Year: 2018

Workplace is making a push into the non-profit segment. Today the enterprise communications app from Facebook is launching a new tier of the product called Workplace for Good, which will let non-profits use the product for no fee.

To be completely clear, Facebook has never charged non-profits to use Workplace, and it’s already used by over 2,500 of them out of the 30,000 or so organisations using Workplace. The ranks include Oxfam, Save the Children, and many educational institutions, who use it to link up their employees, contractors, students with teachers, stakeholders in their groups and more. There is even a Workplace group started by non-profits for all the nonprofits to access to swap stories, advice and so on. But, as of today, Facebook is going to be making a bigger push to open the product up to charities, educational institutions and non-governmental organisations, regardless of their size.

(Pricing for regular, for-profit businesses is on a freemium basis, with a premium tier that gives access to some 52 apps and services starting at is $3 per active user, per month up to 5,000 users.)

Facebook been increasingly focused on non-profits and how it can work with them in recent times. The company now has a fundraising platform that they can use to collect money for charitable causes, and most recently it has been promoting it by encouraging people to raise money for causes on their birthdays and other occasions.

That user-led fundraising push is actually in the middle of a major viral campaign at the moment: three people (all of whom happen to be former Facebook employees) are raising money to give legal support to families detained and separated at the border between the US and Mexico by way of collecting donations for RAICES, a legal organization. Originally aimed at raising $1,500, it’s now at $8.5 million and counting.

More generally, courting non-profits also fit into the company’s bigger strategy to refocus the site not just as a place to get your entertainment and news fix, but as a place to find and build out your community, and so a turn to accommodating and providing a space for non-profit groups is also a strong connection to that.

Julien Codorniou, who heads up Workplace out of London, said that one of the reasons why Facebook is also interested in working more with non-profits is that they have proven to be some of the best testers of all the product’s features.

“When we look at how they use the product, non-profits really push it to its limits, using it in scenarios and ways we never imagined,” he said. One example was a migrant rescue operation that was filmed in the Mediterranean Sea using 360, with the organisation on the boats livestreaming everything as it happened for people to monitor elsewhere. “We want to serve these scenarios,” he said. “We learn a lot from them. Who could have guessed that 360 video would be such a big thing in Workplace? We want to keep learning with them.”

For the organisations, oftentimes employees and those working with them are in far-flung places, and so they rely on platforms (and network connectivity) that can help bring them into closer communication.

“Workplace has made a huge difference in the way our staff can communicate with each other, visually and in real time,” said Ric Sheldon, Interim CIO at Unicef, in a statement. “This means that anyone can share important information instantly, crowd-source answers or opinions at the touch of a button and live stream from every corner of the world. It’s helped our colleagues to stay in the loop and engaged with different parts of our work and find the information they need when they need it. And all of this ultimately helps us to work more effectively and make even more of a difference for children in danger who are in desperate need of Unicef’s help.”

The News Lens launched in 2013 as an independent news site for Taiwanese readers disenchanted with the country’s tabloid-ridden media. Now it has 9 million monthly unique readers, offices in Taipei and Hong Kong and just announced it has raised a Series C. The Taipei-based startup did not disclose the exact amount of the round, but founder and CEO Joey Chung told TechCrunch it’s between $3 million to $4 million.

The round includes participation from Dorcas, Hazel Asset Management, Walden International and returning investor North Base Media. Individual investors in the round include Steve Chen, co-founder and former chief technology officer of YouTube, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Charles Huang, the co-creator of Guitar Hero.

At the very beginning, The News Lens was a Facebook page that shared news and analysis before launching its eponymous site with original content and videos. Now the startup envisions its future as a media group, with several brands. Earlier this year, The News Lens acquired two Taiwanese content producers, tech news site Inside and sports site Sports Vision, which still operate as separate brands. The News Lens’ two other verticals are its flagship news site, which now has Chinese-language editions for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, as well as an English version for international readers, and ELD, which covers lifestyle and fashion.

The News Lens will use some of its new capital to launch its in-house content management and data analytics platform and plans to gain more international readers through strategic partnerships or acquisitions of other Chinese-language online media companies.

