Year: 2018

The long-term future of transportation might see less people owning cars, but today a lot of private vehicles are still on the road, and now a startup that’s building a multi-faceted marketplace to help fix them has raised some funding. Caroobi, a Berlin company that connects individuals with mechanics, and mechanics with parts suppliers, has picked up $20 million, money that it plans to use to expand its business into new markets — it’s active today only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and is just starting to open for business in the UK — and its platform to cover a wider range of services.

The Series B round was led by NGP Capital, formerly known as Nokia Growth Partners, a fund backed by the Finnish telecoms giant. This is part of its “smart mobility” investment strategy.

“We are looking for promising companies in the mobility sector globally and believe that the integrated model across the value chain that Caroobi is building has huge potential. The team is great and we are looking forward to supporting the company’s international expansion and building a global category winner,” said Walter Masalin, Partner at NGP Capital, in a statement.

Other investors in this round include Target Global, BMW iVentures, DN Capital and Cherry Ventures.

The BMW investment is financial, co-founder and MD of Caroobi Mark Michl said in an interview, with no strategic plans for now between the two. Although BMW an iconically German company, the iVentures arm is actually in the Bay Area; Caroobi, in fact, is iVentures’ first investment in BMW’s home country.

Caroobi is not disclosing its valuation but I understand that it is now over $100 million. The company is not yet profitable, by design, and has raised around $30 million to date.

The amount of this investment is notable when you consider the size of it versus the potential of Caroobi’s business today. The company says that in its current German footprint, for example, it works with only 750 mechanics today, but with a total addressable market of around 35,000 mechanics. It’s currently servicing some 2,000 cars per month and growing 100 percent month-over-month.

“The market potential is huge, and we currently have well below only one percent of it,” Michl said.

As Michl and his co-founder Nico Weiler explain it, Caroobi is providing a platform to fill what is effectively a gap in the legacy automotive market.

In many countries, one of the most common routes for repairing a car, or getting it serviced, is to use an independent garage or mechanic. But these days, as much of the process of finding and contacting tradespeople has moved online, much of the mechanic world has not come along.

You may find some recommendations on services like Yelp, and even some targeted directories that help direct referrals for independent mechanics to quote for work, such as WhoCanFixMyCar in the UK, or even services that come to you on-demand, such as YourMechanic in the US.

But what’s largely lacking is a platform that not only helps match up car owners with mechanics and their garages, but also provides those customers with transparent price lists and helps to manage not just bookings, but payments and potentially disputes (and soon, service guarantees). On top of that, the Caroobi platform offers services to the mechanics themselves.

“There are two customers we are addressing,” said Michl. “One is consumers, who often may not know if mechanics are offering them fair quality and price. We are getting around that by offering services directly to customers,” he said. “Two is the mechanic.”

Mechanics services come in two parts, Weiler said. The first is the customer-facing side, Caroobi is giving mechanics are more efficient way of interfacing with customers, with accounting and billing software that links up with Caroobi’s back-end, and scheduling tools to book in appointments. Weiler said that Caroobi’s customer referrals typically account for 50 percent – 60 percent of all mechanics’ jobs once they join.

The second is the supplier-facing side, which is a newer area of business for Caroobi. Mechanics typically work with either a small group of distributors, or more likely one or two purchasing groups, which gives the mechanics less flexibilty in what they can order, the general supply levels, and how much everything costs. Caroobi currently sources parts from over 100 distributors and manufacturers, giving those mechanics a better selection and likely more competitive pricing.

“For mechanics, the parts acquisition process has always been intransparent and inefficient. By sourcing our parts directly from manufacturers we are establishing a lean, efficient process in the market, which becomes more cost effective for our customers and partner mechanics.” Michl said.

Caroobi is not disclosing what this works out to in terms of actual prices, or what kind of a cut Caroobi gets from it. Michl does say that the company takes a small percentage for every kind of transaction, and that these often work out to be competitive or even cheaper than what the mechanic might have charged, were he working directly.

The multi-billion dollar real estate developer and property manager JLL is getting into the tech investment game with the launch of a new $100 million fund run by corporate subsidiary JLL Spark.

