Year: 2018

Here’s one way to make sure Amazon doesn’t get control of Flipkart in India by outbidding you for a majority stake: buy it outright. Today during SoftBank’s earnings presentation, it looks like CEO Masayoshi Son slipped in a little scoop: he announced that Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, on Tuesday night reached a deal to buy Flipkart, the leading e-commerce retailer in India, outright, putting an end to months of speculation. SoftBank is currently one of Flipkart’s biggest investors.

“Walmart is purchasing Flipkart,” Son said in the presentation (he spoke in Japanese with a translation provided over the video by a SoftBank translator). “Last night there was the official announcement.”

Very soon after, there was a quick and slightly messy recovery: a second gentleman approached Son during the Q&A section of his presentation and slipped him a note, after which point the CEO read it, and then said an announcement had not yet been confirmed.

“With regards to Flipkart, it’s not officially announced yet,” he said with a weak smile. “Maybe I should not have mentioned that … Well, I can’t take it out!”

“Not yet announced” is also the line that SoftBank spokespeople are also taking, and we have yet to hear back from Flipkart and Walmart with their comments. Yet could come very soon, though: we’ve been told by a source that the official news will be released at 5pm India time.

If Mon’s first statement was accurate, Walmart’s acquisition would end a long-running saga.  For months now, there have been rumors that the world’s largest retailer was gearing up to acquire a sizeable stake in the Indian company to get its foot into India — with reports putting the size of the stake at anywhere between 51 percent and around 70 percent, and at a value of between $15 billion and $20 billion, with additional investors potentially including Google.

But in the last week, alternative reports started to emerge that Amazon would try to gazump Walmart and take a pole position as a shareholder.

Walmart and Amazon have been hotly competing against each other in other markets, specifically the US — where Amazon dominates in online sales but Walmart continues to lead the charge in brick-and-mortar, despite many aggressive moves from Amazon, such as its acquisition of Whole Foods.

Meanwhile, India — Asia’s second-largest economy after China and one of the world’s fastest-growing markets — has become a key market for Amazon over the last several years, with billions already ploughed into the country and billions more earmarked for future investment, and so when it appeared that Walmart was also going to try to muscle in by taking a stake in the country’s largest homegrown online retailer, Flipkart became the latest battleground between the two U.S. giants.

Walmart clearly was not ready to give up. As we pointed out last week, Walmart divesting its stake in Asda in the UK to Sainsbury’s would pave the way for the company to make a bigger move in India, and that seems to be what has happened here.

Flipkart has raised around $7.3 billion in funding since being founded in 2007, with other investors including Microsoft, eBay, Naspers, Tencent, Tiger Global, Accel and many more, and it has been a consolidator of sorts itself, buying eBay India last year. But although it is the country’s biggest online retailer, it has had a rocky time in terms of its valuation, which at one point was over $15 billion but dipped to $11.6 billion in its last round in 2017, in part because of fierce competition from Amazon, Snapdeal and more.

Do you love coding, hacking and building cool — possibly even life-changing — tech products? Do you love using your mad hacking skills to win super sweet cash and prizes? Do you have citizenship in one of these European countries? Mon Dieu, mes amies, then what are you waiting for? Get your ticket and come strut your stuff at the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech in Paris on May 25-26.

Here’s how the Hackathon works, and we’ll say this right up front: it will be crazy, exhausting fun, but it won’t be a walk in the park. Hundreds of highly skilled techies will form ad hoc teams and work together using BeMyApp, the official Hackathon platform. They have just 24 hours to create their special brand of tech magic and build a product that solves real-world problems. Or maybe just something cool and fun — they get to decide.

Teams better hope their caffeine, power drink and sugar supplies go the distance, because once the 24-hour clock winds down, they’ll have just 60 seconds to pitch their product to a panel of well-rested Hackathon judges. Judges score each team on a scale of 1-5.

