Year: 2018

French startup Comet (not to be confused with Zyl, which was formerly named Comet) is building a marketplace of talented tech and data freelancers as well as companies that are looking for engineers and teams for a specific project. The company just raised a $12.8 million funding round (€11 million) with Otium Venture and Daphni.

While Comet got tens of thousands of applications, Comet is working with 1,700 freelancers right now. This is a different approach from Upwork, Malt and other existing marketplaces. With Comet, companies can get freelancers on demand, without having to scan through hundreds of profiles.

100 clients are using the platform to connect and hire freelancers . Companies upload their assignments and the Comet team matches freelancers with the right job within 48 hours. Comet currently generates around $1.16 million in transaction volume per month (€1 million).

“100 percent of our freelancers are doing this full time,” co-founder and CEO Charles Thomas told me. “On average, they earn 60 percent more than when they were employees.

“Some freelancers say that they want to become a parent and spend more time with their kids. It represents 30 percent of our freelancers. Others work just like a normal employee, around 230 days per year. It represents a big revenue increase.”

But Comet doesn’t want to stop there. According to the startup, freelancing is the future of work. So it means that you might need to put together a team of freelancers for a new project. Comet can now put together teams of multiple freelancers with a project manager, a back-end engineer, a mobile developer, etc. It accounts for around 15 percent of Comet’s business right now.

Comet also wants to convince tech people that they can ditch their jobs and become a full time freelancer for little effort. The company helps you set up a professional bank account, get health insurance, pay less on your coworking space and more. Comet works with Alan, Qonto, Shine, Youse and other products.

When you first apply to become a freelancer on Comet, you’ll first get a call from an HR student (a freelancer on Side) to see if you have the right soft skills. If you pass this first test, you’ll get a technical challenge.

The company also gathers feedbacks about each freelancer. When you sign up, Comet automatically looks at your past job experiences and open source activity on LinkedIn, GitHub and Stack Overflow. The company automatically sends emails to CTOs at previous companies to get some feedback. And of course, just like on all marketplaces, clients can rate freelancers after each job.

Comet takes a 10 percent cut on each transaction on the customer side. On average, freelancers earn $150,000 per year before taxes (€130,000). The company plans to expand to London and Berlin next year.

Alibaba is doubling down on logistics after it led a $1.38 billion investment in Chinese courier firm ZTO Express alongside Alibaba logistics affiliate Cainiao.

ZTO went public on the NYSE in 2016 raising $1.4 billion from what was the year’s largest IPO in the U.S. The Shanghai-based company claims to be one of China’s largest logistics firms via a partner-based network. Its clients include Alibaba and rival e-commerce firm JD.com . There’s plenty more overlap between the two, ZTO CFO Huiping Yan previously spent two years working for Cainiao.

Alibaba, Cainiao and other undisclosed investors will buy around 10 percent of the company through the deal, which is expected to be completed in June. ZTO’s stock price closed at $19.30 on Friday (before the long weekend) which represented an all-time high since its IPO in October 2016, when it opened at $18.40 before dropping 15 percent on day-one.

The deal is focused on Alibaba’s ‘new retail’ version which merges e-commerce and offline retail. The idea is to marry the speed and ease of e-commerce with the advantages of brick and mortar, such as being able to touch and feel products and customer care. Alibaba has already introduced hybrid stores in parts of China, and fast logistics represents an important part of the plan.

Alibaba said in a statement that the investment will “deepen their collaboration” between ZTO, Cainiao and Alibaba.

“This investment will enable Cainiao and ZTO to supercharge joint innovation and development to accelerate digitalization of the industry,” Cainiao President Lin Wan said in a statement.

Cainiao was started in 2013 by Alibaba and eight other backers to bring organization in Chinese logistics, particularly around e-commerce deliveries. Last year, Alibaba agreed to pay over $800 million to take majority ownership in the business, which works closely with the Chinese firm’s business units and services to enable fast delivery. Cainiao is valued at around $20 billion based on its most recent fundraising activity.

