Month: June 2019

What is the world to do with the graveyards of dockless bicycles left over after China’s bike sharing startups retreated from global markets?

One man has come up with the best idea to date: donate them to students who need them.

Entrepreneur Mike Than Tun Win has bought 10,000 bikes from bike-sharing companies which he plans to provide to school children across Myanmar, many of who walk miles to school and, more broadly, lack transportation for their families.

“It’s a common sight to see lines and lines of students walking long distances from home to school in rural villages,” Than explained. “Some students can walk up to one hour from home to school and the families can hardly afford a simple form of transport like bicycle or motorcycle… a school bus is almost unheard of to the students in rural villages.”

To bridge the gap, Than — whose companies include tech entrepreneurship project 8bod.com and travel startup flymya.com — created a non-profit organization called LessWalk which is buying up the bikes and making them suitable for students.

That means fitting them with a second seat, switching the QR code-scan lock for a regular key lock and then shipping them to Myanmar. Many of the bikes have been bought from liquidators — who took control of oBike’s shuttered business in Singapore and inherited Ofo’s abandoned fleets — which makes their acquisition cheaper than regular bikes. But still, the fixes and shipping costs are estimated at around $35-$40 per bike.

FreeWalk is modifying bikes to make them suitable for underprivileged students who walk to school in Myanmar

Than described those prices as “a rare once in a lifetime opportunity” to make a positive impact, but there’s still a significant cost attached to the project.

Than told TechCrunch that the project is funded with around $400,000 in capital, half of which has come from donations and sponsors with Than himself providing the rest.

“Suddenly, there was an opportunity to buy [these bikes] at fraction of price,” he said in an interview. “The benefit it can develop is well beyond that cost.”

Right now, Than said that he has received around 4,000 bikes, which are currently warehoused in Myanmar. Rather than sad, well-used or damaged cycles, LessWalk has bought itself unused, new-generation products that hadn’t been deployed to the streets. Once sitting in a warehouse awaiting a rollout with startups, the adapted bikes will be distributed to students this year.

LessWalk has around 4,000 former bike sharing cycles in its warehouse in Myanmar

But giving out thousands of bicycles is no easy feat given that Myanmar has a population of over 50 million people and more than nine million students.

Than said he’s currently in contact with government organizations and civic groups in Myanmar to identify potential beneficiaries. The primary focus is students aged 13-16 who walk 2km or more to school each day and part of families without transport. He envisages that bikes will be given out in batches every two weeks for two or three months with support from volunteer groups and the government, but a lot of the operational approach is still to be defined.

“I’m only halfway through the journey. The remaining 50 percent is making sure we have an impact,” Than told TechCrunch.

Volunteers from LessWalk move former Ofo bikes into storage ahead of their distribution to students in Myanmar

Further down the line, he is hopeful that he can inspire “global friends” to follow his lead and set up similar donation programs that will put the hundreds of thousands of abandoned bikes to work, instead of creating yet more urban trash. Already, Than said he is fielding interest from Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

Donations aren’t the only sustainable future for fleets of former Mobike and Ofo bikes, in some cases the people who ran the services are taking control. Indeed, a number of Mobike executives got together to buy out the company’s European business from Meituan — the on-demand giant that owns Mobike — for $20 million. That deal is scheduled to close this month.

After a series of tweets that made it seem as if YouTube was contradicting its own anti-harassment policies, the video platform published a blog post in an attempt to clarify its stance. But even though the post is supposed to “provide more details and context than is possible in any one string of tweets,” it is similarly confusing and raises yet more questions about how serious YouTube is about combatting harassment and hate speech on its platform—especially if the abuse comes from a high-profile channel with million of subscribers.

YouTube is currently under fire for not taking earlier, more decisive actions against conservative commentator Steven Crowder after he made homophobic and racist comments about Vox reporter Carlos Maza in multiple videos. The platform eventually demonetized Crowder’s channel, which currently has more than 3.8 million subscribers, but then stated it would allow Crowder to start making ad revenue again if he fixed “all of the issues” with his channel and stopped linking to an online shop that sold shirts saying “Socialism is for f*gs.”

Before demonetizing Crowder’s channels, YouTube responded to Maza in a series of tweets that created confusion about how it enforces it policies. The platform said after an “in-depth review” of flagged videos by Crowder, it decided that even though the language they contained was “clearly hurtful,” the videos did not violate its policies because “as an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone-from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts-to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies.” This was in spite of the fact that Crowder’s derogatory references to Maza’s ethnicity and sexual orientation violate several of YouTube’s policy against harassment and cyberbullying, including “content that makes hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person.”

