Year: 2018

For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates.

While particularly mobile operators have enabled increasing prosperity in third-world countries, new ways of working and fueled entirely new markets, much of the wealth created has landed on the books of companies that we look upon with increasing discomfort: Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and others. And as if this was not enough, the very ingredient — ubiquitous connectivity — that has served as lubricant for the disruption of entire industries is now on the verge of being disrupted itself.

While many expect finance or healthcare to be next on the list of global serial disruptors, and technologies like wearables, blockchain and AI are cited to be the nails in the coffins of these industries, small players have cooked up the ingredients that could well marginalize today’s prevailing telco business models globally. There are three ingredients that could make that happen…

Lack of customer trust

Among the top 100 most trusted brands globally, you will find companies of almost any industry, except telco. You will find our serial disruptors, big brand consumer packaged goods, car manufacturers — even banks, payment companies and healthcare service providers. But you won’t find telcos. In their battle for growth, telcos globally have largely alienated their customers for the sake of managing yield and profitability.

Furthermore, simple customer engagement processes are often broken, and telcos have struggled to achieve a high quality of service with zero defects, high responsiveness and a great customer experience on even their most relevant customer interactions. They have broken the trust equation with their customers.

Why is that relevant? Because trust is an important ingredient in disintermediation, à la Uber or Airbnb. Uber has put trust and ease into the car-hailing business, while Airbnb has put the trust in-between guest and host. On the flip side, an existing trusted relationship is hard to disintermediate.

However, the telco-customer relationship, as global brand indicators show, is ready to be disrupted. Perhaps even more so than the bank-client or doctor-patient relationships.

Liquid infrastructure

While telcos are grappling with fixing their customer front ends, becoming more nimble and responsive to customer needs and putting “greatness” back into the overall customer experience equation, small startups (and large telco suppliers alike) are creating what is known as “liquid infrastructures.”

In today’s cloud-based world, global network traffic is exploding while traffic patterns, with globally scaled and load-balanced cloud-based back-ends, are becoming more and more fluid and less predictable. Likewise, decreasing enterprise assets actually connect to the enterprise network directly.

The internet of things (IoT) is creating massively distributed architectures with globally roaming assets that need to seamlessly blend into critical enterprise applications. So, enterprises are challenged with creating more flexible network infrastructures that not only connect their various operating sites, but also create reliable connections to public cloud service providers, while connecting remote and mobile IoT assets to the core network. And all that while accommodating massive shifts in traffic patterns depending on the day of the week, time of day or reconfigurations happening at service providers.

Liquid infrastructure promises to provide a solution for such challenges, and it’s not a concept telcos are capable of, or offering, in the market place as of now. It is players like Waltz Networks, a venture-backed startup from San Francisco, that are disrupting the market place by providing solutions for the completely self-managed, liquid infrastructure that can handle today’s network demand.

Envision such an offering as a global OTT service and you have a recipe for a serious contender to the global enterprise telco services market.

“On the fly” mobile access

Redtea Mobile is another such interesting disruptor in the telco space. Imagine your IoT assets are roaming around the world globally. Which telco would you go to in order to buy a data plan, plus device management, which enables you to provision and deprovision your devices globally and on the fly?

Telcos globally have been struggling to come up with competitive offerings that make managing such global asset bases economical and a breeze. That is firstly because none of the globally leading telcos can offer a truly global network — be it of their own or partner assets. Secondly, given multiple telcos are forced to collaborate if they want to offer a global virtual mobile data service, long-standing roaming agreements often stand in the way of economical pricing models. Telcos are not yet willing to sacrifice existing global roaming revenue at the expense of a potentially growing global IoT mobility data market opportunity.

Despite these challenges, however, the demand is increasing. While global mobile traffic was 7 exabytes in 2016, it will skyrocket 700 percent by 2021. That’s where Redtea Mobile comes into the picture. With Redtea Mobile’s technology, you could imagine someone buying regional capacity with enough associated international mobile subscriber identities (IMSI), the unique numbers assigned to mobile phone users, around the globe at wholesale prices, bundling this capacity as a global mobile IoT data service, and reselling it to enterprises globally to fuel their IoT devices.

The way Redtea Mobile’s technology works is that it can reprogram eSIMs on the fly from the cloud, so a device that operates on one mobile network in one country can be reprogrammed to another network on the fly once it crosses the border.