Despite a large IPO, ZTO has attracted controversy. U.S. pension fund Birmingham Retirement and Relief System sued the business alleging that it exaggerated profit margins to lure investors to its listing in 2016. The company has denied the claims.

Note: the original version of this story has been updated to correct ZTO’s most recent share price.

Kobo has announced a new e-reader, the Clara HD, which won’t set the world on fire but will be a perfectly good option for e-book readers who don’t want to spend a fortune. It basically revives the well-liked but discontinued Glo HD with a better frontlight and more memory.

The screen is 6 inches and 300 PPI, which is comparable to Amazon’s latest Kindles and high enough that you shouldn’t notice pixelation in the type. More importantly for some, it has the company’s improved frontlight, which can be dialed from the now-familiar cool LED tone to a much, much warmer one. There’s 8 GB of storage inside, more than enough for hundreds of books and comics — but no MicroSD card slot, which some do love to have.

I’ve been using the Clara HD as my daily reader for a week or so and I can vouch for the type quality and usual features — in terms of loading books onto the device, reading and navigating them, this reader is much the same as Kobo’s other ones.

The improvements are small basically because the Clara HD will likely replace the Aura Edition 2, which it outperforms by a huge amount, as the company’s entry-level device. At $130 it’s just $10 more than Amazon’s Paperwhite (the version with built-in ads, that is), but I’d go with the Kobo every time.

The simplicity of managing your books and articles on the Kobo is one selling point — I love being able to just drag and drop files like epubs and CBRs onto it like it’s a USB drive, and my Pocket articles jump onto it automatically.

And the color-changing light might help attract people who aren’t sure about the illumination they’ve seen in other readers. That cold blue tone can really put people off, and the ability to warm it up is great. If you’re like me you’ll find both tone extremes too much, then pick something in the middle and keep it there.

The design is nothing to shout about, but it’s quite light and thin and gets the job done — except for one nuisance that just baffles me. The power button is dead center on the bottom edge of the device.

Why?

Whose idea was that? If you’re holding the device by the side and bottom edges, there’s always a risk you’ll grab the button by mistake and put the device to sleep. It’s dumb, but it’s not enough for me to change my mind and switch to Kindle. I’m also not a big fan of the texture on the back (it feels like it will collect dirt), but that too is far from a deal-breaker.

The Clara HD is available for pre-order now, and if you’re in the market for an all-purpose e-reader, this is a great option and I would say a solid value. It ships in June in the U.S. and some other regions, with more coming later. From the press release:

The device will also be available France on June 1, and as of June 5 in Canada, the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Turkey; Hong Kong in July; with Australia, New Zealand, and Mexico to follow later this year.

Skyfire co-founder Nitin Bhandari is working on a new approach to cutting our addiction to social media and reducing screen time with a startup called ZenScreen.

The startup has raised $700,000 in funding from Opera (now Otello) and assorted angel investors. It launched iOS and Android apps last month, as well as a Chrome browser extension.

Bhandari, who also served as senior vice president of consumer apps at Opera after the acquisition of Skyfire, said that during his work on mobile browsers and apps, he started to worry about whether creating more engaging — even addictive — apps was a worthwhile goal: “The cognitive dissonance was really eating at me and my team.”

Existing apps lock you out of your browser or smartphone for limited periods of time — for example, I use Forest to cut down on distractions when I need to focus on writing. But Bhandari said the “don’t even touch your phone” approach is “just not practical” for many people.

So ZenScreen includes a number of different features that are designed to create what Bhandari said is “almost like a balanced digital diet.” (In fact, ZenScreen created an “AppKins Digital Health Pyramid” showing which apps you can use as much as you want, and others that should  be limited.) Adults can use it to control their own app usage, as well as that of their kids.

For example, instead of trying to keep you off your phone for, say, an hour each morning, ZenScreen offers something called Smart Mornings, where you have 10 minutes to access social apps, followed by 20 minutes where you can only open work apps and utilities. Similarly, you can set limits on how much time you spend on social/entertainment apps during the day and restrict social media again when it’s close to bedtime.

