Month: June 2019

Almost every organization, regardless of size, is inundated with meetings, so much so it’s often hard to find dedicated time do actual work. Clockwise wants to change that by bringing machine learning to the calendar to help employees free up time. Today, it announced an $11 million Series A investment, and made the product, which had been in Beta, generally available.

The round was co-led led by Greylock and Accel . Other investors included Slack Fund, Michael Ovitz, Ellen Levy, George Hu, Soraya Darabi, SV Angel and Jay Simons. The company has raised a total of $13 million.

Matt Martin, CEO and co-founder at Clockwise says the company’s mission is to help employees make time for what matters, and they are doing that by applying machine learning to the calendar to free up blocks of time to concentrate on work. Calendars have tended to be pretty static and this provides a way to bring a level of intelligence to automatically shift meetings to a better time when it makes sense.

You download Clockwise and then you can set parameters for which meetings can be moved and which are set in stone and other preferences. As Martin wrote in a blog post announcing the new tool, this gives employees “uninterrupted blocks of time to focus, think and innovate.” For now, it’s available for G Suite users.

Gif: Clockwise

You may think that this is a one-trick pony that will be hard to scale, but Martin says in the past few months, Clockwise has recovered 1000 of hours, and as they gain more data, the tool will get even more intelligent about meeting shifting.

Certainly his investors see the potential. John Lilly, who is leading the investment at Greylock believes Clockwise filling a huge unfilled need inside organizations. “Clockwise is focused on helping individuals and teams retake ownership of their time. This is not an easy feat — building the Clockwise product requires a sophisticated understanding of machine learning, user interaction, and systems design breakthrough,” Lilly said.

Clockwise founders were part of the team at RelateIQ, a company Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. Since leaving, RelateIQ they decided to put that experience to work on making the calendar more efficient.

Ollie Purdue, the founder of Loot, the current account aimed at millenials that went into administration last month after running out of cash, is joining Bó, the digital bank being developed by RBS-owned Natwest, TechCrunch as learned.

He’ll take up the position of Chief Product Officer and will lead product development for the new brand, reporting to Bó CEO Mark Bailie. I understand that Purdue is also to be joined by 17 other ex-Loot team members, spanning product, marketing and design functions.

Echoing a crop of fast-growing independent U.K. challenger banks, the yet-to-launch Bó is being built on a new technology stack, operating as a separate unit and tech platform from RBS’ legacy operations. In other words, a startup within but supported by an incumbent bank. I’m hearing from my own sources that the digital bank is already up and running and is almost ready to go live, with around 1,000 RBS employees actively testing the product before a public launch this year.

Meanwhile, that Purdue and almost one third of the Loot team is joining the RBS venture is particularly intriguing given that RBS was an investor in Loot and was thought to be close to acquiring the startup before ultimately pulling out of the deal. This led to Loot scrambling for additional funding, which it was unable to do in time before running out of cash entirely after existing investors decided not to follow on.

Specifically, Royal Bank of Scotland Group indirectly owned a 25% stake in Loot via an investment by Bó! In January this year, RBS announced that Bó had invested £2 million in Loot following an initial investment of £3 million in July 2018.

It was also presumed by many fintech insiders that Loot had been white-labeled and was powering the Bó product. Clearly that was never the case, leaving questions unanswered around why RBS/Natwest would invest in a competitor, only to sees its demise six months later. Now we know that it wasn’t for a lack of talent at Loot, while there appears to be little bad blood between Purdue and RBS. There are always multiple parties and dynamics involved in an acquisition.

To that end, one source tells me that Bailie was the main champion for Loot within RBS and that he was likely a draw for the Loot founder and other members of the Loot team. I also understand that Purdue and team feel they have unfinished business within the consumer digital banking space and that with the full resources of RBS they’ll have an opportunity to continue what they started at Loot.

Alibaba is being heavily linked with a public listing in Hong Kong, which could reportedly happen in Q3 and raise up to $20 billion. The firm is keeping quiet on those rumors, but it did let slip a major hint after it announced plans for a stock split.

Filings uploaded today (but originally released Friday) announced a proposal for a one-to-eight stock split.

Shareholders are invited to vote on the offer ahead of the company’s annual general meeting on July 15. The initiative has already been approved by Alibaba’s board, which is recommending that shareholders follow suit.