The top-scoring team takes home the €5,000 grand-prize and all teams that score an average of three or better receive five tickets to VivaTech 2019, plus two Innovator tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in November.

But hang on hack fans. Thanks to our sponsors, those aren’t the only cash, prizes and swag up for grabs. You can choose to hack any one of these awesome contest challenges from leboncoin, Renault, GEFCO+Talan and Microsoft.

Here’s more great news — you can hack in Paris for free, but you need to register. Plus, we have a limited number of tickets, and they’re available on a strictly first-come-first-served basis. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech takes place at the Expo Porte de Versailles in Paris on May 25-26. Get your tickets today before they disappear.

Cryptocurrency is cool, but you know what’d be even cooler? If people used it to buy things.

That they don’t because it’s either not secure or hard to use is a problem that a growing number of founders is trying to tackle. Among them is Merit, a new digital currency that aims to be as simple to use as traditional payment apps like PayPal and Venmo and that officially launches today.

The idea is to make it easy enough for to use to split a bill, share the rent, or shop for clothing online, even for those who are completely crypto illiterate.

Naturally, Merit is facing a daunting uphill battle, but that isn’t dissuading its founder and CEO, Adil Wali, who previously cofounded the indie womenswear brand ModCloth. (To the chagrin of some of its customers, ModCloth sold to Walmart last year after several rounds of layoffs.) Wali has since started two more companies, and he’s clearly not afraid to see where an idea takes him.

This particular idea, which Wali and nine other full time employees are working on from Seattle, involves a few interesting facets that could potentially help the currency gain traction.

First and foremost, Merit says it’s removing barriers to entry to blockchain investments and payments by making the Merit cryptocurrency as easy to send as a tweet. Users can also create and send Merit via a link, to any user in the world, and via different communication channels, whether its SMS, WhatsApp, or email.

It’s invitation-only, which is a newer twist. How it will work: new Merits will  awarded based not only on proof-of-work, which is the norm more generally, but proof-of-growth, meaning that miners are increasing the size of the community. (In theory at least, this set-up encourages miners to both grow the network and keep it secure.)

Speaking of security, Wali says Merit is also creating a new kind of “vault” for users, one that eschews any kind of reliance on the kind of third parties that often centralizing users’ currencies today. (Hello, Coinbase.) A user could create a vault for his or her family, for example, one that only a family member could access through a passcode, and that has rate limits, so if anyone tries to hack into that account, that nefarious individual could only send, say, 100 Merit, before a family member was notified and able to reset the vault.

Also interesting, to us, is simply how Merit is structured, which is as a self-funded nonprofit. That’s partly so its currency can establish a value organically, versus through a valuation established by outside investors. In fact, Wali says he has personally invested $1 million into Merit to prove out that Merit’s software can work.

There are plenty of challenges it has to overcome if it hopes to see its software widely adopted — which is largely its reason for being.

At some point, for example, Merit will need to get listed on a cryptocurrency exchange (or many of them) in order to become truly liquid currency. Wali acknowledges that there’s no promise that that will happen, but sounds an optimistic tone, noting the “explosion in the number of exchanges” and offering that Merit will “work its way up that list, approaching the smaller exchanges first and, as the adoption of Merit grows, presenting a stronger case to go after bigger exchanges.”

Merit also needs retailers and other corporate partners to take it seriously enough to accept it, which will take time — perhaps a lot of it.

Wali acknowledges the issue, observing that “crypto has to go through this crawl-walk-run trajectory” as a way to explain why peer-to-peer transactions are the first way that people will use Merit. Assuming hat takes off, though, he believes that Merit will “talk more with merchants,” he says.

As Wali says he knows well from working in retail for more than a decade, “Retailers’ first question is always, ‘How many people use this?’ In this case they’ll want to know, ‘If I accept this payment method, what does this open up to me?'”

Says Wali, “I want to have a good answer for that.”