To do this, Bhandari said ZenScreen had to solve “a really hard problem to figure out which app is being used and how long it’s in the foreground.” The company uses VPN technology to monitor your app usage, though Bhandari said, “We have a very unique VPN where all of the technology runs right on your device and sensitive data never comes to our servers.”

ZenScreen offers access to personal app usage analytics and its Quiet Time feature for free, then charges $4.99 per month for everything else.

“I actually compare our pricing to a gym membership — that’s kind of what we’re doing for your brain,” Bahndari said. “When you compare it to $80 a month, or $100 a month for the gym, $4.99 seems like such a no brainer if this topic is important to you.”

The UK’s hopes of retaining an influential role for its data protection agency in shaping European Union regulations post-Brexit — including helping to set any new Europe-wide rules around artificial intelligence — look well and truly dashed.

In a speech at the weekend in front of the International Federation for European Law, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, shot down the notion of anything other than a so-called ‘adequacy decision’ being on the table for the UK after it exits the bloc.

If granted, an adequacy decision is an EU mechanism for enabling citizens’ personal data to more easily flow from the bloc to third countries — as the UK will be after Brexit.

Such decisions are only granted by the European Commission after a review of a third country’s privacy standards that’s intended to determine that they offer essentially equivalent protections as EU rules.

But the mechanism does not allow for the third country to be involved, in any shape or form, in discussions around forming and shaping the EU’s rules themselves. So, in the UK’s case, the country would be going from having a seat at the rule-making table to being shut out of the process entirely — at time when the EU is really setting the global agenda on digital regulations.

“The United Kingdom decided to leave our harmonised system of decision-making and enforcement. It must respect the fact that the European Union will continue to work on the basis of this system, which has allowed us to build a single market, and which allows us to deepen our single market in response to new challenges,” said Barnier in Lisbon on Saturday.

“And, as indicated in the European Council guidelines, the UK must understand that the only possibility for the EU to protect personal data is through an adequacy decision. It is one thing to be inside the Union, and another to be outside.”

“Brexit is not, and never will be, in the interest of EU businesses,” he added. “And it will especially run counter to the interests of our businesses if we abandon our decision-making autonomy. This autonomy allows us to set standards for the whole of the EU, but also to see these standards being replicated around the world. This is the normative power of the Union, or what is often called ‘the Brussels effect’.

“And we cannot, and will not, share this decision-making autonomy with a third country, including a former Member State who does not want to be part of the same legal ecosystem as us.”

Earlier this month the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, told MPs on the UK parliament’s committee for exiting the European Union that a bespoke data agreement that gave the ICO a continued role after Brexit would be a far superior option to an adequacy agreement — pointing out that the UK stands to lose influence at a time when the EU is setting global privacy standards via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into full force last Friday.

“At this time when the GDPR is in its infancy, participating in shaping and interpreting the law I think is really important. And the group of regulators that sit around the table at the EU are the most influential blocs of regulators — and if we’re outside of that group and we’re an observer we’re not going to have the kind of effect that we need to have with big tech companies. Because that’s all going to be decided by that group of regulators,” she warned.

“The European Data Protection Board will set the weather when it comes to standards for artificial intelligence, for technologies, for regulating big tech. So we will be a less influential regulator, we will continue to regulate the law and protect UK citizens as we do now, but we won’t be at the leading edge of interpreting the GDPR — and we won’t be bringing British values to that table if we’re not at the table.”

She also pointed out that without a bespoke arrangement to accommodate the ICO her office would also be shut out of participating in the GDPR’s one-stop shop, which allows EU data protection agencies to work together and co-ordinate regulatory actions, and which she said “would bring huge advantages to both sides and also to British businesses”.

Huge advantages that the UK stands to lose as a result of Brexit.

