Year: 2019

DiscountMugs.com, a large online custom mug and apparel store, had a four-month long data breach just before the busy Christmas holiday season.

The company said in a letter to state attorney generals that hackers siphoned off credit card numbers from customers who made orders through its site between August 5 and November 16, 2018 using code injected on the company’s payments page.

The malicious card skimming code was removed from the site after it was discovered.

According to the letter, the hackers stole credit card numbers, the security code, and expiration date, as well as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and ZIP codes — everything that someone might need to make fraudulent payments.

But the company didn’t say how many people were affected by the breach. It’s believed to be thousands of customers who made purchases through the site during the four-month period.

TechCrunch reached out to Sai Koppaka, chief executive of parent company Bel USA, who did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the company’s spokesperson. Emails sent to Comvest, a private equity firm and an investor in Bel USA, also went unreturned.

DiscountMugs.com might not be a household name but it ranks in the top 10,000 sites in the U.S., according to Alexa, bringing in thousands of customers every day.

The company becomes the latest in a line of websites affected by credit card skimming code. The so-called Magecart group of hackers have targeted thousands of sites in the past few years, scraping credit card data when a customer enters their information at the checkout and silently sending it on to the hackers’ servers.

Other big name companies were hit, including British Airways, Newegg, and Ticketmaster.

A hacker has targeted and released private data on German chancellor Angela Merkel and other senior German lawmakers and officials.

The data was leaked from a Twitter account, since suspended, and included email addresses, phone numbers, photo IDs and other personal data on hundreds of senior political figures.

According to a government spokesperson, there was no “sensitive” data from the chancellor’s office, but other lawmakers had more personal data stolen. Other portions of the leaked data included Facebook and Twitter passwords. Some had their credit card information stolen, and chat logs and private letters published in the breach.

Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security said in a statement that it was “extensively investigating” the breach, but does not believe there was an attack on the government’s networks.

It’s been reported that the hacker may have obtained passwords to access social media accounts. Often, hackers do this by tricking a phone company into “porting out” a person’s phone number to another SIM card, allowing them to password reset accounts or obtain two-factor codes.

The hacker leaked data on senior lawmakers across the political spectrum, but noticeably absent were accounts for the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany party.

The hack is reminiscent of a data breach involving the Democratic National Committee in 2016, which targeted the Democrats in the U.S. in the months running up to the U.S. presidential election. The U.S. government later attributed the hack to Russia, which prosecutors say tried to influence the election to elect Donald Trump to the White House. The Justice Department brought charges against seven suspects earlier this year for being part of the so-called “Fancy Bear” group of hackers, working on behalf of the Russian government.

Little is known about who is behind the leak of German lawmakers’ data. The German government has not speculated about who — or if a nation state — may have been behind the attack. But the alleged hacker said in a statement linked from their Twitter account that they “operated alone and does not belong to any organization or similar on Twitter.”

According to security experts who’ve seen portions of the data, the hacker spread the stolen information across several sites and mirrors, making it “really hard to take down.”

Germany’s minister for justice Katarina Barley called the breach a “serious attack,” one that aimed to “damage confidence in our democracy and institutions,” according to the BBC.

It’s not the first time that the German parliament has faced security issues. In 2015, attackers stole gigabytes of data on lawmakers, which Germany’s domestic spy agency later accused Russia of behind behind the breach.

Russia has repeatedly denied launching cyberattacks.

Robinhood, the U.S.-based “zero-fee” stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange, is stealthily recruiting for a new London office ahead of plans to eventually launch in the U.K., TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources within London’s thriving fintech industry, Robinhood is hiring for multiple U.K. positions. These span recruitment, operations, marketing and PR, and customer support. Notably, the company is also seeking people in compliance, and product, including product design.

In other words, significant localisation and local product market fit appears to be the intention. Compliance is also an important part of Robinhood’s future U.K. regulatory requirements as it applies to local regulator the FCA for the appropriate licenses. Robinhood declined to comment on its U.K. plans.

