Year: 2019

Amazon has hired Disney SVP Kyle Laughlin to head its Alexa Gadgets division, TechCrunch has learned. Laughlin spent eight years at Disney, most recently as the SVP and General Manager of Games, Apps and Connected Experience at the entertainment giant’s Consumer Products and Interactive Media division.

According to his LinkedIn profile, the role found Laughlin overseeing apps, connected hardware and games for Disney and Lucasfilm. The gig also involved AI, IoT and AR/VR. Also, lots of Muppets.

Amazon has since confirmed the hire. A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch, “I can confirm that Kyle Laughlin has joined Amazon as Director, Alexa Gadgets. We’re very excited to have him.”

The gig appears to revolve around the newly defined “Alexa Gadget” category, which the company describes as “fun and delightful accessories that pair to compatible Echo devices via Bluetooth.”

Doesn’t seem like much of a stretch after eight years at Disney. Examples of current Alexa Gadgets include the Echo Wall Clock and Gemmy Industries’ connected Big Mouth Billy Bass and Dancing Plush Animatronics.

In a few short years, the Echo has transformed from smart speaker to a category defining, industry driving project. Alexa has become a huge business for Amazon and left everyone else struggling to catch up. Alexa Gadgets is a big push from Amazon to grow the smart assistant’s ecosystem beyond the smart speaker, through a wide range of connected devices.

Collaboration tools tend to be geared towards workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at including these workers.

In a blog post announcing the new features, Emma Williams, Microsoft corporate vice president for modern workplace verticals, wrote that there are two billion such workers. By making the product more mobile-friendly and linking to existing enterprise employee management systems, Microsoft can make Teams more relevant for shift employees.

For starters, Microsoft is making mobile Teams more flexible to meet the needs of a variety of shift worker jobs. Some might need to record and share audio messages, while others might need to share their location or access the camera. Whatever the requirements, Microsoft has started with a Firstline Worker configuration policy template, which IT can customize to meet the needs of various worker types.

The mobile tool also includes a navigation bar, which allows workers to add the tools they use most often for easy access. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to access the tools they need, given that these workers tend to be on their feet or on the move a good part of the day.

Next, the company has released a new API to help IT connect Teams to existing workforce management systems. The Graph API for Shifts enables first line managers, who are responsible for setting up worker schedules to share data between a company’s workforce management system and Teams, allowing employees to get all of their shift information in one tool. This will be available in public preview later in the quarter, according to the company.

Finally, the tool now includes a new Praise feature, designed to let managers recognize good work by their employees by issuing badges with messages like “Thank you” and “Problem solver.”

The company wants Teams to be more than a tool for knowledge workers. These new features provide a way to include workers that are sometimes left out of these kinds of collaboration tools. The new features also help Microsoft compete with a number of startups who trying to attack the same problem.

These include Crew, a startup that scored a $35 million Series C round just last month, and has raised almost $60 million, and Zinc, which also takes aim at the deskless worker, and has raised $16 million, according to Crunchbase.

Whether Microsoft can appeal to both the knowledge worker and the first-line variety in the same tool remains to be seen, but these updates are clearly an effort to take on this space.

Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Elections, has been fined £15,000 in a UK court after pleading guilty to failing to comply with an enforcement notice issued by the national data protection watchdog, the Guardian reports.

While the fine itself is a small and rather symbolic one, given the disgraced political analytics firm went into administration last year, the implications of the prosecution are more sizeable.

Last year the Information Commissioner’s Office ordered SCL to hand over all the data it holds on U.S. academic, professor David Carroll, within 30 days. After the company failed to do so it was taken to court by the ICO.

Prior to Cambridge Analytica gaining infamy for massively misusing Facebook user data, the company, which was used by the Trump campaign, claimed to have up to 7,000 data points on the entire U.S. electorate — circa 240M people.

