Year: 2019

Over 30 civil rights organizations have penned an open letter that calls on government officials to investigate Amazon Ring’s business practices and end the company’s numerous police partnerships. The letter follows a report by The Washington Post in August that detailed how over 400 police forces across the U.S. have partnered with Ring to gain access to homeowners’ camera footage.

These partnerships have already raised concerns with privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations, who claim the agreements turn neighbors into informants and subject innocent people to greater risk and surveillance.

Had the government itself installed a video network of this size and scope, it would have drawn greater scrutiny. But by quietly working with Ring behind the scenes, law enforcement gets to tap into a massive surveillance network without being directly involved in its creation.

The new letter from the civil rights groups demand that government officials put an end to these behind-the-scenes deals between Amazon and the police.

“With no oversight and accountability, Amazon’s technology creates a seamless and easily automated experience for police to request and access footage without a warrant, and then store it indefinitely,” the letter reads. “In the absence of clear civil liberties and rights-protective policies to govern the technologies and the use of their data, once collected, stored footage can be used by law enforcement to conduct facial recognition searches, target protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, teenagers for minor drug possession, or shared with other agencies like ICE or the FBI,” it says.

Additionally, the letter points out these police deals involve Amazon coaching cops on how to obtain surveillance footage without a warrant. It also notes that Ring allowed employees to share unencrypted customer videos with each other, including in offices based in Ukraine. And it raises concerns about Amazon’s potential plans to integrate facial recognition features into Ring cameras, based on patents it filed.

The groups also point to the map released by Amazon Ring, which now shows over 500 cities with Amazon-police partnerships across the U.S.

The groups’ letter is not the first to demand action.

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) also last month wrote to Amazon to get more information about Ring and its relationships with law enforcement agencies.

But unlike Sen. Markey’s investigative letter to Amazon’s Ring, today’s letter has specific demands for action. The groups are asking mayors and city council members to require their local police departments to cancel their Ring partnerships. The groups also want local government officials to pass new surveillance oversight ordinances that will ensure police departments can’t enter into any such partnerships in the future.

And they want Congress to investigate Ring’s dealings with police more closely.

The letter itself was published online and signed by the following organizations:

Fight for the Future, Media Justice, Color of Change, Secure Justice, Demand Progress, Defending Rights & Dissent, Muslim Justice League, X-Lab, Media Mobilizing Project, Restore The Fourth, Inc., Media Alliance, Youth Art & Self Empowerment Project, Center for Human Rights and Privacy, Oakland Privacy, Justice For Muslims Collective, The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Nation Digital Inclusion Alliance, Project On Government Oversight, OpenMedia, Council on American-Islamic Relations-SFBA, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, MPower Change, Mijente, Access Humboldt, RAICES, National Immigration Law Center, The Tor Project, United Church of Christ, Office of Communication Inc., the Constitutional Alliance, RootsAction.org, CREDO Action, Presente.org, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and United We Dream.

According to Evan Greer, Deputy Director at Fight for the Future, the letter has not yet been mailed. But the plan, going forward, is to use it in local organizing when groups on the ground make deliveries to local officials in cities where the partnerships are live.

“Amazon has created the perfect end-run around our democratic process by entering into for-profit surveillance partnerships with local police departments. Police departments have easy access to surveillance networks without oversight or accountability,” said Greer. “Amazon Ring’s customers provide the company with the footage needed to build their privately owned, nationwide surveillance dragnet. We’re the ones who pay the cost – as they violate our privacy rights and civil liberties. Our elected officials are supposed to protect us, both from abusive policing practices and corporate overreach. These partnerships are a clear case of both,” Greer added.

Speaking today at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington DC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the case for edge computing, even while pushing the Azure cloud as what he called “the world’s computer.”

While Amazon, Google and other competitors may have something to say about that, marketing hype aside, many companies are still in the midst of transitioning to the cloud. Nadella says the future of computing could actually be at the edge where computing is done locally before data is then transferred to the cloud for AI and machine learning purposes. What goes around, comes around.

But as Nadella sees it, this is not going to be about either edge or cloud. It’s going to be the two technologies working in tandem. “Now, all this is being driven by this new tech paradigm that we describe as the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge,” he said today.

He said that to truly understand the impact the edge is going to have on computing, you have to look at research, which predicts there will be 50 billion connected devices in the world by 2030, a number even he finds astonishing. “I mean this is pretty stunning. We think about a billion Windows machines or a couple of billion smartphones. This is 50 billion [devices], and that’s the scope,” he said.

The key here is that these 50 billion devices, whether you call them edge devices or the Internet of Things, will be generating tons of data. That means you will have to develop entirely new ways of thinking about how all this flows together. “The capacity at the edge, that ubiquity is going to be transformative in how we think about computation in any business process of ours,” he said. As we generate ever-increasing amounts of data, whether we are talking about public sector kinds of use case, or any business need, it’s going to be the fuel for artificial intelligence, and he sees the sheer amount of that data driving new AI use cases.

“Of course when you have that rich computational fabric, one of the things that you can do is create this new asset, which is data and AI. There is not going to be a single application, a single experience that you are going to build, that is not going to be driven by AI, and that means you have to really have the ability to reason over large amounts of data to create that AI,” he said.

Nadella would be more than happy to have his audience take care of all that using Microsoft products, whether Azure compute, database, AI tools or edge computers like the Data Box Edge it introduced in 2018. While Nadella is probably right about the future of computing, all of this could apply to any cloud, not just Microsoft.

As computing shifts to the edge, it’s going to have a profound impact on the way we think about technology in general, but it’s probably not going to involve being tied to a single vendor, regardless of how comprehensive their offerings may be.

