Year: 2018

Sinemia, a MoviePass competitor that launched four years ago in Europe, has introduced some super-duper low-cost plans for seeing movies in theaters. Here’s the breakdown:

• $4.99 per month: one ticket per month
• $6.99 per month: two tickets per month
• $6.99 per month: two tickets per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX
• $14.99 per month: three tickets per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s true. MoviePass’s $9.99 per month subscription lets you see nearly an unlimited number of movies every month (one per day).

But there’s no way I would take full advantage of the “unlimited” offering. And Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz recognizes that I’m not the only person like that.

“Not everyone really needs an unlimited moviegoing experience,” Oguz told me. “The average in the U.S. is four movies per year.”

For me, at least, Sinemia is a more attractive offer because of one simple feature: advanced online ticketing. MoviePass requires you to be physically at the movie theater to purchase the tickets, and homie just can’t play that. There’s also the fact that Sinemia lets you see 3D, 4D and IMAX. That’s not the case with MoviePass.

While Sinemia pays full price to movie theaters for every ticket purchased through its platform, Sinemia makes up for that via advertising deals with studios and restaurants. For example, when you open up the Sinemia app, the three movies you see featured at the top are paid for by studios wanting to promote their movies. As of right now, 85 percent of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions with just 15 percent coming from advertising.

In the next 12 months, Sinemia hopes to launch its services in countries throughout Asia. Sinemia doesn’t disclose monthly subscriber numbers, but says it’s growing more than 50 percent every month.

Earlier this year, MoviePass sued Sinemia for copyright infringement, alleging Sinemia copied many of MoviePass’s features. Specifically, MoviePass alleges Sinemia violated a patent pertaining to automatic authentication and one pertaining to a ticketing system. The litigation is ongoing, but Oguz said he generally likes competition and appreciates how MoviePass made this model popular.

Alibaba is forecasting yet more growth for its business after it beat analyst forecasts with its fourth-quarter results.

Revenue came in at 61.9 billion RMB ($9.9 billion), an increase of 61 percent year-over-year, which topped a 59.6 billion RMB prediction from analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The company’s net income for the quarter did drop, however, to 6.6 billion RMB ($1.1 billion) from 9.9 billion RMB one year previous on account of increased investment activity.

Alibaba earned 24.51 RMB per share for its full fiscal year 2018, with total revenue of 250.3 billion RMB and 58 percent annual growth.

The firm expects that impressive rate to be held into its next financial year. Alibaba CFO Maggie Wu said she expects “overall revenue growth above 60 percent, reflecting our confidence in our core business as well as positive momentum in new businesses.”

The company said its annual base of active users rose by 37 million to reach 552 million; its monthly active user count reached 617 million, up by the same factor of 37 million.

Breaking things down it was a familiar story. The company’s core commerce business delivered the bulk of the revenue — 214 billion RMB, $34 billion for the quarter — while its cloud computing business was again the star performer, notching 100% growth to record its first $2 billion (13.4 billion RMB) revenue quarter.

Alibaba has always been keen to invest, but during the last quarter it doubled down on a range of initiatives.

The firm is taking an option to buy one-third of Ant Financial, which resulted terminated a long-standing revenue-sharing agreement that some analysts believe to be worth as much as one billion RMB ($160 million) per quarter. While other impacting deals included the full buyout of food delivery services Ele.me, for upwards of $5 billion, as part of an offline retail push in China and, in Southeast Asia, a $2 billion investment in Lazada, which saw original Alibaba co-founder Lucy Peng installed as new CEO.

Costly? Maybe. But these ventures are what makes CFO Wu and others in management optimistic that Alibaba can sustain its growth. That’s been a key question since its blockbuster IPO in 2014 and Alibaba has long invested in international expansion and new revenue channels in China to offset a demand on its core business.

“Alibaba Group had an excellent quarter and fiscal year, driven by robust growth in our core commerce
business and investments we have made over the past several years in longer-term growth initiatives,” added Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang.

Ever since Google created Kubernetes as an open source container orchestration tool, it has seen it blossom in ways it might never have imagined. As the project gains in popularity, we are seeing many adjunct programs develop. Today, Google announced the release of version 0.1 of the Kubeflow open source tool, which is designed to bring machine learning to Kubernetes containers.

