Year: 2019

Last May, Google introduced Asylo, an open source framework for confidential computing, a technique favored by many of the big cloud vendors because it allows you to set up trusted execution environments that are shielded from the rest of the (potentially untrusted) system. Workloads and their data basically sit in a trusted enclave that adds another layer of protection against network and operating system vulnerabilities.

That’s not a new concept, but as Google argues, it has been hard to adopt. “Despite this promise, the adoption of this emerging technology has been hampered by dependence on specific hardware, complexity and the lack of an application development tool to run in confidential computing environments,” Google Cloud Engineering Director Jason Garms and Senior Product Manager Nelly Porter write in a blog post today. The promise of the Asylo framework, as you can probably guess, is to make confidential computing easy.

Asylo makes it easier to build applications that can run in these enclaves and can use various software- and hardware-based security back ends like Intel’s SGX and others. Once an app has been ported to support Asylo, you should also be able to take that code with you and run in on any other Asylo-supported enclave.

Right now, though, many of these technologies and practices around confidential computing remain in flux. Google notes that there are no set design patterns for building applications that then use the Asylo API and run in these enclaves, for example.The different hardware manufacturers also don’t necessarily work together to ensure their technologies are interoperable.

“Together with the industry, we can work toward more transparent and interoperable services to support confidential computing apps, for example, making it easy to understand and verify attestation claims, inter-enclave communication protocols, and federated identity systems across enclaves,” write Garms and Porter.

And to do that, Google is launching its Confidential Computing Challenge (C3) today. The idea here is to have developers create novel use cases for confidential computing — or to advance the current state of the technologies. If you do that and win, you’ll get $15,000 in cash, $5,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits and an undisclosed hardware gift (a Pixelbook or Pixel phone, if I had to guess).

In additionl, Google now also offers developers three hands-on labs that teach how to build apps using Asylo’s tools. Those are free for the first month if you use the code in Google’s blog post.

Today’s news that the (failing?) New York Times reported net income of $55.2 million, after losses a year earlier — and that its digital business raked in $709 million — is just one indicator that some of the nation’s oldest media properties are finally crossing the bridge into the 21st century.

The Times managed to turn a profit while employing 1,600 journalists — an all-time high. Fourth-quarter digital advertising revenue increased 22.8 percent, while print advertising revenue decreased 10.2 percent. Digital advertising revenue was $103.4 million, or 53.9 percent of total advertising revenues, compared with $84.2 million, or 46.1 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to the company.

Add those numbers to a newly robust Washington Post, a consistently profitable New Yorker, and the erection of paywalls at sites across the vast reaches of the internet point to a very simple lesson learned — people will pay for quality reporting, videos, personal writing, and exclusive information.

Given the excitement around subscriptions, it may seem surprising that TechCrunch isn’t doing something in this area… yet.

Some of this is driven by a newly relevant news cycle that has seen American audiences wake up to the day-to-day decisions that are reshaping the country from the halls of power in Congress and the White House .

“Our appeal to subscribers — and to the world’s leading advertisers — depends more than anything on the quality of our journalism,”  said the Times’ chief executive, Mark Thompson, in a statement. “That is why we have increased, rather than cut back, our investment in our newsroom and opinion departments. We want to accelerate our digital growth further, so in 2019, we will direct fresh investment into journalism, product and marketing.”

For some in the word salad business, the news comes a bit too late. Compare the fortunes of these hundred-year-old companies with the newer darlings of the media world and it becomes even more starkly clear how ad-driven businesses were eviscerated by social media.

Layoffs at BuzzFeed, Vice Media, and our own parent company Verizon Media Group especially point to the failings of the “new” media model. The Times actually covered this at some length, but it’s worth repeating.

At two other new media properties; Vox Media Group (a division of Comcast NBC Universal) and Axios, a new subscription newsletter business; it’s a combination

Owning an audience through exclusive information or distribution is a much better way to get to profitability then giving away the store to get eyeballs.

Even network television and movie studios are coming around to the subscription model as the salvation of their business. Ad revenues are declining and subscription services like Netflix and Spotify have already taken huge bites out of the cash cows of the broader entertainment industry. What do studios and networks have left but subscription, subscription, subscription? It’s why CBS launched its exclusive service, why Disney is launching theirs, and how Amazon, Netflix and (even) Hulu have managed to become ascendant.