Initially envisioned as a technology-focused business unit of the multinational real estate company, the firm eventually turned to the more traditional venture capital investment model as a way to get more exposure to all of the new technologies that are coming to market, according to JLL SPark’s co-chief executive Mihir Shah.

For Shah and his co-founder Yishai Lerner running the real estate company’s investment firm is the first foray by either executive into the world of real estate or property technology. But both men have been working in the startup world of the Bay Area for at over a decade.

In fact, the two serial entrepreneurs launched one of their first companies from the TechCrunch 50 conference way back in 2007 (it was a mobile app that mimicked Yelp).

The two eventually sold their mobile review business to GroupOn and began doing some angel investing. It was during that venture into the wild world of seed stage prospecting that Shah got bitten by the real estate bug while trying to buy some commercial real estate.

“I was looking at the process and was thinking ‘Wow! That is not a modern process,'” Shah said.

Unbeknownst to Shah, at the same time he was looking for commercial real estate, the commercial real estate industry was looking for someone like him.

JLL had put out feelers and hired head hunters to find someone who could take the lead at the firm’s burgeoning technology practice, Shah said.

“They had all sorts of internal initiatives bringing in new technology companies and services to their existing clients,” Shah said. “They understood that technology was going to transform all aspects of the industry.”

One of the first steps that JLL had taken was to acquire Stessa, which developed and sold asset management software for the real estate industry. But Shah and Lerner quickly realized that the buy and build strategy wouldn’t be robust enough for JLL’s needs.

“Over the last six months we saw how much innovation was happening in the proptech space and we thought it made more sense to launch a venture fund,” Shah said.

The firm will invest anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million into seed stage or Series A companies with the option to dabble in later stage deals, according to Shah. The firm has made two investments so far — neither one of them in startups.

The commitments have been in one accelerator program, the New York-based Metaprop, which focuses on real estate tech investment, and Navitas Capital, which is billed as a later stage investor in the same space.

Both investments appear to be geared toward educating the firm’s two principals on the market and what’s already happening in the space.

The benefit that a corporate firm like JLL can provide to startups is the access to pilot projects where companies can deploy their technologies and, indeed, that’s the pitch that Shah makes to potential portfolio companies.

“Money is not enough,” he said. “There’s a lot of products out there, but they’re struggling with distribution.” JLL has designated a few buildings in top cities around the world to fast track new technologies and provide trial spaces for them to develop, Shah told me. “Our value as a strategic is to build that bridge and make that connection.”

“Creating this $100 million venture fund through JLL Spark allows us to continue to lead the real estate industry in bringing the best proptech ideas to reality,” said Christian Ulbrich, JLL’s Global chief executive. “It complements and expands our substantial ongoing investments in innovative, cutting-edge digital solutions, which is a core part of our Beyond strategic vision and commitment to achieve ambitions for our clients.”

A lot of people who’ve been working in the venture industry — even for many years — haven’t seen a true down cycle.

Somewhat ironically, Priti Youssef Choksi, a newly minted VC, knows very well what one looks like. The newest partner of the multi-stage investment firm Norwest Venture Partners has been working in tech since before the last boom and bust — and she has lessons to share about both good times and bad.

It started in her native Mumbai (“Bombay to me!” she says). Choski didn’t tell her parents when, as a teenager, she applied to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture and business. “I couldn’t study both back home,” she says, somewhat sheepishly from Norwest’s glass-lined new offices in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood.

She didn’t wind up at an architecture firm. Instead as a young graduate, she landed at Broadview Associates, an investment bank in Foster City that advised many dozens of tech companies during the go-go dot.com era but ran into trouble when the market nosedived. (In 2003, it was acquired by bigger rival Jefferies.)

By then, Choksi had already joined one of the bank’s sell-side clients, an internet marketing company called USWeb, whose CEO asked her to work for him despite having no discrete job description in mind at the time.

Looking back now, Choksi remembers the experience fondly, saying she ran strategy projects and competitive analysis of what others in the industry were doing and ultimately helped the company grow from a 200- to an 8,000-person operation. Indeed USWeb was famous for its roll-up strategy, and it absorbed roughly 40 smaller startups over a two-year period before merging with another company. This being the dot com era, however, the combined company went bankrupt soon after.