With the ICO being excluded from participating in GDPR’s one-stop shop mechanism, it also means UK businesses will have to choose an alternative data protection agency within the EU to act as their lead regulator after Brexit — putting yet another burden on startups as they will need to build new relationships with a regulator in the EU.

The Irish Data Protection Commission seems the likely candidate for UK companies to look to after Brexit, when the ICO is on the side lines of GDPR, given shared language and proximity. (And Ireland’s DPC has been ramping up its headcount in anticipation of handling more investigations as a result of the new regulation.)

But UK businesses would clearly prefer to be able to continue working with their domestic regulator. Unfortunately, though, Brexit closes the door on that option.

We’ve reached out to the ICO for comment and will update this story with any response.

The UK government has committed to aligning the country with GDPR regardless of Brexit — as it seeks to avoid the economic threat of EU-UK data flows being cut off if it’s not judged to be providing adequate data protection.

Looking ahead that also essentially means the UK will need to keep its regulatory regime aligned with the EU’s in perpetuity — or risk being deemed inadequate, with, once again, the risk of data flows being cut of (or at very least businesses scrambling to put in place alternative legal arrangements to authorize their data flows, and saddled with the expense of doing so, as happened when Safe Harbor was struck down in 2015).

So, thanks to Brexit, it will be the rest of Europe setting the agenda on regulating AI — with the UK bound to follow.

Russian search giant Yandex is sometimes described as the “Google of Russia”, but maybe it should be described as the Amazon of Russia, too. The company today took the wraps off Yandex.Plus, a service modelled on Amazon Prime that gives users a number of perks for a monthly fee — 169 roubles/month, or about $2.75. On top of that, the company is making its first foray into hardware with a new, $160 smart speaker, Yandex.Station, and a new skills platform, called Yandex.Dialogues, for the Russian-speaking intelligent assistant it unveiled last year, called Alice. The Station speaker and Plus will be available only in Russia.

The three were all unveiled in Moscow at the company’s annual what’s-new event, which it calls Yet Another Conference.

Plus features include access to streaming service Yandex.Music; storage service Yandex.Disc; discounts for Yandex.Taxi (its Uber-like transportation service, which has partly acquired Uber’s Russian assets and now runs it in a JV); free deliveries and early access to Yandex.Market (an e-commerce marketplace that is in beta); film and TV streaming through its video service KinoPoisk; and expedited services and discounts for Yandex.Drive, its car-sharing service.

(Yandex.Drive’s landing page underscores just how Anglicised the Russian language has become in all things tech, and tech-related: Its big lettering proclaims “Каршеринг” — the Russian transliteration for “Car sharing.”)

The Station speaker — which will go on sale later this summer — was a much-rumored work in progress for the company after it first announced Alice last year. The new product comes at an interesting time: While Amazon with its Echo, Google with its Home device and Apple with its own HomePod all have ambitions to make their own smart speaker plays as international as possible, none of them have to date entered the Russian market, meaning that Yandex has a window of opportunity to build up its own customer base and ecosystem in this area ahead of any of them moving in.

Indeed, that has partly been the company’s strategy with all of its expansions, including its original Russian search engine, which launched and gained market share at a time when search engines outside the country either didn’t search in Russian or simply did it poorly.

But with the progress of time, other search engines have started to work much better in the country, and so while Yandex is still number-one, its market share has slowly eroded to Google — today Yandex has around a 53 percent share to Google’s 43 percent (Yandex’s share is down from over 60 percent just a few years ago) — and this, too, is partly also why Yandex has expanded into other market segments, including the ones being announced today.

Yandex is quick to point out that Station is not just another “me too” product, though. The speaker, it says, “is the first smart speaker to incorporate a full video streaming experience” by way of an HDMI output that users can link up to a screen, and then ask Alice to search for and playback videos, movies and television shows Yandex’s own KinoPoisk, ivi and Amediateka and others.