Meanwhile, news that Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of a planned U.K. launch is interesting in the context of local fintech startups who have launched or announced their own fee-free trading offerings.

Launched late last year, London-based Freetrade has built a bona-fide “challenger broker,” including obtaining the required license from the FCA, rather than simply partnering with an established broker. The app lets you invest in U.K. stocks and ETFs, but will soon add U.S. stocks, too. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a low £1 per trade.

In June last year, Revolut, also headquartered in London, announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in what was seen as a bid to compete with Robinhood. So far, no product has surfaced, although I’m told that we should see trading added to Revolut in Q1 this year.

What’s intriguing about the Revolut-Robinhood comparisons is that the two companies share a number of investors, namely Index and DST. Both companies have incredibly high valuations, too, and, depending on respective burn rates, quite deep pockets.

Co-founded by Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev (pictured above), Robinhood claims 6 million accounts and is valued at $5.6 billion, having raised a total to date of $539 million. It has around 300 employees across its HQ in Menlo Park, California and its regional HQ in Lake Mary, Florida.

Revolut claims 3.5 million users, and at its last funding round was valued at $1.7 billion. The fintech has raised a total of $340 million, and has a headcount of 600 in London and across its various regional offices.

Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.

The investment was led by Merus Capital with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, who sold his startup, Cruise Automation, to General Motors for $1 billion in 2016.

Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”

Heat map showing API usage by region. Screenshot: Moesif

The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.

Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, who use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often, and with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.

The product was released last year and Gilling says his company already has 2000 customers, which includes both the free and pay tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and FinTech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and InsideSales.

While the company currently consists of the three founders, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.

Moesif was founded in 2016, and the three founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.

As predicted, Twitter’s subtle new feature showing which clients tweets are sent from is already embarrassing brands.

Following on from a Korean boyband sponsored by LG and Apple’s own Music staff, Huawei is the latest to be embarrassed after it sent a New Year’s Eve message using an iPhone.

A since-deleted message included the embarrassing tell-tale detail: “Twitter for iPhone” indicating that the Huawei account had tweeted from an iPhone. The tweet was replaced by another sent from Twitter Media Studio client, which is developed for brands and advertisers and isn’t a fierce rival’s smartphone, but the damage was done.

The internet being the internet, the gaffe was noticed and preserved by many keen people who were to point out the contradiction. The mistake also gained lots of attention on Chinese social network Weibo.

Embarrassed by the episode, the Chinese smartphone firm has slapped those responsible with a fine.

That’s according to Reuters, which got its hands on an internal memo which reveals that two employees responsible have had their salaries reduced by 5,000 yuan, that’s around $730. In addition, one of the pair — reportedly Huawei’s digital marketing director — will have their income “frozen” for a year. While we don’t know their full salary packages and a $730 drop may be less than the cost of an iPhone, it is still bound to sting.

Worst of all, perhaps, it seems that they were not directly at fault for the mistake, which Huawei senior VP Chen Lifang said had “caused damage to the Huawei brand.”

The incident, Reuters reports, was due an error by an agency hired by Huawei:

The mistake occurred when outsourced social media handler Sapient experienced “VPN problems” with a desktop computer so used an iPhone with a roaming SIM card in order to send the message on time at midnight, Huawei said in the memo.

The irony here is that Apple’s near-blanket ban on VPN apps means it would probably have been easier to get access to Twitter using an Android phone. Instead, the agency apparently went to the trouble of acquiring a Hong Kong-based SIM card in order to hop over the Great Firewall and send this ultimately ill-fated missive.

It’s fun to joke about consumer companies relying on their archrivals, but the incident comes at a particularly challenging time for Huawei.

The company’s CFO is currently on bail in Canada where she awaits extradition to the U.S. on charges of fraud that could see her jailed for up to 30 years. But its core business is also under pressure.

Huawei may be best-known for its smartphone business, which ranked second in Q3 2018 with 14.6 market share according to IDC, but its telecom equipment unit has always been its biggest seller and now its future is uncertain. Intelligence leaders from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S — the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ — are reported to have agreed to a ban on all equipment from Huawei and fellow Chinese firm ZTE, and that’s something that allies such as Japan appear to be joining in on.

