Year: 2019

Intel, it seems, didn’t have to look too hard to find its new CEO. Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. Swan, the seventh CEO in Intel’s 50 year history will also be joining the chip maker’s board of directors.

Prior to this gig, Swan was Intel’s CFO, grabbing that gig in late-2016 after holding positions at eBay and Electronic Data Systems Corp. Swan stepped into the interim role as word emerged of then-CEO Brian Krzanich’s “past consensual relationship” with an employee.

“In my role as interim CEO, I’ve developed an even deeper understanding of Intel’s opportunities and challenges, our people and our customers,” Swan in a release tied to the news. “When the board approached me to take on the role permanently, I jumped at the chance to lead this special company. This is an exciting time for Intel: 2018 was an outstanding year and we are in the midst of transforming the company to pursue our biggest market opportunity ever.”

Todd Underwood, the company’s VP of Finance, will become the interim CFO as the chipmaker looks to permanently fill Swan’s previous role. As for why it took so long to name a permanent CEO with Swan around the whole time, the executive reportedly wasn’t always so enthusiastic about the position. Shortly after stepping in as interim chief exec, reports surfaced that he didn’t want the gig. He even reportedly went so far as to remove himself from consideration.

Hading up Intel will be a lofty task. the company has struggled to adapt to a changing environment. The company missed out on much of the mobile revolution, as companies like Qualcomm picked up the mantle. Last year, Samsung overtook the company for the title of the world’s largest chipmaker. Intel has since begun bracing itself as a leading force in the push toward 5G, but a slowing smartphone market has had an impact on the company, along with the rest of the industry.

 

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video.

Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial breaks before and during their viewing experience. However, Vice President and Head of Advertising Platforms Jeremy Helfand said the company realizes that playing a similar ad as soon as you hit pause would be bad for both viewers and advertisers.

For the viewer, “It can be jarring — you think you’ve paused the content, but you’re still seeing sight, sound and motion,” Helfand said. As for the advertiser, they don’t want to create a 30-second ad that the viewer doesn’t see because they’ve left for the kitchen or the bathroom, or because they unpause the show five seconds into the ad.

Conversely, he said that during testing, Hulu found that viewers accepted the format “if the ad is subtle and relevant.”

The Hulu Pause Ad is more like a translucent banner — or, as Helfand put it, “a car billboard on the side of the road” — that appears on the right side of the screen. This makes for a better viewing experience, since it’s less distracting than a video and you can still see your TV show underneath. And Helfand argued that it’s also better for the brand, because it allows them to get their message across in a quick and simple way.

Also, Pause Ads won’t appear until several seconds after you pause. That’s in case you’ve paused so that you can rewind or otherwise adjust the video, which isn’t really an ideal time to show an ad. If you start fiddling with the controls, the Pause Ad either won’t appear at all, or if it’s already on-screen, it will immediately disappear. Similarly, it should disappear as soon as you hit play again.

When asked if this might give advertisers another ad placement issue to worry about — say, if their brand shows up next to a risqué sex scene or a gory death scene — Helfand noted that Pause Ads won’t be appearing on episodes that have been rated TV-MA, and that Hulu allows advertisers to target or “anti-target” (explicitly avoid) based on genre. It also sounds like these capabilities will be further refined.

Hulu plans to launch the first Pause Ads in the second quarter of this year, and it’s already announcing two advertisers — Coca-Cola and Charmin. The ads will appear in select on-demand content in the Hulu library.

Helfand said the exact size and placement of the unit could continue evolving over time. In addition, Hulu is still figuring out the exact pricing model, but it’s envisioned as part of a larger package for advertisers.

And while it’s understandable for viewers to get annoyed when they see ads in new places, Helfand suggested that this is part of a broader push towards “non-disruptive formats,” where the ads don’t stop the video and interrupt your viewing experience. In fact, the goal is for these new formats to account for 50 percent of Hulu’s ad revenue within the next three years.

