Year: 2018

A number of people are complaining about Sinemia not delivering them their movie membership cards within the seven-day timeframe the company said it would. Although Sinemia has charged people for their memberships, the company has not been able to deliver the membership cards in a timely manner.

“We have seen strong demand for our new Sinemia membership plans and, while our processing operations have increased production, delivery times can be expected to be longer than usual,” Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz told TechCrunch in a statement. “We greatly appreciate our subscribers’ patience while we work on preparing their cards. Please note that subscribers first month of service will not begin until their card arrives.”

Sinemia, which launched its low-cost plans earlier this month, says to expect your card to be delivered within seven days. Here’s the full text of the email Sinemia sends customers after their purchase:

We have received your payment.

We are now preparing your private card for your Sinemia Premium membership. Your card will be delivered to the shipping units within generally in 7 days, although it can vary depending on the campaign periods. Please note that the estimated time of delivery may also vary depending on the destination and workload of the shipping company at the time. You may start enjoying movie experience with SinemiaPremium right after completing your Premium card activation. You can activate your new Premium card via Sinemia mobile application or from your membership page. If you don’t have a password yet, you can create one from here. Your membership will begin right after your card is delivered.

But this is unacceptable for some customers, with some requesting refunds and others disputing the charge to their credit card company. I’ve sent a followup note to Sinemia to see if the company is offering any refunds.

Baidu’s stocks took a hit earlier today after the company announced that its Qi Lu is stepping down his job as President/COO after just a year and a half. In a press release tied to the news, the executive cited personal reasons for his decision to “transition” to a lesser role.

“Baidu is a great company with strong talent and deep technologies,” Lu said in the statement. “I am highly optimistic on Baidu’s future and will continue to support Baidu, while spending more time with my family in the U.S. For my next steps, I plan to work in research and investment areas, to help advance our shared mission to make a complex world simpler through technology.”

Regardless of his stated reasons, however, the move is seen as a big blow for the Chinese company’s ambitions to grow beyond its search engine roots. The former Microsoft executive, who will maintain his position on Baidu’s board, was seen as the driving force in the company’s AI ambitions, leading the charge into self-driving cars and other emerging technologies.

Baidu has yet to name a replacement for Lu, who is expected to step down in July. The company’s high tech ranks have experienced a bit of turmoil in the past year and change, as its chief scientist and head of autonomous driving have vacated their roles for other gigs.

The highlight of Google’s I/O keynote earlier this month was the reveal of Duplex, a system that can make calls to set up a salon appointment or a restaurant reservation for you by calling those places, chatting with a human and getting the job done. That demo drew lots of laughs at the keynote, but after the dust settled, plenty of ethical questions popped up because of how Duplex tries to fake being human. Over the course of the last few days, those were joined by questions about whether the demo was staged or edited after Axios asked Google a few simple questions about the demo that Google refused to answer.

We have reached out to Google with a number of very specific questions about this and have not heard back. As far as I can tell, the same is true for other outlets that have contacted the company.

If you haven’t seen the demo, take a look at this before you read on.

So did Google fudge this demo? Here is why people are asking and what we know so far:

During his keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted multiple times that we were listening to real calls and real conversations (“What you will hear is the Google Assistant actually calling a real salon.”). The company made the same claims in a blog post (“While sounding natural, these and other examples are conversations between a fully automatic computer system and real businesses.”).

Google has so far declined to disclose the name of the businesses it worked with and whether it had permission to record those calls. California is a two-consent state, so our understanding is that permission to record these calls would have been necessary (unless those calls were made to businesses in a state with different laws). So on top of the ethics questions, there are also a few legal questions here.

We have some clues, though. In the blog post, Google Duplex lead Yaniv Leviathan and engineering manager Matan Kalman posted a picture of themselves eating a meal “booked through a call from Duplex.” Thanks to the wonder of crowdsourcing and a number of intrepid sleuths, we know that this restaurant was Hongs Gourmet in Saratoga, California. We called Hongs Gourmet last night, but the person who answered the phone referred us to her manager, who she told us had left for the day. (We’ll give it another try today.)

Sadly, the rest of Google’s audio samples don’t contain any other clues as to which restaurants were called.