The founder of Korea’s Nexon, one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet, today appeared to acknowledge his intention to sell his controlling interest for around $9 billion.

The divestment has been a hot rumor after a report from newspaper Korea Economic Daily this week [via Reuters] suggested that Jung-Ju Kim, who founded Nexon back in 1989, is moving to sell nearly all of his holdings in the firm, which is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange. Kim, the paper claimed, is tired of the ups and downs of the industry and, fresh from overturning a bribery charge last year, is ready to channel his energies into new areas.

In a statement released today, Kim said he is “contemplating various ways to back up Nexon in becoming a more globally competitive firm” while also assessing “new challenges, without growing complacent.” More information will be announced soon, Kim added.

Nexon provided TechCrunch with a copy of the statement in Korean — you can read it on Google Translate here — while the company also issued a relative no comment of its own.

There have been several media reports in connection with a potential transaction by NEXON
Co., Ltd. (“NEXON”)’s major shareholder, NXC Corporation (“NXC”), or its shareholders.

None of these reports are based on any releases made by NEXON.

While it may be true that NXC or its shareholders are considering various options about their
asset management/transactions, nothing has been decided.

If a decision is made by NXC or any other relevant parties, NEXON will make a release or
disclosure in a timely manner.

Nexon went public in Tokyo in 2011 raising over $1 billion in the year’s biggest listing. Kim’s holdings, which he shares with his wife, are in NXC, which is the biggest backer of Nexon.

Already, games giants Tencent and EA have been linked with a bid for the shareholding. Korean media reports suggest that Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley have been enlisted to manage the sale.

Nexon specializes in free-to-play games. Initially, its focus was on the PC but it has extended its reach into mobile in recent years. Some of its most popular titles include Maplestory, Vindictus and Dungeon and Fighter.

In its most recent financial report in November, Nexon made a net profit of 22.3 billion JPY ($206.5 million) on total revenue of 69.3 billion JPY ($641.7 million), that was up 14 percent and 15 percent year-on-year, respectively. Korea is the company’s biggest market by revenue, followed by North America, Japan and China.

The company is also active in areas outside of gaming, including crypto where its subsidiaries have made acquisitions, and it is an investor, too. Its most recent deal was an uncharacteristic early investment in Embark Studios, an ambitious new gaming venture from former EA executive Patrick Söderlund.

In more bad news for Apple, the company’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are not currently on sale in its own retail stores in Germany.

This follows an injunction issued by a Munich court last month related to patent litigation brought by chipmaker Qualcomm that’s being enforced from today. The patent dispute concerns smartphone power management technology that’s used to extend battery life.

In December the Munich court sided with Qualcomm, finding that Apple is infringing its patented power savings technology in the two models — granting a permanent injunction.

The court ordered Apple to cease the sale, offer for sale and importation for sale in Germany of infringing iPhones.

Apple has said it will appeal.

The Apple Germany website currently offers the newest models of the iPhone, the XS, XS Max and XR; and older models from 2014 (iPhone 6 and 6 Plus); 2015 (iPhone 6S and 6S Plus); and 2016 (iPhone SE). But buyers looking for 2016’s iPhone 7 or 2017’s iPhone 8 will be disappointed.

Yesterday Qualcomm announced it had posted security bonds totalling €1.34BN required by the court, enabling the injunction issued by the District Court of Munich on December 20 to be enforced.

The bonds are required to cover potential damages incurred by Apple should the judgment be overturned or amended on appeal. Qualcomm had said on December 20 that it would post the bonds “within a few days”.

In a statement yesterday the chipmaker also claimed the court had ordered Apple to recall infringing iPhones from third party resellers in the market.

But at the time of writing the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are still being offered by Apple resellers in Germany.

Amazon.de currently offers both handsets, for instance. While Gravis, Germany’s biggest reseller of Apple products, also told Reuters it was still selling all Apple products including the two models.