“The whole conversation that we’ve had in this market, should a commercial break be 10 or 15 seconds — it’s all disruptive,” Helfand said. Instead, he argued that the better question is, “How do you help provide the very best storytelling experience for viewers in an ad-supported service?”

On the back of a strong showing for portfolio company Spotify going public last year and several biggies like Airbnb also slated to list very soon, VC firm TCV has announced its latest fund, the $3 billion TCV X, which has now closed and will start getting invested “soon,” the company tells me.

TCV’s previous fund — the $2.5 billion TCV IX — was closed in 2016 and focused on growth rounds. The firm says that it has made 21 investments out of that fund to date. Recent fundings have included travel platform Sojern, Tour Radar, home-exercise startup Peloton, activity booking platform Klook, ByteDance, LegalZoom and more.

“The amount we raised is about the opportunity in tech investing, it’s large and continues to grow,” Nathan Sanders, TCV GP and COO, said in an interview today about this latest fund. “We are not looking to have explosive growth but we’re increasing our size to meet the opportunity. It’s bigger than what we had before but we will stay focused and disclipined.”

TCV typically invests between $30M and $300M in companies.

The larger size of this fund compared to previous funds for TCV underscores bigger trends affecting the tech industry.

Startups are increasingly raising rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars — Crunchbase estimates that there were some $300 billion collectively invested in equity rounds in 2018, a high-water mark for the industry. Within that, deal volume was up 32 percent and dollar volume was up 55 percent over 2017.

For larger firms like TCV, that essentially spells raising more to spend more order to stay in the game.

Sanders confirmed that he thinks the larger fund sizes and larger rounds in general both were drivers in TCV going for $3 billion this time around. He added that while some are legitimately asking questions about startups that are staying private for too long and racking up sky-high valuations on paper in the process, this isn’t translating to pressure for TCV’s portfolio companies to jump into anything soon themselves.

“The amount of capital we’re seeing getting invested in high-growth companies means there are an increasing number of options for those companies,” he said. “Some will choose to stay private longer and some are using that amount of capital to grow faster. Our number-one priority for our companies is to help them grow and if the company is able to do that in whichever way is best, then the returns will follow.”

China’s internet firms are getting pally with giant state-owned automakers as they look to deploy their artificial intelligence and cloud computing services across traditional industries. Ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, which owns Uber China, announced earlier this week a new joint venture with state-owned BAIC. Hot on the heels came another entity set up between Tencent and the GAC Group.

GAC, which is owned by the Guangzhou municipal government in southern China, announced Thursday in a filing it will jointly establish a mobility company with social media and gaming behemoth Tencent, Guangzhou Public Transport Group alongside other investors.

The announcement followed an agreement between Tencent and GAC in 2017 to team up on internet-connected cars and smart driving, a deal that saw the carmaker tapping into Tencent’s expertise in mobile payments, social networking, big data and cloud services. Tencent, which is most famous for its instant messenger WeChat, went through a major restructuring last October to place more focus on enterprise-facing services, and the GAC tie-up appears to fit nicely into that pivot.

The fresh venture will bank a capital infusion of 1 billion yuan ($149 million) with GAC owning a 35 percent stake. Tencent and Guangzhou Public Transport will take up 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

A flurry of Chinese internet service providers have made forays into the automotive industry, marketing their digital and machine learning capabilities at old-school automakers. Besides Tencent, GAC has also recruited telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and voice assistant startup iFlytec to upgrade its vehicles. Search titan Baidu, on the other hand, operates an open platform for autonomous driving cars and has chosen state-owned Hongqi to test out its autonomous driving solutions. Ecommerce behemoth Alibaba has also set foot in transportation with a smart sedan jointly developed with state-owned SAIC.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volume, will now let you spend money you don’t have after it added support for credit cards from Visa and Mastercard.

Credit card usage in crypto is controversial. Aside from the risk — ask anyone who bought crypto last year… — top exchanges have gone back and forth on support. Coinbase, for example, stopped allowing credit card purchases a year ago but, when it still allowed them, customers were found to have incurred additional charges.