While Google has long since moved Kubernetes into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, it continues to be actively involved, and Kubeflow is one manifestation of that. The project was only first announced at the end of last year at Kubecon in Austin, but it is beginning to gain some momentum.

David Aronchick, who runs Kubeflow for Google, led the Kubernetes team for 2.5 years before moving to Kubeflow. He says the idea behind the project is to enable data scientists to take advantage of running machine learning jobs on Kubernetes clusters. Kubeflow lets machine learning teams take existing jobs and simply attach them to a cluster without a lot of adapting.

With today’s announcement, the project begins to move ahead, and according to a blog post announcing the milestone, brings a new level of stability, while adding a slew of new features that the community has been requesting. These include Jupyter Hub for collaborative and interactive training on machine learning jobs and Tensorflow training and hosting support, among other elements.

Aronchick emphasizes that as an open source project you can bring whatever tools you like, and you are not limited to Tensorflow, despite the fact that this early version release does include support for Google’s machine learning tools. You can expect additional tool support as the project develops further.

In just over 4 months since the original announcement, the community has grown quickly with over 70 contributors, over 20 contributing organizations along with over 700 commits in 15 repositories. You can expect the next version, 0.2, sometime this summer.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange — is the newest addition who will join us for TC Sessions: Blockchain, TechCrunch’s first event dedicated to blockchain technology, which takes place July 6 in Zug, Switzerland.

The event will bring together the startup/business world and blockchain community to explore the potential of the blockchain, where it is now, and much more. The location is Zug — the Swiss city know as “Crypto Valley” for its plethora of startups and forward-thinking governance — and our speaker list already includes standout names such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf.

Tickets are available now priced at 495 Swiss Francs, or around $500 — just head here. Don’t miss it!

Zhao, known as CZ, started Binance in July 2017 and it has enjoyed a meteoric rise. The exchange processes over $3 billion in crypto trades per day, which makes it the world’s largest by some margin, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Binance’s own token (BNB) is currently trading at over $14 — that’s up from an initial ICO price of around $0.10 and it gives it a total market cap of $1.6 billion.

Even in real-world financial times, Binance is huge. The company recorded a profit of around $150 million during its most recent quarter of business despite being less than a year ago.

Zhao himself started out in the world of financial trading, creating a company called Fusion Systems which enabled high-frequency trades for brokers. He got into crypto when he joined wallet app Blockchain.info, before moving on to Chinese exchange OkCoin for a stint as CTO. Spotting an opportunity for a new exchange, he exited to start Binance last year, raising $15 million in July to kick the project off.

There’s been controversy — including rumors of high listing fees and a legal spat with VC firm Sequoia — but Binance is the top dog and it remains the exchange that every crypto firm aspires to list on.

It is also pushing out overseas beyond Hong Kong. Binance has explored the global potential of crypto by moving its exchange to Malta, a country keen to woo blockchain giants, and inking deals to hire large numbers of staff in Uganda, Togo and Bermuda. It looks like that is just scratching the service for what Binance has planned.

“I could retire now and I’d be ok for a few lifetimes, but we are doing something I think is very meaningful,” Zhao, who ranks third on Forbes’ crypto rich list with an estimated worth of $1.1-$2 billion, told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.

Blockchain is the most disruptive new development in the technology space today, and we’re excited to host our first show that is solely dedicated to the blockchain. The event takes place in the Swiss city of Zug — widely known as “Crypto Valley” due to its sizable number of crypto companies and a progressive approach to regulation — and it will bring together top figures from the blockchain space, developer community and business and startup worlds.

Prominent speakers confirmed for the July 6 event include:

• Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum
• Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase CTO
• Roham Gharegozlou, the founder of smash-hit blockchain game CryptoKitties
• Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project
• Leanne Kemp, founder and CEO of Everledger
• Jun Hasegawa, CEO and founder of Omise and OmiseGo
• Mona El Isa, CEO and co-founder of Melonport
• Colin Hanna, associate at Balderton Capital
• Galia Benartzi, co-founder and head of Business Development at Bancor
• Gert Sylvest, co-founder of Tradeshift and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers

You can get your hands on tickets now — they’re priced at 495 Swiss Francs, or around $500 — from the event website here.

