Year: 2019

Yubico, the company behind the almost ubiquitous Yubikey two-factor authentication dongles, today announced that its YubiKey for Lightning is now in private preview. Once it is widely available, this will mark the first time the company offers a key that supports iPad and iPhone users. One nifty feature of the new key is that it has both USB-C and Lightning connectors — one on each side. Thanks to that, you’ll be able to use it on both moderns Macs and iPhones.

With this, Yubico is also announcing that it is extending its developer program to developers who want to use the company’s software tools for two-factor authentication to iOS developers.

“Yubico’s goal is to make strong, simple authentication truly ubiquitous, across all services, devices, and operating systems,” said the company’s CEO and founder Stina Ehrensvard in today’s announcement. “Today at CES, we are excited to introduce the addition of NFC to our Security Key Series, and reveal our YubiKey for Lightning. These two products deliver on our mission to enable a passwordless future for all.”

In addition to the new Lightning key, the company also today announced the launch of its new Security Key NFC, which supports authentication for FIDO2/WabAuthn and U2F services on computers and mobile devices with NFC support. The new key is basically a simplified consumer version of the standard YubiKey 5 devices. It’s now available for $27, compared to $45 for the black YubiKey 5. It’s still a pretty solid device, though, that’s manufactured in Sweden and the US.

For Juul Labs, 2018 was a long year full of ups and downs, with the company coming under heavy scrutiny by the FDA over the popularity of the nicotine vaporizer with young people. But as we begin 2019, Juul is kicking off the year with a massive ad campaign focused on getting adult smokers to ‘make the switch’ to Juul.

The marketing campaign is part of a broader effort to for the company fresh off a $12.8 billion financing from cigarette juggernaut Altria and a bout of withering criticism from the US government.

“It [underage use] is an issue we desperately want to resolve,” Chief Product Officer and cofounder James Monsees said in August. “It doesn’t do us any favors. Any underage consumers using this product are absolutely a negative for our business. We don’t want them. We will never market to them. We never have. And they are stealing life years from adult cigarette consumers at this moment, and that’s a shame.”

In response, Juul spent the greater part of the year working to combat underage use: The company first changed its social media channels to feature only adult former smokers as models, and then removed all marketing through social media, deleting Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Juul also removed all non-cigarette flavors of its Juul pods from all sales channels except its own age-verified website. The company invested $30 million towards its own youth prevention plan, and went after counterfeiters, copycat devices and illegal online sales of both its own product and counterfeiters.

The difference between the 2015 campaign and these new TV spots is stark, with the new ads hyper focused on older individuals telling their stories of switching from cigarettes to Juul.

The main spend ($10 million) is going toward TV spots, with the ads airing on cable after 10pm, geared specifically toward an older audience. Radio, print and online ads featuring testimonials have already begun circulating, and total spend on the campaign is around $20 million. Juul intends to remain flexible on overall spend on the campaign, so that number could go up or down as the marketing push continues.

Juul’s sales figures are kept under wraps, giving us little insight into how public and government scrutiny have affected the company’s financials. That said, it’s clear that the brand has been eroded over the last year, despite the company’s scaled efforts to rectify the situation.

These ads seem to be a step in the right direction for the company. Studies have shown that Juul is effective in helping adult smokers switch from combustible cigarettes. Public Health England has also said that e-cigs are 95 percent less harmful than traditional smokes. That said, the scientific community has yet to determine whether or not there are long-term health risks associated with e-cigs.

However, the segment that is most likely to benefit from Juul is also a group that has been stigmatized over the last few decades and ultimately garner little empathy from the rest of society, despite suffering from an addiction to the leading cause of preventable death across the globe. But if Juul, and e-cigs in general, can show the life-saving potential that comes with disrupting traditional cigarettes, maybe the company can build up more credibility with the public as a whole.

Sex tech has been done at the Consumer Electronics Show before. This year, however, seems to be different, with the organization behind CES, the Consumer Technology Association, revoking an innovation award from a company geared toward women’s sexual health.

The CTA revoked an innovation award from Lora DiCarlo, the company behind a hands-free device that uses biomimicry and robotics to help women achieve a blended orgasm by simultaneous simulating the G-spot and the clitoris. Called Osé, formerly known as Vela, the device uses micro-robotic technology to mimic the sensation of a human mouth, tongue and fingers in order to produce a blended orgasm for women.