Choksi again left before her employer’s demise. This time, when a partner at USWeb left to start an early streaming media company, she went along for the ride. Alas, it was early, broadband connections didn’t yet exist to support the vision and, well, it sold to another early web company called Inktomi that had a hugely successful IPO, saw its shares soar to $240 apiece, then crashed back to earth two years later, selling to Yahoo for just $1.65 a share.

If at this point, Choksi felt ready to throw in the towel, she doesn’t seem to recall it. Instead, she plowed forward, attending a one-year program at the Kellogg School to burnish her “soft skills and negotiating skills and things you don’t have time to practice” when at a startup. Then she headed right back to Silicon Valley.

Her return would begin a second chapter of sorts. In fact, like a lot of people who came to the Bay Area in the ’90s and who have stayed, Choksi’s fortunes began to turn after the detritus of the bubble’s burst began to blow away.

First came a job at Google when it had just 800 employees and was still privately held and that, more to the point, grew and grew rather than go out of business. Choksi wound up staying for six years, holding roles in both strategic partnerships and, later, distribution partnerships, where she says she helped convince management to bundle the company’s search bar with other products to get it into the world more widely.

She must have been doing something right. By 2009, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — a former Google exec who’d seen Choksi’s work — was reaching out to Choksi to ask if she would help run business development at Facebook, which itself was still privately held at the time.

Choksi said yes, so thoroughly enjoying the company that five years later — two years after the company’s employee-enriching 2012 IPO, notably —  she moved to the “dark side, doing M&A at Facebook” for four years.

She notes that, by then, Facebook had “moved beyond acqui-hires to doing big tech bets” but declines to discuss some of her deals, some of which were never publicly announced. Either way, she wasn’t able to strike a deal with every interesting founder she met. And eventually, her abiding fascination with compelling founders and startups led her work with a recruiter earlier this year.

At first, she imagined she would take on yet another operating role at a small but growing company. Instead, Norwest managing partner Jeff Crowe raised his hand and asked for a meeting with her.

It was apparently a match from the start. Sitting in an airy conference room, Choksi says of the move that she and Crowe were and remain “just very direct with each other.” More, the “culture and people at Norwest feel like the right fit; there’s not the eat-what-you-kill mentality here that you see at many other venture firms.”

Not last, says Choksi, Norwest was the “only venture firm that invited me to a partner-and-pitch meeting” while it was trying to lure her into the fold.

Crowe certainly sees Choksi’s hire as a big win as the firm continues to build out it consumer-facing investment practice. He volunteers that he’s particularly appreciative of Choksi’s ties to Facebook and to the many people who’ve spun out of the company to work on their own projects. But he also recognizes her ability to identify a good opportunity when she sees one, and to support founders as they grow their companies.

“Somebody who has been in the industry a long time, knows a lot of people, seen a lot of technologies, and worked with entrepreneurs both inside of out of companies like Facebook — including during their awkward teenage phase,” says Crowe. “It’s pretty exciting for us.”

Concerns around Facebook’s recently revealed data sharing relationship with some device makers just took a turn for the worse. The practice, first revealed over the weekend, is now confirmed to have included relationships with Chinese companies Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL, according to The New York Times. Given that the U.S. government has longstanding national security concerns over Huawei, Facebook’s newly revealed data deal with the Chinese company has raised some eyebrows in Congress.

“Concerns about Huawei aren’t new – they were widely publicized beginning in 2012, when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a well-read report on the close relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei,” U.S. Senator Mark Warner said of the revelation. Warner serves as the Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“The news that Facebook provided privileged access to Facebook’s API to Chinese device makers like Huawei and TCL raises legitimate concerns, and I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers.”

In that report, the House Intelligence Committee wrote that “Huawei did not fully cooperate with the investigation and was unwilling to explain its relationship with the Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party, while credible evidence exists that it fails to comply with U.S. laws” and that Huawei’s history indicated that it likely had ties to the Chinese military.

Earlier in the day, the Senate Commerce Committee addressed a letter to Facebook over the broader issue of these manufacturer relationships and questioning Facebook’s assertion that the shared data was not abused. As the New York Times reports, these relationships date back “at least 2010” — the relative dark ages of Facebook’s mobile strategy. It does not appear that ZTE had a similar agreement with Facebook.