I’ve been called an anchor baby, a lispy queer, a Mexican, etc. These videos get millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter.

— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019

In the new blog post, posted by YouTube head of communications Chris Dale, the platform gives a lengthy explanation of how it attempts to draw the line between things like “edgy stand-up comedy routines” and harassment.

As an open platform, we sometimes host opinions and views that many, ourselves included, may find offensive. These could include edgy stand-up comedy routines, a chart-topping song, or a charged political rant — and more. Short moments from these videos spliced together paint a troubling picture. But, individually, they don’t always cross the line.

There are two key policies at play here: harassment and hate speech. For harassment, we look at whether the purpose of the video is to incite harassment, threaten or humiliate an individual; or whether personal information is revealed. We consider the entire video: For example, is it a two-minute video dedicated to going after an individual? A 30-minute video of political speech where different individuals are called out a handful of times? Is it focused on a public or private figure? For hate speech, we look at whether the primary purpose of the video is to incite hatred toward or promote supremacism over a protected group; or whether it seeks to incite violence. To be clear, using racial, homophobic, or sexist epithets on their own would not necessarily violate either of these policies. For example, as noted above, lewd or offensive language is often used in songs and comedic routines. It’s when the primary purpose of the video is hate or harassment. And when videos violate these policies, we remove them.

In the case of Crowder’s persistent attacks on Maza, YouTube repeated its stance that the videos flagged by users “did not violate our Community Guidelines.”

The decision to demonetize Crowder’s channel was made, however, because “we saw the widespread harm to the YouTube community resulting from the ongoing pattern of egregious behavior, took a deeper look, and made the decision to suspend monetization,” Dale wrote.

In order to start earning ad revenue again, “all relevant issues with the channel need to be addressed, including any videos that violate our policies, as well as things like offensive merchandise,” he added.

The latest YouTube controversy is both upsetting and exhausting, because it is yet another reminder of the company’s lack of action against hate speech and harassment, despite constantly insisting that it will do better (just yesterday, for example, YouTube announced that it will ban videos that support views like white supremacy, Nazi ideology or promote conspiracy theories that deny events like the Holocaust or Sandy Hook).

The passivity of social media companies when it comes to stemming the spread of hate through its platforms has real-life consequences (for example, when (Maza was doxxed and harassed by fans of Crowder last year), and no amount of prevarication or distancing can stop the damage once its been done.

It’s official. After much anticipation, China named the first companies to receive 5G licenses for commercial use on Thursday.

The announcement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the country’s telecoms authority, came as Huawei, the Chinese company that captured nearly 30% of the world’s telecom gear revenues in 2018, faces mounting scrutiny in the west over potential security concerns.

The greenlight arrived months ahead of the long-expected due date for China’s 5G licenses, which was said to be late 2019. The acceleration clearly demonstrates Beijing’s ambition to race ahead in the global 5G race where the United States and South Korea already had a head start in commercial deployment.

The MIIT approved three network operators — China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom — and cable network company China Broadcasting Network to run the next-gen cellular connectivity.

Other players in 5G, including network equipment makers, smartphone manufacturers, chip makers and apps creators, are also gearing up. Over the last few months, Samsung, Oppo, Xiaomi and Huawei have each announced plans to bring 5G into their handsets.

In the meantime, internet giant Tencent has been quietly testing cloud-based games with Intel, and Netflix-like iQiyi has joined hands with China Unicom to make virtual reality products, representing just two of the many applications that rely on 5G-enabled low latency and higher bandwidth to work.

It’s easy to be skeptical of lending companies of every stripe. They uniformly rely on customers who don’t have enough money to cover their bills and are willing to pay interest on money borrowed in exchange for capital they can spend sooner — sometimes immediately.

Unfortunately, those consumers with the worst credit, or no credit at all, are sometimes left with few options other than to work with payday lenders that typically charge astonishingly high annual percentage rates. Until recently, for example, the state of Ohio had the dubious distinction of allowing payday lenders to charge higher rates than anywhere else in the country — with a typical ARR of 591%.