Tame, a self-proclaimed “design-driven” tech startup from Copenhagen in Denmark, is on a mission to “solve the chaos of event planning”. The company’s founders, who claim to have previously organised more than thirty large conferences and events, think they have spotted a gap in the market for an all-in-one event planning tool designed specifically to be used by teams.

Like a Swiss Army Knife for event production, the SaaS spans an array of organisational features, such as event program building, an easy way to store the contact details and current status of speakers, and a place to manage suppliers, sponsors and exhibitors. In addition, Tame supports team collaboration in the form of shared file storage, notes, tasks, and messaging.

“Tame is built as a collaborative event planning tool, enabling your entire organisation to plan and streamline all your events from start to finish,” says Tame co-founder Jasenko Hadzic. “With Tame you can stay on top of every event with a complete 360 real-time overview and collaborate with your team and external partners.

Furthermore, Tame includes its own ticketing features that allows event managers to quickly publish programs, speakers, and sponsors “on a beautifully constructed ticketing page, that can be customised to fit every organisation”. The software plays nicely with the wider event ecosystem, too, with an API that enables Tame to integrate with other event technologies currently on the market, thus letting the startup focus solely on “solving the planning of the event,” says Hadzic.

“Tame’s solution replaces tasks currently done in spreadsheets and is the first of its kind customisable enough to consolidate all of your internal event planning in one place and empower your entire team with real-time collaboration,” he adds.

Last month saw the company launch more publicly, opening up the SaaS to self sign-up so that event teams can hit the road running. “As events are stressful, we’ve focused a lot of on building a simple UI that would allow event teams all over the world to get going easily and onboard themselves. Event teams have to get going smoothly and they can’t afford to make mistakes. We know that, so we’ve allowed them to get going very fast,” says Hadzic.

Tame is operating a freemium model: it costs nothing to use for free events but there’s a fixed fee of €1 per paid ticket, which the event organiser can either absorb or transfer to the attendee. “We are all in on transparency, so therefore we don’t offer a percentage fee of the ticket price like many other ticketing solutions out there. In the future, we will offer a premium version of our platform for a fixed monthly subscription fee and this will be our primary business model”.

Meanwhile, the company is also disclosing a seed round of $550,000 from a number of well-known Nordic angel investors with a proven track record in SaaS and product design. They include Tommy Andersen (co-founder and Managing Partner of ByFounders), Hampus Jakobsson (Venture Partner at BlueYard Capital and co-founder of TAT, which sold to Blackberry for $150m), Jacob Wandt (founder of e-conomic, which sold to HG Capital in 2013 for $100m+), Anders Pollas (co-founder and ex-CPO of Podio, the project management tool sold to Citrix for €50 million), and Gregers Kronborg (ex-General Partner of Northzone).

U.S. job hunting service Glassdoor, which is best known for providing insight into company working cultures, has been acquired for $1.2 billion in cash by Recruit, a $39 billion Japanese corporate that specializes in HR and recruitment services.

The all-cash acquisition will see Glassdoor continue to maintain its brand, CEO Robert Hohman explained in a blog post.

“Our mission has been the same since day one: to help people everywhere find a job and company they love. That mission will not change as part of Recruit. Glassdoor will continue to operate as a distinct brand to fulfill this mission — and will be able to do so with greater speed and impact than we could achieve alone,” Hohman wrote.

Glassdoor raised a total of just over $200 million from investors, with its most recent round a $40 million Series H in March 2016. That last investment gave Glassdoor a valuation of around $1 billion. That’s not a huge amount more than what Recruit is paying, which suggests that the last couple of years haven’t been so spectacular for Glassdoor in terms of growth.

Nonetheless, this deal looks like a win for those backers, particularly the earlier stage investors such as Benchmark and Battery Ventures .

Ten-year-old Glassdoor says it is used by 59 million people each month, many of whom come to the service to read about how companies are rated by the people who work, or worked there. While it is headquartered in the U.S., Glassdoor says it has information on more than 770,000 companies across 190 countries worldwide, including 40 million reviews covering company culture, CEO ratings, salary information and more.