“Vela does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program,” CTA Senior Manager of Event Communications Sarah Brown said in a statement to TechCrunch. “CTA has communicated this position to Lora DiCarlo. We have apologized to the company for our mistake.”

CTA is also prohibiting Lora DiCarlo from exhibiting at CES, TechCrunch has confirmed. When asked why, Brown simply said, “Because they don’t fit a product category.”

As Lora Haddock, founder and CEO of Lora DiCarlo, notes in an open letter today, CES has recognized products like ones from B.sensory and OhMiBod, which won the Digital Health and Fitness Product category in 2016. CES also allowed a virtual reality porn company to exhibit at the show in 2017, as well as a sex toy robot for men to exhibit in 2018.

In a follow-up email, I asked Brown if she could elaborate on why OhMiBod was allowed to exhibit while Lora DiCarlo’s was not. At the time of publication, TechCrunch had yet to receive a response. It’s worth noting that OhMiBod’s product that year helps to strengthen the pelvic floor. However, OhMiBod is back this year exhibiting a remote-controlled vibrator that allows partners to control one another’s vibrators.

“There is an obvious double-standard when it comes to sexuality and sexual health,” Haddock wrote. “While there are sex and sexual health products at CES, it seems that CES/CTA administration applies the rules differently for companies and products based on the gender of their customers. Men’s sexuality is allowed to be explicit with a literal sex robot in the shape of an unrealistically proportioned woman and VR porn in point of pride along the aisle. Female sexuality, on the other hand, is heavily muted if not outright banned.”

She added, “This double standard makes it clear that women’s sexuality is not worthy of innovation. By excluding female-focused Sex Tech, CES and CTA are essentially saying that women’s sexuality and sexual health is not worthy of innovation.”

Here’s the timeline of events. Lora DiCarlo applied for the CES Innovation Award back in September. In early October, the CTA notified the company of its award. Fast forward to Oct. 31, 2018 and CES Projects Senior Manager Brandon Moffett notified the company that it had been disqualified.

In its letter to the company, obtained by TechCrunch, the CTA cited a clause that explained how entries deemed “in their sole discretion to be immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with the CTA’s image will be disqualified. CTA reserves the right in its sole discretion to disqualify any entry at any time which, in CTA’s opinion, endangers the safety or well being of any person, or fails to comply with these Official Rules. CTA decisions are final and binding.”

But Lori DiCarlo argues the device is not immoral, obscene or inappropriate. In a letter to the CTA in November, Lori DiCarlo General Counsel Kenneth N. Bass wrote:

There is certainly nothing immoral about a device aimed at women’s sexual health unless CTA is regressing more than 100 years to an era when women’s sexuality was taboo. Such devices are legal for sale in the United States, and a major public university had no problem using its resources to develop it. The device is also not obscene—it is simply an electronic device with the proper anatomical dimensions to function.

In response to the company’s general counsel, CTA Deputy General Counsel Kara Maser said the product does not fit into any of its existing product categories.

“We can understand your frustration, but hope you understand that we cannot make an award for an ineligible product, even if your submission was mistakenly allowed in the first instance,” Maser wrote. “We made an error and we are sincerely sorry for the oversight.”

But Lora DiCarlo stands firmly behind its submission into the robotics category. It was designed in partnership with Oregon State University and has applied for eight patents around micro-robotics, soft robotics, mechanical engineering for biomimetic functions and advanced material science.

“The Osé device undoubtedly falls within the classification of robotic devices. A common definition of a robot is ‘a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer,'” Oregon State University College of Engineering Research Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering John Parmigiani wrote in support of the company. “The Osé device easily satisfies this definition. The Osé device elicits an intense response from users through a series of complex actions involving biomimicry and precise applications of pressure variation, motion, and expansion. It does so automatically as programmed by computer circuit boards. It contains advanced electromechanical and micromechanical technology commonly associated with robotic products. Osé is truly unique because it is a robotic device and offers a level of sophistication not found in other products in the same market.”