---

If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact us via this link.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance — the world’s largest crypto exchange — is the newest addition who will join us for TC Sessions: Blockchain, TechCrunch’s first event dedicated to blockchain technology, which takes place July 6 in Zug, Switzerland.

The event will bring together the startup/business world and blockchain community to explore the potential of the blockchain, where it is now, and much more. The location is Zug — the Swiss city know as “Crypto Valley” for its plethora of startups and forward-thinking governance — and our speaker list already includes standout names such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, and Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf.

Tickets are available now priced at 495 Swiss Francs, or around $500 — just head here. Don’t miss it!

Zhao, known as CZ, started Binance in July 2017 and it has enjoyed a meteoric rise. The exchange processes over $3 billion in crypto trades per day, which makes it the world’s largest by some margin, according to CoinMarketCap.com. Binance’s own token (BNB) is currently trading at over $14 — that’s up from an initial ICO price of around $0.10 and it gives it a total market cap of $1.6 billion.

Even in real-world financial times, Binance is huge. The company recorded a profit of around $150 million during its most recent quarter of business despite being less than a year ago.

Zhao himself started out in the world of financial trading, creating a company called Fusion Systems which enabled high-frequency trades for brokers. He got into crypto when he joined wallet app Blockchain.info, before moving on to Chinese exchange OkCoin for a stint as CTO. Spotting an opportunity for a new exchange, he exited to start Binance last year, raising $15 million in July to kick the project off.

There’s been controversy — including rumors of high listing fees and a legal spat with VC firm Sequoia — but Binance is the top dog and it remains the exchange that every crypto firm aspires to list on.

It is also pushing out overseas beyond Hong Kong. Binance has explored the global potential of crypto by moving its exchange to Malta, a country keen to woo blockchain giants, and inking deals to hire large numbers of staff in Uganda, Togo and Bermuda. It looks like that is just scratching the service for what Binance has planned.

“I could retire now and I’d be ok for a few lifetimes, but we are doing something I think is very meaningful,” Zhao, who ranks third on Forbes’ crypto rich list with an estimated worth of $1.1-$2 billion, told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.

Blockchain is the most disruptive new development in the technology space today, and we’re excited to host our first show that is solely dedicated to the blockchain. The event takes place in the Swiss city of Zug — widely known as “Crypto Valley” due to its sizable number of crypto companies and a progressive approach to regulation — and it will bring together top figures from the blockchain space, developer community and business and startup worlds.

Prominent speakers confirmed for the July 6 event include:

• Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum
• Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase CTO
• Roham Gharegozlou, the founder of smash-hit blockchain game CryptoKitties
• Brian Behlendorf, executive director of the Hyperledger Project
• Leanne Kemp, founder and CEO of Everledger
• Jun Hasegawa, CEO and founder of Omise and OmiseGo
• Mona El Isa, CEO and co-founder of Melonport
• Colin Hanna, associate at Balderton Capital
• Galia Benartzi, co-founder and head of Business Development at Bancor
• Gert Sylvest, co-founder of Tradeshift and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers

You can get your hands on tickets now — they’re priced at 495 Swiss Francs, or around $500 — from the event website here.

---

If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact us via this link.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Pandora’s quarterly earnings report was music to investor’s ears.

The digital radio platform reported a better-than-expected first quarter report after the bell on Thursday, sending shares up 8% in after-hours trading.

Wall Street liked that the company showed a sizable increase in subscriber revenue, posting $104.7 million, a 63% increase from last year. Pandora has 5.63 million paid listeners, up 19% from the same timeframe in 2017.

By contrast, Apple Music says it has 40 million subscribers and Spotify has 75 million, so Pandora is a distant third in terms of paid users.

But the competition is already reflected in Pandora’s stock price. It closed Thursday at $5.75, which is up a buck for the past month. It’s also substantially beneath the $37 per share that the stock was trading at in 2014. Its market cap is currently $1.45 billion.

In addition to subscribers, Pandora makes money from its unpaid users via ads. The company had 72.3 million active listeners, bringing in $319.2 million in revenue. Analysts had expected $304.3 million.