With a subscriber base, it’s easier for media businesses to sell sponsorships to particular companies or brands that want the influence. With subscriptions, a core readership gets to support the investigative work of a group of journalists and support (and join) a community.

The eyeball business was a classic contrivance of first generation internet businesses — and it largely didn’t work then either.

Now the question remains whether this resurgence can also revivify the moribund prospects of local media. The Times and its marquee media brethren have a national scope and an amazing reach — or command a monopoly in large cities. What’s needed is the resurrection of a vibrant local news scene that can actually make money. Let’s see if the Times’ model shows the way… again.

I remember watching MIT professor Andrew McAfee years ago telling stories about the importance of data over gut feeling, whether it was predicting successful wines or making sound business decisions. We have been hearing about big data and data-driven decision making for so long, you would think it has become hardened into our largest organizations by now. As it turns out, new research by NewVantage Partners finds that most large companies are having problems implementing an organization-wide, data-driven strategy.

McAfee was fond of saying that before the data deluge we have today, the way most large organizations made decisions was via the HiPPO — the highest paid person’s opinion. Then he would chide the audience that this was not the proper way to run your business. Data, not gut feelings, even those based on experience, should drive important organizational decisions.

While companies haven’t failed to recognize McAfee’s advice, the NVP report suggests they are having problems implementing data-driven decision making across organizations. There are plenty of technological solutions out there today to help them from startups all the way to the largest enterprise vendors, but the data (see, you always need to go back to the data) suggests that it’s not a technology problem, it’s people problem.

Executives can have farsighted vision that their organizations need to be data-driven. They can acquire all of the latest solutions to bring data to the forefront, but unless they combine that with a broad cultural shift and a deep understanding of how to use that data inside business processes, they will continue to struggle.

The study’s authors, Randy Bean and Thomas H. Davenport, wrote about the people problem in their study’s executive summary. “We hear little about initiatives devoted to changing human attitudes and behaviors around data. Unless the focus shifts to these types of activities, we are likely to see the same problem areas in the future that we’ve observed year after year in this survey.”

The survey found that 72 percent of respondents have failed in this regard, reporting they haven’t been able to create a data-driven culture, whatever that means to individual respondents. Meanwhile, 69 percent reported they had failed to create a data-driven organization, although it would seem that these two metrics would be closely aligned.

Perhaps most discouraging of all is that the data is trending the wrong way. Over the last several years, the report’s authors say that those organizations calling themselves data-driven has actually dropped each year from 37.1% in 2017 to 32.4% in 2018 to 31.0% in the latest survey.

This matters on so many levels, but consider that as companies shift to artificial intelligence and machine learning, these technologies rely on abundant amounts of data to work effectively. What’s more, every organization regardless of its size, is generating vast amounts of data, simply as part of being a digital business in the 21st century. They need to find a way to control this data to make better decisions and understand their customers better. It’s essential.

There is so much talk about innovation and disruption, and understanding and affecting company culture, but so much of all this is linked. You need to be more agile. You need to be more digital. You need to be transformational. You need to be all of these things — and data is at the center of all of it.

Data has been called the new oil often enough to be cliche, but these results reveal that the lesson is failing to get through. Companies need to be data-driven now, this instant. This isn’t something to be working towards at this point. This is something you need to be doing, unless your ultimate goal is to become irrelevant.

Disney’s soon-to-launch streaming service and Netflix competitor, known as Disney+, will include non-Disney programming at launch, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed in a call with investors following Disney’s earnings on Tuesday. The company had already licensed a CBS show for its service, which led to questions about Disney’s content strategy for the new service. Iger said that while Disney’s long-term strategy will focus on the company’s own internally-sourced programming, it plans to launch this year with shows licensed from outside of Disney.

Last month, Disney had ordered the 10-episode series, “Diary of a Female President” from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writer Ilana Peña, Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”), and CBS TV Studios.

But it was unclear if a buy like this was something of a one-off for Disney, or if the company planned to strategically shop for more programming from outside of its walls to fill out Disney+.

The service, we already knew, will feature content from all of Disney’s big-name brands, including Marvel, LucasFilm/Star Wars, Pixar, National Geographic, and Disney Studios itself. And we knew, too, the service will focus on family-friendly fare, while snaring the exclusive streaming rights to things like the Star Wars and Marvel movies.

On Tuesday, Disney announced that “Captain Marvel” would be the first of its movies to stream exclusively on Disney+.