As for Dialogues, the idea is very similar to the skills that can be created for Alexa: developers for third-party apps can integrate them into Alice so that people can use those apps with a voice interface, and also when using Alice to call up information or order things. To sweeten the deal, Yandex says that the Dialogues interface will also make results discoverable through Yandex’s text-base search results, too.

More to come.

The drive to digitize payments in the UK is modernizing income for London’s famous street performers.

Thanks to a new development backed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, buskers — aka street performers and musicians — in the British capital will be able to solicit tips from credit cards as well as the traditional cash and coins method.

The initiative uses Swedish payment firm iZettle — which U.S. giant PayPal recently agreed to buy for $2.2 billion — to provide buskers with card readers that passers-by and commuters can use to make donations. A recent trial will be expanded to cover all of London’s registered buskers over the coming months, according to a report from the BBC. One busker, Charlotte Campbell, who took part in the test phase said the addition of contactless payments “had a significant impact on contributions” she received.

“More people than ever tap-to-donate whilst I sing, and often, when one person does, another follows,” Campbell added.

The deal is perhaps the most visible piece of business from iZettle, which has quietly made a mark in helping UK payments go digital.

iZettle will be PayPal’s largest acquisition to date. The company has operations in 12 markets, which include northern Europe and Mexico in Latin America. Its business is particularly strong in the UK where it has been successful in building out a point of sale business through card-reading dongles that link up with a smartphone or tablet. Like Square in the U.S., these dongles allow smaller businesses that are priced out of traditional point-of-sale solutions for taking cards to go beyond cash without a lot of hassle.

From that base, iZettle has expanded into other financial services for small businesses, which include inventory management loans and more.

Nur noch vierundzwanzig stunden — only 24 hours left! That’s when we release a sweet 2-4-1 offer on Innovator passes to attend Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Why pay €695 for one ticket later when — in just a few short hours — you can bag two tickets for the same price? Tomorrow, May 30 at 12pm CEST / 6am EDT we will be releasing a limited number of these 2-for-1 Innovator passes on a first-come, first-served basis. This is a limited-time offer, so be sure to sign up here to get notified the moment we release this deal into the wild.

TechCrunch Disrupt events provide access to the world’s leading tech leaders and venture capitalists — as well as the up-and-coming generation of founders and entrepreneurs. The excitement is palpable, and the air is thick with ideas, inspiration and opportunity. Don’t miss your chance to reach out and grab it.

One way to do that is to compete in Startup Battlefield. Go head-to-head against a highly vetted group of pre-Series A startups and compete for the coveted Disrupt Cup, bragging rights, massive media exposure, investor attention and a $50,000 equity-free grand prize. Applications open soon, so sign up for our newsletter to receive timely notification.

You also can join the more than 400 early-stage startups that will exhibit an impressive range of technology products, platforms and services in Startup Alley. It’s one of the best and most affordable ways to get your company in front of tech influencers, investors, potential customers, collaborators and the media. Last year, more than 2,600 people coursed through the Alley. It’s the place to be for world-class networking.

Disrupt Berlin takes place on November 29-30, 2018 at the Arena Berlin. We’re just 24 hours away from releasing two-for-one Innovator passes for €695. Take pity on your bottom line and don’t pay more than necessary. Sign up to be notified when these passes become available. Here’s to seeing you in Berlin!

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here.

Nur noch vierundzwanzig stunden — only 24 hours left! That’s when we release a sweet 2-4-1 offer on Innovator passes to attend Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Why pay €695 for one ticket later when — in just a few short hours — you can bag two tickets for the same price? Tomorrow, May 30 at 12pm CEST / 6am EDT we will be releasing a limited number of these 2-for-1 Innovator passes on a first-come, first-served basis. This is a limited-time offer, so be sure to sign up here to get notified the moment we release this deal into the wild.

TechCrunch Disrupt events provide access to the world’s leading tech leaders and venture capitalists — as well as the up-and-coming generation of founders and entrepreneurs. The excitement is palpable, and the air is thick with ideas, inspiration and opportunity. Don’t miss your chance to reach out and grab it.