With many crypto owners getting “rekt” by a slump that has seen the market crash by around 90 percent, with some tokens now effectively worthless, the winds of change in the bear market are interesting to observe.

Coinbase is abandoning its conservative approach to the coins that it lists, while Binance — which operates on the opposite scale with support for a glut of tokens — has moved from being crypto-only to offer fiat currency options to customers. Support for credit cards is a major part of that and it brings Coinbase and Binance into direct competition for the first time.

The company, which is officially based in Malta, has opened fiat currency trading outposts in Uganda and Jersey, and it has plans to add similar ramps in Liechtenstein, Singapore and other places.

CEO Changpeng Zhao told TechCrunch last year that Binance plans to grow to 10 fiat exchanges in 2019, with “ideally two per continent.” Part of the strategy is to help larger, institutional investors bring money into the crypto ecosystem, a move that he believes will boost Binance and the crypto industry generally.

The credit card support has come via a partnership with crypto-focused payment company Simplex, but there are caveats.

Credit cards can only be used to purchase a limited set of tokens, those are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Ripple’s XRP.

There are also geographical limitations. The Simplex service isn’t supported in some countries, while, in the U.S., it doesn’t cover the following states: New York, Georgia, Connecticut, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Washington.

Finally, support for banks is not universal, too, which means that some users will not be able to buy on Binance using their credit card.

Those that can are charged a 3.5 percent fee and must wait 10-30 minutes for their tokens, a Binance spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Once purchased, those tokens can be freely traded on Binance, which claims to list over 150 cryptocurrencies.

Still, the move may bolster the exchange’s trading volume which, while still the highest in the industry, has dropped below $1 billion per day in recent times.

At the time of writing, the exchange had traded some $666 million worth of crypto in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap. A lot of that depression is down to the market plummet, which has seen the overall value of that trading volumes fall and reduced consumer interest in trading, but giving more people the tools to buy might offset that somewhat.

“The crypto industry is still in its early stages and most of the world’s money is still in fiat. Building fiat gateways is what we need now to grow the ecosystem, increase adoption and introduce crypto to more users,” Zhao said in a canned statement.

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

Social media platforms are being urged to be far more transparent about how their services operate and to make “anonymised high-level data” available to researchers so the technology’s effects on users — and especially on children and teens — can be better understood.

The calls have been made in a report by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee which has been looking into the impacts of social media and screen use among children — to consider whether such tech is “healthy or harmful”.

“Social media companies must also be far more open and transparent regarding how they operate and particularly how they moderate, review and prioritise content,” it writes.

Concerns have been growing about children’s use of social media and mobile technology for some years now, with plenty of anecdotal evidence and also some studies linking tech use to developmental problems, as well as distressing stories connecting depression and even suicide to social media use.

Although the committee writes that its dive into the topic was hindered by “the limited quantity and quality of academic evidence available”. But it also asserts: “The absence of good academic evidence is not, in itself, evidence that social media and screens have no effect on young people.”

“We found that the majority of published research did not provide a clear indication of causation, but instead indicated a possible correlation between social media/screens and a particular health effect,” it continues. “There was even less focus in published research on exactly who was at risk and if some groups were potentially more vulnerable than others when using screens and social media.”

The UK government expressed its intention to legislate in this area, announcing a plan last May to “make social media safer” — promising new online safety laws to tackle concerns.

The committee writes that it’s therefore surprised the government has not commissioned “any new, substantive research to help inform its proposals”, and suggests it get on and do so “as a matter of urgency” — with a focus on identifying people at risk of experiencing harm online and on social media; the reasons for the risk factors; and the longer-term consequences of the tech’s exposure on children.

It further suggests the government should consider what legislation is required to improve researchers’ access to this type of data, given platforms have failed to provide enough access for researchers of their own accord.

The committee says it heard evidence of a variety of instances where social media could be “a force for good” but also received testimonies about some of the potential negative impacts of social media on the health and emotional wellbeing of children.