Disney will also produce original shows and movies for the service, including a “High School Musical” show, an animated “Monsters Inc.” series, a Marvel live-action title, and a “Star Wars” title, “The Mandalorian,” among other things.

What was less clear was whether Disney-owned content would be all there is to watch on Disney+ – at least until Disney’s Fox deal goes through, that is. The company said it plans to leverage some of its new Fox assets and output further down the road to round out Disney+’s offerings.

In the foreseeable future, however, Disney confirmed will strategically buy shows from other studios, and will continue to do so in the future

According to Iger, the long-term strategy is “pretty heavily weighted to internally sourced versus externally sourced.” But he added that there would be times when Disney would be “glad to license from third parties.”

One of those times, apparently, is launch.

“Because we need to launch the service with some volume – and it takes time to ramp up – we’re buying certain products from the outside opportunistically, and we’ll continue to do that,” said Iger. He added that this is something Disney has done for some time, in other areas of its business. For example, its theme parks licensed IP from George Lucas, as well as the Indiana Jones IP, and the Avatar IP.

“We’ll continue to look at opportunities that we think we can leverage because there is a potential consumer demand for it,” Iger said.

Streaming was a big part of Disney’s conversation with investors on Tuesday, as the public debut of Disney+ nears. Investors will get a first look at the new service on April 11, but the pricing and an exact release date aren’t yet known.

Disney also updated investors on its other streaming efforts, including ESPN+ milestone of 2+ million subscribers, and the company’s plans to use the same underlying technology platform, BAMTech, to power Disney+. The company touched on its plans for Hulu, too, again reiterating its desire to take the service international and to offer bundles that combined Hulu and ESPN+ or Disney+ in one package deal.

Iger spoke also of FX’s plans to output content to Hulu instead of Disney+, as FX doesn’t fit the latter’s family-friendly nature.

The shift to streaming is not coming without an initial hit to Disney’s business, though. The company noted it expected to lose $150 million from stopping its licensing deals with Netflix this year, as it expected. Disney believes that it will eventually make up for the loss as consumers sign up for Disney+.

Disney reported flat growth of $15.3 billion in revenue in its fiscal Q1 2019 and adjusted earnings per share of $1.84, topping analyst estimates. It warned that its investments in streaming, including both ESPN+ and Disney+, would negatively impact the segment’s year-over-year operating income by $200 million in Q2.

Image credits: Disney

Last year, Charlie Bergevin and Brian Cristol, co-founders of Uber’s trucking logistics business Uber Freight, heard Reid Hoffman say Turvo had some of the best technology he had ever seen. Frustrated with the direction Uber Freight had taken, they called up Turvo’s founder and chief executive officer Eric Gilmore.

It wasn’t long before offers were on the table and now, they’ve joined Turvo full-time. Cristol as head of enterprise partnerships and Bergevin as an enterprise partnerships executive. Bin Chang, a founding engineer at Uber Freight, is joining Turvo, too, a move I’m told Cristol and Bergevin were unaware of until they’d already accepted roles at the venture-funded startup. Chang begins Feb. 11.

“Brian and Charlie … have contributed so much to incubate this business and scale it to where we are today,” Uber Freight chief Lior Ron wrote in an internal email to employees shared with TechCrunch. “They were always on the forefront of exploration and innovation and were able to constantly push themselves, and all of us, to the next frontier.”

Cristol and Bergevin were Uber’s first B2B sales hires when they joined the ride-hailing firm in 2016. Tasked with finding product market fit for Uber’s final-mile businesses under the ‘Uber Everything’ initiative, they began learning about the truckload transportation and logistics industry. That’s when they linked up with Curtis Chambers, Uber’s long-time director of engineering. Together, the trio pitched their idea for a logistics business unit within Uber to then CEO Travis Kalanick.

Turvo’s real-time logistics platform.

Today, Uber Freight has roughly 750 employees and $1 billion in revenue. While the loss of two of its key dealmakers, who established relationships with Uber Freight’s Fortune 1000 customers, is cause for concern, Cristol and Bergevin suggested the unit is a rocket ship waiting to take off. 

“Uber Freight has by far the biggest market size and is by far the newest and it was made from scratch,” Bergevin told TechCrunch in reference to other Uber-branded businesses. “Sure we had the brand but with Uber Eats we had drivers, too, this was starting from scratch.”