Moving forward, Lora DiCarlo plans to release its product in Q3 of this year. To date, the company has raised $1.1 million in funding.

At CES, IBM today announced its first commercial quantum computer for use outside of the lab. The 20-qubit system combines into a single package the quantum and classical computing parts it takes to use a machine like this for research and business applications. That package, the IBM Q system, is still huge, of course, but it includes everything a company would need to get started with its quantum computing experiments, including all the machinery necessary to cool the quantum computing hardware.

While IBM describes it as the first fully integrated universal quantum computing system designed for scientific and commercial use, it’s worth stressing that a 20-qubit machine is nowhere near powerful enough for most of the commercial applications that people envision for a quantum computer with more qubits — and qubits that are useful for more than 100 microseconds. It’s no surprise then, that IBM stresses that this is a first attempt and that the systems are “designed to one day tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical systems to handle.” Right now, we’re not quite there yet, but the company also notes that these systems are upgradable (and easy to maintain).

“The IBM Q System One is a major step forward in the commercialization of quantum computing,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director of IBM Research. “This new system is critical in expanding quantum computing beyond the walls of the research lab as we work to develop practical quantum applications for business and science.”

More than anything, though, IBM seems to be proud of the design of the Q systems. In a move that harkens back to Cray’s supercomputers with its expensive couches, IBM worked with design studios Map Project Office and Universal Design Studio, as well Goppion, the company that has built, among other things, the display cases that house the U.K.’s crown jewels and the Mona Lisa. IBM clearly thinks of the Q system as a piece of art and, indeed, the final result is quite stunning. It’s a nine-foot-tall and nine-foot-wide airtight box, with the quantum computing chandelier hanging in the middle, with all of the parts neatly hidden away.

If you want to buy yourself a quantum computer, you’ll have to work with IBM, though. It won’t be available with free two-day shipping on Amazon anytime soon.

In related news, IBM also announced the IBM Q Network, a partnership with ExxonMobil and research labs like CERN and Fermilab that aims to build a community that brings together the business and research interests to explore use cases for quantum computing. The organizations that partner with IBM will get access to its quantum software and cloud-based quantum computing systems.

Mobileye, the Israeli-based automotive sensor company acquired by Intel in 2017, is leveraging the huge amounts of data it can collect to help build precise maps of the UK’s roads and infrastructure.

The company announced at CES 2019 that it has reached an agreement with Ordnance Survey to help the UK mapping agency bring high-precision location data to businesses in the country. Under the agreement, Mobileye’s sensors will be retrofitted onto Ordnance’s utility fleets to collect volumes of location data on road networks and roadside infrastructure. The collected data is then cross-referenced with existing geospatial data sets to develop accurate maps of Britain’s roads and surrounding areas.

That kind of information could be useful to utilities to provide precise locations of manhole covers and other assets, Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua told TechCrunch in recent interview. As a result, companies can better plan and manage maintenance needs.

Mobileye and Ordnance Survey piloted the concept in 2018. A number of Ordnance Survey vehicles have also  been fitted with Mobileye 8 Connect technology to collect data on the roads of Britain. The pilots are delivering a new level of roadside data that, through the partnership, will benefit customers across the many sectors including utilities, infrastructure and telecommunications, according to Mobileye.

At first glance, this looks like a shift for Mobileye. But it’s closely linked to Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua’s vision for the company and future cities.

“Using maps to improve operations between businesses and cities will help bring us closer to the realization of smart cities and safer roads,” Shashua said. 

The deal demonstrates the utility of mapping innovation beyond future autonomous vehicles, the company said.

“We envisage this new rich data to be key to how vehicles, infrastructure, people and more will communicate in the digital age,” Ordnance Survey CEO Neil Ackroyd said in a statement.

A former Magic Leap engineer believes the problem with most consumer-facing augmented headsets on the market is their bulky size.

“You wouldn’t want to wear them for more than one hour,” Xu Chi, founder and chief executive officer of Nreal told me as he put on a bright orange headgear that looked just like plastic Ray-Ban shades. Called Light and powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor, Nreal’s first-generation mixed reality glasses officially launched at Las Vegas’ tech trade show CES this week.