Both Redtea Mobile and Waltz Network enable the disintermediation of telcos, cutting out the expensive middle man. In the scenarios described above, the end-customer relationship would likely not reside with the telco, but with a service provider smartly repackaging core telco services with new technology into an over-the-top (OTT) service that completely marginalizes the telco to a pure infrastructure provider — much like the Uber drivers or the Airbnb property owners. And, as my first argument suggests, it is unlikely that many customers will bemoan the demise of global telcos as customer-facing service providers.

So what can telcos do?

Enough cases have proven already that companies are better off disrupting than being disrupted.

True, telcos have one strength that is impossible to beat — they own assets that are hard, in most markets impossible, to replicate. However, while telcos will not vanish entirely, they run the risk of being completely marginalized. To prevent that, they should drive disruptive change of their own. While small companies are innovating, telcos could be at the forefront of deploying those technologies across their infrastructure and of developing new and innovative offerings that disrupt their prevailing products and business models on top of those technologies.

Will this be enough to win? No, telcos will still have to fix the trust equation with their customers, become more responsive, etc.

But if telcos rely on their stagnant existing revenue streams and are too timid in embracing disruption, they are likely to continue their slow path toward the ultimate horror scenario of many telco executives: that of becoming a dump pipe.

For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates.

While particularly mobile operators have enabled increasing prosperity in third-world countries, new ways of working and fueled entirely new markets, much of the wealth created has landed on the books of companies that we look upon with increasing discomfort: Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and others. And as if this was not enough, the very ingredient — ubiquitous connectivity — that has served as lubricant for the disruption of entire industries is now on the verge of being disrupted itself.

While many expect finance or healthcare to be next on the list of global serial disruptors, and technologies like wearables, blockchain and AI are cited to be the nails in the coffins of these industries, small players have cooked up the ingredients that could well marginalize today’s prevailing telco business models globally. There are three ingredients that could make that happen…

Lack of customer trust

Among the top 100 most trusted brands globally, you will find companies of almost any industry, except telco. You will find our serial disruptors, big brand consumer packaged goods, car manufacturers — even banks, payment companies and healthcare service providers. But you won’t find telcos. In their battle for growth, telcos globally have largely alienated their customers for the sake of managing yield and profitability.

Furthermore, simple customer engagement processes are often broken, and telcos have struggled to achieve a high quality of service with zero defects, high responsiveness and a great customer experience on even their most relevant customer interactions. They have broken the trust equation with their customers.

Why is that relevant? Because trust is an important ingredient in disintermediation, à la Uber or Airbnb. Uber has put trust and ease into the car-hailing business, while Airbnb has put the trust in-between guest and host. On the flip side, an existing trusted relationship is hard to disintermediate.

However, the telco-customer relationship, as global brand indicators show, is ready to be disrupted. Perhaps even more so than the bank-client or doctor-patient relationships.

Liquid infrastructure

While telcos are grappling with fixing their customer front ends, becoming more nimble and responsive to customer needs and putting “greatness” back into the overall customer experience equation, small startups (and large telco suppliers alike) are creating what is known as “liquid infrastructures.”

In today’s cloud-based world, global network traffic is exploding while traffic patterns, with globally scaled and load-balanced cloud-based back-ends, are becoming more and more fluid and less predictable. Likewise, decreasing enterprise assets actually connect to the enterprise network directly.

The internet of things (IoT) is creating massively distributed architectures with globally roaming assets that need to seamlessly blend into critical enterprise applications. So, enterprises are challenged with creating more flexible network infrastructures that not only connect their various operating sites, but also create reliable connections to public cloud service providers, while connecting remote and mobile IoT assets to the core network. And all that while accommodating massive shifts in traffic patterns depending on the day of the week, time of day or reconfigurations happening at service providers.

Liquid infrastructure promises to provide a solution for such challenges, and it’s not a concept telcos are capable of, or offering, in the market place as of now. It is players like Waltz Networks, a venture-backed startup from San Francisco, that are disrupting the market place by providing solutions for the completely self-managed, liquid infrastructure that can handle today’s network demand.

Envision such an offering as a global OTT service and you have a recipe for a serious contender to the global enterprise telco services market.

“On the fly” mobile access

Redtea Mobile is another such interesting disruptor in the telco space. Imagine your IoT assets are roaming around the world globally. Which telco would you go to in order to buy a data plan, plus device management, which enables you to provision and deprovision your devices globally and on the fly?

