RED’s Hydrogen One handset is one of those devices we’ll believe when we actually see. The company’s been promising up the $1,200 smartphone for a while now, only to be hit with delays and outright admit, “We have no idea whatsoever what we are doing.”
Consider this some small vote of confidence, however. AT&T announced today that it will be carrying the 5.7-inch “holographic display device.” That, of course, shouldn’t be taken as a tacit approval of the device, so much as a confirmation of the fact that it does, in fact, exist.
Though in a press release tied to the announcement, a market SVP says, “This revolutionary smartphone will provide you with significant advancements in the way you create and view content on the leading network for entertainment.” So, take that as you will. Personally, I’m holding off any sort of judgement until I can hold the thing in my hands.
The carrier mentions “later this summer” in the press release, which lines up with RED’s most recent mention of an August launch date. As for price, your guess is as good as ours. We reached out to AT&T to see whether the company will be subsidizing the product on contract, or simply offering up the $1,200 phone as is through its retail channel. The carrier won’t comment on that, yet, though its Next subsidy plan might make sense, cushioning the cost by stretching it out over a longer period.
The Hydrogen One is, by all accounts, about as far as you can get from a mainstream piece of mobile hardware. At the moment, it feels more like a fun consumer electronics thought experiment, but at least it’s one that’s real — and coming to the second largest mobile carrier in the U.S. at some point this summer.
Sprinklr, the unicorn startup best known for helping customers interpret social signals has been moving into the broader customer experience market in the last year. Today it announced is was hiring a heavy hitter as Chief Operating Officer, bringing in former federal CIO and Salesforce executive Vivek Kundra. He began working at his new position just this week.
Kundra says that he sees a company that is in a good position and poised for growth. It will be part of his job to work with CEO Ragy Thomas to make sure that happens. “When I look at the 1200 customers we have today, I see a massive opportunity to provide technology to change the way [our users] interact with customers,” Kundra told TechCrunch.
He says that, with his background, whether working under President Obama or with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the focus has always been on the customer, however you defined that, whether in the context of delivering government services or selling cloud software.
He said that to achieve that you have to be ruthlessly focused on execution. “Ideas are cheap, but how do you bring them to life in a way that inspires and motivates? I think that’s really important,” he said.
It’s worth noting that Kundra is not the first COO, however. The company hired Tim Page, who was a founder and COO at VCE before joining Sprinklr in 2016. That was apparently not a good fit.
Thomas says that landing Kundra was part of an extensive 9-month executive search where they looked at people who had worked at SaaS companies that had scaled over a billion dollars in revenue, concentrating on Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow. “If you look at people in the driver’s seat at those companies, there is a finite number of people. Salesforce is a great company and a great partner. That experience is relevant and unique,” Thomas said.
Kundra pointed out that as part of his responsibilities at Salesforce he built a business unit from scratch that included driving adoption for the company’s Government Cloud and other verticals. “Now I have ability to draw on those experiences,” he said.
Firming up the COO position, much like the CFO, is crucial ahead of going public. With the company valued at $1.8 billion in 2016, they would seem to be of sufficient size to make that move, but Thomas wasn’t ready to commit to anything definitive (much as you would expect).
Instead, he talked of building a strong foundation as preparation to become a public company at some point. “It’s a question of when, not if [we go public], but for a company of our size and scale, it’s logical for us to go public. We aren’t talking about when and how, and we are trying to pour a strong foundation [before we do]” he said. Bringing in Kundra appears to be part of that.
Two out of the top three challenges facing tech companies in the UK’s top two tech clusters are related to Brexit, according to a UK government-backed report, and for much of the rest of the country.
That at least is the only possible conclusion from the release today of Tech Nation 2018, the UK’s annual state of the nation’ report on the country’s tech sector. This year’s survey interviewed 3,428 people members of the UK tech community, including founders and workers in tech companies, but has been heavily spun to de-emphasise the effects of Brexit on the UK tech industry.
The report stated that the top three challenges in London and Cambridge (which contains the world-renowned ‘Silicon Fen’ tech cluster) were:
London:
1. Access to talent (which will be affected by immigration rules before and after Brexit)
2. Cost of living
3. Brexit
Cambridge’s were:
1. Cost of living
2. Access to talent (again, affected by Brexit)
3. Brexit
Outside of London, once again, two out of the top three main concerns would be affected by how immigration will play out before and after Brexit.
In the rest of the country, access to talent was cited as the most common challenge – affecting 83% of the UK’s regional tech clusters. Access a funding was a top 3 challenge in 49% of clusters and bad transport links were also cited.
Funding is clearly also Brexit-related, given that funding from the European Investment Fund has collapsed since the Brexit vote.