So Carroll’s attempt to understand exactly what data the company had on him, and how the information was processed to create a voter profile of it, has much wider relevance.

Under EU law, citizens can file a Subject Access Request (SAR) to obtain personal data held on them. So Carroll, a U.S. citizen, decided to bring a test case by requesting his data even though he is not a UK citizen — having learnt Cambridge Analytica had processed his personal data in the U.K.

He lodged his original SAR in January 2017 after becoming suspicious about the company’s claim to have built profiles of every U.S. voter.

Cambridge Analytica responded to the SAR in March 2017 but only sent partial data. So Carroll complained to the ICO which backed his request — issuing an enforcement notice on SCL Elections in May 2018, days after the (now) scandal-hit company announced it was shutting down.

The company pulled the plug on its business in the wake of the Facebook data misuse scandal, when it emerged SCL had paid an academic with developer access to Facebook’s platform to harvest data on millions of users without proper consents in a bid to create psychological profiles of U.S. voters for election campaign purposes.

The story snowballed into a global scandal for Facebook and triggered a major (and still ongoing) investigation by the ICO into how online data is used for political campaigning.

It also led the ICO to hit Facebook with a £500,000 fine last year (the maximum possible under the relevant UK data protection law). Although the company is appealing.

The SCL prosecution is an important one, cementing the fact that anyone who requests their personal information from a U.K.-based company or organisation is legally entitled to have that request answered, in full, under national data protection law — regardless of whether they’re a British citizen or not.

Commenting in a statement, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: “This prosecution, the first against Cambridge Analytica, is a warning that there are consequences for ignoring the law. Wherever you live in the world, if your data is being processed by a UK company, UK data protection laws apply.

“Organisations that handle personal data must respect people’s legal privacy rights. Where that does not happen and companies ignore ICO enforcement notices, we will take action.”

The Daily Beast reports that at today’s hearing, at Hendon magistrates court, the court was told that the administrators of Cambridge Analytica and its related companies had now provided relevant passwords to the ICO. Cambridge Analytica had previously failed to supply these passwords.

This means the regulator should be able to gain access to more of the data it seized when it raided the company’s London offices in March last year. So it’s at least possible Carroll’s SAR might eventually be fulfilled that way, i.e. by the regulatory sifting through the circa 700TB of data it seized.

However Carroll told TechCrunch he’s hoping for a faster route to get to the truth of exactly what the company did with his data, telling us there’s still “a March court event that could yield our end goal: Disclosure”.

“Why would they rather plead guilty to a criminal offense instead of complying with disclosure required by UK DPA ‘98. What are they hiding? Why has it come to this?” he added.

“Testing the Subject Access Request in this way is an important exercise. Do regulators and companies really know how to fully execute a Subject Access Request? How about when it escalates to a matter of international importance?”

Looks like August’s big news for the show wasn’t doorbell, after all. Rather, the smart lock maker announced this morning that it will be bringing its technology to three new locks from Emtek.

Like August, Emtek is a part of the Swedish conglomerate Assa Abloy. The implementation of the technology will be similar to August’s relationship with fellow Assa Abloy brand, Yale, where the more tech-savvy start will essentially power the lock’s smart capabilities. August branding won’t appear on the locks themselves, but its app will be required to interact with the technology.

Two of the three will include August’s Auto-Unlock, DoorSense and Auto-Lock tech. The locks will come in keypad or keyed models, priced at $440 and $370 — around $100 pricier than August’s own models. The difference is apparently due to the more premium materials used in Emtek’s version.

The new locks will be available in showrooms where Emtek hardware is sold this spring.

Last year, four of the largest U.S. cell carriers were caught selling and sending real-time location data of their customers to shady companies that sold it on to big spenders, who would use the data to track anyone “within seconds” for whatever reason they wanted.