Telcos globally have been struggling to come up with competitive offerings that make managing such global asset bases economical and a breeze. That is firstly because none of the globally leading telcos can offer a truly global network — be it of their own or partner assets. Secondly, given multiple telcos are forced to collaborate if they want to offer a global virtual mobile data service, long-standing roaming agreements often stand in the way of economical pricing models. Telcos are not yet willing to sacrifice existing global roaming revenue at the expense of a potentially growing global IoT mobility data market opportunity.

Despite these challenges, however, the demand is increasing. While global mobile traffic was 7 exabytes in 2016, it will skyrocket 700 percent by 2021. That’s where Redtea Mobile comes into the picture. With Redtea Mobile’s technology, you could imagine someone buying regional capacity with enough associated international mobile subscriber identities (IMSI), the unique numbers assigned to mobile phone users, around the globe at wholesale prices, bundling this capacity as a global mobile IoT data service, and reselling it to enterprises globally to fuel their IoT devices.

The way Redtea Mobile’s technology works is that it can reprogram eSIMs on the fly from the cloud, so a device that operates on one mobile network in one country can be reprogrammed to another network on the fly once it crosses the border.

Both Redtea Mobile and Waltz Network enable the disintermediation of telcos, cutting out the expensive middle man. In the scenarios described above, the end-customer relationship would likely not reside with the telco, but with a service provider smartly repackaging core telco services with new technology into an over-the-top (OTT) service that completely marginalizes the telco to a pure infrastructure provider — much like the Uber drivers or the Airbnb property owners. And, as my first argument suggests, it is unlikely that many customers will bemoan the demise of global telcos as customer-facing service providers.

So what can telcos do?

Enough cases have proven already that companies are better off disrupting than being disrupted.

True, telcos have one strength that is impossible to beat — they own assets that are hard, in most markets impossible, to replicate. However, while telcos will not vanish entirely, they run the risk of being completely marginalized. To prevent that, they should drive disruptive change of their own. While small companies are innovating, telcos could be at the forefront of deploying those technologies across their infrastructure and of developing new and innovative offerings that disrupt their prevailing products and business models on top of those technologies.

Will this be enough to win? No, telcos will still have to fix the trust equation with their customers, become more responsive, etc.

But if telcos rely on their stagnant existing revenue streams and are too timid in embracing disruption, they are likely to continue their slow path toward the ultimate horror scenario of many telco executives: that of becoming a dump pipe.

Facebook and Google were paid millions for political advertising purposes in Washington but failed for years to publish related information — such as the advertiser’s address — as required by state law, alleges a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general.

Washington law requires that “political campaign and lobbying contributions and expenditures be fully disclosed to the public and that secrecy is to be avoided.”

Specifically, “documents and books of account” must be made available for public inspection during the campaign and for three years following; these must detail the candidate, name of advertiser, address, cost and method of payment, and description services rendered.

Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging that both Facebook and Google “failed to obtain and maintain” this information. Earlier this year, Eli Sanders of Seattle’s esteemed biweekly paper The Stranger requested to view the “books of account” from both companies, and another person followed up with an in-person visit; both received unsatisfactory results.

They alerted the AG’s office to these investigations in mid-April, and here we are a month and a half later with a pair of remarkably concise lawsuits. (This appears to be separate from the Seattle Election Commission’s allegations of similar failings by Facebook in February.)

All told Facebook took in about $3.4 million over the last decade, including “$2.5 million paid through political consultants and other agents or intermediaries, and $619,861 paid directly to Facebook.” Google received about $1.5 million over the same period, almost none of which was paid directly to the company. (I’ve asked the AG’s office for more information on how these amounts are defined.)

The total yearly amounts listed in the lawsuits may be interesting to anyone curious about the scale of political payments to online platforms at the state scale, so I’m reproducing them here.

Facebook

• 2013: $129,099
• 2014: $310,165
• 2015: $147,689
• 2016: $1,153,688
• 2017: $857,893

Google

• 2013: $47,431
• 2014: $72,803
• 2015: $56,639
• 2016: $310,175
• 2017: $295,473

(Note that these don’t add up to the totals mentioned above; these are the numbers filed with the state’s Public Disclosure Committee. 2018 amounts are listed but are necessarily incomplete, so I omitted them.)

At least some of the many payments making up these results are not properly documented, and from the looks of it, this could amount to willful negligence. If a company is operating in a state and taking millions for political ads, it really can’t be unaware of that state’s disclosure laws. Yet according to the lawsuits, even basic data like names and addresses of advertisers and the amounts paid were not collected systematically, let alone made available publicly.

It’s impossible to characterize flouting the law in such a way as an innocent mistake, and certainly not when the mistake is repeated year after year. This isn’t an academic question: if the companies are found to have intentionally violated the law, the lawsuit asks that damages be tripled (technically, “trebled.”)