The European Investment Bank has slashed deals with UK VCs and private equity groups by more than two-thirds, with no equivalent funding from the UK government in sight.
The massive cut pushed the UK out of the top spot at the main recipient of EU venture funding, which is the single largest source of early-stage capital in Europe. France and Germany have now overtaken the UK as the main recipients of capital from the European Investment Bank. UK VCs have expressed concern that the loss of EIF funding will have a “significant” impact on funds.
However, you probably won’t get that impression from the way the report is being pitched to the media at a lavish launch in the centre of London today. Instead, the report is filled with heady statistics about the UK’s booming tech industry.
The report also makes absolutely no mention of the effect of the UK leaving the EU’s Digital Single Market.
The Tech Nation survey found London tech startups have the fourth most international workforce in the world, behind Singapore, Berlin and Chicago, with 54% of workers born outside the UK.
In other words, with over half of London tech workers born outside the UK, Brexit and its impact of the future immigration status of much-needed tech talent will continue to overshadow the entire issue.
The report also found that more black, Asian and ethnic minority workers are employed in London’s tech scene than across the UK in general (15% v 10%).
It will hardly be of any succour them then that a recent report by the United Nations ‘special rapporteur’ on racism found that Brexit has contributed to an environment of increased racial discrimination and intolerance. Other UK-based reports say there’s been a sharp rise in reported hate crimes since the EU referendum.
And over 1,000 young Eastern Europeans who took part in study by researchers from the universities of Strathclyde, Plymouth and Durham, found increasing levels of racism and xenophobia in their neighbourhoods since the Brexit Referendum.
Hardly the welcoming environment Britain needs to fill the many jobs in tech right now.
The rest of the Tech Nation report outlines how the UK’s large tech industry, which has benefitted from the access to talent afforded by EU membership, continues to grow. However, the report can hardly claim independence from government since it was launched and backed by HMG’s Digital Secretary Matt Hancock.
The report’s further claims, which are not independently verified, include:
The UK was in the top three countries in the world for total capital invested in digital tech companies in 2017, behind the US and China.
UK tech companies have more foreign customers than companies in Silicon Valley. In London, 33% of tech company customers are based outside the UK, compared to 30% in Silicon Valley and 7% in Beijing.
Digital tech companies in London are “the most connected in Europe”, second only to Silicon Valley for international connections. Twenty-five per cent of entrepreneurs across the world report having a significant relationship with two or more entrepreneurs in London, compared to 33% for Silicon Valley.
London tech startups have the fourth most international workforce in the world, behind Singapore, Berlin and Chicago, with 54% of workers born outside the UK.
Tech communities across the UK are “highly optimistic” about the growth prospects for digital tech companies in their local area, both in terms of scale and number of businesses
Tech is expanding 2.6x faster than the rest of the UK economy
Turnover of digital tech companies grew by 4.5% between 2016-17 compared to UK GDP which grew by 1.7% over the same period
Digital tech sector worth nearly £184bn to UK economy, up from £170bn in 2016
Who says privacy is dead? Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to take European parliamentarians’ questions about how his platform impacts the privacy of hundreds of millions of European citizens — but only behind closed doors. Where no one except a handful of carefully chosen MEPs will bear witness to what’s said.
The private meeting will take place on May 22 at 17.45CET in Brussels. After which the president of the European Parliament, Antonio Tajani, will hold a press conference to furnish the media with his version of events.
It’s just a shame that journalists are being blocked from being able to report on what actually goes on in the room.
And that members of the public won’t be able to form their own opinions about how Facebook’s founder responds to pressing questions about what Zuckerberg’s platform is doing to their privacy and their fundamental rights.
Because the doors are being closed to journalists and citizens.
The Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament will meet on 22 May at 17.45 with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the use of personal data of millions of #Facebook EU users. After the meeting @EP_President Tajani will inform media of the discussions. Details will follow.
Even the intended contents of the meeting is been glossed over in public — with the purpose of the chat being vaguely couched as “to clarify issues related to the use of personal data” in a statement by Tajani (below).
The impact of Facebook’s platform on “electoral processes in Europe” is the only discussion point that’s specifically flagged.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and founder, has accepted our invitation. He will come to the European Parliament. My full statement pic.twitter.com/FdmuDPl8Wb
Given Zuckerberg has thrice denied requests from UK lawmakers to take questions about his platform in a public hearing we can only assume the company made the CEO’s appearance in front of EU parliamentarians conditional on the meeting being closed.
Zuckerberg did agree to public sessions with US lawmakers last month, following a major global privacy scandal related to user data and political ad targeting.