At first, a little-known company LocationSmart was obtaining (and leaking) real-time location data from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint and selling access through another company, 3Cinteractive, to Securus, a prison technology company, which tracked phone owners without asking for their permission. This game of telephone with people’s private information was discovered, and the cell carriers, facing heavy rebuke from Sen. Ron Wyden, a privacy-minded lawmaker, buckled under the public pressure and said they’d stop selling and sharing customers’ locations.

And that would’ve been that — until it wasn’t.

Now, new reporting by Motherboard shows that while LocationSmart faced the brunt of the criticism, few focused on the other big player in the location-tracking business, Zumigo. A payment of $300 and a phone number was enough for a bounty hunter to track down the participating reporter by obtaining his location using Zumigo’s location data, which was continuing to pay for access from most of the carriers.

Worse, Zumigo sold that data on — like LocationSmart did with Securus — to other companies, like Microbilt, a Georgia-based credit reporting company, which in turn sells that data on to other firms who want that data. In this case, it was a bail bond company, whose bounty hunter was paid by Motherboard to track the reporter down — with his permission.

Everyone seemed to drop the ball. Microbilt said the bounty hunter shouldn’t have used the location data to track the Motherboard reporter. Zumigo said it didn’t mind location data ending up in the hands of the bounty hunter, but still cut Microbilt’s access.

But nobody quite dropped the ball like the carriers, which said it would not to share location data again.

T-Mobile, at the center of the latest location-selling revelations for passing the reporter’s location to the bounty hunter, said last year in the midst of the Securus scandal that it “reviewed” its real-time location data sharing program and found that appropriate controls in place. To appease even the skeptical, T-Mobile chief executive John Legere tweeted at the time that he “personally evaluated the issue” and promised that the company “will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”

It’s hard to see how that isn’t, in hindsight, a downright lie.

This time around, T-Mobile said it “does not have a direct relationship” with Microbilt but admitted one with Zumigo, which, given the story and the similarities to last year’s Securus scandal, could be considered one of many “shady middlemen” still obtaining location data from cell carriers.

It wasn’t just T-Mobile. Other carriers were also still selling and sharing their customers’ data.

AT&T said in last year’s letter it would “protect customer data” and “shut down” Securus’ access to its real-time store of customer location data. Most saw that as a swift move to prevent third-parties accessing customer location data. Now, AT&T seemed to renege on that year-ago pledge, saying it “only permit the sharing of location” in limited cases, including when required by law.

Sprint didn’t say what its relationship was with either Zumigo or Microbilt, but once again — like last year — cited its privacy policy as its catch-all to sell and share customer location data. Yet Sprint, like its fellow carriers AT&T and T-Mobile, which pledged to stop selling location data, clearly didn’t complete its “process of terminating its current contracts with data aggregators to whom we provide location data” as it promised in a letter a year ago.

Verizon, the parent company of TechCrunch, wasn’t explicitly cleared from sharing location data with third-parties in Motherboard’s report — only that the bounty hunter refused to search for a Verizon number. (We’ve asked Verizon if it wants to clarify its position — so far, we’ve had nothing back.)

In a letter sent last year when the Securus scandal blew up, Verizon said it would “take steps to stop” sharing data with two firms — Zumigo, and LocationSmart, an intermediary that passed on obtained location data to Securus. But that doesn’t mean it’s off the hook. It was still sharing location data with anyone who wanted to pay in the first place, putting its customers at risk from hackers, stalkers — or worse.

Wyden. who tweeted about the story, said carriers selling its customers location data “is a nightmare for national security and the personal safety of anyone with a phone.” And yet there’s no way to opt out — shy of a legislative fix — given that two-thirds of the U.S. population aren’t going to switch to a carrier that doesn’t sell your location data.

It turns out, you really can’t trust your cell carrier. Who knew?

Thailand has joined Japan in regulating crypto exchanges after it issued its first licenses to four applicants.

The four that were approved as licensed brokers and dealers of cryptocurrencies in the country are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro. One other exchange — Coin Asset — is under extended review after replacing its management team in a bid to win a license.