Its adjusted loss per share was 27 cents, well above the negative 38 cents that Wall Street forecast.

“Pandora is exactly where we want to be: at the center of a growing market with huge potential,” said Roger Lynch, CEO of Pandora, in a statement.

 

 

 

Critical infrastructure worries in the U.S. and abroad are far from over. This week, security firm Tenable published research demonstrating a vulnerability affecting two software programs used by global energy management company Schneider Electric. The company’s systems are in place in facilities across North America, Western Europe and Asia.

Before publishing its research, Tenable notified Schneider Electric, allowing the company to patch its software vulnerabilities in early April while issuing guidance for affected plants to update their systems.

“There’s no doubt the discovery of this severe vulnerability comes at a time when critical infrastructure security is top-of-mind for organizations and government agencies everywhere,” Tenable Chief Product Officer Dave Cole said in a statement. Cole noted that this vulnerability exists at the relatively new intersection of IT and operational technology.

Tenable describes the flaw, present in InduSoft Web Studio and InTouch Machine Edition, as a remote code execution vulnerability possible when an overflow condition is triggered in the software.

As Tenable explains, that loophole could allow malicious code to be executed, granting hackers high-level access in any facility running the affected software:

A threat actor could send a crafted packet to exploit the buffer overflow vulnerability using a tag, alarm, event, read or write action to execute code.

The vulnerability can be remotely exploited without authentication and targets the IWS Runtime Data Server service, by default on TCP port 1234. The software implements a custom protocol that uses various ‘commands.’ This vulnerability is triggered through command 50, and is caused by the incorrect usage of a string conversion function.

The vulnerability, when exploited, could allow an unauthenticated malicious entity to remotely execute code with high privileges.

Critical infrastructure attacks are on the rise, and the results can be devastating. And while compromising a nuclear facility or power grid can result in exceptional consequences, the attacks generally follow the same rulebook that hackers use to compromise other, less high-consequence systems.

“It’s important to keep in mind that attackers are generally after one thing — access. Once they obtain it, their primary goal is typically to make sure long-term access can be maintained,” Ben Johnson, CTO and co-founder of Obsidian Security told TechCrunch.

“… If they compromise devices associated with critical infrastructure, they will find themselves with all kinds of leverage. So any flaw that makes obtaining access easier is a serious concern.”

Critical infrastructure worries in the U.S. and abroad are far from over. This week, security firm Tenable published research demonstrating a vulnerability affecting two software programs used by global energy management company Schneider Electric. The company’s systems are in place in facilities across North America, Western Europe and Asia.

Before publishing its research, Tenable notified Schneider Electric, allowing the company to patch its software vulnerabilities in early April while issuing guidance for affected plants to update their systems.

“There’s no doubt the discovery of this severe vulnerability comes at a time when critical infrastructure security is top-of-mind for organizations and government agencies everywhere,” Tenable Chief Product Officer Dave Cole said in a statement. Cole noted that this vulnerability exists at the relatively new intersection of IT and operational technology.

Tenable describes the flaw, present in InduSoft Web Studio and InTouch Machine Edition, as a remote code execution vulnerability possible when an overflow condition is triggered in the software.

As Tenable explains, that loophole could allow malicious code to be executed, granting hackers high-level access in any facility running the affected software:

A threat actor could send a crafted packet to exploit the buffer overflow vulnerability using a tag, alarm, event, read or write action to execute code.

The vulnerability can be remotely exploited without authentication and targets the IWS Runtime Data Server service, by default on TCP port 1234. The software implements a custom protocol that uses various ‘commands.’ This vulnerability is triggered through command 50, and is caused by the incorrect usage of a string conversion function.

The vulnerability, when exploited, could allow an unauthenticated malicious entity to remotely execute code with high privileges.

Critical infrastructure attacks are on the rise, and the results can be devastating. And while compromising a nuclear facility or power grid can result in exceptional consequences, the attacks generally follow the same rulebook that hackers use to compromise other, less high-consequence systems.

“It’s important to keep in mind that attackers are generally after one thing — access. Once they obtain it, their primary goal is typically to make sure long-term access can be maintained,” Ben Johnson, CTO and co-founder of Obsidian Security told TechCrunch.