“These ranged from detrimental effects on sleep patterns and body image through to cyberbullying, grooming and ‘sexting’,” it notes. “Generally, social media was not the root cause of the risk but helped to facilitate it, while also providing the opportunity for a large degree of amplification. This was particularly apparent in the case of the abuse of children online, via social media.

“It is imperative that the government leads the way in ensuring that an effective partnership is in place, across civil society, technology companies, law enforcement agencies, the government and non-governmental organisations, aimed at ending child sexual exploitation (CSE) and abuse online.”

The committee suggests the government commission specific research to establish the scale and prevalence of online CSE — pushing it to set an “ambitious target” to halve reported online CSE in two years and “all but eliminate it in four”.

A duty of care

A further recommendation will likely send a shiver down tech giants’ spines, with the committee urging a duty of care principle be enshrined in law for social media users under 18 years of age to protect them from harm when on social media sites.

Such a duty would up the legal risk stakes considerably for user generated content platforms which don’t bar children from accessing their services.

The committee suggests the government could achieve that by introducing a statutory code of practice for social media firms, via new primary legislation, to provide “consistency on content reporting practices and moderation mechanisms”.

It also recommends a requirement in law for social media companies to publish detailed Transparency Reports every six months.

It is also for a 24 hour takedown law for illegal content, saying that platforms should have to review reports of potentially illegal content and take a decision on whether to remove, block or flag it — and reply the decision to the individual/organisation who reported it — within 24 hours.

Germany already legislated for such a law, back in 2017 — though in that case the focus is on speeding up hate speech takedowns.

In Germany social media platforms can be fined up to €50 million if they fail to comply with the NetzDG law, as its truncated German name is known. (The EU executive has also been pushing platforms to remove terrorist related material within an hour of a report, suggesting it too could legislate on this front if they fail to moderate content fast enough.)

The committee suggests the UK’s media and telecoms regulator, Ofcom would be well-placed to oversee how illegal content is handled under any new law.

It also recommends that social media companies use AI to identify and flag to users (or remove as appropriate) content that “may be fake” — pointing to the risk posed by new technologies such as “deep fake videos”.

More robust systems for age verification are also needed, in the committee’s view. It writes that these must go beyond “a simple ‘tick box’ or entering a date of birth”.

Looking beyond platforms, the committee presses the government to take steps to improve children’s digital literacy and resilience, suggesting PSHE (personal, social and health) education should be made mandatory for primary and secondary school pupils — delivering “an age-appropriate understanding of, and resilience towards, the harms and benefits of the digital world”.

Teachers and parents should also not be overlooked, with the committee suggesting training and resources for teachers and awareness and engagement campaigns for parents.

We’ve written extensively about LG’s struggling mobile business, which has suffered at the hands of aggressive Chinese Android makers, and now that unit has dragged its parent company into posting its first quarterly loss for two years.

The Korean electronics giant is generally in good health — it posted a $2.4 billion profit for 2018 — but its smartphone business’s failings saw it post a loss in Q4 2018, its first quarterly negative since Q4 2016.

Overall, the company posted a KRW 75.7 billion ($67.1 million) operating loss as revenue slid seven percent year-on-year to KRW 15.77 trillion ($13.99 billion). LG said the change was “primarily due to lower sales of mobile products.”

We’ve known for some time that LG’s mobile business is struggling — the division got another new head last November — but things went from bad to worse in Q4. LG Mobile saw revenue fall by 42 percent to reach KRW 1.71 trillion, $1.51 billion. The operating loss for the period grew to KRW 322.3 billion, or $289.8 million, from KRW 216.3 billion, $194 million, one year previous.

Over the full year, LG Mobile posted a $700 million loss (KRW 790.1 billion) but the company claimed things are improving thanks to “better material cost controls and overhead efficiencies based on the company’s platform modularization strategy.”

LG used CES to showcase a range of home entertainment products — that division is doing far better than mobile, with a record annual profit of $1.35 billion in 2018 — so we’ll have to wait until Mobile World Congress in February to see exactly what LG has in mind. Already, though, we have a suggestion and it isn’t exactly set-the-world-on-fire stuff.