Neither company addressed the claims of the lawsuit directly when contacted for comment.

Facebook said in a statement that “Attorney General Ferguson has raised important questions and we look forward to resolving this matter with his office quickly.” The company also noted that it has taken several steps to improve transparency in political spending, such as its planned political ad archive and an API for requesting this type of data.

Google said only that it is “currently reviewing the complaint and will be engaging with the Attorney General’s office” and asserted that it is “committed” to transparency and disclosure, although evidently not in the manner Washington requires.

The case likely will not result in significant monetary penalties for the companies in question; even if fines and damages totaled tens of millions it would be a drop in the bucket for the tech giants. But deliberately skirting laws governing political spending and public disclosure is rather a bad look for companies under especial scrutiny for systematic dishonesty — primarily Facebook.

If the AG’s suit goes forward and the companies are found to have intentionally avoided doing what the law required, they (and others like them) would be under serious pressure to do so in the future, not just in Washington, but in other states where similar negligence may have taken place. AG Ferguson seems clearly to want to set a precedent and perhaps inspire others to take action.

I’ve asked the AG’s office for some clarifications and additional info, and will update this post if I hear back.

Facebook and Google were paid millions for political advertising purposes in Washington but failed for years to publish related information — such as the advertiser’s address — as required by state law, alleges a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general.

Washington law requires that “political campaign and lobbying contributions and expenditures be fully disclosed to the public and that secrecy is to be avoided.”

Specifically, “documents and books of account” must be made available for public inspection during the campaign and for three years following; these must detail the candidate, name of advertiser, address, cost and method of payment, and description services rendered.

Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging that both Facebook and Google “failed to obtain and maintain” this information. Earlier this year, Eli Sanders of Seattle’s esteemed biweekly paper The Stranger requested to view the “books of account” from both companies, and another person followed up with an in-person visit; both received unsatisfactory results.

They alerted the AG’s office to these investigations in mid-April, and here we are a month and a half later with a pair of remarkably concise lawsuits. (This appears to be separate from the Seattle Election Commission’s allegations of similar failings by Facebook in February.)

All told Facebook took in about $3.4 million over the last decade, including “$2.5 million paid through political consultants and other agents or intermediaries, and $619,861 paid directly to Facebook.” Google received about $1.5 million over the same period, almost none of which was paid directly to the company. (I’ve asked the AG’s office for more information on how these amounts are defined.)

The total yearly amounts listed in the lawsuits may be interesting to anyone curious about the scale of political payments to online platforms at the state scale, so I’m reproducing them here.

Facebook

• 2013: $129,099
• 2014: $310,165
• 2015: $147,689
• 2016: $1,153,688
• 2017: $857,893

Google

• 2013: $47,431
• 2014: $72,803
• 2015: $56,639
• 2016: $310,175
• 2017: $295,473

(Note that these don’t add up to the totals mentioned above; these are the numbers filed with the state’s Public Disclosure Committee. 2018 amounts are listed but are necessarily incomplete, so I omitted them.)

At least some of the many payments making up these results are not properly documented, and from the looks of it, this could amount to willful negligence. If a company is operating in a state and taking millions for political ads, it really can’t be unaware of that state’s disclosure laws. Yet according to the lawsuits, even basic data like names and addresses of advertisers and the amounts paid were not collected systematically, let alone made available publicly.

It’s impossible to characterize flouting the law in such a way as an innocent mistake, and certainly not when the mistake is repeated year after year. This isn’t an academic question: if the companies are found to have intentionally violated the law, the lawsuit asks that damages be tripled (technically, “trebled.”)

Neither company addressed the claims of the lawsuit directly when contacted for comment.

Facebook said in a statement that “Attorney General Ferguson has raised important questions and we look forward to resolving this matter with his office quickly.” The company also noted that it has taken several steps to improve transparency in political spending, such as its planned political ad archive and an API for requesting this type of data.

Google said only that it is “currently reviewing the complaint and will be engaging with the Attorney General’s office” and asserted that it is “committed” to transparency and disclosure, although evidently not in the manner Washington requires.

The case likely will not result in significant monetary penalties for the companies in question; even if fines and damages totaled tens of millions it would be a drop in the bucket for the tech giants. But deliberately skirting laws governing political spending and public disclosure is rather a bad look for companies under especial scrutiny for systematic dishonesty — primarily Facebook.

