Month: June 2019

Uber has unveiled a new model of its JUMP electric scooters, featuring a bigger frame and hand brakes. Uber plans to deploy these scooters in the U.S. on June 24 and in Europe later this summer.

Uber first deployed electric scooters last October in Santa Monica, Calif. At launch, JUMP relied on Xiaomi Ninebot scooters, but that’s no longer the case with version two. Instead, JUMP partnered with a different company to build these scooters.

“Uber is innovating new mobility hardware to make it safer and easier for people to choose bikes and scooters over cars,” Uber Head of New Mobility Rachel Holt said in a statement. “The more our technology can expand access to bikes and scooters, the greener and less congested cities will be.”

While Uber does not specifically break out new mobility growth, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on an investor conference call for Q1 2019 that gross bookings for new mobility “grew strong quarter over quarter.”

Uber’s other bets, which includes freight and new mobility, saw gross bookings of $132 million for Q1 2019. That represented 230% growth from the same quarter last year, while ridesharing grew just 22%.

Holt also debuted a new swappable battery for JUMP’s dockless electric bikes. JUMP added swappable batteries to its bikes late last year, but now riders will be able to replace them.

Designed by Uber Director of Engineering for Energy Storage Systems Celina Mikolajczak and her team, the swappable batteries are much safer than the ones that have been in the scooters and bikes we’ve seen, she told TechCrunch.

“It’s a growing industry,” Mikolajczak told TechCrunch. “And the regulations, the standards have not caught up. Where in an automotive space, you would have propagation resistance in your battery pack built in and designed in, those requirements have really not moved into the bike and scooter area. But one of the things that we’re doing, as the battery team is, we’re bringing those requirements into that area, so that when we come out with our new swappable battery, it’s going to be at a new level of safety and a much higher level of safety than anything that’s been in the scooter and bike fleet till now, which is exciting. And, you know, one of the things that we can bring that’s unique and different compared to you know, what’s out there.”

Before, while JUMP was able to swap out the batteries back at the warehouse, Mikolajczak said they weren’t truly swappable.

“The current batteries that are on the scooters and bikes are really not designed to be swappable,” she said. “With the JUMP bike, you can swap the battery but it’s something the operator has to do. There’s some fussy connections in there. What we’re doing for the new battery packs is to make them user-swappable so that anyone can swap this battery pack really quickly and easily. That’s something that just hasn’t been done.”

This could mean kiosks around the city where you swap the battery out for a new one and then bike farther. Or, you park the bike near a battery kiosk and then the next person swaps in a new battery before they ride off.

“So that becomes a lot more self-serve,” she said. “If they’re user swappable, they swap a lot faster than if you send people out to do it. We’re exploring a few different options on that.”

Xiaomi has refreshed its smart fitness tracker and unveiled a range of other gadgets in China, giving a glimpse at some of its affordable products that it will likely be bringing to other markets in the coming future.

The wearable fitness tracker, called Mi Smart Band 4, sports a bigger AMOLED display (39.9% increase in screen size) than its popular year-old predecessor and features support for XiaoAI, the company’s voice assistant that can be activated with a voice command.

The bigger display, which supports 16 million colors and 77 customized themes, will allow users to quickly glance at notifications and fitness stats. The tracker also supports offline payments via AliPay. It is still very affordable, priced at just RMB 169 (roughly $24.5).

Coupled with the long durability that previous generation smart bands have offered, it is no wonder that the Chinese giant has emerged as the second largest wearable maker in the world. According to IDC, Xiaomi shipped 7.5 million wearable units in the waning quarter of last year, second only to Apple, which shipped 16.2 units.

The company has also launched a smart lock, dubbed Mi Smart Door Lock, that offers up to six unlocking modes and allows users to track its status in real time. It also works with the NFC variant of Mi Smart Band 4 that when paired can serve as a key. It is priced at RMB 1699 (roughly $245).

The announcement comes as Xiaomi, which went public last year and is increasingly trying to expand its services business, struggles to meet analysts expectations. The Chinese group, once thought of worth over $100 billion, has a market cap of under $30 billion currently.

Xiaomi also launched a smart washing machine, induction cooker, e-skate hover, digital translator, and pens. The washing machine, called Mi Smart Combo Wash Dryer, sports OLED smart buttons and supports voice controls for activating or halting a washing cycle. It is priced at RMB 2999 (roughly $433).