“… If they compromise devices associated with critical infrastructure, they will find themselves with all kinds of leverage. So any flaw that makes obtaining access easier is a serious concern.”

In April, Spotify and Hulu teamed up on a discounted bundle of both of their services for $12.99 per month, following a similar deal for students launched last fall. Now, it seems, the streaming service is considering expanding its entertainment bundle offerings to include one with Scribd’s audiobooks service, too.

In a consumer survey that recently popped up in Spotify’s mobile app, the company asks a lot of questions about audiobooks – and more specifically, about a bundle with Spotify, Hulu and Scribd combined.

The survey begins with questions about media consumption habits involving reading or listening to non-music content – like if the customer had listened to an audiobook or podcast in the past three months, or if they’ve read a physical book, magazine or e-book.

It then asks the customer how they listen to audiobooks, how often, and using what format – downloads, borrowing, CDs, or subscriptions.

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In a question about subscriptions, Spotify asks, “which is your main audiobook subscription service?”

The survey taker can then choose from: Playster, Scribd, Amazon Prime, Downpour, Otto, Audiobooks.com, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, Kobo, and “Other.” 

But the most interesting question is the one where Spotify tries to get a feel for consumer interest in a Spotify/Hulu/Scribd bundle.

The bundle, the survey explains, would add an additional $2.99 per more on top of the existing Spotify Premium for Family subscription, which currently costs $14.99. Like the Hulu/Spotify deal, it would offer access to Hulu’s Limited Commercials plan along with a Premium subscription to Spotify – in this case, however, its family plan. But for an extra $2.99 per month – bringing the total to $17.98 per month – the customer would receive 1 free book credit per month from Scribd’s library of audiobooks.

These audiobooks would be ad-free and could be listened to offline, the survey notes.

Of course, a survey question doesn’t mean that a deal currently exists or is being offered to customers. It doesn’t even mean Spotify will follow through by offering a deal with Scribd. But it is an interesting signal about Spotify’s plans – especially given its recent partnership with Hulu, and its earlier comments about exploring different bundles in the future, which were made after its first bundle launched.

The issue facing Hulu and Spotify’s services – and Scribd as well, for that matter – is a war with platform giants like Amazon, Apple and Google who are already bundling streaming services for music, video and, in Amazon’s case, books, magazines and audiobooks, and a host of other perks via Amazon Prime.

Apple, too, is exploring a magazine subscription service, according to reports; and its upcoming over-the-top TV service is expected to be bundled with Apple Music. Google, meanwhile, is planning a revamp of its music subscription service which will incorporate YouTube video.

That means rivals, like Spotify, Hulu and Scribd will have to fight back with deals of their own – and maybe even consolidation efforts through M&A at some point.

Reached for comment, a Spotify spokesperson responded, “We continuously test new products and features to better the on platform experience for our users. This is not an indication of an upcoming partnership at this time.” 

At this time. Yep. Noted.

A year and change after the car maker pleaded guilty to obstructing investigations and importing cars under false pretenses, Volkswagen’s former CEO Martin Winterkorn has been charged with conspiracy and wire fraud in a U.S. court. All of this stems from a diesel emissions scandal that ultimately found VW paying $4.3 billion in penalties.

Winterkorn stepped down from his role at Volkswagen in September of 2015, only a matter of days after the German car maker confessed to outfitting 11 million cars with a device designed to cheat at emissions testing.

Winterkorn is the highest ranking of a number of former executives named in an indictment unsealed by U.S. courts today. Initial claims by VW had suggested that the cheating was only known by lower-level executives, but the indictment suggests that the former CEO was alerted to the situation as far back as 2014.

”The indictment of Winterkorn alleges that he was informed of VW’s diesel emissions cheating in May 2014 and again in July 2015,” the Justice Department said in a statement issued today. “The indictment further alleges that Winterkorn, after having been clearly informed of the emissions cheating, agreed with other senior VW executives to continue to perpetrate the fraud and deceive U.S. regulators.

The scandal has continued to plague the automaker. Last month, CEO Matthias Müller stepped down from the CEO role three years after replacing Winterkorn.