Glassdoor’s revenue comes from recruitment services, and it claims to work with some 7,000 employees and 40 percent of the Fortune 500.

Recruit may not be a well-known name in the U.S. but the Japanese firm is huge, and it is history as a purchaser of overseas businesses.

The firm — which was founded in 1960 — is listed on the Toyko Stock Exchange and it has 45,000 employees across 60 countries.

Beyond recruitment and HR services, it also operates in real estates, travel, dining and other segments. That’s reflected in its past acquisitions, which have included U.S. job sites Indeed.com (2012), Simply Hired (2016) and, in Europe, restaurant site Quandoo (2015), hair and beauty service Wahanda (2015) and education technology company Quipper (2015).

U.S. job hunting service Glassdoor, which is best known for providing insight into company working cultures, has been acquired for $1.2 billion in cash by Recruit, a $39 billion Japanese corporate that specializes in HR and recruitment services.

The all-cash acquisition will see Glassdoor continue to maintain its brand, CEO Robert Hohman explained in a blog post.

“Our mission has been the same since day one: to help people everywhere find a job and company they love. That mission will not change as part of Recruit. Glassdoor will continue to operate as a distinct brand to fulfill this mission — and will be able to do so with greater speed and impact than we could achieve alone,” Hohman wrote.

Glassdoor raised a total of just over $200 million from investors, with its most recent round a $40 million Series H in March 2016. That last investment gave Glassdoor a valuation of around $1 billion. That’s not a huge amount more than what Recruit is paying, which suggests that the last couple of years haven’t been so spectacular for Glassdoor in terms of growth.

Nonetheless, this deal looks like a win for those backers, particularly the earlier stage investors such as Benchmark and Battery Ventures .

Ten-year-old Glassdoor says it is used by 59 million people each month, many of whom come to the service to read about how companies are rated by the people who work, or worked there. While it is headquartered in the U.S., Glassdoor says it has information on more than 770,000 companies across 190 countries worldwide, including 40 million reviews covering company culture, CEO ratings, salary information and more.

Glassdoor’s revenue comes from recruitment services, and it claims to work with some 7,000 employees and 40 percent of the Fortune 500.

Recruit may not be a well-known name in the U.S. but the Japanese firm is huge, and it is history as a purchaser of overseas businesses.

The firm — which was founded in 1960 — is listed on the Toyko Stock Exchange and it has 45,000 employees across 60 countries.

Beyond recruitment and HR services, it also operates in real estates, travel, dining and other segments. That’s reflected in its past acquisitions, which have included U.S. job sites Indeed.com (2012), Simply Hired (2016) and, in Europe, restaurant site Quandoo (2015), hair and beauty service Wahanda (2015) and education technology company Quipper (2015).

Hey Google, what happened at Google I/O today?

Artificial intelligence.

Okay, that’s non-specific. I heard Android P was released today. What’s new?

Artificial intelligence.

Hmm. Has Google added any features to make battery life longer on Android?

Artificial intelligence.

Let’s move on. What about the brightness settings? I heard there was something new there too?

Artificial intelligence.

How the hell can brightness use artificial intelligence? And why do you only say one thing? Let’s move on to some apps. What’s new with Google Maps?

Artificial intelligence.

Photos?

Artificial intelligence.

Lens?

Artificial intelligence.

News?

Artificial intelligence.

Gmail?

Artificial intelligence.

Gboard?

Artificial intelligence.

You are the worst assistant ever. Did Google update Assistant at all?

Artificial intelligence.

Argh. I heard Google released a lot of dev tools today. What’s ML Kit about?

Artificial intelligence.

And Duplex?

Artificial intelligence.

And tensor processing un…you know never mind. I get the damn picture. At least you still call Google Research Google Research right?

Artificial intelligence.

No, it’s called Google Research.

Artificial intelligence.