The particularly interesting part of the filing is where Alibaba explains the reasons behind the stock split.

“The Board of Directors is proposing the Share Subdivision to increase the flexibility for the Company in future capital market activities. Among other reasons, the one-to-eight share subdivision will increase the number of shares available for issuance at a lower per share price, and the Board of Directors believes that this will increase flexibility in the Company’s capital raising activities, including the issuance of new shares,” the filing reads.

That would appear to clear the way for a second listing for the company, which went public in a record U.S. IPO that raised over $20 billion in 2014.

Alibaba declined to provide further comment when we asked.

Reports last week suggested that the Chinese e-commerce giant has already filed initial paperwork for the listing, which would become the largest such float on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The city has become a destination for Chinese tech IPOs since relaxed listing rules came into effect two years ago. Ironically, a lack of flexibility was cited as a key reason why Alibaba picked the U.S. over Hong Kong for its 2014 listing.

Tech firms that have gone public in Hong Kong include Razer, Xiaomi, Tencent’s China Literature and selfie app company Meitu. Despite the hype, some have been guarded of Hong Kong’s suitability for tech firms, which are often not profitable when listing. Indeed, Razer CEO Min Liang Tan previously warned that “the U.S. [public markets] are probably more cognizant of tech companies” than Hong Kong retail investors.

Menlo Park-based Hatch Baby has prided itself on introducing “smart” nursery devices — including Grow, a changing pad with a built-in scale and Rest, a device doubling as a sound machine and night light.

Now, the company is introducing an updated version of Rest with Rest+ as part of an effort to help further establish Hatch Baby in the family sleep space.

The Rest+ device will still have the sound machine, night light and a “time to rise” feature found in the original. But, with feedback from many customers and Amazon reviews, Hatch Baby has now included the addition of an audio monitor and a clock.

The audio monitor is essential for letting parents check in on baby while they sleep without going into the room and potentially waking the baby up.

The clock is also a fantastic addition, in my opinion, especially for those with toddlers who can read numbers. These little people are big enough to get out of their beds but not mature enough to know moms and dads need to sleep at 4 a.m. Often advice passed from parent to parent is to put a clock in the baby room and tell kids not to come out until it shows a certain number.

It also helps establish healthy sleep habits in little ones. Most toddlers (ages one to 3) need about 12 to 14 hours of sleep in a day, spread out between nighttime and naps, according to the National Sleep Foundation. However, as any parent knows, the older a baby gets, the harder it is to get them to want to go to bed.

Rest+ features include:

• Audio monitor: Parents can now check in on their child in their room without the risk of disrupting their little one’s sleep right from their phone — no extra gadgets necessary.
• Sound machine: Parents can choose from a range of sound options, from white noise to soft lullabies. They can simply crank up the volume remotely when the dog barks or the neighbors throw a party.
• Night light: This feature, which stays cool to the touch, provides soft and soothing
  lighting for midnight feeding sessions or bright and reassuring light when the dark feels scary for older kids. Parents and kids can choose from a rainbow of colors to make it their own, but the optional patented toddler-lock setting makes sure that parents are the only ones in control when needed.
• Time-to-Rise: Green means go! This feature enables parents to teach toddlers and
  preschoolers to stay in bed until it’s time to rise once the light changes color (and enjoy those extra minutes of sleep).
• Clock: Rest+ features an easy-to-read clock so that parents can stay on track with their busy schedules and can help teach children to read numbers.

Any one of these features could cost parents a good amount of dough when purchased separately. A Phillips Avent audio monitor runs just under $100 on Amazon, for example. However, Rest+ is just $80 (slightly more than the original $60 price tag for the Rest device), for all five features.

Something else that may make the Rest+ attractive to parents — it is WiFi-enabled and portable so you can take it with you when you travel.

Whipping a sound machine, nightlight, audio monitor and clock all into one portable, WiFi-enabled device can also save precious space in the nursery and makes this a must-have item for many parents hoping for just a little bit more sleep.

Hatch Baby co-founder Ann Crady Weiss tells TechCrunch the Rest+ will only be available on the Hatch Baby site and is part of a plan to launch a full line of products aimed at getting parents — and their children — more precious sleep. Though she wouldn’t say what the company was working on next, she did mention we’d hear something about it in the coming months. So stay tuned!

French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.

PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.

After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.

When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You can also generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.

And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You can also manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.