But evidently the company’s sense of political accountability doesn’t travel very far.
We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask why Zuckerberg will not take European parliamentarians questions in a public hearing. And indeed whether Mark can find the time to hop on a train to London afterwards to testify before the DCMS committee’s enquiry into online disinformation — and will update this story with any response.
As Vera Jourova, the European commissioner for justice and consumers, put it in a tweet, it’s a pity the Facebook founder does not believe all Europeans deserve to know how their data is handled by his company. Just a select few, holding positions of elected office.
A pity or, well, a shame.
Glad that Mark Zuckerberg accepted invitation from @Europarl_EN and will come to Brussels to answer European questions on privacy. Pity this will not be a public hearing. There are more EU users on FB than there are in the US & Europeans deserve to know how their data is handled.
Safe to say, not all MEPs are happy with the arrangement…
I will not attend the meeting with Mr Zuckerberg if it’s held behind closed doors. It must be a public hearing – why not a Facebook Live? I strongly regret that the @EPPGroup has colluded with extreme right to keep everything behind closed doors. https://t.co/uYqEDlRtyo
But let’s at least be thankful that Zuckerberg has shown us, once again, how very much privacy matters — to him personally…
Yes, the Senators questioning Mark Zuckerberg were generally terrible at it. But Illinois Sen. @DickDurbin got him to admit he wouldn’t want to publicly share his hotel name and location on his DC trip – something FB loves its members to do. https://t.co/dg2voDFM26 via @YouTube
Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, has finally added Apple Pay to its mobile-only current account. The just over three year-old fintech says it has been one of the most requested features for its banking app, with over 2,000 mentions of Apple Pay on Monzo’s forum, whilst its customer support team have been asked about the functionality more than 13,000 times. In other words, the rollout can’t come soon enough. Noteworthy, Monzo was able to add Google Pay all the way back in October 2017.
Meanwhile, many of its passionate and vocal users will be wondering what took Monzo so long (as an aside, rival challenger Starling was able to add Apple Pay in July 2017). The upstart bank, which usually makes a virtue of its community-driven approach and transparency hasn’t been able to say (or even fully acknowledge that the feature was coming), likely because Apple imposes strict rules on the ways its partners communicate working with the tech giant. And when you sign an NDA with Apple it’s not untypical for it to stipulate that you don’t talk about said NDA.
What we do know is that — similar to Apple’s iOS App Store when submitting an app — the Apple Pay approval process for a new bank partner is not for the faint-hearted. Industry insiders tell me that Google Pay has less hurdles to jump in comparison.
Now that the feature is live, Monzo is talking up the security and privacy aspect of using Apple Pay, noting that when you use a credit or debit card with Apple Pay, the actual card numbers are not stored on the device, nor on Apple servers. Instead, “a unique Device Account Number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored in the Secure Element on your device… [and] each transaction is authorised with a one-time unique dynamic security code”.
Of course, most people simply like Apple Pay for its convenience, letting you use your phone to pay rather than fumbling for a debit or credit card, and when shopping online not having to repeatedly enter card details.
Cue Monzo’s Tom Blomfield waxing lyrical in a company statement about Apple’s design and UX. “Apple is famous for building beautiful products with simple, intuitive interfaces. Their design thinking has long been a source of inspiration for us. Monzo’s mission has alway been to make sure everyone can use and manage their money effortlessly, and with Apple Pay we are one step closer to achieving that,” says the challenger bank’s co-founder and CEO.
It’s been a busy week for startup funding in Southeast Asia. Following big deals for Carro and Carousell, financial comparison startup Jirnexu is the latest to announce new capital after it closed an $11 million Series B round.
The new investment comes courtesy of Japan’s SBI Group — a returning investor which led the round having co-led Carro’s $60 million raise — alongside new backer SIG Asia Investments. The deal takes Jirnexu to $17 million from investors to date.
The startup was founded in 2012 and it is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It operates financial comparison services in its native Malaysia (‘RinggitPlus‘) and in Indonesia, under the ‘KreditGoGo‘ brand, that aggregate offerings from banks and financial companies that include Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, and UOB. In short, the company acts as a user acquisition channel for financial organizations that want to reach consumers and maintain a dialogue with them.
In recent years, Jirnexu has gone beyond basic banking products to offer insurance and e-policies, while it has introduced chatbots in conjunction with five financial organizations to help ease the process of sign-up and selection for their customers.
“Our core focus is to become the only band of services a consumer needs for their personal finance and money,” Jirnexu CEO Yuen Tuck Siew, who founded the company after returning home from a decade in the UK, told TechCrunch in an interview. “Two years ago, it was all about banking, particularly secure credit, now we’ve announced live quotes for insurance and we’ll be adding more insurance products.”
