needs of new internet users in emerging markets, including the launch of new services like this neighborhoods app and a successful public WiFi program.

While Google continues to develop its Android smartphone platform, it has long been an advocate of expanding its services to other platforms, too, and that’s been the case with KaiOS.

In February, KaiOS announced that it would be adding Google Search, Google Maps and the Google Voice Assistant to the new Nokia 8110 feature phone, and it seems that this is the Google agreement that will be expanded to all models as part of Google’s investment.

To be clear, Google services are not the only ones on KaiOS. It added apps for Twitter and Facebook earlier this year, and it mixes dedicated KaiOS apps — WhatsApp is said to be coming — with others that are more basic HTML-5 web apps.

Google’s investment in KaiOS is the latest in a line of direct startup deals from the U.S. tech giant that sit alongside investments made by GV and CapitalG, its two investment arms. Google has also backed concierge service Dunzo and is partnering with the carrier Orange to make investments and potentially acquire startups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

More scrutiny than ever is in place on the tech industry, and while high-profile cases like Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance in front of lawmakers garner headlines, there are subtler forces at work. This study from a Norway watchdog group eloquently and painstakingly describes the ways that companies like Facebook and Google push their users towards making choices that negatively affect their own privacy.

It was spurred, like many other new inquiries, by Europe’s GDPR, which has caused no small amount of consternation among companies for whom collecting and leveraging user data is their main source of income.

The report (PDF) goes into detail on exactly how these companies create an illusion of control over your data while simultaneously nudging you towards making choices that limit that control.

Although the companies and their products will be quick to point out that they are in compliance with the requirements of the GDPR, there are still plenty of ways in which they can be consumer-unfriendly.

In going through a set of privacy popups put out in May by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the researchers found that the first two especially feature “dark patterns, techniques and features of interface design mean to manipulate users…used to nudge users towards privacy intrusive options.”

It’s not big obvious things — in fact, that’s the point of these “dark patterns”: that they are small and subtle yet effective ways of guiding people towards the outcome preferred by the designers.

For instance, in Facebook and Google’s privacy settings process, the more private options are simply disabled by default, and users not paying close attention will not know that there was a choice to begin with. You’re always opting out of things, not in. To enable these options is also a considerably longer process: 13 clicks or taps versus 4 in Facebook’s case.

That’s especially troubling when the companies are also forcing this action to take place at a time of their choosing, not yours. And Facebook added a cherry on top, almost literally, with the fake red dots that appeared behind the privacy popup, suggesting users had messages and notifications waiting for them even if that wasn’t the case.

When choosing the privacy-enhancing option, such as disabling face recognition, users are presented with a tailored set of consequences: “we won’t be able to use this technology if a stranger uses your photo to impersonate you,” for instance, to scare the user into enabling it. But nothing is said about what you will be opting into, such as how your likeness could be used in ad targeting or automatically matched to photos taken by others.

Disabling ad targeting on Google, meanwhile, warns you that you will not be able to mute some ads going forward. People who don’t understand the mechanism of muting being referred to here will be scared of the possibility — what if an ad pops up at work or during a show and I can’t mute it? So they agree to share their data.

In this way users are punished for choosing privacy over sharing, and are always presented only with a carefully curated set of pros and cons intended to cue the user to decide in favor of sharing. “You’re in control,” the user is constantly told, though those controls are deliberately designed to undermine what control you do have and exert.

Microsoft, while guilty of the biased phrasing, received much better marks in the report. Its privacy setup process put the less and more private options right next to each other, presenting them as equally valid choices rather than some tedious configuration tool that might break something if you’re not careful. Subtle cues do push users towards sharing more data or enabling voice recognition, but users aren’t punished or deceived the way they are elsewhere.

You may already have been aware of some of these tactics, as I was, but it makes for interesting reading nevertheless. We tend to discount these things when it’s just one screen here or there, but seeing them all together along with a calm explanation of why they are the way they are makes it rather obvious that there’s something insidious at play here.