Facebook has disputed the characterization of these relationships as a privacy scandal, emphasizing that it imposed tight restrictions on this class of device integration.

Facebook told the New York Times that while the partnerships have been ongoing for years, the company would end its relationship with Huawei by the week’s end.

Apple will now allow password manager applications to integrate with Password AutoFill in iOS 12. That means you’ll have easier access to all your passwords when trying to sign into mobile websites and apps, not just those stored in iCloud Keychain.

This may seem like a small change, but it’s actually an important one.

Many users today take advantage of password management applications to help get control over their dozens, or even hundreds, of online accounts.

Password managers help them secure their credentials and recall them quickly, making it easier to use complex, secure, but hard-to-remember passwords. And the password managers can help alert to other problems — like services that have experienced a data breach such as with the 92 million compromised MyHeritage accounts, for example — as well as issues with re-used passwords, passwords that are too easy to guess, and other issues.

But even though many users today rely on password managers, they’ve been a bit cumbersome to access while on Apple mobile devices.

You’d either have to launch the password manager’s iOS app and copy and paste the password, then return to the app or website in question, or you could use workaround solutions — like 1Password’s use of the iOS Share Sheet to pull up your password with a series taps without having to directly launch its own app.

This still took time, and was overly complicated when compared to the ease-of-use of just tapping on the AutoFill option on the QuickType Bar.

Allowing users to instead access the passwords they’ve saved in their preferred password manager application through the same Password AutoFill flow they’re comfortable with today will make it not only faster to sign in, but could also encourage more adoption of password manager apps, in general.

1Password, upon hearing the news at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week in San Jose, was so excited about the solution that it went ahead and gave the new software a shot.

As you can see in the 1Password demo above, the new API will allow you to simply tap on the QuickType bar to access your credentials saved with 1Password. The location of those credentials is also identified on the bar itself, after the dash. If two different sets of credentials are stored in both the password manager and in iCloud Keychain, they would both appear in the QuickType bar, so the user could choose.

This is a feature 1Password has been clamoring for since the introduction of Password AutoFill for Apps last year.

“With iOS 11, Apple introduced the ability to fill from your iCloud Keychain into Safari and into apps,” says 1Password’s Mac and iOS team lead at AgileBits, Michael Fey. “As soon as we saw this, we got in touch with them, and said can we get this for 1Password as well?”

“We filed some bug reports and presented them with mockups of ways we though it could work. And this year, it turns out, they granted our request,” he says. (The enhancement request filed with Apple was a joint effort between 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass. All three filed the same request with the same requirements.)

1Password, and likely those other password manager apps as well, will have their integrations ready as soon as Apple’s software launches publicly this fall.

Apple will now allow password manager applications to integrate with Password AutoFill in iOS 12. That means you’ll have easier access to all your passwords when trying to sign into mobile websites and apps, not just those stored in iCloud Keychain.

This may seem like a small change, but it’s actually an important one.

Many users today take advantage of password management applications to help get control over their dozens, or even hundreds, of online accounts.

Password managers help them secure their credentials and recall them quickly, making it easier to use complex, secure, but hard-to-remember passwords. And the password managers can help alert to other problems — like services that have experienced a data breach such as with the 92 million compromised MyHeritage accounts, for example — as well as issues with re-used passwords, passwords that are too easy to guess, and other issues.

But even though many users today rely on password managers, they’ve been a bit cumbersome to access while on Apple mobile devices.

You’d either have to launch the password manager’s iOS app and copy and paste the password, then return to the app or website in question, or you could use workaround solutions — like 1Password’s use of the iOS Share Sheet to pull up your password with a series taps without having to directly launch its own app.

This still took time, and was overly complicated when compared to the ease-of-use of just tapping on the AutoFill option on the QuickType Bar.

Allowing users to instead access the passwords they’ve saved in their preferred password manager application through the same Password AutoFill flow they’re comfortable with today will make it not only faster to sign in, but could also encourage more adoption of password manager apps, in general.

1Password, upon hearing the news at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week in San Jose, was so excited about the solution that it went ahead and gave the new software a shot.