Dammit they rebranded. You know, you are the very definition of a PR drone.

Artificial intelligence.

Wait, you’re not human?

Artificial intelligence.

You pass the Turing test.

Google kicked off its annual I/O developer conference at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. Here are some of the biggest announcements from the Day 1 keynote. There will be more to come over the next couple of days, so follow along on everything Google I/O on TechCrunch. 

Google goes all in on artificial intelligence, rebranding its research division to Google AI

Just before the keynote, Google announced it is rebranding its Google Research division to Google AI. The move signals how Google has increasingly focused R&D on computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks.

Google makes talking to the Assistant more natural with “continued conversation”

What Google announced: Google announced a “continued conversation” update to Google Assistant that makes talking to the Assistant feel more natural. Now, instead of having to say “Hey Google” or “OK Google” every time you want to say a command, you’ll only have to do so the first time. The company also is adding a new feature that allows you to ask multiple questions within the same request. All this will roll out in the coming weeks.

Why it’s important: When you’re having a typical conversation, odds are you are asking follow-up questions if you didn’t get the answer you wanted. But it can be jarring to have to say “Hey Google” every single time, and it breaks the whole flow and makes the process feel pretty unnatural. If Google wants to be a significant player when it comes to voice interfaces, the actual interaction has to feel like a conversation — not just a series of queries.

Google Photos gets an AI boost

What Google announced: Google Photos already makes it easy for you to correct photos with built-in editing tools and AI-powered features for automatically creating collages, movies and stylized photos. Now, Photos is getting more AI-powered fixes like B&W photo colorization, brightness correction and suggested rotations. A new version of the Google Photos app will suggest quick fixes and tweaks like rotations, brightness corrections or adding pops of color.

Why it’s important: Google is working to become a hub for all of your photos, and it’s able to woo potential users by offering powerful tools to edit, sort, and modify those photos. Each additional photo Google gets offers it more data and helps them get better and better at image recognition, which in the end not only improves the user experience for Google, but also makes its own tools for its services better. Google, at its heart, is a search company — and it needs a lot of data to get visual search right.

Google Assistant and YouTube are coming to Smart Displays

What Google announced: Smart Displays were the talk of Google’s CES push this year, but we haven’t heard much about Google’s Echo Show competitor since. At I/O, we got a little more insight into the company’s smart display efforts. Google’s first Smart Displays will launch in July, and of course will be powered by Google Assistant and YouTube . It’s clear that the company’s invested some resources into building a visual-first version of Assistant, justifying the addition of a screen to the experience.

Why it’s important: Users are increasingly getting accustomed to the idea of some smart device sitting in their living room that will answer their questions. But Google is looking to create a system where a user can ask questions and then have an option to have some kind of visual display for actions that just can’t be resolved with a voice interface. Google Assistant handles the voice part of that equation — and having YouTube is a good service that goes alongside that.

Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps

What Google announced: Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps, available on iOS and Android this summer. The addition is meant to provide better recommendations to users. Google has long worked to make Maps seem more personalized, but since Maps is now about far more than just directions, the company is introducing new features to give you better recommendations for local places.

The maps integration also combines the camera, computer vision technology, and Google Maps with Street View. With the camera/Maps combination, it really looks like you’ve jumped inside Street View. Google Lens can do things like identify buildings, or even dog breeds, just by pointing your camera at the object in question. It will also be able to identify text.

Why it’s important: Maps is one of Google’s biggest and most important products. There’s a lot of excitement around augmented reality — you can point to phenomena like Pokémon Go — and companies are just starting to scratch the surface of the best use cases for it. Figuring out directions seems like such a natural use case for a camera, and while it was a bit of a technical feat, it gives Google yet another perk for its Maps users to keep them inside the service and not switch over to alternatives. Again, with Google, everything comes back to the data, and it’s able to capture more data if users stick around in its apps.