In particular, the startup is focused on consumer digital identification and eKYC that will help it to tailor suggested packages more accurately for consumers.
Jirnexu has raised new funding in 2016 and 2017, but Siew said this newest round gives significant runway that will allow it to focus on longer-term strategies with more clarity than before.
“We can now plan multiple years ahead which is absolutely essential with what we can do. No matter how longterm you want to think, [when you need to raise money regularly] you’re always looking at KPIs. Now we can plan and invest in projects that can really have a huge impact for customers,” he explained.
Much of the effort right now, he added, is on hiring for senior executive positions and operational roles, including a CTO, to build out the business and push into new financial verticals.
For now, the company isn’t looking to expand to new markets. Siew suggested that new launches would likely come after a Series C round but, per earlier comments, that’s not an event he sees happening in the immediate term.
Likewise, he said there is potential to work more closely with SBI — which operates a range of financial services in Japan — in the future. But initially, the company is just focused on executing on its plans with its investors’ backing.
“They understand the challenges in the market and see the value of us being able to overcome issues like regulatory and long sales cycles,” the Jirnexu CEO said.
Bossa Studios, the London gaming startup backed by Atomico and behind popular titles ‘Surgeon Simulator’ and ‘I am Bread’, is embarking on its biggest and most ambitious project yet.
Described as a “Community-Crafted MMO,” where players have literally co-built the game’s environment and will continue to do so, Worlds Adrift sees its wider public outing today via the Steam Early Access program.
The new game, which has been three years in the making and was born out of a Bossa Studios “game jam,” akin to the kinds of internal ‘hackathons’ many startups routinely hold, is attempting to pull off a number of firsts.
For starters (and probably most noteworthy to TechCrunch readers), it was the first game built on top of Improbable’s SpatialOS, the cloud-based platform for creating games and other virtual environments that need to go beyond the limitations of traditional server architectures.
For the Bossa Studios team, the stakes are even higher. Improbable’s tech isn’t exactly proven and, in comparison, Bossa Studios is a smaller and much less well-funded startup attempting to punch way above its weight, even if the team has a lot of gaming industry pedigree.
In a video call with two of its founders, Roberta Lucca and Henrique Olifiers, they were visibly excited by the launch but conceded a large amount of pre-launch nerves. When the Worlds Adrift concept was first conceived during that soon-to-be infamous game jam several years ago, it was indefinitely put on hold due to being far too ambitious per the size of the company.
A chance meeting with Improbable some time later — where I’m told the two young companies were introduced somewhat serendipitously through having the same PR agency — it became clear that it might just be possible. In the coming weeks and months, Bossa Studios will find out if that bet, which meant redirecting all of the startup’s resources into by far its largest undertaking, has likely paid off.
The other first, explained Lucca and Olifiers, is the sheer open-ended, community-driven and ‘persistent’ scale of the game. Tapping into the ‘makers’ trend, early testers of Worlds Adrift have shaped the game itself via Bossa’s Island Creator tool. This has seen 10,000 designs submitted, and Worlds Adrift is launching with 300 ‘floating islands,’ nearly all of which have been created by the community rather than Bossa Studios staff.
Related to this and enabled by the scalable nature of SpatialOS, every aspect of Worlds Adrift is ‘persistent,’ meaning that an object’s current physical status persists in realtime, relative to how or when it was last interacted with, either by a player or the game’s own persistent physics. If, for example, a ship is blown up and its pieces scattered across the ground, it will remain that way indefinitely unless another player, object or the environment it resides in disturbs it.
In addition, the employment of SpatialOS means that players don’t need to be segregated into cohorts based on region and/or distance to a specific set of servers and instead can all play in the same world and at the same time.
“Every player globally will be able to interact with each other and every action by every player will have a lasting impact and be visible to every other player inside the game forever,” is how Bossa Studios explains it.
At scale, opened-ended, and with player versus player gameplay increasing exponentially as the Worlds Adrift launch ramps up, even its makers aren’t sure how these dynamics will play out.
“Offering an entirely user-generated environment, with a completely unscripted style of play, the sheer scale of its scope, and beauty of its design, is an invitation to experiment. Bound only by the laws of physics, the sky truly is the limit,” reads the game’s blurb.
On that note, I wasn’t able to play the game — yet — namely because it runs on Windows and I only have access to a Mac. However, Bossa have kindly invited me to their next game jam and to spend some time up close with Worlds Adrift and its makers. If I’m to join in on the jam, I’m ready to pitch my idea for an adventure game starring a guy in a wheelchair wearing a hat who has to navigate a dystopian future rife with inaccessibility, bureaucracy and government cuts, all the while holding down a job as a tech journalist-cum-private investigator. I think it could be a hit.