Shaped like a smartphone, the Mi AI Translator, comes preloaded with Oxford and Collins dictionary as well as Chinese dictionaries. It is aimed at people who are trying to learn a new language and want to improve their pronunciation. It supports real-time translation between 34 languages. It starts at RMB 499 (roughly $72).

SpaceX has a launch scheduled today from California’s Vandenberg Air Force base, currently targeting a launch window of 14 minutes that opens at 7:17 AM PT (10:17 AM ET). The RADARSAT Constellation mission will carry a constellation of three satellites to low-Earth orbit, built by MDA for use by the Government of Canada in observing Canadian territory and surrounding ocean, with the added ability of being able to also provide imagery from anywhere around the world on top of its primary purpose.

The Government of Canada will make use of the new satellites’ capabilities to generate accurate maps of the sea ice present in Canada’s oceans and across the Great Lakes to help map and navigate those bodies of water for commercial interests. The satellites also have receivers on board to help them tag and ID any seafaring “ships of interest,” according to the mission description. Other uses for the imagery captured by the satellites including helping farmers boost yields from crops will reducing energy consumption, and assisting with the handling of disasters including wild fires.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to be used in this mission was flown once before – and only a few months ago in March, when it was used in an uncrewed demonstration mission for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.

Currently, the spacecraft is vertical at the launch pad awaiting the launch window. A backup window is set for Thursday, June 13 at 7:17 AM PT. The webcast above should go live around 15 minutes prior to the lift scheduled for today at 7:17 AM PT.

Go-Jek may be based in Southeast Asia, but the multi-billion-dollar ride-hailing firm continues to tap India for engineering talent. The Indonesia-headquartered firm announced today that it has acquired AirCTO, a recruitment platform based in Gurgaon.

The acquisition, the price of which has not been disclosed, is a talent grab. AirCTO’s platform uses a mix of AI and humans to help companies hire “top” developer talent — that’s of interest to Go-Jek because the company intends to double down on India, which houses a significant number of its R&D workforce already thanks to prior acquisitions.

Indeed, the company said that AirCTO’s entire team will join it to develop “products that accelerate the recruitment of talent” within its ranks.

First up, the deal will see a Gurgaon office opened as part of a wider plan to hire 100 new tech staff this year to increase Go-Jek’s headcount in India to 500. The firm said that some of that hiring could come from other acquisitions — that makes sense given that Go-Jek is the midst of raising a round that it claims has already passed the $1 billion mark at a valuation approaching $10 billion.

It’s challenging to keep up with Go-Jek acquisition spree because many of its deals are not announced at the time, or, indeed, at all.

But we do know there have been many. According to Crunchbase data, AirCTO is its tenth purchase. Three of those came from India — C42 Engineering, Pianta and Leftshift Technologies — to form an offshored R&D division. In addition, the company’s group CTO is Ajey Gore, a hire from India who spends a large chunk of his time at Go-Jek’s Bangalore office.

Go-Jek isn’t alone in setting up R&D centers in India, rival Grab, which is backed by SoftBank’s Vision Fund and valued at $14 billion, is present in the country, too.

Aware of the limits of the talent pool in its native Southeast Asia, Grab has long maintained engineering outposts overseas. These include Beijing, Seattle and — as of 2017 — Bangalore, in addition to various countries in Southeast Asia. Grab has also made an acquisition in India.

Back on the battlefield of Southeast Asia, Grab and Go-Jek are competing to become the region’s ‘super app.’ Since Uber exited more than a year ago, the ride-hailing war has developed into a contest to become the daily go-to app for the region’s 600 million consumers. That’s seen Go-Jek and Grab steadily add new features and services. Those range from the obvious like food and grocery deliveries, to messages, haircuts and other services on demand, and now even games, video streaming and other entertainment.

Grab operates in eight countries while Go-Jek, which finally forayed outside of Indonesia last year, is present in four.

Shared e-scooters aren’t just gaining popularity in the United States; they’re hitting the streets of China, too. Recognizing the possibility that some people just don’t want to pedal that last mile, China’s transportation startup Hellobike is setting up a 1 billion yuan ($145 million) joint venture with Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial and battery maker CATL to provide battery-swapping services for scooters.

That’s according to an announcement from Hellobike on Wednesday, though it did not specify individual shares of the three partners.