What prompted much of the suspicion here is that nobody who answers the calls from the Assistant in Google’s samples identifies their name or the name of the business. My best guess is that Google cut those parts from the conversations, but it’s hard to tell. Some of the audio samples do however sound as if the beginning was edited out.

Google clearly didn’t expect this project to be controversial. The keynote demo was clearly meant to dazzle — and it did so in the moment because, if it really works, this technology represents the culmination of years of work on machine learning. But the company clearly didn’t think through the consequences.

My best guess is that Google didn’t fake these calls. But it surely only presented the best examples of its tests. That’s what you do in a big keynote demo, after all, even though in hindsight, showing the system fail or trying to place a live call would have been even better (remember Steve Job’s Starbucks call?).

For now, we’ll see if we can get more answers, but so far all of our calls and emails have gone unanswered. Google could easily do away with all of those questions around Duplex by simply answering them, but so far, that’s not happening.

Every tech founder worth their title knows that investors, customers and media exposure form the life blood of every early-stage startup. And there’s no better way to place your startup in front of these three essential groups than to exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt San Francisco 2018. The conference takes place on September 5-7, but if you want to secure your spot you need to apply to purchase a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before the application window closes.

Startup Alley at Disrupt SF ’18 will feature more than 1,200 highly vetted, early-stage startups showcasing the very latest in tech products, platforms and services spanning the tech spectrum. You can expect more than 10,000 attendees to pass through the Alley, including more than 400 media outlets.

Exhibit your company in the Alley’s energetic atmosphere of networking, collaboration and possibility. According to Crunchbase, Startup Alley exhibitors at Disrupt SF 2017 raised more than $37 million in seed and Series A funding within the four months following the conference.

The Startup Alley Exhibitor package includes a one-day 4’x6′ exhibit space, three Disrupt SF Founder passes (as long as you apply before July 25) and you get to use CrunchMatch — our curated investor-to-startup matching platform.

Plus, you can take advantage of the Startup Alley exhibitor lounge and receive access to the full Disrupt press list. Your company also will have the chance to be selected as a Wildcard entry to the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. Did we mention that we doubled this year’s prize to $100,000? Yeah, we did that.

The Startup Alley Exhibitor Package offers enormous value at $1,995. But here’s the thing — you can apply to exhibit in Startup Alley for free as a TC Top Pick. Here’s what you need to know:

Companies vying for a free TC Top Pick spot must fit in one of these 12 categories: AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics.

TechCrunch editors will review every TC Top Pick application and select only five companies for each category. Each of the 60 companies receives one free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and will also score sweet media coverage in the form of a recorded three-minute interview on the Startup Alley Showcase Stage — and TechCrunch will promote that video across its social media platforms.

Now pay close attention to these three deadlines. If you want to be considered for a TC Top Pick, you must apply by June 29. If you want your Startup Alley Exhibitor Package to include three Disrupt SF Founder passes, you must apply before July 25. And finally, the last-chance application deadline for a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package is August 8.

Disrupt San Francisco takes place on September 5-7, and you simply won’t find a better opportunity to showcase your early-stage startup to the most influential industry movers and shakers. One more thing. We believe in rewarding action, and early applicants will be eligible to score special offers, so apply today. We can’t wait to see you there!

Sameer Qureshi has left his role as a senior manager of Tesla Autopilot Programs and has joined Lyft, according to his LinkedIn. We first saw the news over on Electrek. Tesla declined to comment, but Lyft confirmed Qureshi joined the team this week.

At Lyft, Qureshi is now director of product for autonomous driving, specifically focused on Lyft’s Level 5 self-driving car efforts. To be clear, Level 5 is when a car requires no human to be at the wheel. In fact, Level 5 prohibits humans from intervening, even if they want to.

At Tesla, Qureshi was “responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Tesla’s cars and platforms” for more than one year, he wrote on his LinkedIn. To be clear, Qureshi was not an executive, VP or director, but one of 4,000 managers at Tesla. Prior to his most recent role at Tesla, Qureshi served as senior manager for software and firmware programs at Tesla for more than two years.

Lyft first launched its self-driving car division in July 2017. At the time, the project was led by Lyft VP of Engineering Luc Vincent. Since then, Lyft has partnered with tier-one automotive industry supplier Magna on autonomous vehicle technology. Magna also invested $200 million in Lyft in exchange for an equity stake.