 

Health and wellness has been one of the biggest categories for development in the tech industry, with huge range of wearable devices and connected equipment being built to track how we are moving and helping us stay fit. Now, a startup whose app offers users a selection of audio-based, personal-trainer-led workouts that also monitors users as they progress through them, has closed a major round of funding that underscores how software — and specifically apps — are also capitalising on that trend. Aaptiv, which makes what its founder and CEO Ethan Agarwal described to me as “the Netflix of fitness” — providing streams of music-based fitness training on demand — has raised $22 million in funding.

(It’s not the only big wellness software app that’s announcing funding today: Calm, the meditation app, announced a $27 million round of funding today, too.)

The Series C round brings the total raised by New York-based Aaptiv to $52 million, and while the company is not disclosing its valuation, sources close to it tell me that it is now over $200 million. The company has picked up 200,000 paying members in the last two years, and says that its audio classes have been streaming more than 14 million times.

The funding is significant not only because it will give Aaptiv some firepower to expand its product and user base further — more on that below — but also because of who is in this round.

It was led by Millennium Technology Value Partners (backer of illustrious tech names like Spotify, Facebook and Alibaba); with e-commerce investor 14W and Insight Venture Partners also participating. There is also a list of notable strategic investors, including Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Disney, Warner Music Group and NWS Holdings.

Investors say they were attracted by the company’s growth.

“We are most excited by how fast Aaptiv has established itself as a category leader in the wellness and fitness space,” said Ray Cheng, Partner at Millennium, in a statement. “The company’s growth and user engagement metrics over the past two years are some of the best we have seen, and we believe a large opportunity awaits as Aaptiv continues deliver the best in class workout experience.”

The strategic investors are likely to manifest in a number of ways. Agarwal noted that there was a lot of potential to develop training services that could work with Amazon’s Alexa voice-based assistant and more specifically Amazon’s Echo devices: bringing more sticky content to the platform is a priority, given that discovery and retention have already been highlighted to be big issues with this shiny new tech, and regular fitnesss workouts could be the “killer app” for some people. Similarly, as Amazon starts to offer more perks as part of its Prime subscription package, it will be interesting to see how and if it extends to fitness content, too.

“Connected fitness is emerging as a compelling new domain for consumers,” said Paul Bernard, director of Amazon’s Alexa Fund, in a statement. “We’re excited about Aaptiv’s voice-first approach to personal training and look forward to helping them explore innovative ways to bring that experience to Alexa.”

Warner Music also has a clear connection here, given that the workouts and other classes are all music-based, meaning Aaptiv needs to license that content (and Warner itself, like other music industry players, must be eyeing up the growth of podcasts and wondering how and where it might play in them).

Lastly, Aaptiv will become a part of the Disney Accelerator this summer as part of the entertainment giant’s investment.

In terms of the product, Agarwal says that today Aaptiv covers 22 fitness categories, from boxing to jogging to yoga, and it will be looking to expand to more. It’s also hiring a lot of engineers to help build out the data science component of the product: figuring out how to improve recommendations and better tailor classes to individuals. Today, the audio files are static — meaning a workout does not modify on the fly if you are hitting a wall or finding it too easy — but the longer-term intention is to bring this sort of technology to bear to make the experience more personalised, tapping into diagnostics that the app will pick up from wearables like the Apple Watch.

Where engineers will not be working, however, is in creating “trainers” that will design or lead workouts. While Aaptiv competes against the likes of ClassPass in providing a way for individuals to find and partake in more fitness workouts, the end point is never a physical class or group workout. It’s a digital-only, audio-based, training session with a personal trainer hired by Aaptiv to create it. That is not likely to change any time soon.

“We might the only people willing to acknowledge that we will not use AI to replace trainers,” said Agarwal. “The trainers create the classes and that will be always the same. That relationship and drive and the passion cannot be matched by anyone or anything.”

“As evidenced by their strong growth, Aaptiv is running toward becoming the next big name in the fitness tech market, due substantially to a rather advanced technology strategy and approach to growth,” said Harley Miller, Vice President, Insight Venture Partners. “We are thrilled to further our investment in Aaptiv and look forward to working together to continue scaling their innovative product.”

The tech world sees plenty of Chinese companies move into India — including the likes of Alibaba and Xiaomi — but few expand the other way. OYO Rooms, the billion-dollar Indian startup that pioneered budget hotel networks, is looking to buck the trend, however, after it launched operations in China.