Hellobike, backed by Ant Financial, has evolved from a bike sharing service into a one-stop app to include ride-hailing and other transportation means. That puts it in competition with car-hailing leader Didi Chuxing and Mobike, the bike sharing service now owned by Meituan Dianping.

Three-year-old Hellobike claims it’s now serving more than 200 million users in some 360 cities around China. It has its eye set on electric bikes for some time, especially when it comes to capturing users in smaller cities where buildings are more spread out. Its existing battery-swapping service, according to the announcement, can fulfill the energy need of more than two million bikes daily, and the JV will potentially give its network a boost.

Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, seems like a key partner for Hellobike as it’s China’s largest battery maker for electric vehicles and has years of experience supplying to local carmakers as well as more recently international players Volvo and Toyota.

“China is ‘a country on two wheels,” said Yang Lei, Hellobike’s co-founder and chief executive officer, adding that there are one billion trips that are completed on two-wheelers in China each day. For some context, the country has a population of about 1.4 billion.

Many people in China own electric scooters. Food delivery workers ride them to navigate through rush hour traffic. Grandparents send their grandchildren to school on sun and rain-proof e-bikes. The problem, Hellobike claims, is that private bikes and their batteries can get stolen and charging stations are hard to find. What’s more, most batteries for scooters on the market currently fail to meet international environmental standards.

The three-way joint venture hopes to solve these issues by putting up battery-swapping infrastructure across the country. Users will scan a bar code at one of the swapping stations, take out a fresh, charged battery to replace their drained one, and pay via Ant’s e-wallet, which claims to have one billion users so most people can access the service without downloading a new app.

Spanish soccer’s premier league, LaLiga, has netted itself a €250,000 (~$280k) fine for privacy violations of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) related to its official app.

As we reported a year ago, users of the LaLiga app were outraged to discover the smartphone software does rather more than show minute-by-minute commentary of football matches — but can use the microphone and GPS of fans’ phones to record their surroundings in a bid to identify bars which are unofficially streaming games instead of coughing up for broadcasting rights.

Unwitting fans who hadn’t read the tea leaves of opaque app permissions took to social media to vent their anger at finding they’d been co-opted into an unofficial LaLiga piracy police force as the app repurposed their smartphone sensors to rat out their favorite local bars.

The spy mode function is not mentioned in the app’s description.

El Diaro reports the fine being issued by Spain’s data protection watchdog, the AEPD. A spokesperson for the watchdog confirmed the penalty but told us the full decision has not yet been published.

Per El Diaro’s report, the AEPD found LaLiga failed to be adequately clear about how the app recorded audio, violating Article 5.1 of the GDPR — which requires that personal data be processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner. It said LaLiga should have indicated to app users every time the app remotely switched on the microphone to record their surroundings.

If LaLiga had done so that would have required some form of in-app notification once per minute every time a football match is in play, being as — once granted permission to record audio — the app does so for five sections every minute when a league game is happening.

Instead the app only asks for permission to use the microphone twice per user (per LaLiga’s explanation).

The AEPD found the level of notification the app provides to users inadequate — pointing out, per El Diaro’s reports, that users are unlikely to remember what they have previously consented each time they use the app.

It suggests active notification could be provided to users each time the app is recording, such as by displaying an icon that indicates the microphone is listening in, according to the newspaper. 

The watchdog also found LaLiga to have violated Article 7.3 of the GDPR which stipulates that when consent is being used as the legal basis for processing personal data users should have the right to withdraw their consent at any time. Whereas, again, the LaLiga app does not offer users an ongoing chance to withdraw consent to its spy mode recording after the initial permission requests.

LaLiga has been given a month to correct the violations with the app. However in a statement responding to the AEPD’s decision the association has denied any wrongdoing — and said it plans to appeal the fine.

“LaLiga disagrees deeply with the interpretation of the AEPD and believes that it has not made the effort to understand how the technology [functions],” it writes. “For the microphone functionality to be active, the user has to expressly, proactively and on two occasions grant consent, so it can not be attributed to LaLiga lack of
transparency or information about this functionality.”

“LaLiga will appeal the decision in court to prove that has acted in accordance with data protection regulations,” it adds.

A video produced by LaLiga to try to sell the spy mode function to fans following last year’s social media backlash claims it does not capture any personal data — and describes the dual permission requests to use the microphone as “an exercise in transparency”.