But two that failed to win a license — Cash2Coins and Southeast Asia Digital Exchange — will shut down this month. They have until January 14 to notify their customers and move any assets outside of their exchanges. The companies were rejected on account of insufficient know your customer (KYC) processes and inadequate IT infrastructure, according to a report from the Bangkok Post.

The deal has been hailed as a major step forward for the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in Thailand.

“We can partner with traditional financial institutions, brokers, e-wallets etc to offer more financial products to customers,” Jirayut Srupsrisopa, the founder of Bitkub, told TechCrunch. “The bottleneck was the regulation.”

The move could help Thailand establish itself as a hub for the blockchain industry in Asia. The country announced regulation for ICOs — initial coin offerings — last year and it is said to considering moves to loosen those rules. That, combined with licensed exchanges, could appeal to those who seek ‘regulatory havens’ in light of China’s ban on crypto and increased activity from the SEC in the U.S.

But Thailand is up against stiff competition to attract blockchain projects and talent.

Singapore has established itself as a global hub for ICOs while it has a wider pool of developers than most of Southeast Asia. Japan was the first to regulate crypto exchanges — there are currently over a dozen licensed and the exchange industry has been granted self-regulatory status — while Vietnam had made its name as blockchain talent hub with China’s Huboi and Quoine, the parent company of the Liquid exchange, among the companies operating local offices.

Hong Kong has also said in the last year that it may license exchanges, now it has another model to look at for ideas.

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

Thailand has joined Japan in regulating crypto exchanges after it issued its first licenses to four applicants.

The four that were approved as licensed brokers and dealers of cryptocurrencies in the country are Bx, Bitkub, Coins and Satang Pro. One other exchange — Coin Asset — is under extended review after replacing its management team in a bid to win a license.

But two that failed to win a license — Cash2Coins and Southeast Asia Digital Exchange — will shut down this month. They have until January 14 to notify their customers and move any assets outside of their exchanges. The companies were rejected on account of insufficient know your customer (KYC) processes and inadequate IT infrastructure, according to a report from the Bangkok Post.

The deal has been hailed as a major step forward for the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in Thailand.

“We can partner with traditional financial institutions, brokers, e-wallets etc to offer more financial products to customers,” Jirayut Srupsrisopa, the founder of Bitkub, told TechCrunch. “The bottleneck was the regulation.”

The move could help Thailand establish itself as a hub for the blockchain industry in Asia. The country announced regulation for ICOs — initial coin offerings — last year and it is said to considering moves to loosen those rules. That, combined with licensed exchanges, could appeal to those who seek ‘regulatory havens’ in light of China’s ban on crypto and increased activity from the SEC in the U.S.

But Thailand is up against stiff competition to attract blockchain projects and talent.

Singapore has established itself as a global hub for ICOs while it has a wider pool of developers than most of Southeast Asia. Japan was the first to regulate crypto exchanges — there are currently over a dozen licensed and the exchange industry has been granted self-regulatory status — while Vietnam had made its name as blockchain talent hub with China’s Huboi and Quoine, the parent company of the Liquid exchange, among the companies operating local offices.

Hong Kong has also said in the last year that it may license exchanges, now it has another model to look at for ideas.

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

Few outside of the food service industry know about Olo a 13.5-year-old, New York-based mobile and online ordering platform for 250 restaurant chains, from Applebee’s to Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle to Denny’s, and Jamba Juice to Chili’s.

Tiger Global has been tracking the company’s growth, however. In fact, in a new secondary transaction, Tiger just snapped up $18 million worth of employees’ equity.

Olo isn’t talking about at what valuation, but founder and CEO Noah Glass notes that the company’s previous investors — RRE Ventures, Core Capital, and the Raine Group, among them — have collectively provided Olo with $63.3 million in primary funding. And they didn’t sell a share to Tiger.