Qualcomm has also been pursing patent litigation against Apple in China and the U.S., and last month Apple appealed against a preliminary injunction banning the import and sales of old iPhone models in that market.

In that case the patents relate to editing photos and managing apps on smartphone touchscreens.

While, in the US, Qualcomm has most recently accused Intel engineers working with Apple of stealing trade secrets.

The feud dates back further though. Two years ago the FTC filed charges against Qualcomm accusing it of anticompetitive tactics in an attempt to maintain a monopoly in its chip business — with Apple officially cited in the complaint.

Cupertino also filed a billion-dollar royalty lawsuit against the chipmaker at the same time, accusing it of charging for patents “they have nothing to do with”.

The legal battle between the pair shows no signs of fizzling out, and has led Apple to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm chips — with Intel the short term beneficiary.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the latest litigious development in Germany but pointed to its statement from December 20 in which it takes a broad swipe at Qualcomm’s “tactics”.

In the statement Apple also said resellers in the market would continue to stock all models.

It writes:

Qualcomm’s campaign is a desperate attempt to distract from the real issues between our companies.  Their tactics, in the courts and in their everyday business, are harming innovation and harming consumers.  Qualcomm insists on charging exorbitant fees based on work they didn’t do and they are being investigated by governments all around the world for their behavior.

We are of course disappointed by this verdict and we plan to appeal. All iPhone models remain available to customers through carriers and resellers in 4,300 locations across Germany. During the appeal process, iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models will not be available at Apple’s 15 retail stores in Germany. iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR will remain available in all our stores.

The sideswipe at Qualcomm’s “tactics” is perhaps also a tactic reference to the use of a controversial PR firm, Definers, which — as we reported in November — had sent pitches slinging mud at Apple seemingly on Qualcomm’s behalf.

Late last year Facebook confirmed it had severed its own business relationship with the PR firm after it was revealed to have used antisemitic smear tactics to try to discredit Facebook critics.

We’ve asked Qualcomm for comment on its use of the PR firm.

Roads in a Chinese city have gotten much quieter in recent years. Shenzhen, widely called the Silicon Valley of hardware, has been pouring resources to phase out rattling diesel vehicles chugging through the city of 12 million people.

All public buses in the city went electric by the end of 2017. Taxis soon followed suit. The Transport Commission of Shenzhen announced on its official site this week that 99 percent of the city’s more than 21,000 cabs are now powered by batteries.

However, 1,350 vehicles from the fleet are still waiting to be deployed because of a shortage of charging stations, a sign the city’s infrastructure is not up to speed with its electric car movement. A survey done by newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily last year showed that 80 percent of Shenzhen’s cab drivers were unsatisfied with the supply and allocation of charging stations in the city.

Shenzhen, where Warren Buffet-backed battery and car manufacturer BYD stations its headquarters, is spearheading China’s electric dream. Its electrifying evolution dates back to 2010 when the city became part of China’s grand plan to pilot hybrid and all-electric vehicles with deep subsidies for both manufacturers and consumers. Underneath the ostensible goal of improving air quality is China’s ambition to be a world leader in battery technologies, which could subsequently drive employment and export sales.

Shenzhen’s traffic authority claims that electric cabs are 70 percent more energy efficient compared to those powered by fossil fuel. The entire fleet of electric cabs is estimated to cut carbon emissions by 856 thousand metric tons a year for Shenzhen. That’s equivalent to greenhouse gas emissions neutralized by 1,007,445 acres of US forests in one year, according to a greenhouse gas calculator provided by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s worth noting that the environmental perks of EVs are dependent on how a city is generating electricity. The dirtier the energy source, like coal and oil, the dirtier its electric cars are.

A major beneficiary in Shenzhen’s green push is BYD, which manufacturers a big portion of the city’s non-petrol buses and taxis. Recently, the carmaker has made forays into overseas markets to electrify their public transportation system as China weighs subsidy cuts on electric cars. The Shenzhen automaker is trecking across the globe and shipping fleets to the UK, Chile and Egypt. In Asia, it’s sold electric vehicles to neighboring Macau, Singapore and Japan.