Clearly, the AEPD takes a very different view.

LaLiga’s argument against the AEPD’s decision that it violated the GDPR appears to rest on its suggestion that the watchdog does not understand the technology it’s using — which it claims “neither record, store, or listen to conversations”.

So it looks to be trying to push its own self-serving interpretation of what is and isn’t personal data. (Nor is it the only commercial entity attempting that, of course.)

In the response statement, which we’ve translated from Spanish, LaLiga writes:

The technology used is designed to generate exclusively a specific sound footprint (fingerprint acoustic). This fingerprint only contains 0.75% of the information, discarding the remaining 99.25%, so it is technically impossible to interpret the voice or human conversations.

This fingerprint is transformed into an alphanumeric code (hash) that cannot be reversed to recreate the original sound. The technology’s operation is backed by an independent expert report, that among other arguments that favor our position, concludes that it “does not allow LaLiga to know the contents of any conversation or identify potential speakers”. Furthermore, it adds that this fraud control mechanism “does not store the information captured from the microphone of the mobile” and “the information captured by the microphone of the mobile is subjected to a complex transformation process that is irreversible”.

In comments to El Diaro, LaLiga also likens its technology to the Shazam app — which compares an audio fingerprint to try to identify a song also being recorded in real-time via the phone’s microphone.

However Shazam users manually activate its listening feature, and are shown a visual ‘listening’ icon during the process. Whereas LaLiga has created an embedded spy mode that systematically switches itself after a couple of initial permissions. So it’s perhaps not the best comparison to try to suggest.

LaLiga’s statement adds that the audio eavesdropping on fans’ surroundings is intended to “achieve a legitimate goal” of fighting piracy. 

“LaLiga would not be acting diligently if it did not use all means and technologies at its fingertips to fight against piracy,” it writes. “It is a particularly relevant task taking into account the enormous magnitude of fraud in the marketing system, which is estimated at approximately 400 million euros per year.”

LaLiga also says it will not be making any changes to how the app functions because it already intends to remove what it describes to El Diario as “experimental” functionality at the end of the current football season, which ends June 30.

With most small grocery stores in India yet to get online, startups racing to digitize them continue to see promising backing from investors. Jumbotail, an online wholesale marketplace for grocery and food items, today said it has raised $12.7 million to scale its operations.

The Series B financing round for the Bangalore-based startup was led by Heron Rock, with participation from Capria Fund, BNK Ventures and William Jarvis and existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, and Kalaari Capital . The three-and-a-half-year old startup has raised about $24 million to date.

More than 10 million grocery stores, locally known as kiranas, bridge urban cities, towns and villages in India. They control over 95% of the $350 billion food and grocery market in the nation, according to some estimates.

Jumbotail operates a marketplace that connects tens of thousands of these kirana stores with brands and traders. It offers a whole suite of services including supply chain logistics, a mobile app for placing orders, integration with point-and-sales devices, and credit solutions to shop owners that can’t easily get loan from banks.

Ashish Jhina, cofounder and COO of Jumbotail, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will invest the fresh capital in developing AI solutions to improve its supply chain network, and make it easier for brands to get started on the marketplace.

Jumbotail, which is only operational in Bangalore area for now, offers its mobile app and support in four languages (English, Hindi, Malayalam, and Kannada), something that is crucially important for their business.

“Our fundamental principle is to serve our customers in languages they are comfortable in. Many of these people are not using other apps. They are using smartphones for the first time. This is also their first experience with e-commerce,” he said.

Jhina added that even as Bangalore area is the only place the startup operates in, Jumbotail is on track to clock $100 million in GMV there by year-end. The startup is exploring expansion in other cities and will make moves in that space soon enough, he said, without disclosing the geography.

The startup employs about 140 people and has an additional 400 staff that work in supply chain network. It’s a small team compared to the likes of Amazon India and Walmart -owned Flipkart that are increasingly working with small retailers in the country to grow their wholesale operations. And then there is Reliance Retail, which is expanding its footprint quickly, too.

But Jhina, an alumnus of Stanford, don’t necessarily seem them as a big threat. On the contrary, he believes that since much of the market remains untapped, any player with deep pockets is helping educate the masses about the potential of e-commerce in the nation. In some ways, Jumbotail also competes with the likes of BigBasket, Grofers, Udaan, and ShopX, all of which are comparatively heavily backed.