Seemingly, Olo’s traction has given them reason to hang tight to their holdings in the company. According to Glass, more than 100 million orders were processed on Olo’s platform last year — the same amount that had been processed by the platform across the first 12.5 years of the company’s existence. Olo has also outlived or outgrown many of its earlier competitors like Onosys, a company that was acquired by Living Social and later acquired again by another competitor called Splick.it, a smaller, Boulder, Co.-based outfit.

Not last, Olo, which sells it customizable tech stack as a subscription offering to its customers, is benefiting from numerous trends, including that people are increasingly eating restaurant food outside the establishments’ walls. According to the research firm NPD Group, close to half of dinners purchased from a restaurant are now consumed at home, partly because it can be cheaper and faster to eat at home, partly because there’s more entertainment at home (think Netflix), and partly because of the rise of on-demand delivery services like Uber and Postmates.

Indeed, Olo’s technology is largely responsible for enabling customers like Shake Shack to integrate third-party delivery services into their own point-of-sale systems, so that when an order comes through from, say, DoorDash, Shake Shack’s customized Olo software can not only process the sale but help find a just-in-time delivery person to pick it up and take it to the customer.

We talked with Glass at length yesterday to learn more. For a much deeper dive into how the whole thing works (we find it kind of fascinating ourselves), keep reading. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length

TC: You started this company back in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced. How? Why?

NG: I’d been working for Endeavor Global, which is sort of like a venture firm with a high-impact, nonprofit model, and I got to see and work with a lot of smartphone developers who were working on software before we called them apps. I thought then that we’d all have smart phones, and that when we did, it would make e-commerce possible in on-demand ways.

That insight is what led to the first prototype, which I showed to [venture capitalist] David Frankel, now of Founder Collective. He said, ‘If you believe in this enough to go for it and quit your job and withdraw your admission to Harvard Business School,” where I was headed, “I’ll give you half a million dollars to get started.” When I launched in NYC, i think under 5 percent of the population had a smartphone or mobile web on a mobile device, so we brought the service to life through text-message ordering first, then it evolved to include the mobile web, then apps.

TC: And now Tiger is in the Olo business. Why stage a secondary?

NG: We’re in a very good place from a balance sheet perspective, but we now have 175 employees, with around half in engineering and then a big customer success team. And some of them have been with the company for 10-plus years. They’re true believers, and we wanted to reward them for that long-term loyalty.

TC: Olo sells software as service to fast-casual restaurants that don’t want to build their own enterprise software to take online orders. But you’re also involved in delivery. Can you explain how?

NG: First, about three years ago, we launched a service called Dispatch that enables our brands to take orders, then get the order delivered without having to do delivery themselves. We partnered with various delivery service providers to create a network, basically, and we’ll find the nearest or cheapest courier to deliver to the customer just in time. We can do that because we know how long it take for a meal to be prepared based on our deep integrations with our customers, so food is getting picked up at its peak quality, and then it takes 12 to 13 minutes on average for it to be delivered to someone’s front door.

TC: And you charge that delivery provider a fee per transaction, sort of like a finders fee.

NG: Yes.

We also have a service called Rails that enables third parties like DoorDash and Postmates and Amazon Restaurants to send orders through our API to keep things simpler operationally at the restaurants we serve. Every order comes in through the same point-of-sale system.

TC: So you aren’t competing with a DoorDash in any way but rather partnering with it.

NG: Right. We view DoorDash as another source of demand, and that’s a good thing for our restaurants. It drives more orders.

We have to play the role of Switzerland. If restaurants want to work with Amazon or with Caviar, that’s fine. We’ll work with anyone. We’re a common carrier. We could never say, “We’re only going to work with these two” third parties.

TC: How much are you charging your customers, and how long are your agreements with them?

NG: A typical agreement is 36 to 60 months on average, and it’s transactional SaaS, so we charge a fee per month per store — think of it as around $100 per month — then a small fee per transaction for our core ordering platform.