If the AG’s suit goes forward and the companies are found to have intentionally avoided doing what the law required, they (and others like them) would be under serious pressure to do so in the future, not just in Washington, but in other states where similar negligence may have taken place. AG Ferguson seems clearly to want to set a precedent and perhaps inspire others to take action.

I’ve asked the AG’s office for some clarifications and additional info, and will update this post if I hear back.

Here’s a heartfelt gift for all you procrastinating early-stage startup founders who haven’t gotten your act together to apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. You’re strapped for time, we get it. So, we’re extending the application deadline by one week.

You now have until June 13 — that’s seven days to collect your team and take your shot at winning $100,000. Yup, we doubled the prize money this year because we’re supersizing Disrupt SF. We’ve moved to Moscone Center West, which offers three times the floor space. That’ll make it much more comfortable for the more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibitors and more than 400 media outlets we expect to take in all that Disrupt has to offer.

Like, for example, Startup Battlefield — humanity’s best launching pad for early-stage startups. Seriously, winning this gig can have life-altering implications. Consider New York-based chore wizard Hello Alfred, which won Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF back in 2014. The company — founded by Jessica Beck and Marcela Sapone — is ready to scale having just scored $40 million in a Series B round of funding. That’s what we call a good ROI.

In case you’re wondering how well other Battlefield competitors have fared, listen up. The Startup Battlefield alumni community consists of more than 800 companies and has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. The networking opportunities alone make applying worth your time.

And let’s not forget all the press and investor interest. The competition takes place on the Disrupt Main Stage in front of a live audience that numbers in the thousands. The funding you seek is no doubt sitting in that audience. If you make the cut, experienced TechCrunch editors will coach you on the finer points of startup-pitching, so you’ll make the best impression possible.

We live-stream the entire event around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later, on demand. Remember, applying and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. Where else will you find media and investor exposure at that price?

Battlefield competitors also get to exhibit their company in Startup Alley for all three days of the show — for free. Remember all those attendees and media outlets? They spend a lot of time combing the Alley for the next big thing. Competing in the Battlefield is the gift that keeps on giving.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have one extra week to get your application to us. Don’t delay any longer. Apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

Here’s a heartfelt gift for all you procrastinating early-stage startup founders who haven’t gotten your act together to apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. You’re strapped for time, we get it. So, we’re extending the application deadline by one week.

You now have until June 13 — that’s seven days to collect your team and take your shot at winning $100,000. Yup, we doubled the prize money this year because we’re supersizing Disrupt SF. We’ve moved to Moscone Center West, which offers three times the floor space. That’ll make it much more comfortable for the more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibitors and more than 400 media outlets we expect to take in all that Disrupt has to offer.

Like, for example, Startup Battlefield — humanity’s best launching pad for early-stage startups. Seriously, winning this gig can have life-altering implications. Consider New York-based chore wizard Hello Alfred, which won Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF back in 2014. The company — founded by Jessica Beck and Marcela Sapone — is ready to scale having just scored $40 million in a Series B round of funding. That’s what we call a good ROI.

In case you’re wondering how well other Battlefield competitors have fared, listen up. The Startup Battlefield alumni community consists of more than 800 companies and has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. The networking opportunities alone make applying worth your time.

And let’s not forget all the press and investor interest. The competition takes place on the Disrupt Main Stage in front of a live audience that numbers in the thousands. The funding you seek is no doubt sitting in that audience. If you make the cut, experienced TechCrunch editors will coach you on the finer points of startup-pitching, so you’ll make the best impression possible.

We live-stream the entire event around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later, on demand. Remember, applying and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. Where else will you find media and investor exposure at that price?

Battlefield competitors also get to exhibit their company in Startup Alley for all three days of the show — for free. Remember all those attendees and media outlets? They spend a lot of time combing the Alley for the next big thing. Competing in the Battlefield is the gift that keeps on giving.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have one extra week to get your application to us. Don’t delay any longer. Apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

The Oculus Connect developer conference is back for its fifth year of chasing the VR dream.

Facebook VP or VR Hugo Barra announced that the company’s virtual reality-centric conference would be returning to San Jose on September 26 and 27. In past years, Oculus has used the conference to reveal its latest prototype hardware and to announce new software upgrades. This year, VR took center stage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference with the company using the event to launch the $199 Oculus Go standalone headset while also showcasing its latest prototype “Half Dome”.

It will be interesting to see what VR announcements are saved for Oculus at its own developer centric event and whether they use the opportunity to talk more about prototypes like its positionally-tracked “Santa Cruz” standalone which they have discussed the development of for the past two years.