It’s one reason that venture capitalist Rebecca Lynn, a managing partner with Canvas Ventures and an early investor in the online lending company LendingClub, has largely steered clear of the numerous startups crowding into the industry in recent years. It’s also why she just led a $10.5 million investment in Possible Finance, a two-year-old, Seattle-based outfit that’s doing what she “thought was impossible,” she says. The startup is “helping people on the lower end of the credit spectrum improve their financial outlook without being predatory.”

At the very least, Possible is charging a whole lot less interest on loans than some of its rivals. Here’s how it works: a person pulls up the company’s mobile app, through which she shares the bank account that she has to have in order to get a loan from the startup. Based on her transaction history alone — Possible doesn’t check whether or not that person has a credit history —  the company makes a fast, machine-learning driven decision about whether a loan is a risk worth taking. Assuming the borrower is approved, it then transfers up to $500 to that individual the following day, money that can be paid over numerous installments over a two-month period.

Those repayments are reported to the credit agencies, helping that person either build, or rebuild, her credit rating.

If the money can’t be repaid right away, the borrower has up to 29 more days to pay it. ( By federal law, a late payment must be reported to credit reporting bureaus when it’s 30 days past due.)

Possible has immediate advantages over some of the many usurious lenders out there. First, it gives people more time to pay back their loans, where traditional payday lenders give borrowers just 30 days. It also charges APRs in the 150% to 200% range. That may still seem high, but as Possible’s cofounder and CEO Tony Huang explains it, the company has to “charge a minimum amount of fees to recoup our loss and service the loan. Smaller ticket items have more fixed costs, which is why banks don’t offer them.”

More important to Lynn, traditional payday loans are structured so those payments don’t impact credit scores, often trapping consumers in a cycle of borrowing at excessively high rates from shady issuers. Meanwhile, Possible, she believes, gives them a way off that path.

Yet Possible has another thing going for it: the apparent blessing of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Alex Horowitz, who guides research for Pew’s consumer finance project. As Horowitz tells us, his group has spent years looking at payday loans and other deep subprime credit lending, and one of their key findings about such loans “isn’t just that interest rates or APRs are high, but they’re unnecessarily high.”

In fact, though payday lenders once warned that they would exit certain states that set price limits on how much they can wring from their customers, a “kind of remarkable finding is that states are setting prices as much as four times lower — and these lenders are still coming in and providing credit.”

Horowitz gives Possible credit for not pricing its loans at the ceilings that those states are setting. “Usually,” he explains, “customers are price sensitive, so if a lender comes in two to three times lower than others, they’ll win a lot of customers.” That’s not true in the market in which Possible is playing, says Horowitz. Customers focus on how fast and how easily they can line up a loan, making it “unusual for a lender to offer loans that’s at a price point far below its rivals.”

Worth noting: Ohio, which once allowed payday lenders to get away with murder, is one of those states that more recently implemented interest rate ceilings, with a new payday lending law that went into effect in late April. It’s now one of six states where Possible operates (“with many more to come,” says Huang).

Possible, which currently employs 14 people, has processed 50,000 loans on behalf of users since launching the product in April of last year.

With its new round of funding, it has now raised $13.5 million altogether, including from Columbia Pacific Advisors; Union Bay Partners; Unlock Venture Partners, and angel investor Tom Williams.

The wheels are turning on Didi Chuxing’s first major expansion in Latin America after the Chinese ride-hailing firm announced moves into Chile and Colombia to double its presence in the region.

Didi said it rolled into Valparaiso, Chile’s third largest metropolis, and Colombian capital city Bogota this week. The company plans to expand beyond those cities over time, and, in terms of services, it said that it will add dedicated licensed taxis in Colombia this year.

Anchored in China, where it is the country’s dominant ride-hailing service, Didi began to place focus on international expansion last year and Latin America is a key part of its global ambitions.

In the region, Didi currently operates in Brazil — where it acquired local player 99 for $1 billion — and Mexico, but recent reports have linked it with more countries in Latin America. In February, Reuters reported that the company was hiring for operational staff in Chile, Peru and Colombia. Other reports have put its total headcount in Latin America at over 1,000 staff, that’s a clear indication of its intent for the region.

In a statement, Mi Yang — who leads Didi’s operations in Central and South America — called Chile and Colombia “two important centers of growth and innovation in the region.”

Outside of Latin America and its homeland, Didi is present in Taiwan and Australia, where it has other global connection through its investment deals. The company owns a significant stake in Southeast Asia-based Grab — it doubled down with a $2 billion investment alongside SoftBank in 2017 — as well as Bolt (formerly known as Taxify) across Europe and Africa, Ola in India and Lyft in the U.S.