TC: You must have tons of data. What percentage of diners are picking up food versus having it delivered?

NG: More than 90 percent are customers picking it up. Delivery accounts for just 3 percent at this point. It has huge growth ahead of it if you think about it. What’s more convenient than going to a restaurant and picking food up than having it magically come you?

TC: But it comes to you at an added cost. If we enter into a longer recession, how does the picture change? How are your customers impacted? 

NG: First, officially we work with restaurants that have 10 units or more, though we make exceptions to that rule every now and then and the goal is to be able to work with small chains and independent restaurants some day.

And for the restaurants we work with, a recession could be an accelerant. We saw this in 2008, with more customers choosing to use digital ordering and save time instead of preparing food at home or heading to restaurants for a dining experience. Fine dining will take a hit in a recession, but [our customers] are selling every day lunch and dinner choices, and when you have families where both parents are working and you can get a meal curbside for often less than it costs to cook, that’s compelling.

TC: Do you sell the data you’re collecting from your transaction volume or might you someday?

NG: We make zero revenue from our data today and if we did anything, it would only be with aggregated, anonymized data. But we haven’t done anything with it [to date], including because it’s a precious commodity and also because we’e very restricted in our contracts with what we can do. We do give our customers all the same data as if they built their own software.

TC: But you can see things that no one else can see. Any trends you can share?

NG: We can see that the first Monday after New Year’s is the biggest day for every organic salad chain, whereas at the end of the year, people are eating burgers and pizza and chicken wings and burritos. You see the same thing play out each week. People start the week eating healthy food. By the end of the week, it’s barbecue-ville.

TC: Before you go, is Olo profitable?

NG: We’re not in a place of worrying about raising more money. We have no need for primary capital where we are. We’e big believers in this company as an independent company, and we’re building it until we’re ready to have some kind of [exit] event. We think that’s in the cards if we keep doing what we’re doing.

Few outside of the food service industry know about Olo a 13.5-year-old, New York-based mobile and online ordering platform for 250 restaurant chains, from Applebee’s to Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle to Denny’s, and Jamba Juice to Chili’s.

Tiger Global has been tracking the company’s growth, however. In fact, in a new secondary transaction, Tiger just snapped up $18 million worth of employees’ equity.

Olo isn’t talking about at what valuation, but founder and CEO Noah Glass notes that the company’s previous investors — RRE Ventures, Core Capital, and the Raine Group, among them — have collectively provided Olo with $63.3 million in primary funding. And they didn’t sell a share to Tiger.

Seemingly, Olo’s traction has given them reason to hang tight to their holdings in the company. According to Glass, more than 100 million orders were processed on Olo’s platform last year — the same amount that had been processed by the platform across the first 12.5 years of the company’s existence. Olo has also outlived or outgrown many of its earlier competitors like Onosys, a company that was acquired by Living Social and later acquired again by another competitor called Splick.it, a smaller, Boulder, Co.-based outfit.

Not last, Olo, which sells it customizable tech stack as a subscription offering to its customers, is benefiting from numerous trends, including that people are increasingly eating restaurant food outside the establishments’ walls. According to the research firm NPD Group, close to half of dinners purchased from a restaurant are now consumed at home, partly because it can be cheaper and faster to eat at home, partly because there’s more entertainment at home (think Netflix), and partly because of the rise of on-demand delivery services like Uber and Postmates.

Indeed, Olo’s technology is largely responsible for enabling customers like Shake Shack to integrate third-party delivery services into their own point-of-sale systems, so that when an order comes through from, say, DoorDash, Shake Shack’s customized Olo software can not only process the sale but help find a just-in-time delivery person to pick it up and take it to the customer.

We talked with Glass at length yesterday to learn more. For a much deeper dive into how the whole thing works (we find it kind of fascinating ourselves), keep reading. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length

TC: You started this company back in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced. How? Why?