Today the company officially announced its arrival in China, where it says it covers 11,000 (exclusive) rooms across 26 cities, including Hangzhou, Xian, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Xiamen and Kunming. That selection includes a combination of franchises and managed hotels. OYO is initially launching its ‘hotels’ product, and it isn’t saying whether others — which include ‘rooms’ and ‘townhouses’ — will also expand to China.

Interestingly, an OYO representative confirmed that this expansion wasn’t conducted in partnership with China Lodgings, the Nasdaq-listed hotel firm that invested $10 million in the startup last year. OYO said China Lodgings is assisting with the overall strategy in China, however. Make of that what you will.

OYO — which stands for On Your Own — was founded in 2013 by then-teenager Ritesh Agarwal, a Thiel Fellow who got the idea for the business after a stint backpacking across India staying budget hotels. The service helps bring the long-tail of small hotels online to generate bookings whilst also ensuring (often absent) minimum standards for travelers, such as hot water, clean towels and linen and Wi-Fi.

The company counts SoftBank among its backers and it has raised over $450 million in capital to date, including a $250 million round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund last year.

OYO claims over 100,000 rooms in Inda, and it has been busy investigating new growth opportunities. The China launch is the third overseas foray from OYO, coming after expansions to Nepal and Malaysia. Given the size of the Chinese market and strong competition, this is a daunting challenge for OYO.

Just ask Airbnb .

While the two don’t compete directly on product, they target a similar consumer bracket — consumers seeking an alternative to conventional hotels and lodgings. In China, Airbnb’s big rival is Tujia, which is valued at $1.5 billion and pushing the U.S. company hard. Tujia and Airbnb were one final signature away from calling off their war and merging, Bloomberg recently reported, but ultimately Airbnb opted to go it alone in China. Tujia is determined to battle it so hard that it returns to the negotiation table.

So, how then, will OYO — which is well-funded but lacking the capitalization and experience of Airbnb — navigate the Chinese market? Time will tell but you’d suspect it will need to call on some local allies if it is to make an impact.

Canaan Partners, the venture capital firm that has backed companies like Skybox Imaging, Match.com and Lending Club, has a new investment strategy. Called Canaan Beta, it entails setting aside $20 million of its $800 million fund to its two youngest employees, and then empowering them to make their own investment decisions as a duo. The bet is that, just how Jeremy Liew found out about Snapchat from his teenage daughter, Canaan’s youngest staffers will find other potentially lucrative opportunities.

As the speed of technological innovation continues to increase, the barriers to starting a tech company decline and the demographics in the U.S. go in the direction of non-white, Canaan envisions its Beta program being potentially game-changing for the firm. Since January, Hootan Rashidifard (28 years old) and Adina Tecklu (27 years old) have invested in five seed stage startups, with checks ranging in size from $250,000 – $500,000 each. Before Canaan Beta kicked off, Rashidifard and Tecklu worked as analysts at Canaan, where they have supported partners and founders but have not been autonomous check writers. By empowering its two youngest employees with decision-making power, Canaan hopes to better tap into the non-white, younger consumer market.

Rashidifard and Tecklu, both people of color, have joined an industry where 73 percent of investment professionals are white, according to a report from the Kapor Center for Social Impact. Meanwhile, just 12 percent of all investment professionals are women.

“We can use our backgrounds and our perspectives to see opportunities that others might overlook, which is really awesome,” Rashidifard told TechCrunch. “We might be seeing something that other people aren’t.”

More specifically, Rashidifard and Tecklu are looking at companies in blockchain, gaming, digital media, social and digital health.

“We’re not looking for incremental improvements to products or services,” Tecklu told TechCrunch. “We’re looking at category defining and category creating companies here. So the scope feels quite large but what they all have in common is that we’re really backing tenacious founders with audacious visions for what the future looks like and they’re building towards that.”

To hear more about Tecklu’s new role, and her take on all-things technology and culture, check out the latest episode of CTRL+T.

Just a few years ago, it might have been a bit of a challenge to convince investors that a mindfulness app would end up being a big business — but thanks to an increasing focus on mental health from both startups and larger companies, companies like Calm are now capturing the excitement of investors.