With a light-weight play, the two-year-old Chinese startup managed to bring in some big-name investors. Aside from debuting Light, Nreal also announced this week that it has raised $15 million in total funding to date. The proceeds include a Series A from Shunwei, the venture fund that Xiaomi founder set up, Baidu’s video streaming unit iQiyi, investment firm China Growth Capital, and others. According to Xu, R&D is his company’s biggest expense at this stage.

The financial injection bears strategic significance to Xiaomi and iQIYI. The former is best known for its budget smartphones but its bigger ambition lies in an Apple Home-like ecosystem that surely welcomes portable MR headsets. IQiyi, on the other hand, already has a channel dedicated to virtual reality, which is meant to immerse the end user in a completely digital environment. MR content may just be around the corner to provide an interactive experience of the real world.

Taking money from Shunwei rather than straight from Xiaomi is a thought-through choice. Xiaomi has backed hundreds of manufacturers to gain control over supply chains. Its portfolio companies, in turn, get access to Xiaomi’s retail channels, but they make comprises on various fronts such as product design and pricing.

Xu doesn’t want his freshly minted business to lose independence. “We don’t want to pick sides. We want to be able to work with Oppo and a whole lot of other brands. We want to be compatible with a wide range of devices — smartphones, laptops, PCs, and so on,” said the founder.

In early 2017, the Chinese entrepreneur started Nreal with his cofounder Xiao Bing, an optical engineer. The brand “Nreal” conveys the partners’ vision to bring users to spaces that fall between the real and unreal. Xu, who spent years working and studying in the US, decided to pursue his ideas back on his homeland for easier access to supply chains.

“We are combining our technological know-how from overseas with great resources in China’s manufacturing industry,” the founder said of his firm’s edge.

The 85-gram (about 3-ounce) Nreal Light isn’t as featherweight as regular glasses but it’s a significant improvement from the biggies it’s going after — Magic Leap One and Microsoft’s HoloLens. Nreal was able to shrink its gadget size because it uses a display solution that requires fewer cameras and sensors than its peers, Xu explained.

Furthermore, Nreal is fixated on the consumer market from the outset, unlike its bigger rivals which, in Xu’s words, are “building gadgets for the next five or even ten years.”

“They want to disrupt everything from cell phones, computers to televisions. They are not necessarily oriented towards consumers,” Xu added.

When it comes to performance, Light claims its display has a 52-degree field of view and a 1080p resolution, which my human eyes weren’t able to verify when I wore it to play an interactive shooting game. That said, I did experience minimum dizziness and latency on Light, as the company promised.

The only irritating part was I started to feel the weight of the specs on my nose bridge a few minutes into my session. Xu assured me that what I tried on was a prototype and that an assortment of nose pads and lenses for different facial features will be available. The glasses also come in a variety of flashy coral colors.

Nreal Light won’t be shipping until Q2 this year and mass production won’t arrive until Q3. Xu hasn’t priced his brainchild but said it will probably hover around $1,000. By comparison, HoloLens charges $3,000 and Magic Leap One costs $2,300.

Where does that price tag leave Nreal in terms of profitability? It’s a matter of what kind of consumer hardware Nreal wants to become. “Do we want to be Apple or Xiaomi?” The founder asked himself rhetorically. He’s sure of one thing: As the MR industry matures in China, production costs will also come down. The company is already mulling its own factory so as to beef up supply chains and reduce costs, according to Xu.

AT&T recently started a shady marketing tactic that labeled its 4G network as a 5G network. Now, rivals Verizon and T-Mobile are not having any of it.

In an open letter, in which AT&T is not named directly, Verizon says in part “the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a temptation that the wireless industry must resist.” TechCrunch agrees. The advantages of 5G networks are profound. The next generation of wireless networks will bring more than just increased speeds and AT&T’s current campaign of calling a 4G network a 5G network clouds the water.

T-Mobile is more direct in its criticism of AT&T. Because that’s how T-Mobile rolls. Watch.

This isn’t the first time AT&T has employed this mislabeling campaign. The wireless carrier did something similar prior to launching its LTE network and it was shady then and it’s shady now.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is a Verizon Media company.

Another day, another batch of bad apps in Google Play.