As you can see in the 1Password demo above, the new API will allow you to simply tap on the QuickType bar to access your credentials saved with 1Password. The location of those credentials is also identified on the bar itself, after the dash. If two different sets of credentials are stored in both the password manager and in iCloud Keychain, they would both appear in the QuickType bar, so the user could choose.

This is a feature 1Password has been clamoring for since the introduction of Password AutoFill for Apps last year.

“With iOS 11, Apple introduced the ability to fill from your iCloud Keychain into Safari and into apps,” says 1Password’s Mac and iOS team lead at AgileBits, Michael Fey. “As soon as we saw this, we got in touch with them, and said can we get this for 1Password as well?”

“We filed some bug reports and presented them with mockups of ways we though it could work. And this year, it turns out, they granted our request,” he says. (The enhancement request filed with Apple was a joint effort between 1Password, Dashlane and LastPass. All three filed the same request with the same requirements.)

1Password, and likely those other password manager apps as well, will have their integrations ready as soon as Apple’s software launches publicly this fall.

While crowdfunding company Indiegogo has been running a pilot program in China for the past couple of years, it’s now building on those efforts with the launch of the Indiegogo China Global Fast-Track Program.

CEO David Mandelbrot is in Shenzhen, China this week to announce the program, which is designed to help Chinese entrepreneurs reach a global audience. In an email, he told me:

The China Pilot Program is officially out of pilot phase — today, we are officially launching the Indiegogo Global Fast Track. During the pilot phase, the team experimented with different ways to help service Chinese brands and manufacturers who were looking to launch products overseas. After helping companies raise over $100 million and launch over 3,000 China-based projects over two years time, the team has finalized its new suite of services.

Those services include guidance around crowdfunding and marketing in the United States and other countries, access to a network of more than 65 service providers (including retailers and marketing firms, as well as Indiegogo’s manufacturing partner Arrow Electronics and shipping partner Ingram Micro) and Chinese-to-English consultation with bilingual staff.

Even while in the pilot phase, Indiegogo has had some success stories in helping Chinese companies launch globally. For example, Bluetooth headphone company crazybaby raised more than $4 million across three campaigns.

Mandelbrot said Indiegogo also has opened a satellite office in the Tencent incubator in Shenzhen — a manufacturing hub that’s become a hub for hardware startups, too.

You may remember the FCC explaining that in both 2014 and 2017, its comment system was briefly taken down by a denial of service attack. At least, so it says — but newly released emails show that the 2014 case was essentially fabricated, and the agency has so aggressively redacted documents relating to the 2017 incident that one suspects they’re hiding more than ordinary privileged information.

As a very quick recap: Shortly after the comment period opened for both net neutrality and the rollback of net neutrality there was a rush of activity that rendered the filing system unusable for a period of hours. This was corrected soon afterwards and the capacity of the system increased to cope with the increased traffic.

A report from Gizmodo based on more than 1,300 pages of emails obtained by watchdog group American Oversight shows that David Bray, the FCC’s chief information officer for a period encompassing both events, appears to have advanced the DDoS narrative with no real evidence or official support.

The 2014 event was not called an attack until much later, when Bray told reporters following the 2017 event that it was. “At the time the Chairman [i.e. Tom Wheeler] did not want to say there was a DDoS attack out of concern of copycats,” Bray wrote to a reporter at Federal News Radio. “So we accepted the punches that it somehow crashed because of volume even though actual comment volume wasn’t an issue.”

Gigi Sohn, who was Wheeler’s counsel at the time, put down this idea: “That’s just flat out false,” she told Gizmodo. “We didn’t want to say it because Bray had no hard proof that it was a DDoS attack. Just like the second time.”

And it is the second time that is most suspicious. Differing on the preferred nomenclature for a four-year-old suspicious cyber event would not be particularly damning, but Bray’s narrative of a DDoS is hard to justify with the facts we do know.

In a blog post written in response to the report, Bray explained regarding the 2017 outage:

Whether the correct phrase is denial of service or “bot swarm” or “something hammering the Application Programming Interface” (API) of the commenting system — the fact is something odd was happening in May 2017.