Didi also has relations with Uber as a mutual investment was part of the deal that saw it acquire the Uber China business in 2016, and it invested in Middle East-based Careem, which is being acquired by Uber.

That’s a pretty complicated web of relationships and, with Didi’s global expansion, it often pits the Chinese company against its investments. In Australia, for example, Didi is up against Uber, Bolt AND Ola.

In Latin America, Uber is again a competitor and others the field include local players Cabify, Easy Taxi and Beat from Greece — companies that Didi hasn’t backed.

On offer is a market with vast growth potential. Latin America is the world’s second-fastest-growing mobile market. In a region of approximately 640 million people, there are more than 200 million smartphone users and, by 2020, predictions say that 63% of Latin America’s population will have access to the mobile Internet.

Didi’s globetrotting comes at a challenging time for its domestic business, where it is still reeling from the murder of two passengers last year.

As TechCrunch reported last month, Didi is revamping its security systems to put an increased focus on passenger security in the wake of those tragic deaths. That’s come at significant cost and it is said to have pushed back plans to take the company. Uber and Lyft have, of course, completed IPO this year, but Didi’s own timeline for doing so is unclear.

More generally, Didi is far from the first Chinese company to head to Latin America with ambitions of dizzying growth. Earlier this decade, Baidu made a major push to own the nascent web and search business in Brazil — which culminated in an acquisition — while Tencent has backed fintech unicorn Nubank and it is trying sniff out other potential giants-in-waiting as the region’s ecosystem matures.

Everyone gets a kick out of mocking the quintessential San Francisco techie, Patagonia vest and all. ‘Socially Inept,’ a new traveling comedy cohort, is making a business out of it.

The group has been roasting the tech scene in hubs across the U.S., including Seattle, where the company is based, as well as Los Angeles, Austin and San Francisco, since last summer.

It’s made out of current and former techies themselves. Co-founders Jesse Warren and Austin Nasso have a history at Microsoft . Warren recently left his full-time gig at the tech giant, while Nasso has yet to let go of the 9 to 5. Lee Yang, a producer, is concurrently building another startup called Epitome.io.

The hope is that the traveling comedy show will gain followers across the U.S. and perform shows in dozens of cities. That way, the entire team can commit to the effort full-time.

At their shows, Socially Inept taps local comedic talent to roast willing local tech workers.

“On the one hand they are wealthy and intelligent which puts them in a sort of ‘elevated status.’ It’s hard to really punch down on a recent college grad who makes $130,000 per year,” Warren recently told GeekWire. “However, despite their high status they typically have many funny characteristics and interests such as their social awkwardness, obsession with self-help, inability to properly dress themselves, and fascination with the television series ‘My Little Pony.'”

The show is making its way back to San Francisco this Thursday for a night of tech-themed insults at Cobb’s Comedy Club. Warren and Nasso, along with local comedians Tony Zavala and Julie Ash will be doing the honors of roasting.

Everyone gets a kick out of mocking the quintessential San Francisco techie, Patagonia vest and all. ‘Socially Inept,’ a new traveling comedy cohort, is making a business out of it.

The group has been roasting the tech scene in hubs across the U.S., including Seattle, where the company is based, as well as Los Angeles, Austin and San Francisco, since last summer.

It’s made out of current and former techies themselves. Co-founders Jesse Warren and Austin Nasso have a history at Microsoft . Warren recently left his full-time gig at the tech giant, while Nasso has yet to let go of the 9 to 5. Lee Yang, a producer, is concurrently building another startup called Epitome.io.

The hope is that the traveling comedy show will gain followers across the U.S. and perform shows in dozens of cities. That way, the entire team can commit to the effort full-time.

At their shows, Socially Inept taps local comedic talent to roast willing local tech workers.

“On the one hand they are wealthy and intelligent which puts them in a sort of ‘elevated status.’ It’s hard to really punch down on a recent college grad who makes $130,000 per year,” Warren recently told GeekWire. “However, despite their high status they typically have many funny characteristics and interests such as their social awkwardness, obsession with self-help, inability to properly dress themselves, and fascination with the television series ‘My Little Pony.'”

The show is making its way back to San Francisco this Thursday for a night of tech-themed insults at Cobb’s Comedy Club. Warren and Nasso, along with local comedians Tony Zavala and Julie Ash will be doing the honors of roasting.

