Year: 2018

YouTube has long been the key to Vevo’s music syndication services, and in a blog post today, the company announced plans to focus even more on the site. The effort, which finds Vevo, “focused on engaging the biggest audiences and pursuing growth opportunities,” also involves trimming away some of the elements it deems unnecessary to that strategy.

On the chopping block are Vevo’s iOS, Android and Windows apps, along with the consumer-facing side of its own site. “To be most effective in achieving those goals,” Vevo writes, “we will phase out elements of our owned and operated platforms.”

Those who have been viewing service’s content through its proprietary offering will get access to tools for importing things like playlists to YouTube. Of course, the Universal/Sony/Warner Music-owned service is doing this precisely at the moment that YouTube is launching its own music service to compete with the likes of Spotify.

That ultimately could put a hamper on the company’s plans to essentially put all of its eggs into the YouTube basket. The company hasn’t yet announced what non-YouTube platforms will ultimately be key to its strategy moving forward, though Variety notes that, for now, at least, the company is continuing to offer apps for some smart TVs.

Amazon’s unannounced YouTube competitor could be on the list, as the company looks to provide its own video platform for the Echo. For now, however, Vevo will continue to focus on advertising and original content, as it leans even more heavily on Google’s video service. 

Google earlier this year rebranded all of its payment services under Google Pay to help it double down on making transactions across its platform more frictionless (and more used). Now comes another development: PayPal and Google are kicking off a deep integration, where users who add their PayPal details to their Google Play accounts will be able to pay bills and for other items, using PayPal, without logging in and without leaving the Google services.

The integration, when it goes live later this year, will cover apps like Gmail, YouTube, Google Store and any services using Google Pay — and it will include not just payments but also peer-to-peer transfers.

This is not the first time that Google and PayPal have worked together — the latter has been a payment option in Google Play since 2014, in-store, and in online transactions that were managed by Google and a Google Pay option since last year. And similarly, Google itself has a number of other partners from the payments world, including Braintree, Sripe, Cybersource, Vantiv, Visa and Mastercard.

This new phase of the relationship is interesting for how it benefits both sides. For Google, it will mean that users are less likely to leave Google sites to complete a transaction, potentially never to return; and will give users one more option for how to pay for things, making Google’s own sales more likely to be completed rather than abandoned. For PayPal, it will give users one more easy option for using its rails when buying things, and that will translate into more transaction revenues for PayPal.

We’re in an interesting phase in the world of payments at the moment. The challenge is no longer getting people used to the idea of paying online: a substantial proportion of consumers in developed markets are willing and able to pay for items on digital platforms. The problem is one of trying to capture and keep users’ attention: there are potentially now too many payment options, and too many places for us to visit too easily. The struggle for app publishers, platform owners, and others now is to keep people engaged in your product, rather than migrating elsewhere, which could lead to people abandoning their purchases and also leaving your service for another one.

This is part of the reason why Amazon is so effective: it provides a very seamless and quick way for people to browse and buy things, even more so if you are a Prime subscriber.

In payments, this is translating into a new wave of services where transactions are being enabled at the point at which you need them, with minimal friction: no log-ins, no jumping to new sites or apps, no additional steps. Google and PayPal are not the only ones who are now knitting all of this together more tightly.

Just earlier this month, Microsoft integrated its own answer to Google Pay, Microsoft Pay, into Outlook precisely for this reason, with Stripe as one of the first active integration partners. And PayPal itself is buying mobile payments company iZettle to close the loop better on point of sale payments in markets like Europe.

I asked Bill Ready, the EVP and COO of PayPal (and previously the co-founder and head of Braintree), why it’s taken this long to get this integration in place on Google. I didn’t get a direct answer, but a hint that although tighter integration is the goal, it’s not always that easy to stitch together services from different silos:

“We are always looking for ways to improve the experience and to make payments even more seamless and secure for our customers wherever they want to pay,” he said. “After the successful launch with Android Pay last year, which built on our existing integration with Google Play, our teams came together to enable this new experience, which will allow customers in the U.S. who add PayPal to any one of Google’s services to be able to pay across the Google ecosystem, anywhere that PayPal is offered as a payment method, with only minimal setup.”