“LG’s mobile division will push 5G products and smartphones featuring different form factors while focusing on key markets where the LG brand remains strong,” the company said in a statement.

It will certainly take something very special to turn things around. It seems more likely that LG Mobile head Brian Kwon — who also heads up that hugely-profitable home entertainment business — will focus on cutting costs and squeezing out the few sweet spots left. Continued losses, particularly against success from other units, might eventually see LG shutter its mobile business.

Still, things could be worse for LG, it could be HTC.

The founders of Dadi — pronounced daddy — think men are in need of a wake-up call.

“Men [have] a biological clock just like women, which is something that people don’t talk about,” Dadi co-founder and chief executive officer Tom Smith told TechCrunch. “Infertility isn’t a women’s issue; It’s both a men’s and women’s issue.”

Smith believes Dadi, the provider of a temperature-controlled at-home fertility test and sperm collection kit, will encourage men to contribute to family planning conversations and become more aware of their reproductive health. The startup is officially launching its kit and long-term sperm storage service today with nearly $2 million in venture capital funding from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital.

“Our mission is to normalize the conversation around male fertility and reproductive health, and empower men with knowledge of fertility so they can have that conversation with their family,” Smith said.

Here’s how it works: Dadi customers order a kit online, masturbate and collect their sperm within the comfort of their own homes, drop it off with FedEx and wait for a full fertility report, which comes with a microscopic video of the each man’s actual sperm. To survive the trip to the startup’s laboratory — the New England Cryogenic Center — the Dadi-designed container injects preservatives, which are nested in the lid of the cup, into the sperm sample.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, Dadi’s service is FDA-licensed in all 50 states and costs a total of $198, including a test and one-year of sperm storage.

Dadi’s co-founding team includes Mackey Saturday, a graphic designer who created Instagram’s logo, and Gordon von Steiner, a former creative director in the fashion industry. The team has prioritized design and messaging of the product, in addition to security, privacy and high medical standards.

“We aren’t trying to sell hair pills, we are actually interacting with customers at a very vulnerable part of their life,” Smith said. “We feel like our value set, approach and thoughtfulness really differentiate us from anyone else in the space.”

One in 6 U.S. couples struggles with fertility, with male factor infertility a cause of 30 percent of those cases, per ReproductiveFacts.org. Startups want to improve these statistics, targeting an industry that’s trapped in the 1980s.

“We are in the direct-to-consumer era,” Smith said. “We reached peak app a couple years ago and I think a lot of the innovation that’s happening in the space comes down to individualized services.”

Dadi joins a cadre of privately-funded male fertility or men’s health businesses. Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, leads the pact. The 2-year-old business entered the unicorn club last week with a $100 million investment. Ro, formerly known only as Roman, sells ED medication online, too, and has raised a total of $91 million. Legacy, which freezes men’s sperm, recently won TechCrunch’s very own Startup Battlefield competition in Berlin. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round earlier this month from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.

It’s clear that VCs have woken up to the opportunity to disrupt fertility with tech-enabled solutions to age-old issues and now, entrepreneurs passionate about helping men broach sensitive topics, from infertility to erectile dysfunction to hair loss and more, are able to gain ground.

Here’s to more funding for women’s health businesses, which are in dire need of innovation, too.

Uber is suspending its professional taxi service in Barcelona from tomorrow almost a year after it re-entered the Catalan capital.

The move follows the regional government agreeing new regulations for the vehicle for hire (VTC) sector aimed at making sure they do not compete directly with taxis.

“The new restrictions approved by the Catalan Government leave us with no choice but to suspend UberX while we assess our future in Barcelona. We are committed to being a long term partner to Spanish cities and hope to work with the Catalan Government and the City Council on fair regulation for all,” an Uber spokesman told us.

We’ve reached out to Cabify to ask whether it will also be suspending service in the city tomorrow.