Just in time for your road trip to LA for E3, Square Enix has suddenly made the soundtracks to every main Final Fantasy game available for free to listen to online. Just log into Spotify or Apple Music and search for “Final Fantasy original soundtrack.”

I just checked and Final Fantasies I-XV and some sub-sequels are all there, some in original and remastered versions, plus plenty of popular (or not) side titles like FF Tactics and Type-0. There’s even the soundtrack for the ill-considered 2001 movie, The Spirits Within.

No X-2, unfortunately for the few who liked that one (usually very intensely), and a few of the other non-main entries (like Tactics Advance and A2) are missing right now but perhaps only late to arrive. So it’s not every every Final Fantasy, but close enough that I don’t feel bad about putting it in the headline.

There’s been no mention of it on Square Enix’s social media channels, even the Final Fantasy-specific one. But it likely has to do with a special concert being given this week for FF VII, the remake of which is almost certain to appear at E3.

I’ve listened to a few tracks and it all seems legit. The only thing is that many of the titles are in Japanese — so it might be difficult to pick out your favorite character’s theme or what have you if you don’t, you know, speak that language.

Now you can at last create a greatest hits of Nobuo Uematsu’s FF work and access it from anywhere. It’s been a long time coming.

Apple is closing a loophole that allowed app developers to access users’ potentially sensitive and private data. With the launch of iOS 13, apps that request access to users’ Contacts will no longer be able to read the data in the “Notes” field of those address book entries.

For years, security professionals have warned people not to store private information in their phone’s Address Book because it’s not protected or encrypted in any way. And that makes it vulnerable.

Yet, people continued to use their Address Book as a makeshift password manager. Or they would enter in a variety of other private information into the Notes field in Contacts.

Perhaps they’d note their ATM pin code, the door code for their home, a vault code, a social security number, credit card information, and more. They may also have written down private notes about a person that they wouldn’t want shared.

However, when an iOS app asked for access to a user’s Contacts, it would receive all this data from the Notes field, in addition to the name, address, email and phone number stored.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week, the company announced that would no longer be the case.

The Notes field, Apple said, could include potentially sensitive details like sneaky comments about the boss. In reality, many users’ Notes field may have contained much worse than that.

The company explained that most apps have no need to request this private Notes data, so this change won’t impact them. However, if an app developer does believe it has a valid reason for accessing the Notes field, they’ll be able to file a request for an exception.

Most users probably didn’t think too much about this problem. After all, those who were smart enough not to use their Address Book for sensitive information won’t care about this change because it doesn’t impact them.

And those who didn’t know any better now have Apple stepping in on their behalf to make sure their private data stays private.

A proposed merger between Fiat Chrysler -Renault that would have created the third largest global automaker, is off. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles withdrew its offer, the Wall Street Journal reported.

FCA confirmed to TechCrunch that it has withdrawn its offer, largely due to political conditions.

“FCA remains firmly convinced of the compelling, transformational rationale of a proposal that
has been widely appreciated since it was submitted, the structure and terms of which were
carefully balanced to deliver substantial benefits to all parties,” according to a company statement provided to TechCrunch. “However, it has become clear that the political conditions in France do not currently exist for such a combination to proceed successfully.”

FCA delivered May 27 a non-binding letter to Renault’s board that proposed combining the business as a 50-50 merger. FCA’s proposal illustrated the growing desire among automakers to consolidate, or form partnerships, in an environment of increasing regulatory pressure, declining sales and rising costs associated with next-generation technologies such as autonomous vehicle technology. Earlier Wednesday, BMW and Jaguar announced a collaboration on developing next-generation electric vehicle components.

Under the proposal, the combined businesses would have been split equally between FCA and Renault shareholders. The board would be a combined entity of 11 members, FCA said. The majority would be independent. FCA and Renault would get equal represent with four members ea

The WSJ  reported that Nissan Motor, French automaker Renault’s existing partner, was the primary sticking point in the merger. Renault has an alliance with Nissan Motor. Under that alliance, Renault owns 43.4 percent of Nissan. Nissan owns 15 percent of Renault.

The relationship between Renault and Nissan Motor has become stressed in the fallout over the arrest of former Renault-Nissan Alliance CEO Carlos Ghosn and subsequent power struggle, share vehicle parts and collaborate on technology.

This is a developing story.