One way to do that is to compete in Startup Battlefield. Go head-to-head against a highly vetted group of pre-Series A startups and compete for the coveted Disrupt Cup, bragging rights, massive media exposure, investor attention and a $50,000 equity-free grand prize. Applications open soon, so sign up for our newsletter to receive timely notification.

You also can join the more than 400 early-stage startups that will exhibit an impressive range of technology products, platforms and services in Startup Alley. It’s one of the best and most affordable ways to get your company in front of tech influencers, investors, potential customers, collaborators and the media. Last year, more than 2,600 people coursed through the Alley. It’s the place to be for world-class networking.

Disrupt Berlin takes place on November 29-30, 2018 at the Arena Berlin. We’re just 24 hours away from releasing two-for-one Innovator passes for €695. Take pity on your bottom line and don’t pay more than necessary. Sign up to be notified when these passes become available. Here’s to seeing you in Berlin!

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here.

Flock, a London-based startup that has created a data-driven insurance product for drones, has picked up £2.25 million in seed funding. Leading the round is fintech and insurtech VC fund Anthemis, with participation from Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play, Seed and Speed, and previous backer Downing Ventures. A number of unnamed angel investors also took part.

Describing itself as “pioneering the use of real-time data in insurance,” Flock’s drone insurance has its roots in the academic studies of founder Antton Pena. He wrote his thesis on the use of real-time data to quantify drone flight risks, and began building the first version of the Flock platform at the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London with help from a post-doctoral researcher in artificial intelligence.

Likewise, while studying at Cambridge University, Flock CEO Ed Leon Klinger focused on the future of the autonomous world, writing and publishing papers on driverless vehicles, AI safety, and autonomous drones. This included a paper on the future of the drone industry in which he identified the same solution that Antton had already begun building: the idea that real-time data could be leveraged to identify and quantify the risks of drone flights.

To that end, Flock’s first product, dubbed “Flock Cover”, is a ‘pay-as-you-fly’ insurance app that allows drone pilots to insure flights for a minimum of one hour. It aggregates real-time data, including hyperlocal weather conditions, population density, proximity to high-risk areas (such as airports), and more. Flock’s algorithms then analyse this data, coupled with other data points, such as the weight of the drone, to quantify the risk of any given drone flight. The insurance itself is offered through a partnership with Allianz.

“The problem we’re solving in the drone industry is that drone flight risks are unpredictable, complex, and not particularly well understood by insurers,” explains Klinger. “The result of this is overpriced, cumbersome, but often compulsory insurance policies that are not fit for purpose (in the U.K. drone insurance is a legal requirement for commercial pilots)”.

In contrast, Flock’s use of real-time (and static) data enables the startup to offer pricing that is “risk-dependant,” says Klinger, “so the safer you fly, the less you pay. Our safest pilots now pay less for their insurance than their morning coffee!”.

The company says that 1,000 commercial drone pilots now use Flock Cover, which launched earlier this year in the U.K., representing a departure from flat-rate annual premiums in favour of Flock’s on-demand model.

With that said, the Flock CEO concedes that there are a number of other on-demand drone insurance products already on the market, even if traditional insurers remain the startup’s main competition. “These insurers have been going for longer than us, and they certainly have bigger budgets. What they don’t have is real-time data on their side. They cannot differentiate between high-risk and low-risk customers or flights, so they simply charge everyone roughly the same amount for an annual policy,” he says.

Meanwhile, it would appear that drone insurance is just the beginning, as Klinger and Pena eye up other areas of cover where Big Data can be utilised to offer more flexible and better value insurance.

“As the world becomes increasingly autonomous, from the cars on our streets to the robots in our homes, we can expect to see a whole new set of risks emerge,” adds Klinger. “Here at Flock we’re using cutting edge data science to identify, quantify and insure these risks for drones, but we’re just getting started. Our wider vision is ultimately to bridge the gap between today’s insurers and tomorrow’s technologies, pioneering the use of Big Data in insurance for an autonomous future”.