The ride-hailing company also said previously that it would have no choice but to leave if the decree was approved. And local press is reporting it will also suspend services across the region tomorrow.

The new regional VTC rules, which also come into force across Catalonia from tomorrow, require a minimum 15 minute wait between a booking being made and a passenger being picked up.

The decree also bans VTCs from circulating in the streets between jobs, requiring they go back to a base such as a parking lot or garage to wait for the next pick up.

VTC companies using apps for ride bookings are also prohibited from displaying the real-time location of bookable vehicles prior to a reservation being made.

Achieving compliance would clearly require major changes to how ride-hailing companies like Uber and Cabify operate. The decree also provides for fines of up to €1,400 (~$1,600) for any VTC drivers caught infringing the provisions. So Uber’s announcement of a service suspension is not a surprise.

Nor does the company appear prepared to return unless the decree is reversed, saying it needs a “fair” regulation — echoing its messaging when it pulled out of Denmark back in 2017.

“The obligation to wait 15 minutes to travel in a VTC does not exist anywhere in Europe and is totally incompatible with the immediacy of on-demand services, such as UberX,” it writes now in a blog post entitled ‘see you later, Barcelona’.

“Barcelona, we hope to see you soon,” it adds, claiming the relaunched service was used by more than half a million people over its run, relying on “thousands” of drivers to deliver it.

Uber’s original p2p service was also forced out of Barcelona, back in 2014, following legal challenges from the taxi sector that eventually went all the way up to Europe’s top court.

At the end of 2017 the court judged Uber to be a transport company, not a neutral platform — enforcing compliance with local VTC rules and rendering the Uber’s early regulation-dodging playbook a dud in Europe.

Since then, taxi associations in Barcelona and other major Spanish cities have been keeping up the pressure for regulation on the VTC sector by holding a series of strikes — including one earlier this month in which some strikers were caught on camera attacking a Cabify driver’s car.

The driver was reported to have suffered a panic attack during the attack.

An ‘indefinite strike’ was also called last summer and only ended after the Spanish government agreed to devolve regulatory power to autonomous regions and local authorities.

Uber and Cabify temporarily paused services in Barcelona during that strike after reports of violence, including attacks on drivers. Although taxi associations organizing the protests were quick to distance themselves from any violent acts, urging their members to protest peacefully.

The most recent strike in Barcelona also saw some VTC drivers take to the streets to try to apply the brake to regulation, parking their vehicles along a major road and demonstrating outside parliament.

There’s still a chance that the Catalan parliament could refuse to back the decree. Though the current regional government is committed to a full restructuring of the law to ensure VTCs and taxis do not compete for the same work.

Nintendo has cut its ambitious annual Switch sales forecast despite enjoying a strong Christmas Q3 quarter.

The Japanese games giant recorded a 104.21 billion JPY ($958 million) net profit on revenue of 608.39 billion JPY ($5.59 billion) between October and December 2018. Revenue was up 26 percent year-on-year, which is an impressive feature given that quarter was a successful one for Nintendo, yielding its biggest operating profit in a Q3 for eight years.

The Nintendo Switch is now closing down on lifetime sales of the N64. Nintendo shifted a record 9.41 million consoles during the three-month period, up 30 percent annually, to take it to 14.49 million this financial year, which began in April 2018. However, despite a success last quarter, likely helped in no small amount by Christmas, Nintendo has trimmed its ambitious goal to sell 20 million Switch units this financial year. Instead, the target is 17 million, which means it is estimating around 2.5 million sales during January, February and March.

In terms of games, a bunch of new releases performed well in the last quarter. Pokémon: Let’s Go sold million titles since its November release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate sold 12.08 million since its December launch and Super Mario Party, released in October, reached 5.3 million sales. Total game sales jumped by 101 percent to reach 94.64 million sales during the period.

Nintendo’s retro consoles — the NES Classic and Super NES Classic — sold 5.83 million. But there is bad news for Nintendo loyalists, the upcoming Mario Kart Tour mobile game won’t ship in March — its revised launch date is this summer.