PornHub is diversifying. The most popular site that no one you know will admit to frequenting, is launching its very own VPN service today, called, get this: VPNHub. The app, which is available on Android, iOS, MacOS and Windows, is primarily designed to offer “free and unlimited bandwidth,” according to its creators.

It’s an attempt to circumvent ISP throttling, a potential boon for those who frequently visit sites with lot of video. Sites like, well, PornHub. “With 90 million visitors a day, the vast majority of whom are using devices on the go, it’s especially important that we continue to ensure the privacy of our users,” VP Corey Price said in a statement.

The app is free on the aforementioned mobile platforms, but there’s a premium for desktop users. Another higher tier will drop ads, offer faster connection speeds and provide logins in additional countries, according to the company. That one runs either $13 a month or $90 for a full year subscription.

Of course, there are some privacy concerns to contend with, including some security issues that have arisen in recent months. This WTF is a VPN primer should good you a good overview of what you’re contending with a bit more broadly.

“Assume that all the free VPN apps that you see in the App Store and Google Play are free for a reason,” Romain wrote in the piece. “They’ll analyze your browsing habits, sell them to advertisers, inject their own ads on non-secure pages or steal your identity. You should avoid free VPNs at all costs.”

So, keep that in mind.

If you want to take the leap, however, the service is available now. There’s also a free seven-day trial for the premium version.

Sinemia is further differentiating itself from its main competitor, MoviePass. The moviegoing startup is launching a new feature today that gets rid of the need for people to have a physical card in order to purchase movie tickets. This comes after a number of new Sinemia customers reported long wait times for their debit cards to arrive.

“The Cardless feature was in our product pipeline but we accelerated it due to strong demand and issues that it brought,” Sinemia founder and CEO Rifat Oguz said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Following Sinemia’s launch of new plans that cost as little as $4.99 a month a few weeks ago, interest and demand has skyrocketed, according to the company. That resulted in longer wait times for debit cards.

“We’ve seen incredible demand for our movie ticket subscription service, with many customers wanting to dive right in and buy movie tickets without waiting for a physical card to be shipped to them,” Oguz said in a press release. “At Sinemia, we strive to provide the best moviegoing experience possible while driving the industry forward, and this is just one example of how we’re moving quickly to address our customers’ needs. Sinemia Cardless makes it easier than ever for people to get their movie tickets in advance.”

MoviePass, on the other hand, requires a physical card that you have to use in person at the theater. That means advanced ticketing is not an option with MoviePass. Sinemia’s cardless feature will not just be available to new customers, but to everyone in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia. Meanwhile, MoviePass is on the struggle bus and might not have enough money to make it through the summer.

WorkFusion, a business process automation software developer, has raised $50 million in a new, strategic round of funding as it prepares to start adding new verticals to its product suite.

The company’s new cash came from the large insurance company, Guardian; health care services provider New York-Presbyterian, and the commercial bank, PNC Bank. Venture investor Alpha Intelligence Capital, which specializes in backing artificial intelligence-enabled companies also participated in the new financing.

Certainly WorkFusion seems to have come a long way since its days hiring crowdsourced workers to train algorithms how to automate the workflows that used to be done manually. The company has raised a lot of money — roughly $121 million, according to Crunchbase — which is some kind of validation, and in its core markets of financial services and insurance it’s attracted some real fans.

“Guardian uses data to better understand and serve customers, and WorkFusion will bring new data-driven intelligence capabilities into the company,” said Dean Del Vecchio, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer & Head of Enterprise Shared Services at Guardian, in a statement. “We look to invest in and deploy RPA and AI technology that can help us leap forward in operations and improve outcomes– WorkFusion has that potential.”

According to chief executive, Alex Lyashok, the company now intends to begin looking at acquisition opportunities that can “compliment our technology,” he said. “WorkFusion today is focused on banking, financial services and insurance. This problem [of automation] is not endemic to those industries.”