Google announces a new generation for its TPU machine learning hardware

What Google announced: As the war for creating customized AI hardware heats up, Google said that it is rolling out its third generation of silicon, the Tensor Processor Unit 3.0. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the new TPU is 8x more powerful than last year per pod, with up to 100 petaflops in performance. Google joins pretty much every other major company in looking to create custom silicon in order to handle its machine operations.

Why it’s important: There’s a race to create the best machine learning tools for developers. Whether that’s at the framework level with tools like TensorFlow or PyTorch or at the actual hardware level, the company that’s able to lock developers into its ecosystem will have an advantage over the its competitors. It’s especially important as Google looks to build its cloud platform, GCP, into a massive business while going up against Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure. Giving developers — who are already adopting TensorFlow en masse — a way to speed up their operations can help Google continue to woo them into Google’s ecosystem.

Google News gets an AI-powered redesign

What Google announced: Watch out, Facebook . Google is also planning to leverage AI in a revamped version of Google News. The AI-powered, redesigned news destination app will “allow users to keep up with the news they care about, understand the full story, and enjoy and support the publishers they trust.” It will leverage elements found in Google’s digital magazine app, Newsstand and YouTube, and introduces new features like “newscasts” and “full coverage” to help people get a summary or a more holistic view of a news story.

Why it’s important: Facebook’s main product is literally called “News Feed,” and it serves as a major source of information for a non-trivial portion of the planet. But Facebook is embroiled in a scandal over personal data of as many as 87 million users ending up in the hands of a political research firm, and there are a lot of questions over Facebook’s algorithms and whether they surface up legitimate information. That’s a huge hole that Google could exploit by offering a better news product and, once again, lock users into its ecosystem.

Google unveils ML Kit, an SDK that makes it easy to add AI smarts to iOS and Android apps

What Google announced: Google unveiled ML Kit, a new software development kit for app developers on iOS and Android that allows them to integrate pre-built, Google-provided machine learning models into apps. The models support text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning, image labeling and landmark recognition.

Why it’s important: Machine learning tools have enabled a new wave of use cases that include use cases built on top of image recognition or speech detection. But even though frameworks like TensorFlow have made it easier to build applications that tap those tools, it can still take a high level of expertise to get them off the ground and running. Developers often figure out the best use cases for new tools and devices, and development kits like ML Kit help lower the barrier to entry and give developers without a ton of expertise in machine learning a playground to start figuring out interesting use cases for those appliocations.

So when will you be able to actually play with all these new features? The Android P beta is available today, and you can find the upgrade here.

Messaging apps collectively passed the 5 billion mark for monthly active users last year, with Facebook’s WhatsApp and Messenger on track now to pass 2 billion users apiece. With messaging’s popularity showing no signs of slowing down, a new app is entering the fray in hopes of catching the wave. Yahoo has quietly launched a new iOS and Android messaging app called Squirrel, focused specifically on friend, family and work groups that want to exchange messages and share photos, links and other media.

The key with Squirrel is that access to any group is by invitation-only. That is, you invite people with a link, no need to access your wider set of contacts as part of the process of picking up new group members. That is a critical detail, given both Yahoo’s reputation in the wake of its massive data breach a couple of years ago; and the fact that some may now be turning off to just how much data messaging-dominant platforms like Facebook might have about you, starting with your contacts.

Squirrel was first spotted earlier by AndroidPolice, and Oath (Yahoo’s parent company, which also owns TC) has since confirmed to us that the app is in test mode. The ability to kick off a conversation group is also currently in invitation-only mode, and appears to require a Yahoo login to get started for now.

“At Oath, we’re always looking for creative ways to add value to our members’ lives,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We listen closely and frequently test new product ideas based on research and feedback. Right now we’re experimenting with a new invite-only messaging app focused on improving group communication in everyday life.”