Bray’s analysis appears sincere, but the data he volunteers is highly circumstantial: large amounts of API requests that don’t match comment counts, for instance, or bunches of RSS requests that tie up the servers. Could it have been a malicious actor doing this? It’s possible. Could it have been bad code hammering the servers with repeated or malformed requests? Also totally possible. The FCC’s justification for calling it an attack seems to be nothing more than a hunch.

Later the FCC, via then-CIO Bray, would categorize the event as a “non-traditional DDoS attack” flooding the API interface. But beyond that it has produced so little information of any import that Congress has had to re-issue its questions in stronger words.

No official documentation of either supposed attack has appeared, nor has the FCC released any data on it, even a year later and long after the comment period has closed, improvements to the system have been made and the CIO who evaded senators’ questions departed.

But most suspicious is the extent to which the FCC redacted documents relating to the 2017 event. Having read through the trove of emails, Gizmodo concludes that “every internal conversation about the 2017 incident between FCC employees” has been redacted. Every one!

The FCC stated before that the “ongoing nature” of the threats to its systems meant it would “undermine our system’s security” to provide any details on the improvements it had made to mitigate future attacks. And Bray wrote in his post that there was no “full blown report” because the team was focused on getting the system up and running again. But there is also an FCC statement saying that “our analysis reveals” that a DDoS was the cause.

What analysis? If it’s not a “significant cyber incident,” as the FBI determined, why the secrecy? If there’s no report or significant analysis from the day — wrong or right in retrospect — what is sensitive about the emails that they have to be redacted en masse? Bray himself wrote more technical details into his post than the FCC has offered in the year since the event — was this information sent to reporters at the time? Was it redacted? Why? So little about this whole information play makes no sense.

One reasonable explanation (and just speculation, I should add) would be that the data do not support the idea of an attack, and internal discussions are an unflattering portrait of an agency doing spin work. The commitment to transparency that FCC Chairman Pai so frequently invokes is conspicuously absent in this specific case, and one has to wonder why.

The ongoing refusal to officially document or discuss what all seem to agree was an important event, whether it’s a DDoS or something else, is making the FCC look bad to just about everyone. No amount of redaction can change that.

Amazon just got a step closer to world smart speaker domination. Starting today, users in France can pre-order the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Spot. The standard Echo and Echo Dot will start shipping to users next week. The display-equipped Echo Spot will arrive at some point next month.

Naturally, the expansion also includes a French version of Alexa. As the company notes, the Alexa Skills Kit rolled out in March to French developers and device makers to prep for the expansion and create skills focused on the new market. After all, tweaking a smart assistant for a new market requires more than just learning a new language.

There are also a dialect and local customs to contend with, in order to offer the best possible experience. The skills that devs have built will also arrive later this month.

France joins a rapidly growing list of countries with Alexa/Echo, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, India, New Zealand, Germany, Japan and Ireland. No word on availability for the rest of the Echo line. Google Home, meanwhile, has been available in France since last summer. 

Apple has one hardware-specific feature planned that wasn’t announced at Monday’s WWDC keynote. In iOS 12, users will be able to use Live Listen, a special feature previously reserved for hearing aids certified through Apple’s Made for iPhone hearing aid program, with their AirPods.

After enabling the feature in the iPhone’s settings, users will be able to use their phones effectively as a directional mic. This means you can have AirPods in at a noisy restaurant with your iPhone on the table, for example, and the voice of whomever is speaking will be routed to your AirPods.

Live Listen is a feature Apple developed and eventually launched in 2014 that allows iPhone users with hearing aids to hear people in noisy environments or from across a room, such as a crowded restaurant or lecture hall. If a compatible hearing aid is paired to a user’s phone, there are options to turn Live Listen on and off, adjust volume, and even set it as their preferred Accessibility Shortcut.

Live Listen support in AirPods is key. The inclusion of this feature makes AirPods more capable and more alluring; it’s significant given they are almost universally hailed as one of Apple’s best products in years. Soon, anyone — particularly someone with limited hearing — will have access to this feature without needing to buy dedicated hardware to get it.

Still, it’s critical to note AirPods with Live Listen is not a full replacement for a hearing aid. It’s obviously best to speak with your audiologist to determine the best solution for your ears.