IBM launched its Quantum computer program in Africa today, announcing a partnership with South Africa’s Wits University that will extend to 15 additional universities across 9 countries.

Quantum—or IBM Q, as the U.S. based company calls it—is a computer that uses quantum bits (or qubits) to top the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputers.

When launched in early 2019, IBM said “Q systems are designed to one day tackle problems…seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle.”  It named future IBM Q applications in financial data, minimizing global financial risk, and optimizing logistics.

On how Q works, “It’s not your usual one and zeros. It’s about the superposition of ones and zeros, to have three zeros, a one, two ones to create a qubit,” IBM Research Africa VP Solomon Assefa told TechCrunch on a call.

“Because of that, and that it has so many difference states, the amount of computing you can do becomes exponential.”

IBM Q operates out of IBM’s Yorktown Heights research center in New York and will be accessed from African universities via the cloud.

IBM believes Q could yield research and development advances in areas such as drug discovery based on Africa’s genetic diversity that could lead to new treatments for diseases like HIV or TB.

This is one of the research areas IBM will focus on in its rollout of Q Africa to Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Assefa sees other potential research and use-case for Q Africa in financial sectors, mining, and natural resources management.

“What excites me here, is for once we are ahead in Africa for joining this movement. In 5 to 10 years, Q will have significant impact, but if we can start the wave now, you never know what kind of applications and research will come out of this technology,” said Assefa.

Wits University will manage access to Q from the 15 additional African education institutions, that include Addis Ababa University, the University of Nairobi, and University of Lagos.

IBM will also convene a camp for 200 computer scientists using Q this December in Cape Town. Researchers interested in working with IBM Q can apply online.

The program is part of IBM Research Africa’s extended build-out on the continent, since launching a  facility in Kenya in 2013 and expanding it to South Africa in 2016. In Africa, IBM Research has extended its capabilities to a number of partnerships, including blockchain enabled collaborations with agtech startups Twiga and Hello Tractor.

IBM also maintains an extensive commercial services and consulting business in Africa, for which its research activities could have application.

It could be a ways off before Q rolls up into that, according to Assefa. “We are developing commercial grade Q machines…in terms of that being applicable for Africa, it’s still early days,” he said.

 

 

 

IBM launched its Quantum computer program in Africa today, announcing a partnership with South Africa’s Wits University that will extend to 15 additional universities across 9 countries.

Quantum—or IBM Q, as the U.S. based company calls it—is a computer that uses quantum bits (or qubits) to top the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputers.

When launched in early 2019, IBM said “Q systems are designed to one day tackle problems…seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle.”  It named future IBM Q applications in financial data, minimizing global financial risk, and optimizing logistics.

On how Q works, “It’s not your usual one and zeros. It’s about the superposition of ones and zeros, to have three zeros, a one, two ones to create a qubit,” IBM Research Africa VP Solomon Assefa told TechCrunch on a call.

“Because of that, and that it has so many difference states, the amount of computing you can do becomes exponential.”

IBM Q operates out of IBM’s Yorktown Heights research center in New York and will be accessed from African universities via the cloud.

IBM believes Q could yield research and development advances in areas such as drug discovery based on Africa’s genetic diversity that could lead to new treatments for diseases like HIV or TB.

This is one of the research areas IBM will focus on in its rollout of Q Africa to Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Assefa sees other potential research and use-case for Q Africa in financial sectors, mining, and natural resources management.

“What excites me here, is for once we are ahead in Africa for joining this movement. In 5 to 10 years, Q will have significant impact, but if we can start the wave now, you never know what kind of applications and research will come out of this technology,” said Assefa.

Wits University will manage access to Q from the 15 additional African education institutions, that include Addis Ababa University, the University of Nairobi, and University of Lagos.

IBM will also convene a camp for 200 computer scientists using Q this December in Cape Town. Researchers interested in working with IBM Q can apply online.

The program is part of IBM Research Africa’s extended build-out on the continent, since launching a  facility in Kenya in 2013 and expanding it to South Africa in 2016. In Africa, IBM Research has extended its capabilities to a number of partnerships, including blockchain enabled collaborations with agtech startups Twiga and Hello Tractor.

IBM also maintains an extensive commercial services and consulting business in Africa, for which its research activities could have application.