Researchers at security firm Trend Micro have discovered dozens of apps, including popular utilities and games, to serve a ton of deceptively displayed ads — including full-screen ads, hidden ads and running in the background to squeeze as much money out of unsuspecting Android users.

In all, the researchers found 85 apps pushing adware, totaling at least 9 million affected users.

One app — a universal TV remote app for Android — had more than five million users alone, despite a rash of negative reviews and complaints that ads were “hidden in the background.” Other users said that there were “so many ads, [they] can’t even use it.”

The researchers tested each app and found that most shared the same or similar code, and often the apps were similarly named. At every turn, tap or click, the app would display an ad, they found. In doing so, the app generates money for the app maker.

Adware-fueled apps might not seem as other apps packed with malware or hidden functionality, such as apps that pull malicious payloads from another server after the app is installed. At scale, that can amount to thousands of fraudulent ad dollars each week. Some ads also have a tendency to be malicious, containing hidden code that tries to trick users into installing malware on their phones or computers.

Some of the affected apps include: A/C Air Conditioner Remote, Police Chase Extreme City 3D Game, Easy Universal TV Remote, Garage Door Remote Control, Prado Parking City 3D Game, and more. (You can find a full list of apps here.)

Google told TechCrunch that it had removed the apps, but a spokesperson did not comment further.

We tried reaching out to the universal TV remote app creator but the registered email on the since-removed Google Play store points to a domain that no longer exists.

Despite Google’s best efforts in scanning apps before they’re accepted into Google Play, malicious apps are one of the biggest and most common threats to Android users. Google pulled more than 700,000 malicious apps from Google Play in the past year alone, and has tried to improve its back-end to prevent malicious apps from getting into the store in the first place.

Yet the search and mobile giant continues to battle rogue and malicious apps, pulling at least 13 malicious apps in sweep in November alone.

Plaid, a startup that has made a name building APIs for financial services apps aimed at consumers, expanded its horizon today with the purchase of Quovo, a similar company with a focus on the investments side of the financial service business.

Bloomberg reported the price tag could be as much as $200 million, but the company told TechCrunch that it is not sharing the price. It seems that Plaid, which has raised almost $310 million, including $250 million on a $2.65 billion valuation just last month, was eager to put the money to work.

While Plaid helps link your checking and savings account to modern financial apps like Venmo, Acorns and Robinhood, Quovo’s APIs are aimed at the investment side of the financial services market with up and coming customers like Betterment, Wealthfront and SoFi, and established players like Stifel, Vanguard, Empower Retirement and John Hancock.

The combined companies plan to offer a full range of financial services APIs. “Together, we’ll build a single platform that developers and large companies alike can use to build any financial application—from payments to lending to wealth management,”  the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.

Each company helps developers build financial services applications by providing the tools to integrate with accounts, so that developers don’t have to build these links from scratch. Much like Twilio helps build communications into an app and Stripe helps add payments functionality, Plaid builds easy integration with checking and savings accounts. Now it will also provide similar integration for investments.

The deal is expected to close this week and the Quovo team is expected to join Plaid shortly. Quovo CEO, Lowell Putnam, will continue to run the Quovo team and lead strategy for that part of the product set, according to a company spokesperson.

Quovo was founded in 2010 and has raised $21 million, including $4.8 million Series B last May, according to Crunchbase data. If the price is accurate, it would seem that the company gave a nice return on the $21 million investors made in the company.

Last week, in light of Apple’s revised revenue guidance, my TC colleague Ron Miller made a tongue-in-cheek apology for taking so long to upgrade his old iPhone.

He wrote that he had finally bitten the bullet and shelled out to upgrade a more than three-years-old (but still working) iPhone 6 for a shiny new iPhone XR ($750+) — deciding at the last minute to spare his wallet the full $1,000 whack for the top of the range iPhone XS. 

Ergo, even the famous Apple premium only stretches so far.

I bring even less good news for the company. I still can’t bring myself to upgrade my (still working but now heavily creaking on the battery and storage front) iPhone 6S because — and here’s my line — Apple removed the headphone jack. Which is absolutely an affront to usability and choice.

My (petite) ears do not conform to the one-size fits all shape Cupertino uses for its bundled earbuds. So even if the earbuds weren’t low audio quality I still couldn’t use them. Headphones that you have to walk around holding in your ears because otherwise every twist and head turn pops them right back out again are, to put it politely, not very useful.