Yahoo has had a mixed track record when it comes to messaging apps. Yahoo Messenger, first launched 20 years ago in 1998, was one of the early movers and leaders in instant messaging in the days when it was mainly a computer-based chat service. But like other services in that first generation of messaging, its role and functions were swiftly surpassed by faster and more functional mobile-based services, and specifically mobile messaging apps (notably, WhatsApp was created by ex-Yahoo employees).

In the years since, Yahoo has had moderate (but far from blockbuster) success with Yahoo Messenger on mobile, which today ranks at 160 on iOS and 117 on Android in the social networking category, according to App Annie. Other attempts at building new messaging products have been short-lived.

Messaging can be a tough nut to crack.

Squirrel is hoping to find traction by digging into the group experience first rather than offering yet another direct messaging option to users with a group option tacked onto that.

It works a little like old-style IRC, or, if you like, new-style Slack, minus the hundreds of app integrations. Those in a group get access to a main room, and have the option of creating side-rooms for separate topics or conversation threads, which can potentially include 1:1 conversations.

Rooms that are not relevant to you can be muted, and those who are given administration access can send out “blasts”, or alerts for priority messages. All activity in a group also gets logged in a separate feed that highlights your mentions.

From what I understand, some of what Yahoo is trying to do is build a new product around how it sees people already sharing content and conversations in groups in email and its other communications products.

It’s not the only one spotting that opportunity. In addition to the group features of most mobile messaging apps, Facebook — in its new push for “community” — has been expanding and revamping its own approach to groups across its range of products. There are also a fair number of group-first apps, with business-user options including the likes of Slack and Teams, and those for consumers including GroupMe. Is there room for a little Squirrel in the forest of apps?

The idea will be to keep the product in a semi-closed, invite-only mode while Yahoo continues to tweak it, with the plan being to roll it out more widely, making the ability to start a new group open to anyone. We’ll update with more as we learn it.

App revenue continues to climb year-over-year, a large part which can be contributed to the growth of subscription services. Now, Google is looking to make subscribing to apps easier for both consumers and developers alike, with a series of new features announced today at Google’s I/O conference.

On the user’s side of things, the company is launching a new app discovery experience for finding subscription-based apps and tools for managing existing subscriptions.

As the company explained during a breakout session at I/O, consumers are often hesitant to sign up for subscription services because they’re concerned it will be too much of a hassle to cancel — they feel trapped.

Google will address this with a new “subscription center” in Google Play, where users will be able to both explore new subscription apps to try, as well as manage their current subscriptions. Here, they can address issues like updating a payment method that’s expired, for example. Other new features will allow users to add a backup payment method to fall back on for those subscriptions that are critical — like your favorite streaming service, perhaps.

And if you sometimes want to turn a subscription off, then later back on, the new subscription center will support this too with a click of a button.

The demo of the subscription center shown at Google I/O is not the final version, Google cautioned, as it hasn’t fully rolled out just yet.

Meanwhile, the company announced a longer handful of updates to help developers building subscription-based apps.

For starters, it’s offering deeplinks for managing subscriptions that let developers link directly to their app’s page in the end user’s subscription center. This could be useful to include when trying to notify a user that their payment method failed, or to encourage them to renew their subscription because new content has been added, among other things.

Developers will also be able to learn more about their subscription business with updated reporting that lets them drill down into the reasons why users may have canceled — reasons developers can now collect through new “cancel surveys” where they can prompt users to pick an option or fill in their own reason as to why they ended the subscription.

Another new report will offer the flip side to cancellation tracking — it will help track retention, so developers can see retention by SKU, dates and country, allowing them to better see what’s working and where.

The advanced reporting was offered amid a solid handful of other developer features, including the ability to change SKU pricing with Google Play handling getting user confirmation through emails and push notifications; or handling the cancellation process if the user doesn’t agree.

Google also will offer faster test renewals, support for flexible introductory pricing, upgrades with the same renewal date, partial refunds and other refund API improvements.

Some of the features are available now, while others will roll out in the weeks ahead, Google said. (The slide below shows the timing — bold features are live now.)