NG: I’d been working for Endeavor Global, which is sort of like a venture firm with a high-impact, nonprofit model, and I got to see and work with a lot of smartphone developers who were working on software before we called them apps. I thought then that we’d all have smart phones, and that when we did, it would make e-commerce possible in on-demand ways.

That insight is what led to the first prototype, which I showed to [venture capitalist] David Frankel, now of Founder Collective. He said, ‘If you believe in this enough to go for it and quit your job and withdraw your admission to Harvard Business School,” where I was headed, “I’ll give you half a million dollars to get started.” When I launched in NYC, i think under 5 percent of the population had a smartphone or mobile web on a mobile device, so we brought the service to life through text-message ordering first, then it evolved to include the mobile web, then apps.

TC: And now Tiger is in the Olo business. Why stage a secondary?

NG: We’re in a very good place from a balance sheet perspective, but we now have 175 employees, with around half in engineering and then a big customer success team. And some of them have been with the company for 10-plus years. They’re true believers, and we wanted to reward them for that long-term loyalty.

TC: Olo sells software as service to fast-casual restaurants that don’t want to build their own enterprise software to take online orders. But you’re also involved in delivery. Can you explain how?

NG: First, about three years ago, we launched a service called Dispatch that enables our brands to take orders, then get the order delivered without having to do delivery themselves. We partnered with various delivery service providers to create a network, basically, and we’ll find the nearest or cheapest courier to deliver to the customer just in time. We can do that because we know how long it take for a meal to be prepared based on our deep integrations with our customers, so food is getting picked up at its peak quality, and then it takes 12 to 13 minutes on average for it to be delivered to someone’s front door.

TC: And you charge that delivery provider a fee per transaction, sort of like a finders fee.

NG: Yes.

We also have a service called Rails that enables third parties like DoorDash and Postmates and Amazon Restaurants to send orders through our API to keep things simpler operationally at the restaurants we serve. Every order comes in through the same point-of-sale system.

TC: So you aren’t competing with a DoorDash in any way but rather partnering with it.

NG: Right. We view DoorDash as another source of demand, and that’s a good thing for our restaurants. It drives more orders.

We have to play the role of Switzerland. If restaurants want to work with Amazon or with Caviar, that’s fine. We’ll work with anyone. We’re a common carrier. We could never say, “We’re only going to work with these two” third parties.

TC: How much are you charging your customers, and how long are your agreements with them?

NG: A typical agreement is 36 to 60 months on average, and it’s transactional SaaS, so we charge a fee per month per store — think of it as around $100 per month — then a small fee per transaction for our core ordering platform.

TC: You must have tons of data. What percentage of diners are picking up food versus having it delivered?

NG: More than 90 percent are customers picking it up. Delivery accounts for just 3 percent at this point. It has huge growth ahead of it if you think about it. What’s more convenient than going to a restaurant and picking food up than having it magically come you?

TC: But it comes to you at an added cost. If we enter into a longer recession, how does the picture change? How are your customers impacted? 

NG: First, officially we work with restaurants that have 10 units or more, though we make exceptions to that rule every now and then and the goal is to be able to work with small chains and independent restaurants some day.

And for the restaurants we work with, a recession could be an accelerant. We saw this in 2008, with more customers choosing to use digital ordering and save time instead of preparing food at home or heading to restaurants for a dining experience. Fine dining will take a hit in a recession, but [our customers] are selling every day lunch and dinner choices, and when you have families where both parents are working and you can get a meal curbside for often less than it costs to cook, that’s compelling.

TC: Do you sell the data you’re collecting from your transaction volume or might you someday?

NG: We make zero revenue from our data today and if we did anything, it would only be with aggregated, anonymized data. But we haven’t done anything with it [to date], including because it’s a precious commodity and also because we’e very restricted in our contracts with what we can do. We do give our customers all the same data as if they built their own software.