Dave Waiser has been at the forefront of the mobility technology revolution in Israel for the past eight years, ever since he launched Gett in 2010.
One of the last companies standing in the ultra-competitive global ride-sharing market, Gett has withstood competition from Didi Chuxing, Grab, Ola, Lyft and Uber and kept pace with those rivals as it claims a share of a worldwide market worth billions.
Through direct operations and partnerships with companies like the chauffeur and logistics business Carey International, Gett has managed to achieve a footprint of 1,000 cities that span the globe. It operates directly in 100 cities in four countries (including a competitive position in New York) and has raised some $640 million in venture funding — including a $300 million investment from the Volkswagen Group.
For Waiser, Gett’s success is only the latest in a string of endeavors which the enterprising entrepreneur has undertaken since the early days of the new millennium. One of Waiser’s first jobs, back in 2000, was to launch the Russian entity of the publicly traded early telecommunications software vendor, Comverse.
In Tel Aviv, Waiser will share his thoughts with us on the future of mobility, the peaks and valleys of the entrepreneur’s journey, and what’s next for Gett as it continues to drive forward in a highly competitive market.
It’s a perspective that no one would want to miss, and one that’ll be exclusively available to our audience in Tel Aviv. Tickets are on sale now.
Like Google’s messaging focus, YouTube’s efforts to spin out successful streaming and music products has felt confusing and haphazard. Now the company is simplifying and consolidating that play by decoupling the music and film components with the launch of a new service.
YouTube Music is, as the name suggests, a music streaming service that will launch on May 22. Aimed squarely at competing with Apple Music and Spotify, it’ll cost $9.99 per month following a free trial period as is standard in the industry.
An ad-supported version will be available for free also, but it won’t include premium features such as background listening, song downloads and music discovery features. (It’s worth noting that this new service will replace the existing Google Play Music service.)
YouTube Music was originally part of YouTube Red, the company’s subscription video streaming service, and though it is being decoupled, customers will be able to subscribe to both services if they buy a YouTube Red subscription, which is now priced at $11.99 per month. Except that YouTube Red will now be known as YouTube Premium since it covers both music and video.
Confused? Well, essentially YouTube has made it possible for customers to opt for music only. But it is also dangling the carrot of the full video service for just $2 more. Or, if you prefer a more negative slant, YouTube Red now costs $2 more than it did before. Take your pick.
The split makes a lot of sense when you consider how many people use YouTube for playing music for free despite a plethora of excellent streaming experiences like Spotify and Apple Music. It’s particularly popular in emerging markets where you can see YouTube listeners on public transport or other moments that Spotify and co would want to own.
That said, the new YouTube services are being focused on first-world markets initially. The company said the first stops will be U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and South Korea. Further down the line, it will expand to Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Pluralsight priced the shares in its IPO at $15 this afternoon, above its previously set target range of between $12 and $14, and will raise as much as $357 million ahead of its public debut tomorrow morning.
Pluralsight offers software development courses, specifically ones targeting employees that are looking to advance in their careers by acquiring new skills in order to transition to higher-level roles. As knowledge workers become increasingly valuable, especially in larger enterprises with sprawling workforces, companies like Pluralsight have found a sweet spot in building tools that enable companies to help identify talent in their own workforce and train them, rather than have to aggressively search outside the company to satisfy their needs. The company has raised $310.5 million in its IPO, with underwriters having the option to purchase an additional 3.1 million shares and bring that up to $357 million.
The company is one of a continuing wave of enterprise IPOs this year, including multiple successful ones like zScalar and Dropbox — the latter of which was more of a flagship as both a hotly-anticipated one and as a company that possesses a unique business model. But nonetheless, it’s shown that there’s an appetite for enterprise startups looking to go public, which offers those companies a way to raise capital in addition to offering their employees liquidity.
Pluralsight will be another of an increasing pack of unicorns in the Utah tech scene that are on their way to going public. Founded in 2004, Pluralsight was largely bootstrapped until its first financing round in 2013 where it raised $27.5 million from Insight Venture Partners. That firm is the company’s largest shareholder, and since then Pluralsight has raised nearly $200 million in financing.
Its The company’s IPO tomorrow will once again test the appetite for fresh IPOs among public investors. Enterprise companies generally offer a more stable batch for venture portfolios, with predictable and reliable growth that eventually carries it to an IPO with varying levels of success. They’re smaller than blockbuster consumer-ish IPOs, but they are the ones that can provide a stable return for funds like IVP.