Another sizeable cash injection for big data biotech: Sophia Genetics has announced a $77M Series E funding round, bringing its total raised to $140M since the business was founded back in 2011.

The company, which applies AI to DNA sequencing to enable what it dubs “data-driven medicine”, last closed a $30M Series D in fall 2017.

The Series E was led by Generation Investment Management . Also investing: European private equity firm, Idinvest Partners. Existing investors, including Balderton Capital and Alychlo, also participated in the round.

When we last spoke to Sophia Genetics it had around 350 hospitals linked via its SaaS platform, and was then adding around 10 new hospitals per month.

Now it says its Sophia AI platform is being used by more than 850 hospitals across 77 countries, and it claims to have supported the diagnosis of more than 300,000 patients.

The basic idea is to improve diagnoses by enabling closer collaboration and knowledge sharing between hospitals via the Sophia AI platform, with an initial focus on oncology, hereditary cancer, metabolic disorders, pediatrics and cardiology. 

Expert (human) insights across the network of hospital users are used to collectively enhance genomic diagnostics, and push towards predictive analysis, by feeding and training AI algorithms intended to enhance the reading and analysis of DNA sequencing data.

Sophia Genetics describes its approach as the “democratization” of DNA sequencing expertise.

Commenting on the Series E in a statement, Lilly Wollman, co-head of Generation’s growth equity team said: “We believe that leveraging genetic sequencing and advanced digital analysis will enable a more sustainable healthcare system. Sophia Genetics is a leader in the preventive and personalized medicine revolution, enabling the development of targeted therapeutics, thereby vastly improving health outcomes. We admire Sophia Genetics not just for its differentiated analytics capability across genomic and radiomic data, but also for its exceptional team and culture”.

The new funding will be put towards further expanding the number of hospitals using Sophia Genetics’ technology, and also on growing its headcount with a plan to ramp up hiring in the US especially.

The Swiss-founded firm is now co-based in Lausanne and Boston, US.

In another recent development the company added radiomics capabilities to its platform last year, allowing for what it describes as “a prediction of the evolution of a tumour”, which it suggests can help inform a physician’s choice of treatment for the patient.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with more than a million customers and a unicorn valuation to boot, has quietly began working on a U.S. launch, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, the fintech startup has set up a small team to begin laying the ground work to bring a version of Monzo to North America, which will initially be powered by a U.S. banking partner while Monzo works on the necessarily regulatory licenses to go it alone.

The plan, which could still be subject to change, is for Monzo to create a “lite” version of its product for U.S. customers, much in the same was as it first launched in the U.K. with a pre-paid debit card before eventually offering a fully fledged bank account.

The thinking, according to one person familiar with the company’s strategy, is that this will enable Monzo to build up a U.S. customer base and iterate its product for the U.S. market in parallel with the challenger bank’s federal charter bank application.

I understand that the plan is for the initial Monzo U.S. product to offer in-app signup, the trademark “hot coral” Monzo debit card, an account and routing number, the ability to make and accept payments, ATM withdrawals, and realtime transaction notifications. In other words, many of the same features that has endeared Monzo with U.K. customers.

Contacted by TechCrunch, a Monzo spokesperson provided the following statement:

We’re really excited about international expansion over the coming months and years. After all, it’s hard to build a bank for a billion people in the UK alone!

However, we don’t have anything specific to share at this stage about those plans. When we do, we’ll be sure to tell the world.

Meanwhile, news that Monzo has begun executing U.S. expansion plans isn’t entirely surprising, even it appears to be happening significantly faster than previously thought.

Co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield has openly talked about his ambition to bring Monzo to the U.S. one day and the London-based challenger bank boasts an array of U.S. investors. They include most recently General Catalyst, along with the likes of Thrive Capital, Goodwater Capital, Stripe, Michael Moritz, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.

The fintech company also recently opened a Las Vegas office, from which it offers twilight hours customer support for U.K. customers. Or at least that is the party line. Now it appears that Las Vegas could soon have Monzo customers closer to home to keep happy, too.