Oh my god, someone’s doing Blippy again. If you’ve been around the internet as long as I have (too long), you’ll probably remember the meteoric rise of the social network for sharing your purchases, Blippy, which was hyped up to a $46.2 million valuation back in 2010 before the world realized that almost nobody wanted a dedicated network for sharing and viewing each others’ purchases. Well, guess what? Someone’s trying a Blippy-like thing again — this time, in the form of a new app called Vota, which automatically records your credit card purchases and the places you visit so you can share them with friends or family, or view them privately for your own reference.

As a byproduct of this data collection, you may spot credit card fraud or other errant charges, too, or just get a handle on your spending.

But why revisit this concept now, when it failed before?

Well, there’s the argument that some startups are just “too early,” or that they could have succeeded if they had done X instead of Y. That’s coming into play here, a bit.

Plus, the younger generation is a little more comfortable with sharing financial data, as evidenced by the popularity of Venmo, where a feed shows your friends’ payments for seemingly no other reason beyond the fact that someone had to the idea to“make payments social.” (I mean, really — does anyone actually browse their Venmo feed for recommendations?)

Venmo, however, is largely a utility, and a useful one at that. It lets you pay back a friend when you’re splitting the check, the cab fare or anything else, as well as quickly move money back to and from bank accounts.

Vota, on the other hand, is like turning your credit card transactions into check-ins.

Thankfully, it’s not publicizing them for the world to see, nor is it sharing dollar amounts, as Blippy had done.

The concept for Vota comes from Kiyo Kubo and Nick Farina, the founders of Meridian — a location-based technology company acquired by Aruba Networks five years ago, which then became a part of HP. 

The two left HP in 2016 with the goal of building something meaningful.

“One of the things that we came across [was that] nobody knows anything about personal finance, and so we thought, ‘well, maybe we can help with that,'” explains Kubo.

The app lets you connect your bank cards from Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citi and other Visa cards, to get an easy-to-read feed of what and where you’re spending — information you can opt to share with individual friends or family members. And because it pulls in data in real time, Vota can help you quickly spot fraud.

But Kubo admits that, in its current form, Vota could be a hard sell.

“The very first thing we learned was that people are not comfortable sharing their finances,” he says.

That’s why the app removes the dollar amount, makes sharing opt in and allows you to selectively show or hide individual purchases. It also won’t share some transactions, like online purchases.

But that may not be enough.

There is, arguably, value in seeing a cleaned-up, pretty feed of users’ check-ins. Foursquare’s Swarm does this with some success, for example, as it’s a way of keeping up with friends, and learning about cool places to visit in a sort of indirect way.

But linking a credit card and automating the process will likely give users pause, especially at a time when our personal data has been slurped up repeatedly for unscrupulous reasons. To get regular folks to try an app like this, they’ll need a better reason than it being a “useful journal of transactions” or a way to explore what friends are doing.

The company is considering those other paths. In fact, Kubo says the original idea was to develop a personal finance insights app, but user behavior during the beta led them to focus more heavily on the social portion.

It’s a case of following the data instead of your gut.

However, Vota aims to roll out other features that could broaden its appeal. For example, it may work on features to help people find ways to save — like by highlighting subscriptions you forgot about; or it may automate expense reports for businesses.

The goal is to roll out a set of premium features like this, rather than use the data to target you with ads or offers to monetize Vota (which is bootstrapped and not making money today).

These actually sound like better ideas.

An app that shows me all the iTunes subscriptions I forgot about, or helps me to cancel HBO NOW when Game of Thrones ends would be handy — especially if it also alerted me to suspicious transitions and fraud, while helping me budget and track trends. Selective private sharing could also be useful for spouses or partners who are pooling their finances, or need a way to coordinate their spending.

But much of what could make Vota interesting or mainstream-friendly isn’t built yet. And that makes Vota’s launch feel a little early, too.

Vota is a free download on iOS and Android.

In my endless quest to get geeks interested in watches I present to you the Bell & Ross BR V2-93 GMT 24H, a new GMT watch from one of my favorite manufacturers that is a great departure from the company’s traditional designs.