Particularly of interest to the New York-based company are those industries that missed out on the first wave of automation and digitization. “Industries that have already invested in digitization are being very aggressive, but companies that have bene very manual and then have not developed a technology program internally,” also represent a big opportunity, Lyashok said.

In September, Amazon announced it was adding support for Alexa voice control to its Amazon Music app for iOS and Android. However, it was implemented as a tap-to-talk function – something that didn’t quite mesh with the hands-free voice control experience Alexa is known for. Today, Amazon is addressing that problem by rolling out hands-free listening to the Amazon Music app instead, as a result of user feedback.

That means customers can command Alexa to do things like play or pause music, move back and forth between songs, and create playlists by asking, as well as take advantage of Alexa’s more innovative features around playing music by mood, activity, genre, lyrics, artist or song title.

For example, you can ask Alexa to do things like “play the song that goes ‘I’m lovin’ I’m livin’ I’m picking it up” and she’ll play Ariana Grande’s latest single, “No Tears Left to Cry,” notes Amazon. Or you can say things like “Alexa, play that Drake playlist I was listening to last week.”

The update to hands-free voice control could help better establish Amazon’s Music service as a viable competitor to Apple Music, which includes Siri voice control, and Spotify, which began testing its own voice search functionality this March.

Amazon Music is still seen as an underdog in the streaming music battle, compared with these two market leaders, but it may not be as far behind as people though.

Last month, for instance, Billboard reported the number of people subscribing to Amazon Music had doubled over the last six months, and Amazon was claiming “tens of millions” of paid customers. (Apple Music had 40 million paid members as of April and Spotify had 70 million.)  An earlier report had also found that Amazon’s service had grown to become the third largest music subscription service worldwide.

Voice control – and specifically the hands-free experience offered by Echo speakers – has been a huge contributor to Amazon Music’s growth, as has been its inclusion with the Amazon Prime membership program.

It makes sense, then, that Amazon would want to offer a similar hands-free experience across devices – especially as voice assistants like Google’s and Apple’s Siri have the advantage of being built-in. (And Google has also just launched its own YouTube Music service, which could be a disruptor to this space.)

Amazon says hands-free Alexa is rolling out starting today on the iOS and Android versions of the Amazon Music mobile app for both Amazon Music Unlimited and Prime Music listeners. The feature can be turned off in the settings if you don’t want to use it.

ClassPass, the studio fitness platform that gives users access to thousands of boutique fitness classes, has said it plans to expand internationally into nine new countries by the end of 2018. The company’s top priorities are consolidating its position in the UK and launching in three countries in Asia, according to chief executive Fritz Lanman. Lanman declined to disclose which countries the fitness subscription service was targeting.

ClassPass’s further international expansion isn’t exactly a surprise. The company already serves parts of Canada, the UK and Australia alongside its 50 cities within the US. ClassPass also raised a whopping $70 million Series C last year which Lanman tells me was purposefully large to fuel this type of expansion without being dependent on another round of financing.

As part of the expansion initiative, ClassPass has hired Chloe Ross as VP of International. Ross has worked on international strategy at Microsoft and has helped in developing policy in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.

In 2014, ClassPass found its footing with a brand new model for the fitness world. The company aggregated fitness classes and studio partners while offering a subscription model for users, letting them pick and play as they choose across a wide variety of classes. In essence, the company brought a media model, not unlike Netflix, to the real world industry of fitness.

Lanman says that this kind of business model innovation has spurred a large number of clones, both domestically and internationally, and that international expansion is integral to cementing ClassPass’s spot at the top of the heap.

As it stands now, ClassPass currently has 9,000 studio partners, but Lanman and founder Payal Kadakia see the opportunity to grow that to 90,000 as the company ventures outside of the U.S.

Moreover, ClassPass has played with the idea of expanding into new verticals for quite some time, with wellness being first in line. But before ClassPass can dive deep into a wellness vertical, it must first solidify its place as a global aggregator of studio fitness.

The company recently unveiled a new at-home workout program called ClassPass Live, letting users stream classes from the comfort of their own home. No word yet on when ClassPass Live will debut in new international markets, Lanman said.

ClassPass has raised a total of $154 million since launch.