And, yes, this also applies to wireless AirPods — even if I wanted to give Apple more money to be forever stuck having to charge a pair of headphones before being able to use them, which frankly doesn’t sound very smart to me.

On the earbuds front Apple does not cater to petite people, period. I have to use in-ear headphones, with replaceable rubber caps that come in a range of sizes (typically requiring the tiniest of the bunch). This means a 3.5mm jack, which lets me use my own choice of appropriately sized headphones, is not optional but essential.

A 3.5mm jack also lets me invest in higher audio quality kit, should I choose to.

Apple has other ideas, however. And judging by its own messaging at the time it ditched the headphone jack, it presumably thinks I should bravely ram its earbuds in my undersized ears anyway. Er, no thanks!

Of course I could upgrade and just plug in a dongle to (re)convert the Lightning port into the necessary 3.5mm headphone jack. But that’s yet another dongle tax ($9) I shouldn’t have to pay.

iPhones are a premium product, after all. Having to buy extra accessories that are actually essential to get you back to where you were doesn’t feel like progress. (A better word for these irritating wallet-gougers would be ‘unnecessaries’.)

Add to that there is of course the sheer irritation and hassle of having to remember to have the stupid thing with you whenever you want to use your headphones.

While, for those into Apple aesthetics, dongles are of course 100% pure eyesore.

Also — an extra kicker — the Apple Lighting to 3.5mm converter doesn’t appear to play nice with third party remotes. So your headphones’ physical volume control is probably going to be glitchy… (Just check out all these 1-star reviews.)

I won’t get started on Apple also vanishing the SD card port from the MBA. But the expense and hassle of trying to deal with that SNAFU, following a work laptop upgrade, has put me right off the prospect of ‘courageously’ forgetting about other ports that I really need to use.

Nor am I the only TCer affronted by Apple ditching the headphone jack. My colleague Greg Kumparak wrote in December that he’s still missing the 3.5mm port two years later. “It enabled happy moments and never got in the way,” he lamented of the missing jack.

Safe to say, no one is ever going to bemoan the lack of a dongle like that.

For TC’s Miller, he was finally pushed to upgrade his trusty old iPhone because of bad battery and a glitchy recharge cable.

My own iPhone 6S has also tipped over into bad battery territory. The original battery was replaced in 2017 (after being in a faulty bunch that Apple offered free replacements for). But the other day the phone experienced its first “unexpected shutdown” — and a pop-up informed me Peak Performance Capability had been switched on.

Aka the performance management feature Apple got in some hot water with consumer groups for not being clear enough about previously. So there’s now an option to disable this in iOS settings.

I could also, of course, pay to replace the battery. Which would be a lot cheaper than a new iPhone. Or else — even cheaper — just carry a spare battery pack.

So which is less hassle to remember? A spare battery or a headphone dongle?

At least a battery pack extends the daily longevity of the handset which feels like it’s offering some added utility (with the bonus social feature of being able to offer to juice up friends’ devices on-demand).

I’d certainly much prefer to keep a spare battery pack in my bag when I leave the house than always be trying to remember where on earth I left the dumb headphone dongle.

Ignoring Apple’s customary fraying charger cables (which can just be replaced), the other issue I’m facing with my current iPhone is storage. It’s almost full.

Apple offers cloud storage for a fee (after a small amount of free space). But I could also delete stuff I’m not using and buy an external hard drive for storing iPhone photo content (which is what’s taking up the most space) and offload the data to that.

Then I could wipe the iPhone 6S clean and start again.

Frankly the prospect of a rebooted iPhone 6S, which (battery wobbles aside) otherwise still works fine, is more appealing than paying a premium for an otherwise not so different handset which will, in certain key aspects, be less welcoming and useful to me than the one I already own.

It’s almost the more environmentally friendly choice, of course. And let’s not forget that lots of dongles = lots more unnecessary e-waste. So imposed dongle hell is bad for the planet too.

One size never fits all but when combined with an upwardly inflating Apple premium the Cupertino philosophy is starting to feel increasingly awkward.

While ‘reuse don’t replace’ feels more and more normal.