In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you can also build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.

While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.

The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.

There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.

A month after being placed on a trade blacklist by the Trump administration, Huawei is reportedly steadying itself for international shipments of its smartphones to decline by 40% to 60%. According to a report in Bloomberg, Huawei may end up pulling shipments of the Honor 20, its flagship phone for overseas markets, if sales are poor.

The U.S. Department of Commerce barred Huawei in May from purchasing parts from U.S. companies without prior approval from Washington, claiming that Huawei is a possible threat to national security. After the ban, Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei said the blacklist may slow the company’s growth, but “only slightly.”

But Bloomberg reports that the company is now steeling itself for international shipments to plummet, with Huawei sales and marketing manager internally forecasting a drop in shipment volumes between 40 million to 60 million smartphones. The Honor 20 will go on sale in parts of Europe, including France and the U.K., on June 21, but Huawei may stop shipments if it sells poorly.

In order to offset the anticipated decline in international shipments, Huawei wants to grab half of China’s smartphone market this year. According to Canalys, Huawei was the only company among China’s top five smartphone vendors to report growth as the rest of the market declined last year, achieving a 34% market share, but nonetheless it needs to ward off competition from Oppo and Vivo, which are both refreshing their product strategies in order to cover more consumer segments. Bloomberg reports that Huawei wants to increase shipments by spending more on marketing and expanding its distribution channels, but some executives have said its target is too high.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the trade blacklist is also impacting some of Huawei’s most important chip suppliers, including Qualcomm, Intel and Xilinx. Reuters reports that representatives from some companies have met with the Commerce Department to lift restrictions on parts for common devices that they say do not present security concerns, like smartphone chips.

A few months after nabbing a handsome $500 million funding round, China’s shared housing startup Danke Apartment got a talent boost.

On Monday, Danke announced the appointment of Gu Guoliang as its new chief operating officer to ramp up the company’s offline operational crew. Gu, whose nickname is Michael, stepped down from Baidu after five years as one of the key figures in search, historically the company’s biggest revenue-generating division. He’s known to have managed several tens of thousands of marketing staff and helped generate sales of close to 100 billion yuan ($14.44 billion) for Baidu annually.

Gu’s arrival followed a period of explosive expansion at Danke, which is now managing almost 500,000 units of rooms across 10 Chinese cities after founding four years ago. The startup takes the co-living approach akin to that of WeWork’s Welive and rents out fully furnished apartments targeted at young professionals who can’t afford a full suite. Backed by Tiger Global and Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial, Danke’s valuation crossed $2 billion in its funding round in February.

Gu is one of the former Baidu executives who resigned during a recent top-level exodus (report in Chinese) that involved at least five leaders, including the search division boss Xiang Hailong, to whom Gu reported. There were speculations that Xiang’s exit might have triggered his lieutenants to leave, though TechCrunch has learned from a person close to Gu that he had left “one to two weeks” prior to Xiang’s departure.

For Gu, joining Danke would almost feel like returning home. “We welcome our comrade and good friend Michael,” said Danke chief executive Gao Jing, who previously worked alongside Gu at Nuomi, the local services startup that was sold to Baidu for $3.2 billion and became integral to the internet giant’s online-to-offline business. Derek Shen, an investor and current chairman of Danke, co-founded Nuomi in 2010 before heading up LinkedIn China between 2014 and 2017. Several other core members of Danke have also hailed from Nuomi.

Danke is confident that Gu’s addition will be a boon to its operational capacity. “Gu has abundant experience in operational management, sharp business insights, outstanding leadership, and a deep understanding of the internet sector and user needs,” said Gao. “Under his direction, Danke will enter a new phase of refined operation.”

By that, Gao means Gu will be tasked with rolling out more targeted marketing, more efficient housing renovation, more precise acquisition of apartment space, among other quality-control measures to drive sustainable growth at the company.

Another day, another Target checkout outage.

Many took to social media to complain that checkouts at the retail giant went down for a second day in a row. Many stores were only taking cash and gift cards. It comes after Target suffered a global point-of-sale machine outage on Saturday. Checkouts were down for more than two hours.

Target said in a statement yesterday that it could “confirm that this was not a data breach or security-related issue” and “no guest information was compromised at any time.” Instead, the company blamed the outage on an “internal technology issue” without disclosing specifics.