From meditation sessions like you might find on other apps to tracks called “sleep stories” designed to help people get control of their sleep, Calm serves as a suite of content for users focusing on mental wellness. It’s one of an increasingly hot space centered around mental wellness and maintaining a sort of mindfulness in the hope that it’ll convert into a daily habit and help people just generally feel, well, more calm. The company says it has raised $27 million in a new financing round that values it at a $250 million pre-money led by Insight Venture Partners with Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures also participating. Before this, Calm raised around $1.5 million in seed funding.

“There’s definitely a bias toward the physical body in fitness,” co-founder Michael Acton Smith said. “For a long time there’s been a certain amount of embarrassment and shame talking about our own feelings. A lot of people are realizing that we’re all, at different times, going through tough times. I think that’s part of the culture we’ve grown up in. Everything’s been about improving the efficiency and improving the effectiveness and the external circumstances. We haven’t considered the internal circumstances the same way. The same thing isn’t true of eastern philosophies. This crossover is just beginning to happen in a big way.”

Calm, at its core, is a hub of content centered around mindfulness ranging from in-the-moment sessions to tracks that are designed to soothing enough to help people get ready to go to sleep. Everything boils down to trying to help teach users mindfulness, which is in of itself a skill that requires training, co-founder Alex Tew said. This itself has morphed into a business in of itself, with the company generating $22 million in revenue in 2017 and reaching an annual revenue run rate of $75 million.

And the more content the company creates, and the more people come back, the more data it acquires on what’s working and what isn’t. Like any other tech tool or service, some of the content resonates with users and some doesn’t, and the startup looks to employ the same rigor that many other companies with a heavy testing culture to ensure that the experience is simple for users that will jump in and jump out. For example, it turns out a voice named Eric reading stories about being on a train struck a chord with users — so the company invested more in Eric.

“It’s a tricky balance,” Tew said. “Sometimes we’ll launch things that we think are popular but don’t end up being popular, but there’s never been any kind of dramatic errors. We try to create content that will appeal to the biggest range of users. We speak to our customers and find out what they would like.”

Calm’s focus is built off of an increasingly important topic the technology industry is grappling with — mental health. As more and more users pick up Calm and start listening to the tracks, the company can start to figure out what kinds of sessions or tools are helping people want to come back more often and, in theory, start feeling better with those kinds of practices. If you talk to investors in the valley, helping founders manage the highs and lows of starting a company is increasingly part of the discussion, with the refrain that ‘people are at least talking about it now’ showing up more and more often. That’s also helping companies like Calm and Headspace attract funding from the venture community.

“It does feel like a major societal shift,” Acton Smith said. “Just a few years ago no one talked about mental health, it was very much in the shadows. As more politicians talk about it, as the media treat it as something normal and healthy to do, more and more people step out of the shadows and into the light. We realize the brain is pretty much the most complex thing in the known universe, it’s not surprising it goes wrong every now and then. To be able to talk about that and understand it is a very healthy and positive thing. It just feels like we’re at the start, 50 years ago the wave began around physical fitness, jogging, aerobics, and now we’re at the start of this new wave.

Calm and other mindfulness apps are not the only companies at play here. Indeed, the two largest direct owners of smartphone platforms — Apple and Google — this year announced a suite of tools geared toward trying to manage the amount of time users end up glued to their screens. While those are centered around helping users manage their time on their phones, it does show that even the largest companies in the world are increasingly aware of the potential negative effects their devices may have spawned from people spending all their time on their phones.

But by extension, Calm is not the only app where people can throw on some headphones and listen to a soothing voice with a British accent. Headspace is another obvious player in the space, having also raised a substantial amount of funding. Tew said the goal is to remain focused on simplicity, which in the end will keep people coming back over and over — and then end up continuing to drive that business.

“There was a lot of skepticism around Calm and this category as recently as a year ago,” Acton Smith said.” People were concerned that there was a lot of competition, and wondered whether people would really pay for this. We’ve quite convincingly shown we’ve answered all those questions with the growth we’ve had in our user numbers and our revenue. This is a successful business with very high margins and a huge addressable market. If you think about Nike, and the physical exercise boom being worth tens of billions, there’s no reason why mental wellness won’t be.”

In a key vote this morning the European Parliament’s legal affairs committee has backed the two most controversial elements of a digital copyright reform package — which critics warn could have a chilling effect on Internet norms like memes and also damage freedom of expression online.