The watch is a 41mm round GMT, which means it has three hands to show the time in the 12-hour scale and another separate hand that shows the time in a 24-hour scale. You can use it to see time zones in two or even three places and it comes in a nice satin-brushed metal case with a rubber or metal strap.

B&R is unique because it’s one of the first companies to embrace online sales after selling primarily in watch stores for about a decade. This means the watches are slightly cheaper — this one is $3,500 — and jewelers can’t really jack up the prices in stores. Further, B&R has a great legacy of making legible, usable watches, and this one is no exception. It is also a fascinating addition to the line. B&R has an Instrument series, which consists of large, square watches with huge numerals, and a Vintage series that hearkens back to WWII-inspired, smaller watches. This one sits firmly in the middle, taking on the clear lines of the Instrument inside a more vintage case.

Ultimately watches like this one are nice tool watches — designed for legibility and usability above fashion. It’s a nice addition to the line and looks like something a proper geek could wear in lieu of Apple Watches and other nerd jewelry. Here’s hoping.

Facebook’s next money-maker could be this tool for connecting marketers to social media creators so they can team up on sponsored content Facebook ad campaigns. The Branded Content Matching search engine lets advertisers select the biographical characteristics of creators’ fans they want to reach, see stats about these audiences, and contact them to hammer out deals.

Leaked screenshots of Facebook’s promotional materials for the tool were first attained and published in german by AllFacebook.de. TechCrunch has now confirmed with Facebook the existence of the test of the search engine. Facebook first vaguely noted it would build a creator-brand tool in March, but now we know what it looks like and exactly how it works.

Even though Facebook will not actually broker or initially take a cut of the deals, the tool could equip brands with much more compelling and original marketing content. That could in turn encourage them to spend more on Facebook ads to spread that content, while also making the ads users see more entertaining and tolerable so they spend longer on the social network. By getting creators paid, even if not directly by Facebook, they’ll invest more in the quality of their content and size of their following on the app instead of with competitors.

How Facebook’s influencer marketing search engine works

A Facebook spokesperson explained the motive behind the tool like this. Facebook wants to help businesses find creators who can reach their target audience in an authentic way, while allowing creators a path to monetizing their Facebook content and fan base. Creators opt in to participating in the test and set up a portfolio showcasing their audience size and metrics plus their best branded content. Facebook is starting the program primarily with a set of lifestyle brands and creators.

Advertisers in the test can search for creators with specific audience demographics using a wide range of targeting options. Those include both general and industry-specific parameters like:

• Top countries where they’re popular
• Interests
• Gender
• Education history
• Relationship status
• Life events
• Home ownership status
• Home type

The search engine’s results page shows a list of creators with each’s audience match percentage to the search terms, percentage of their followers they reach, engagement rate, follower count, and video views. Advertisers can save their best matches to private lists, and reach out to contact the creators, though Facebook is still figuring out if it’s best to connect them through their Facebook Page or traditional contact info.

The deals for product placement or sponsored content creation and sharing are then worked out between the brand and creator without Facebook’s involvement. The platform is not taking any revenue cut during the testing phase, but longer-term will evaluate whether it should. The only thing Facebook doesn’t allow is pure re-sharing deals where influencers are paid to just post the brand’s pre-made content they didn’t help create.

The crowsourced future of advertising

Foreshadowed the launch of its dedicated Facebook Creator app in November, this is the company’s first serious foray into influencer marketing. This emerging industry holds the potential to overhaul the way advertising content is produced. In days of old, brands couldn’t target very narrow segments of their customers since they were using broadcast mediums like TV commercials, magazine ads, and billboards, or endoresements from mainstream celebrity like movie actors. They might only make a few separate styles of marketing compaigns that would appeal to wide swaths of their target audience.

With the Internet and targeting data-rich social networks like Facebook, they can reach extremely specific subsets of their customers with marketing messages tuned to their identity. But reaching these niche audiences with corporate content that feels authentic rather than fake and smarmy is difficult. That’s where social media creators come in. Not only do they have a pre-existing and intimate relationship with their fans who’ll take their endorsements to heart. They’ve also already spent years figuring out exactly what type of content appeals to these specific people. When they team up with brands, the businesses get their products recontextualized and interpreted for that audience with content they could never come up with themselves.