All told, 16 years is a pretty good run in the social media world. After launching in 2002, website discovery platform StumbleUpon is shutting down on June 30. Over its existence, the service racked up 60 billion stumbles for 40 million users, cofounder Garrett Camp wrote in a Medium post this week.

Those of us who wrote for sites at the height of the tool’s power know it was capable of driving a tremendous amount of traffic in its prime. One of StumbleUpon’s greatest strengths was its simplicity, offering up content with a single click. But Camp notes in his post that its simplicity was ultimately its detriment in the ever-changing online world.

eBay bought the service for a reported $75 million in 2007, but failed it relevant. In 2013, the service underwent significant layoffs, allowing Camp to buy a majority share two years later.

“Since starting SU the number of people with internet access has grown nearly 10x, and mobile phones and social media have changed our lives. The number of platforms to share or host content has increased significantly, yet we still need better tools to help us filter through the exploding amount of content on the web, and find signal within the noise. And we’ve learned from SU that while simplicity and serendipity is important, so is enabling contextual curation.”

Those lessons, it seems, will be informing Camp’s product, Mix.com — as will StumbleUpon’s use base. Existing StumbleUpon accounts will be transitioned to Mix ahead of the June 30 deadline.

Most high-end restaurants don’t get their beef from the local grocery store. Well-regarded chefs and restauranteurs build relationships with small farms and family ranchers to procure what’s known in the industry as craft beef.

Just like coffee or chocolate or wine, the smallest differences (type of grass, breed of cow, lifestyle, etc.) can make a big difference in overall taste. But you and I have never had easy access to this beef outside of hitting up a Michelin-star restaurant.

And then Crowd Cow came along.

Crowd Cow, based in Seattle, works with small family farms to let users choose their cow and their cut. Crowd Cow then ships this craft beef directly to a user’s home.

Before Crowd Cow, five or six families would have to go in together on more than 500 LBs of beef in order to be a compelling customer to these small farms. That means they need a large meat freezer, upfront cash, and all the time and resources necessary to get the product from the farm to the home.

Crowd Cow founders Joe Heitzeberg and Ethan Lowry realized the whole process would be much better for everyone if they could crowdsource 50 families, instead of four or five, to buy a cow. The company handles logistics and offers users a way to learn about the ranch, the cow, and more via the app.

Today, the company is announcing that it has closed an $8 million Series A funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Ashton Kutcher of Sound Ventures and existing investor Joe Montana of Liquid 2 Ventures.

Since launch, Seattle-based Crowd Cow has expanded to offer chicken, olive wagyu, and pork and now serves the entire contiguous United States. The company generates more than $1 million in revenue a month and revenue has grown 10x over the last year.

The greater vision is to de-commoditize beef.

The Seattle-based company isn’t the only startup to raise money in an attempt to get people to eat better beef. Earlier this month, Porter Road closed on $3.7 million to go after the market with a similar mission.

Backed by a slew of New York venture firms including Slow Ventures, Max Ventures, BoxGroup, Tribeca Venture Partners and the Collaborative Fund, Porter Road was founded by trained chefs and butchers Chris Carter and James Peisker. Originally working out of a butcher shop in Nashville, Tenn. since 2011, the two partners work with sustainable local farmers to source the best meat.

Both companies are putting a new spin on a model made famous by Omaha Steaks, the meat packer and mail order distributor founded over 100 years ago, which is now pulls in $450 million in revenue a year.

“Before Starbucks and microbrew, coffee was 50 cents and there were a handful of beers and no one really cared,” said Crow Cow’s Heitzeberg. “The reality is that beef is varied. There are 300 breeds, and there are different types of grass in these pastures, and these factors will lead to a very different taste. Beef doesn’t have to be a commodity.”

Crowd Cow plans to use the funding to continue expansion into different proteins and new markets, as well as opening new distribution centers to speed up delivery to customers.

Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.

However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook, Recode point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.

Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.

But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.

In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.

For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.

As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.

Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:

• How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
• Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
• How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
• Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)

If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.

After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from Settings or Privacy Shortcuts, the company says.

Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.

The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.