In the draft copyright directive, Article 11; “Protection of press publications concerning online uses” — which targets news aggregator business models by setting out a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content that requires a license from the publisher to use this type of content (aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it) — was adopted by a 13:12 majority of the legal committee.

While, Article 13; “Use of protected content by online content sharing service providers”, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — thereby pushing them towards creating filters that monitor all content uploads with all the associated potential chilling affects (aka ‘censorship machines’) — was adopted by a 15:10 majority.

MEPs critical of the proposals have vowed to continue to oppose the measures, and the EU parliament will eventually need to vote as a whole.

EU Member State representatives in the EU Council will also need to vote on the reforms before the directive can become law. Though, as it stands, a majority of European governments appear to back the proposals.

European digital rights group EDRi, a long-standing critic of Article 13, has a breakdown of the next steps for the copyright directive here. It’s possible there could be another key vote in the parliament next month — ahead of negotiations with the European Council, which could be finished by fall. A final vote on a legally checked text will take place in the parliament — perhaps before the end of the year.

Derailing the proposals now essentially rests on whether enough MEPs can be convinced it’s politically expedient to do so — factoring in a timeline that includes the next EU parliament elections, in May 2019.

Last week, a coalition of original Internet architects, computer scientists, academics and supporters — including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Bruce Schneier, Jimmy Wales and Mitch Kapor — penned an open letter to the European Parliament’s president to oppose Article 13, warning that while “well-intended” the requirement that Internet platforms perform automatic filtering of all content uploaded by users “takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users”.

“As creators ourselves, we share the concern that there should be a fair distribution of revenues from the online use of copyright works, that benefits creators, publishers, and platforms alike. But Article 13 is not the right way to achieve this,” they write in the letter.

“By inverting this liability model and essentially making platforms directly responsible for ensuring the legality of content in the first instance, the business models and investments of platforms large and small will be impacted. The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial.”

The Wikimedia Foundational also blogged separately, setting out some specific concerns about the impact that mandatory upload filters could have on Wikipedia.

“[A]ny sort of law which mandates the deployment of automatic filters to screen all uploaded content using AI or related technologies does not leave room for the types of community processes which have been so effective on the Wikimedia projects,” it warned last week. “As previously mentioned, upload filters as they exist today view content through a broad lens, that can miss a lot of the nuances which are crucial for the review of content and assessments of legality or veracity.”

More generally critics warn that expressive and creative remix formats like memes and GIFs — which have come to form an integral part of the rich communication currency of the Internet — will be at risk if the proposals become law…

Regarding Article 11, Europe already has experience experimenting with a neighboring right for news, after an ancillary copyright law was enacted in Germany in 2013. But local publishers ended up offering Google free consent to display their snippets after they saw traffic fall substantially when Google stopped showing their content rather than pay for using them.

Spain also enacted a similar law for publishers in 2014, but its implementation required publishers to charge for using their snippets — leading Google to permanently close its news aggregation service in the country.

Critics of this component of the digital copyright reform package also warn it’s unclear what kinds of news content will constitute a snippet, and thus fall under the proposal — even suggesting a URL including the headline of an article could fall foul of the copyright extension; ergo that the hyperlink itself could be in danger.

They also argue that an amendment giving Member States the flexibility to decide whether or not a snippet should be considered “insubstantial” (and thus freely shared) or not, does not clear up problems — saying it just risks causing fresh fragmentation across the bloc, at a time when the Commission is keenly pushing a so-called ‘Digital Single Market’ strategy.

“Instead of one Europe-wide law, we’d have 28,” warns Reda on that. “With the most extreme becoming the de-facto standard: To avoid being sued, international internet platforms would be motivated to comply with the strictest version implemented by any member state.”

However several European news and magazine publisher groups have welcomed the committee’s backing for Article 11. In a joint statement on behalf of publishing groups EMMA, ENPA, EPC and NME a spokesperson said: “The Internet is only as useful as the content that populates it. This Publisher’s neighbouring Right will be key to encouraging further investment in professional, diverse, fact-checked content for the enrichment and enjoyment of everyone, everywhere.”

Returning to Article 13, the EU’s executive, the Commission — the body responsible for drafting the copyright reforms — has also been pushing online platforms towards pre-filtering content as a mechanism for combating terrorist content, setting out a “one hour rule” for takedowns of this type of content earlier this year, for example.