Twitter realized this early, which is why it acquired creator-brand deal broker Niche for a reported $50 million back in 2015. [Disclosure: I got fascinated with this industry because my cousin Darren Lachtman is one of the co-founders of Niche] But now as Facebook seeks to attract influencers and their audiences to its social network, it’s trying to find ways to get them paid. Otherwise, they’re likely to stray to YouTube’s ad revenue shares and Patreon’s subscription payments. So far Facebook has tested tipping and subscriptions from fans, as well as letting creators host ad breaks — essentially commercials — during their videos. But brands want the creators’ help designing the content, not just distributing it.

But what about Instagram and YouTube influencers?

The Branded Content Matching search engine will help brands find those creators…but only on Facebook for now. The tool doesn’t pull in their audience sizes and metrics from other important platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, or Twitch. Brands don’t get a holistic view of the value and reach of a creator, who might be way more popular on another platform than Facebook.

And really, Instagram is where all these influencers spend their time and share their content. Though Facebook owns it, it says it’s not showing Instagram influencers in the tool at the moment. Adding them in, the same way advertisers can push ads to Facebook and Instagram from one interface, would make the search engine much more powerful.

There’s already a whole industry of independent creator search engines and databases for marketers like Hypr, Whalar, Fohr Card, Tap Influence, and Creator IQ. If Facebook built one with first-party data from across its properties, or even pulled stats from competing platforms, it might squash these startups. Alternatively, it might buy one to ramp up its efforts here like how Twitter bought Niche.

Facebook is running out of ad inventory in the News Feed. It needs to make each ad better and more watchable so it can grow revenue by charging more per ads rather than selling more ads. Meanwhile, yesterday it started testing ads in Facebook Stories, where brands will need help navigating the more personal, vertical video format. Awesome content made by creators could be the answer. And Facebook could finally start helping more of these artists, comedians, and storytellers to turn their passion into a profession.

Fornite is finally coming to Android…in a matter of months. After dominating the iOS gaming charts since March, the wildly popular sandbox survival game will be hitting the world’s top mobile operating system at some point this summer.

Creator Epic Games buried the news in the middle of a larger blog post titled, “The State of Mobile,” noting, vaguely, “We know many of you are excited for this release, and we promise that when we have more information to share, you’ll hear it from us first.”

That news comes amid a flurry of other Fornite related announcements this week. Earlier this morning, Epic unveiled a Battle Royale competition with a large in-game cash prize. This morning, the company also laid out plans to bring voice chat and improved gameplay and controls to the mobile side of things. Stats are coming to mobile, as well, along with a reduced install size.

Not that any of those issues have hampered the games success, of course. Earlier this year, the game was reportedly bringing in $126 million in monthly revenue — even before it arrived on iOS. With its imminent release on Android, that number’s likely to get a whole lot larger. 

Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden, who oversaw Uber Elevate, has left the company, Recode first reported. His last day was yesterday, TechCrunch confirmed.

On a day-to-day level, Holden was not that heavily involved. Manik Gupta, for example, is in charge of product, maps and marketplace at the VP level. There was also Uber Head of Product Daniel Graf, who left the company in March but was quickly replaced by former Amazon Alexa shopping lead Assaf Ronen.

Holden, instead, was more of a big-picture kind of executive, which entailed him taking ownership over Uber Elevate. Under his leadership, Uber brought on the CEO of flying taxi startup Zee Aero, Eric Allison.

“As demonstrated by last week’s Uber Elevate Summit, we’re incredibly bullish on the future of aerial ridesharing,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Under the leadership of Eric Allison, the Elevate team is set up for success and will continue to chart the course for this growing industry.”

But it’s worth pointing out that Holden had a lengthy conversation with Federal Aviation Administration Acting Administrator Dan Elwell about regulation for uberAIR, the company’s upcoming aerial taxi service. That was just last week at Uber Elevate, the company’s two-day summit on aerial transportation. It seems odd that Holden was tasked with leading a conversation with the head of the FAA regarding what will arguably be the biggest hurdle uberAIR will face: regulation.

Prior to joining Uber, Holden served as Groupon’s senior vice president. It’s not clear what Holden’s next move is, but a source says Holden is pursuing another opportunity somewhere.