Registration details for OC5 aren’t available yet but the application has typically gone live in mid-summer.

The Oculus Connect developer conference is back for its fifth year of chasing the VR dream.

Facebook VP or VR Hugo Barra announced that the company’s virtual reality-centric conference would be returning to San Jose on September 26 and 27. In past years, Oculus has used the conference to reveal its latest prototype hardware and to announce new software upgrades. This year, VR took center stage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference with the company using the event to launch the $199 Oculus Go standalone headset while also showcasing its latest prototype “Half Dome”.

It will be interesting to see what VR announcements are saved for Oculus at its own developer centric event and whether they use the opportunity to talk more about prototypes like its positionally-tracked “Santa Cruz” standalone which they have discussed the development of for the past two years.

Registration details for OC5 aren’t available yet but the application has typically gone live in mid-summer.

Beyond Watch compatibility, podcasting didn’t get a lot of love as Apple blew through announcements at a frenetic pace during its two-hour-plus keynote yesterday. This week, however, the company has announced a few new download milestones and offered a bit more insight into its recently introduced Podcast Analytics offering.

iTunes currently hosts north of 550,000 active shows, a bump from the 525,000 the company reported back in April — that’s a considerable jump from the 3,000 programs it hosted when the program launched back in 2005. The new numbers include 18.5 million individual episodes representing 155 countries, in more than 100 languages.

Fifty billion episodes have been streamed/downloaded since launch — numbers that are certainly on the upswing. 2016 saw 10 billion, and last year’s number was 13.7 billion. The company also revealed today that Stuff You Should Know has officially become the first podcast to cross the fairly staggering 500 million download/stream mark.

As for Analytics, the company is going to be issuing more requirements on shows to continue utilizing the tool. The company hasn’t offered a timeline by which podcast providers will be required to meet these more stringent rules, beyond the fact that the changes are coming soon. Among the requirements are cover art and the inclusion of certain meta data like pubdate.

Those join some guidelines the company has already issued for acceptance into the company’s app, which has long employed a vetting process that includes a combination of human and automated reviews. The company also continues to police shows to make sure they are active and continue to abide by those initial rules.

These new rules will make access to Analytics a bit more stringent, but will hopefully maintain Podcasts’ nature as a democratized platform for media creation at all levels. After all, that’s long been one of the medium’s biggest appeals. Whether you’re one person with access to a cheap computer microphone or NPR, you have access to the same platform.

That said, Apple does appear poised to be pushing podcast providers toward more quality standards like mastering levels, so different shows don’t have vastly different volume levels when played in succession. The HomePod will likely serve as the gold standard for the setting of those requirements.

Acorns, the financial management service for micro-investments, is adding a rewards debit card to its arsenal of tools aimed at getting Americans to create balanced stock portfolios for economic health.

The company has already racked up 10,000 pre-orders for its new (gorgeous) payment card that offers perks like investments into Acorns accounts when users purchase with the card at certain online and brick and mortar retailers.

The debit card comes with Acorns micro-investment and its retirement account built into the card’s services. According to the company, it’s the next step in its mission to build an easy, automated system to spend and save money in a way that benefits average consumers.

The card comes with real-time round-ups on all purchases so that consumers are automatically putting money into their Acorns accounts every time they spend.

Linked with Acorns customers’ bank accounts, the card also offers digital direct deposit, mobile check deposit and check sending, free bank-to-bank transfers and unlimited free or fee-reimbursed withdrawals from automatic teller machines around the country.

In addition to those features, the company said users can get up to 10 percent of every purchase made at local merchants deposited into an Acorns account.

Card users get a bundle of the card, Acorns and the Acorns later account for $3 per month. The Acorns portfolio management service costs $1 on its own; coupled with the retirement account, the service is $2.

The debit card works as an Acorns checking account, which is secured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. for up to $250,000.

For Acorns chief executive Noah Kerner, the card’s physical design was just as important as the services it offers.

“The design is important to us because this card is a badge of honor,” said Kerner. “By choosing it, people are choosing to save, invest and earn while they spend. They’re handling their business and they deserve a card that reflects that — a card made of tungsten metal, the heaviest non-radioactive element, and designed together with the visionary behind Apple’s design group.”

According to Kerner, the company has already received 10,000 pre-orders for the card. Only 100,000 cards will be available initially, and the first cards will be mailed by November 1, 2018.

Existing Acorns customers can sign up here. New customers must create an Acorns account and then are eligible to sign up for the debit card.