So why are they leaving? The pair told TechCrunch they simply don’t feel like they are solving enough of the key issues plaguing the industry, particularly legacy systems. Uber Freight, for its part, focuses on freight brokerage, optimizing for top-line revenue. The business automates the backend operations that exist in transportation and truckload brokerage today, aggregating trucking fleets via the Uber Freight app and connecting drivers with shippers.

Turvo, on the other hand, works across the supply chain. The company, which has raised a total of $88.6 million at a $435 million valuation, according to PitchBook, helps shippers, brokers and carriers work together in real time using a software interface on their desktops and mobile phones. Turvo emerged from stealth two years ago with a $25 million Series A led by Activant Capital, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Upside Partnership, Slow Ventures and more. In November, the startup closed a Series B funding of $60 million led by Mubadala Ventures.

“Turvo’s platform is providing this solution to legacy logistics platforms and really maximizing all parts of the supply chain, not just pieces of it, which we were accustomed to at Uber,” Cristol told TechCrunch. “We were excited about how Turvo was innovating around the nucleus of logistics.”

Cristol and Bergevin officially began work at Turvo last week.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB – a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders – have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders, in order to promote collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources.

In addition to connecting member companies and talent, The Grid will host various events, educational programs, and co-innovation projects, while hopefully improving access to investors as well as pilot program opportunities. The Grid is launching with over 70 member organizations – approved through an application and screening process – across various stages and sectors.

In recent years, the tech and startup scene in New York has notably ballooned – evolving from the Valley’s obscure younger sibling to one of the top cities for talent, entrepreneurship, and venture capital investment. And while the city has seen countless startups, VCs, accelerators, and other entrepreneurial resources set up shop within its borders, getting the right tools in place is only part of the battle.

New York wants to prove its initiatives are more than just “show-and-tell” projects and city officials believe that building a truly sustainable innovation economy is dependent on all its local resources working in conjunction, allowing entrepreneurship to permeate every arm of commerce. With an institutionalized network like The Grid, New York hopes it can further fuse its pockets of innovation into to one well-oiled machine, consistently producing transformative ideas.

“The Grid represents a promising new way for NYCEDC to work across sectors to strengthen collaboration and innovation, first in New York City and hopefully soon in many more cities across the country and around the world,” said NYCEDC President and CEO James Patchett in a statement. “It signals that New York City is leading with  a new approach to technology and startup culture, with a real focus on diversity, inclusion, equity, and community.”

As one of the largest and most industrially diverse cities in the world, New York has naturally placed a heightened focus on the growing sector of “urban tech” – which has been broadly categorized as innovation focused on improving city functionality, equality or ease of living. According to NYCEDC, the urban tech space has seen nearly $80 billion in VC investment since 2016, with nearly 10% going to New York-based beneficiaries.

The launch of The Grid is part of an expansion of NYCEDC’s larger UrbanTech NYC program, which has already helped establish the New York innovation hubs New Lab, Urban Future Lab, and Company. Alongside the membership network and a new site for UrbanTech NYC, NYCEDC is also launching The Grid Academy, an adjacent academic group with the mission of creating applied R&D partnerships between local academic institutions and corporate sponsors. The expansion of UrbanTech NYC represents the latest of several initiatives NYCEDC is pursuing to develop the broader ecosystem, coming just months after the EDC announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million investment initiative focused on growing New York’s cybersecurity presence and infrastructure.

The group will be led by a steering committee that will guide decisions related to strategic priorities, funding, events, and communications. Members of the committee include some of The Grid’s largest government and corporate members including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Civic Hall, Company, New Lab, Urban Future Lab, Dreamit UrbanTech, URBAN-X, Urban.Us, Accenture, Samsung NEXT, Rentlogic, Smarter Grid Solutions, Civic Consulting USA, and the World Economic Forum.

“Since its early days, innovation has been part of the DNA that is New York City,” said Jeff Merritt, Head of IoT + Smart Cities at World Economic Forum. “Nowhere else in the world can you find an ecosystem that combines as many industries and nationalities. New York’s thriving urban technology community is a natural byproduct of what happens when you allow diversity, entrepreneurship and ambition to collide in one of the greatest cities in the world.” 

The Grid’s first meeting will be held on February 19th at Samsung NEXT’s New York HQ. Membership applications for The Grid are accepted on a rolling basis and can be found here on the UrbanTech NYC website.