But again critics of the copyright reforms argue it’s outrageously disproportionate to seek to apply the same measures that are being applied to try to clamp down on terrorist propaganda and serious criminal offenses like child exploitation to police copyright.

“For copyrighted content these automated tools simply undermine copyright exceptions. And they are not proportionate,” Reda told us last year. “We are not talking about violent crimes here in the way that terrorism or child abuse are. We’re talking about something that is a really widespread phenomenon and that’s dealt with by providing attractive legal offers to people. And not by treating them as criminals.”

Responding to today’s committee vote, Jim Killock, executive director of digital rights group, the Open Rights Group, attacked what he dubbed a “dreadful law”, warning it would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression online.

“Article 13 must go,” he said in a statement. “The EU Parliament’s duty is to defend citizens from unfair and unjust laws. MEPs must reject this law, which would create a Robo-copyright regime intended to zap any image, text, meme or video that appears to include copyright material, even when it is entirely legal material.”

Also reacting to the vote today, Monique Goyens, director general of European consumer rights group BEUC, said: “The internet as we know it will change when platforms will need to systematically filter content that users want to upload. The internet will change from a place where consumers can enjoy sharing creations and ideas to an environment that is restricted and controlled. Fair remuneration for creators is important, but consumers should not be at the losing end.”

Goyens blamed the “pressure of the copyright industry” for scuppering “even modest attempts to modernise copyright law”.

“Today’s rules are outdated and patchy. It is high time that copyright laws take into account that consumers share and create videos, music and photos on a daily basis. The majority of MEPs failed to find a solution that would have benefitted consumers and creators,” she added in a statement.

Spanish banking giant BBVA has an early adopter when it comes to exploring and using blockchain in its legacy business, being the first global bank to use its blockchain network, built with distributed ledger architecture, to issue a corporate loan earlier this year. Now it is taking the next step: BBVA has inked a partnership with Repsol, the Spanish energy giant, to build blockchain-based corporate finance solutions, and as first step BBVA has transferred a credit facility of €325 million ($375 million) using its blockchain network.

BBVA says that this is the first time that distributed ledger technology has been used to issue a credit facility, and as with the loan it issued, the incentive for doing so is to reduce the time it takes to do this: the process takes “a matter of hours rather than days in a fully transparent operation that allowed the tracking and approval of the documentation involved.” It said “different types of blockchain” were used in the transfer, including a Hyperledger private blockchain network, with the signed contract registered using the Ethereum test network through a hash, a “unique document identifier that guarantees its immutability”.

Google has been the target of many an investigative journalism scoop, but today in the UK it’s sitting on the other side of the table. The search giant’s Digital News Initiative — the division that was created to give millions in funding to startups and new projects that are pushing the boundaries of digital news — has announced a new partnership with the Centre for Investigative Journalism to help journalists learn how use digital tools to dig up news.

The two will be jointly running 20 free workshops in the UK under the name “Access to Tools,” available both to freelancers and staff editors and writers, that will train them on some of the tricks of the trade when it comes to using digital media to find and report a story, including data analysis on spreadsheets, finding and ‘reading’ minutes from public meetings, and tracking down sources for images. Google says the workshops will use “technology from a range of providers” — not just Google. As for the content: the focus here seems to be on using these tools for digging up local news stories, not dirt on Google.

The efforts are Google’s latest moves to position itself as a friend, and not a foe, to the news industry. Over the years, the company has raised the hackles of many a publisher that has been unhappy with how Google either summarizes stories in Google News, or simply provides enough links around a subject from other sources that a user potentially never needs to visit a publication online to read the original source of the information — thereby depriving the news organisations of traffic and subsequent revenues that come with that traffic from advertising.

That scuffle between Google and the news industry has been going on for years, with the latest frontier being mobile. Google has developed a format for viewing stories on pages with accelerated loading times on mobile, but those stories (signified with a lightning bolt when you search on Google for a story on you mobile device) all get delivered on Google URLs. Now, as Google plans to expand its so-called AMP project to desktop, it has said it’s working on fixing that URL situation, although I’ve checked just now and those Google URLs are still there.

All of this comes at the same time that company is already under investigation by European regulators for its anticompetitive practices in areas like search and mobile.