The retail giant was forced to pay $162 million in expenses related to a data breach in 2013.

A spokesperson for Target didn’t immediately return a request for comment. We’ll update once we know more.

American Airlines, the world’s largest airline by fleet size and passenger traffic, has finished rolling out satellite-based broadband Wi-Fi to its entire mainline narrowbody fleet of over 700 aircraft (that is, the Boing 737s and Airbus A319 and 320 that typically fly the company’s domestic routes). All of these satellite-equipped planes also offer access to 12 free channels of live TV that you can stream to your personal device, including on international flights where this hasn’t traditionally been an option.

Unless you are comfortably sitting in business class and sipping on your pre-departure champagne, modern air travel isn’t exactly a fun or relaxing experience, no matter the reason for your travel. If you need to get work done on a flight, though, having access to fast and reliable Wi-Fi can often make a huge difference.

Today’s announcement from American follows a similar announcement from last year, after the airline finishing bringing the same system to all of its widebody fleet. At this time last year, though, American had only brought this same system to a meager 13 percent of its narrowbody planes.

One thing worth noting is that it’s my understanding is that American isn’t counting some of its oldest MD-83s in this count. These will never get a Wi-Fi upgrade because they are currently being phased out for more modern jets.

As for the technology that powers all of this, American Airlines is betting on satellite-based systems that use either Gogo 2Ku or ViaSat Ka. Unlike some of the earlier ground-based systems, satellite systems have the obvious advantage of offering a larger coverage area (including over oceans) and more consistent connectivity. These new satellite-based systems also allow for significantly faster connections. Among American’s competitors, Delta is currently in the process of updating most of its fleet to satellite-based systems, too, while the situation at United remains a bit complicated.

“Elevating the travel experience is one of our top goals at American and we’ve been working hard to provide our customers with the same level of entertainment and connectivity options they enjoy in their own living rooms,” said Kurt Stache, Senior Vice President for Marketing, Loyalty and Sales for American. “In less than two years, we completed broadband internet installation on our entire mainline fleet and we will continue setting new standards in the industry to show our customers we value the time they spend with us.”

Soon, American will also bring power outlets to every seat in its mainline fleet, as well as its two-class regional fleet. Since American, just like most of its competitors, is also removing most of its in-seat entertainment systems in favor of personal device entertainment that is streamed to your phone or tablet, it is also now bringing tablet holders to most of its narrowbody fleet as well.

Unlike some of its competitors, American doesn’t offer free Wi-Fi access to chat apps — or even free Wi-Fi in general. Still, if you are an American loyalist, you’ll be happy to see that the airline now offers a consistent Wi-Fi product that is clearly a step up from some of the legacy systems that are still in use by some of the other carriers.

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

A year on, Salmon showed little has changed and that it’s still easy to download millions of transactions through the company’s developer API without obtaining user permission or needing the app.

Using that data, anyone can look at an entire user’s public transaction history, who they shared money with, when, and in some cases for what reason — including illicit goods and substances.

“There’s truly no reason to have this API open to unauthenticated requests,” he told TechCrunch. “The API only exists to provide like a scrolling feed of public transactions for the home page of the app, but if that’s your goal then you should require a token with each request to verify that the user is logged in.”

He published the scraped data on his GitHub page.

Venmo has done little to curb the privacy issue for its 40 million users since the scraping effort blew up a year ago. Venmo reacted by changing its privacy guide and, and later updated its app to remove a warning when users went to change their default privacy settings from public to private.

How to change your Venmo privacy settings.

Instead, Venmo has focused its effort on making the data more difficult to scrape rather than focusing on the underlying privacy issues.

When Dan Gorelick first sounded the alarm on Venmo’s public data in 2016, few limits on the API meant anyone could scrape data in bulk and at speed. Other researchers like Johnny Xmas have since said that Venmo restricted its API to limit what historical data can be collected. But Venmo’s most recent limits still allowed Salmon to spit out 40 transactions per minute. That amounts to about 57,600 scraped transactions each day, he said.

Last year, PayPal — which owns Venmo — settled with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy and security violations. The company was criticized for misleading users over its privacy settings. The FTC said users weren’t properly informed that some transactions would be shared publicly, and that Venmo misrepresented the app’s security by saying it was “bank-grade,” which the FTC disputed.

Juliet Niczewicz, a spokesperson for PayPal, did not return a request for comment.