Six months after an episode of “Homeland” showed hackers exploiting security vulnerabilities in the (fictional) Vice President’s pacemaker, Mike Kijewski, the founder of a new startup security company called Medcrypt, was approached by his (then) employers at Varian Medical Systems with a unique problem. 

“A hospital came to the company and said we are treating a patient and a nation-state may attempt to assassinate the patient that we’re treating by using a cybersecurity vulnerability in a medical device to do it,” Kijewski recalled.

At the time, there were no universal solutions to those types of security threats — so companies were left to cobble together one-off solutions for their devices, which is what Kijewski’s former employer likely attempted to do.

Ever since, Kijewski became obsessed with the security holes that exist in the foundation of the healthcare industry’s practice — the devices used to diagnose and treat patients.

“My partner Eric Pancoast and I looked into the problem of medical device cybersecurity and we found two things,” says Kijewski. “Number one there were no regulations forcing medical device companies to use cybersecurity protections at all. Number two, any given company has only one core competency — maybe two. And are medical device vendors going to have cryptography and cybersecurity competencies?”

Medcrypt was launched in 2016 to ensure that medical device manufacturers wouldn’t need to be cryptographic experts. The company is graduating from the latest batch of Y Combinator (after raising a $3 million seed round from Eniac Ventures and other investors) with a pitch to secure medical devices using just a single line of code.

It’s a technological necessity thanks to new guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration requiring medical devices to include security features like encryption, signature verification, and intrusion detection.

By inserting a single line of code into the software of a device, Medcrypt can provide the security manufacturers need at the device level, according to Kijewski.

The company not only encrypts the data on the device, but it also provide intrusion detection services by analyzing medical device metadata to identify standard device behaviors and deviations from that behavior, Kijewski said.

Medcrypt is one of a growing number of startups that are securing medical devices and hospital networks as the threats to the healthcare system proliferate.

Other startups are working on protecting hospital networks. Companies like Medigate, founded by ex-Israeli officers from the Israeli Defense Forces, which just raised $15 million from investors including YL Ventures and US Venture Partners; and Cylera, which is backed by Samsung Next and launched from the DreamIT healthcare accelerator are two such companies.

By 2017, Beckers Health IT and CIO Report counted over 107 technology companies pitching cybersecurity solutions to healthcare practitioners and medical device manufacturers.

The UK government has announced it’s working on a process to support so-called ‘advanced trials’ of autonomous vehicles — i.e. trials without human safety drivers.

It also says it will be beefing up the existing Code of Practice for testing driverless cars to provide a framework to support the evolution of the tech, saying it’s on track to meet its goal of fully driverless cars being tested on public roads by 2021.

Commenting in a statement, Richard Harrington, automotive minister, said: “We want to ensure through the Industrial Strategy Future of Mobility Grand Challenge that we build on this success and strength to ensure we are home to development and manufacture of the next generation of vehicles.

“We need to ensure we take the public with us as we move towards having self-driving cars on our roads by 2021. The update to the Code of Practice will provide clearer guidance to those looking to carry out trials on public roads.”

The government gave the greenlight for hands-free testing of driverless cars back in 2015, though it still require there to be a (human) safety driver behind the wheel (which also of course requires the vehicle to have a wheel in the first place).

The move was quickly followed by a Code of Practice for testing autonomous vehicles in public places — which remains in operation. But a Department for Transport spokesman said there’s been an increase in trial activity across the UK since then.

Hence the plan to update and strengthen the code and also make provisions for fully autonomous trials — to “set even clearer expectations for safe and responsible trials”, as the government’s press release puts it.

The current code of practice allows for automated vehicle trials on any UK road in compliance with UK law — which means test vehicles must include a remote driver.

But in the coming years the government is preparing to drop that requirement.

In its stead, it says the updated code will include an expectation on those carrying out trials to publish safety information; trial performance reports; and to carry out risks assessments before conducting a trial.

Trialling organisations will also be expected to inform the relevant authorities, emergency services, and “anyone who might be affected by trial activity” — which could potentially entail a lot of outreach for autonomous vehicle startups hoping to run tests in densely populated urban environments. (Ergo, remote, rural regions may end up being test locations of initial choice.)

“Advanced trials will not be supported unless they have passed rigorous safety assessments,” the government also warns.

The devil will clearly be in the detail of the updated code and it’s not clear exactly when it will be published. Nor whether trials of fully autonomous vehicles will be able to take to public roads before 2021.