TC: But you can see things that no one else can see. Any trends you can share?

NG: We can see that the first Monday after New Year’s is the biggest day for every organic salad chain, whereas at the end of the year, people are eating burgers and pizza and chicken wings and burritos. You see the same thing play out each week. People start the week eating healthy food. By the end of the week, it’s barbecue-ville.

TC: Before you go, is Olo profitable?

NG: We’re not in a place of worrying about raising more money. We have no need for primary capital where we are. We’e big believers in this company as an independent company, and we’re building it until we’re ready to have some kind of [exit] event. We think that’s in the cards if we keep doing what we’re doing.

Well, that didn’t take long. We’re less than ten days into 2019 and already Vietnam is aiming threats at Facebook after it violating its draconian cybersecurity law which came into force on January 1.

The U.S. social network stands accused of allowing users in Vietnam to post “slanderous content, anti-government sentiment and libel and defamation of individuals, organisations and state agencies,” according to a report from state-controlled media Vietnam News.

The content is said to have been flagged to Facebook which, reports say, has “delayed removing” it.

That violates the law which — passed last June — broadly forbids internet users from organizing with, or training, others for anti-state purposes, spreading false information, and undermining the nation state’s achievements or solidarity, according to reports at the time. It also requires foreign internet companies to operate a local office and store user information on Vietnamese soil. That’s something neither Google nor Facebook has complied with, despite the Vietnamese government’s recent claim that the former is investigating a local office launch.

In addition, the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information (ABEI) claimed Facebook had violated online advertising rules by allowing accounts to promote fraudulent products and scams, while it is considering penalties for failure to pay tax. The Vietnamese report claimed some $235 million was spent on Facebook ads in 2018, with $152.1 million going to Google.

Facebook responded by clarifying its existing channels for reporting illegal content.

“We have a clear process for governments to report illegal content to us, and we review all these requests against our terms of service and local law. We are transparent about the content restrictions we make in accordance with local law in our Transparency Report,” a Facebook representative told TechCrunch in a statement.

TechCrunch understands that the company is in contact with the Vietnamese government and it intends to review content flagged as illegal before making a decision.

Vietnamese media reports claim that Facebook has already told the government that the content in question doesn’t violate its community standards.

It looks likely that the new law will see contact from Vietnamese government censors spike, but Facebook has acted on content before. The company latest transparency report covers the first half of 2018 and it shows that received 12 requests for data in Vietnam, granting just two. Facebook confirmed it has previously taken action on content that has included the alleged illegal sale of regulated products, trade of wildlife, and efforts to impersonate an individual.

Facebook did not respond to the tax liability claim.

The company previously indicated its concern at the cybersecurity law via Asia Internet Coalition (AIC) — a group that represents the social media giant as well as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Line and others — which cautioned that the regulations would negatively impact Vietnam.

“The provisions for data localization, controls on content that affect free speech, and local office requirements will undoubtedly hinder the nation’s fourth Industrial Revolution ambitions to achieve GDP and job growth,” AIC wrote in a statement in June.

“Unfortunately, these provisions will result in severe limitations on Vietnam’s digital economy, dampening the foreign investment climate and hurting opportunities for local businesses and SMEs to flourish inside and beyond Vietnam,” it added.

Vietnam is increasingly gaining a reputation as a growing market for startups, but the cybersecurity act threatens to impact that. One key issue is that the broad terms appear to give the government signficant scope to remove content that it deems offensive.

“This decision has potentially devastating consequences for freedom of expression in Vietnam. In the country’s deeply repressive climate, the online space was a relative refuge where people could go to share ideas and opinions with less fear of censure by the authorities,” said Amnesty International.

Vietnam News reports that the authorities are continuing to collect evidence against Facebook.

“If Facebook did not take positive steps, Vietnamese regulators would apply necessary economic and technical measures to ensure a clean and healthy network environment,” the ABEI is reported to have said.