Google’s News Initiative is one example of how Google is trying to offset all this controversy. Aimed at news organisations in Europe, the group provides no-strings-attached grants to businesses that are aiming to bring more innovation to the field using tech like AI, mobile and more. Google has also run training on its own steam through its News Lab, and also offers online courses. The CIJ association adds another layer of impartiality to the wider strategy.

For the CIJ, it gives the group some funding to bring more of their expertise to a wider set of journalists, and that on balance can only be a good thing.

“Our leading concern is to put the best tools in the hands of investigative journalists, and then grow their expertise in using them,” said CIJ director James Harkin. “Building on our 15 years of expertise in data journalism, advanced internet research, financial search, and internet-powered fact-checking and our relationships of trust with the corporate and independent local media, ‘Access to Tools’ is the perfect way to extend the already impressive reach of our regional network and to get out there into more regional newsrooms, communities, and universities.”

Brave, an ad-blocking web browser with a blockchain-based twist, has started trials of ads that reward viewers for watching them — the next step in its ambitious push towards a consent-based, pro-privacy overhaul of online advertising.

Brave’s Basic Attention Token (BAT) is the underlying micropayments mechanism it’s using to fuel the model. The startup was founded in 2015 by former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, and had a hugely successful initial coin offering last year.

In a blog post announcing the opt-in trial yesterday, Brave says it’s started “voluntary testing” of the ad model before it scales up to additional user trials.

These first tests involve around 250 “pre-packaged ads” being shown to trial volunteers via a dedicated version of the Brave browser that’s both loaded with the ads and capable of tracking users’ browsing behavior.

The startup signed up Dow Jones Media Group as a partner for the trial-based ad content back in April.

People interested in joining these trials are being asked to contact its Early Access group — via community.brave.com.

Brave says the test is intended to analyze user interactions to generate test data for training its on-device machine learning algorithms. So while its ultimate goal for the BAT platform is to be able to deliver ads without eroding individual users’ privacy via this kind of invasive tracking, the test phase does involve “a detailed log” of browsing activity being sent to it.

Though Brave also specifies: “Brave will not share this information, and users can leave this test at any time by switching off this feature or using a regular version of Brave (which never logs user browsing data to any server).”

“Once we’re satisfied with the performance of the ad system, Brave ads will be shown directly in the browser in a private channel to users who consent to see them. When the Brave ad system becomes widely available, users will receive 70% of the gross ad revenue, while preserving their privacy,” it adds.

The key privacy-by-design shift Brave is working towards is moving ad targeting from a cloud-based ad exchange to the local device where users can control their own interactions with marketing content, and don’t have to give up personal data to a chain of opaque third parties (armed with hooks and data-sucking pipes) in order to do so.

Local device ad targeting will work by Brave pushing out ad catalogs (one per region and natural language) to available devices on a recurring basis.

“Downloading a catalog does not identify any user,” it writes. “As the user browses, Brave locally matches the best available ad from the catalog to display that ad at the appropriate time. Brave ads are opt-in and consent-based (disabled by default), and engineered to operate without leaking the user’s personal data from their device.”

It couches this approach as “a more efficient and direct opportunity to access user attention without the inherent liabilities and risks involved with large scale user data collection”.

Though there’s still a ways to go before Brave is in a position to prove out its claims — including several more testing phases.

Brave says it’s planning to run further studies later this month with a larger set of users that will focus on improving its user modeling — “to integrate specific usage of the browser, with the primary goal of understanding how behavior in the browser impacts when to deliver ads”.

“This will serve to strengthen existing modeling and data classification engines and to refine the system’s machine learning,” it adds.

After that it says it will start to expand user trials — “in a few months” — focusing testing on the impact of rewards in its user-centric ad system.

“Thousands of ads will be used in this phase, and users will be able to earn tokens for viewing and interacting with ads,” it says of that.

Brave’s initial goal is for users to be able to reward content producers via the utility BAT token stored in a payment wallet baked into the browser. The default distributes the tokens stored in a users’ wallet based on time spent on Brave-verified websites (though users can also make manual tips).

Though payments using BAT may also ultimately be able to do more.

Its roadmap envisages real ad revenue and donation flow fee revenue being generated via its system this year, and also anticipates BAT integration into “other apps based on open source & specs for greater ad buying leverage and publisher onboarding”.