A report in today’s Times newspaper suggests such vehicles could be being tested by the end of this year. But the Department for Transport spokesman we spoke to would not confirm that timeframe — pointing only to the existing government target of trials by 2021.

Calm, the meditation and wellness app that launched back in 2012, has today announced the close of an $88 million Series B financing with a valuation of $1 billion. (We have not been able to clarify whether the valuation was post- or pre-money.)

The funding was led by TPG Growth, with participation from CAA and existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Sound Ventures.

As meditation grows in popularity across the U.S. — the CDC says it tripled from 4.1 percent in 2012 to 14.2 percent in 2017 — Calm has capitalized on the craze by offering a suite of mindfulness and wellness tools, from guided meditation sessions to a product called “Sleep Stories,” via a subscription.

But Calm is also meeting stress where it lives. For example, the company invested $3 million in XPresSpa late in 2018. XPresSpa is a chain of quick spa stores found in airports. Meanwhile, Calm partnered with American Airlines to offer Calm content within AA’s in-flight entertainment system.

The growth of Calm is hard to deny. The company says that it has topped 40 million downloads worldwide, with more than one million paying subscribers. Calm also says that it quadrupled its revenue in 2018 — the company is now profitable — and is on track to do $150 million in annual revenue.

With the new financing, Calm’s total amount raised comes to $116 million.

Moreover, Calm’s valuation has soared from $250 million at the beginning of 2018, on the heels of a $27 million Series A, to now hit $1 billion.

Here’s what cofounder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith had to say in a prepared statement:

We started as a meditation app, but have grown far beyond that. Our vision is to build one of the most valuable and meaningful brands of the 21st century. Health and wellness is a $4 trillion industry and we believe there is a big opportunity to build the leading company in this fast growing and important space.

Cofounder and co-CEO Alex Tew said that the funding will predominantly go towards international growth and increased investment in content.

Spotify continues to see growing uptake for its all-you-can-eat streaming music (and increasingly podcast) services, even as it fell short of analyst expectations on sales in its earnings.

In Q4 results reported today alongside the blockbuster news that it was acquiring Gimlet and Anchor to step up its podcast push, the company said that monthly active users have hit 207 million, up nearly 30 percent on a year ago, and that it is for the first time reporting positive operating profit — of €94 million — and net income — of €442 million, making this Spotify’s first ever quarter to post positive operating profit, net income, and free cash flow.

But those strong numbers were also dimmed by one of the big downsides of being a public company: failing to meet analyst expectations on its financials.

The company reported revenues of €1,495 million, up 30 percent on the same quarter a year ago. This works out to $1,702 million, falling short of the $1.71 billion analysts collectively were expecting.

On the earnings per share front, however, the company’s strong net income helped it well exceed estimates. Spotify noted diluted EPS of $0.36, while analysts had expected a loss per share of $0.22.

Spotify is still a relatively young company, and as it continues to face competition from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google, it’s still showing very strong growth despite not meeting some targets.

With a push into more countries in the Middle Eastern region, Spotify is now active in 78 countries and it said it has plans to add more this year. Across that footprint, listening time is growing, both in its free (ad-supported) and paid tiers, with 15 billion hours of content consumed in the quarter.

While the company continues to build out its free tier with more adtech both across its music and now podcast offerings, its Premium tier is also continuing to grow and still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues.

Subscribers now stand at 96 million for its paid services, up 36 percent, with Spotify attributing some of the strong performance to promotions with Google Home — its first-ever hardware bundle — and the holiday season rush. The company has been increasingly diversifying its paid tiers, now offering student and family plans alongside its individual subscriptions.

Revenues from paid subs account for nearly all of Spotify’s turnover. In Q4 it was €1,320 million, or 88 percent of the total, and in line with revenue growth overall, were also up 30 percent over last year. Average revenue per user was €4.89, Spotify said.

Ad-Supported revenue, meanwhile, accounted for just €175 million of its total turnover.

The company’s B2B sales are similarly being developed in earnest. Spotify for Artists — which helps to measure how tracks are played and other business aspects of an artists’ profile on Spotify — is now used by 300,000 creators, the company said.

Now that there is also a supplementary Spotify for Podcasters service, given that Spotify is now amping up its spoken content with the Gimlet and Anchor acquisitions, that may also start to see a bump in usage. Currently Spotify says that 10,000 podcasters are using its analytics tool for audience and other insights, which is a relatively small number. The jury is still out on this and Spotify’s other pushing analytics efforts.