It could be a ways off before Q rolls up into that, according to Assefa. “We are developing commercial grade Q machines…in terms of that being applicable for Africa, it’s still early days,” he said.

 

 

 

This year’s edition of Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report, released earlier today, once again included a section on China prepared by Hillhouse Capital. There are now 3.8 billion Internet users globally, more than half of the world’s population, but growth is slowing (as demonstrated by declining smartphone shipments). Internet leaders in China can continue helping companies in other countries find ways to engage their users, the way WeChat launched features, including mini-programs and e-commerce, that are now ubiquitous in messaging and social media apps around the world.

China has the most internet users in the world, about 800,000,000 or 21% of the world’s total internet users (it is followed by India, the United States and Indonesia). Chinese companies took seven of the top 30 spots for internet market cap leaders: Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan Dianping, JD.com, Baidu, NetEase and Xiaomi—stable, just one less than one year.

Mobile Internet users in China grew 9% year-over-year in 2018 to 817 million, while mobile data usage increased 189% year-over-year, faster than 2017’s 162% growth. While data volume share (or new data captured, generated and replicated by region) is falling in the U.S., it is rising in China, second in growth only to EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

In particular, this year’s report highlighted short-form videos as a key driver of Internet usage growth in China, leading user and usage growth across all app categories. Users spent a total of nearly 600 million hours per day watching short-form videos on mobile in April 2019, more than in any other category. Short-form video leaders included Douyin (known as Tik Tok in international markets), Kuaishou and Haokan.

Another major video trend is live-streaming, especially for e-commerce platforms. Taobao got more than $14 billion GMV through live-streaming in 2018, while fashion e-commerce and social media platform Mogu attributed 24% of its GMV to live-streaming, which also had a four times repeat purchase rate.

While WeChat’s mini-programs have already influenced other apps like Instagram, WhatsApp, Kakao and Line, there is still plenty to learn from them. For example, the role they play as CRMs for many Chinese retailers: many brands send information about sales and other promotions by public accounts on WeChat or send red packets for discounts to group chats to drive engagement.

The rise of the “super app”

Meituan Dianping’s “super app” is growing increasingly huge. It now includes more than 30 services (for example, restaurant reviews, reservations, movie tickets, home rentals, hotel bookings, payments, travel booking, food delivery and grocery ordering), although restaurant-related services and travel make up as much as 88% of its revenue. The company’s annual transacting users grew 26% year-over-year to 412 million.

Alipay has also evolved from a payments app to hosting more than 200,000 mini-programs, including ones that enable users to manage their healthcare, investments, invoices, car payments and insurance. Alipay now counts more than one billion users, 70% of whom use at least three financial services in the app.

The influence of these “super apps” can be seen outside of China in apps like Grab, Rappi and Uber, which are adding more services (for example, Uber’s app now lets you order food, reserve e-bikes and find promotions at other businesses).

From offline to online 

Another trend that may make its way to other countries is the wide variety of business models used by grocery delivery apps in China. In the U.S., most grocery delivery apps take one of two approaches, either partnering with retailers and delivering groceries from their brick-and-mortar stores to users (like Instacart) or delivering from their own stores or warehouses, like Amazon Prime Now and Whole Foods.

In China, on the other hand, grocery delivery apps are divided into four business models. Some, like Alibaba’s Freshippo (Hema) and JD.com’s 7 Fresh, own, operate and offer delivery or pickup from their own stores, while others like Miss Fresh and Dindong Maicai, deliver from their own warehouses, using their own fulfillment systems. A third group, including Xingsheng Youxuan, Songshu Pinpin and Dailubo, works with local franchised partners and allows users to order or make group purchases in WeChat mini-programs for next-day delivery or pick up. The fourth group offers quick deliveries from retail partners and includes big companies like Meituan, Alibaba’s Ele.me and Taoxianda, and JD.

Riding the same offline-to-online wave, educators are digitizing classes that were traditionally taught in person. Online tutoring has hit the mainstream as K-12 students embrace homework apps to get afterschool help. Similarly, parents sign their younger children (ages 3-10) up for English and coding classes hosted on smartphones.

The Chinese government has also gone digital and is increasingly offering public services through in-house apps and third-party super apps such as WeChat and Alipay. The list of tasks that citizens can complete on their phones includes applying for visas, paying utility bills, virtually queuing up at hospitals, renewing a driver’s license, and many more that can save people the hassle of hopping from one government office to another.