Speaking today at the Microsoft Government Leaders Summit in Washington DC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the case for edge computing, even while pushing the Azure cloud as what he called “the world’s computer.”

While Amazon, Google and other competitors may have something to say about that, marketing hype aside, many companies are still in the midst of transitioning to the cloud. Nadella says the future of computing could actually be at the edge where computing is done locally before data is then transferred to the cloud for AI and machine learning purposes. What goes around, comes around.

But as Nadella sees it, this is not going to be about either edge or cloud. It’s going to be the two technologies working in tandem. “Now, all this is being driven by this new tech paradigm that we describe as the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge,” he said today.

He said that to truly understand the impact the edge is going to have on computing, you have to look at research, which predicts there will be 50 billion connected devices in the world by 2030, a number even he finds astonishing. “I mean this is pretty stunning. We think about a billion Windows machines or a couple of billion smartphones. This is 50 billion [devices], and that’s the scope,” he said.

The key here is that these 50 billion devices, whether you call them edge devices or the Internet of Things, will be generating tons of data. That means you will have to develop entirely new ways of thinking about how all this flows together. “The capacity at the edge, that ubiquity is going to be transformative in how we think about computation in any business process of ours,” he said. As we generate ever-increasing amounts of data, whether we are talking about public sector kinds of use case, or any business need, it’s going to be the fuel for artificial intelligence, and he sees the sheer amount of that data driving new AI use cases.

“Of course when you have that rich computational fabric, one of the things that you can do is create this new asset, which is data and AI. There is not going to be a single application, a single experience that you are going to build, that is not going to be driven by AI, and that means you have to really have the ability to reason over large amounts of data to create that AI,” he said.

Nadella would be more than happy to have his audience take care of all that using Microsoft products, whether Azure compute, database, AI tools or edge computers like the Data Box Edge it introduced in 2018. While Nadella is probably right about the future of computing, all of this could apply to any cloud, not just Microsoft.

As computing shifts to the edge, it’s going to have a profound impact on the way we think about technology in general, but it’s probably not going to involve being tied to a single vendor, regardless of how comprehensive their offerings may be.

Last week, former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt filed a defamation lawsuit against Sean Rad and Rosette Pambakian, who are part of a group of Tinder founders and former executives who accused Blatt (pictured above) of sexual harassment and assault as part of a broader suit.

Now Rad and Pambakian’s attorneys have filed their own motion to dismiss the suit, arguing that it “seeks to chill protected speech through costly litigation” — in other words, that it’s the kind of lawsuit prohibited under California’s anti-SLAPP law.

“This lawsuit is intended to muzzle Rosette and Sean from telling the truth about how [IAC chairman] Barry Diller and Greg Blatt stole from their employees and covered up sexual assault allegations,” said Rad and Pambakian’s attorney Orin Snyder in a statement. “Unfortunately, unlawful retaliatory lawsuits like this one designed to silence victims and violate their First Amendment rights are all too common in the #metoo era.”

In the filing, Rad and Pambakian’s attorneys also argued that Blatt filed the suit “solely to launch a public smear campaign against Pambakian and the person who reported the assault to Match, Sean Rad. At the same time, and now that Blatt’s public court filings have served his media objective, Blatt says that the complaint that he himself chose to file in court should actually be sent to private arbitration.”

In response, Blatt’s attorney Vineet Bhatia sent the following statement:

We fully expected this run-of-the-mill, procedural smoke screen to be made by Rad and Pambakian. These arguments are legally wrong and we expect to prevail in Court. The bottom line is, Rad and Pambakian conspired to defame Mr. Blatt and should be held responsible.

Both Blatt’s suit and the new filing seek to connect the case to the broader #metoo movement (which, as Snyder alluded to, has seen number of high-profile figures accused of sexual assault, and who then fought back through defamation lawsuits).

Blatt’s lawyers argued that “Rad and Pambakian have attempted to weaponize an important social movement, undermining the plight of true victims of sexual abuse by making false accusations in cynical pursuit of a $2 billion windfall.”

In contrast, Rad and Pambakian’s attorneys said the “ensuing crescendo of retaliation — reminiscent of many Hollywood #MeToo cases — included [Tinder’s parent company] Match circling the wagons around Blatt, publicly belittling Pambakian by chalking up the assault to ‘consensual cuddling,’ and firing her months later after she refused to sign an NDA.”

In a lawsuit filed in the summer of 2018, Rad (Tinder’s co-founder and former CEO), Pambakian (who was then the company’s vice president of marketing and communications), Rad’s fellow co-founders Justin Mateen and Jonathan Badeen and others sued Match and its controlling shareholder IAC, accusing them of manipulating financial data and removing Rad as CEO in order to create a “fake lowball valuation” and strip the founders and executives of their stock options.

The suit also accused Blatt — who served as an executive at IAC and as CEO of Match before replacing Rad as CEO of Tinder — of sexually harassing Pambakian at a company holiday party in 2016.

IAC and Match have called this suit meritless. And in Blatt’s defamation lawsuit, his attorneys said the encounter between Blatt and Pambakian at the holiday party was consensual and that Rad and Pambakian subsequently “conspired to make false allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Blatt with the specific intent to damage Blatt’s good name, personal and professional reputation, and credibility.”

In a footnote, Rad and Pambakian’s attorney say that because they’re making a free speech argument, their motion to dismiss Blatt’s suit does not require the court to “delve into the facts.” However, they add:

Blatt’s false narrative — that this was consensual, and that Pambakian and Rad concocted the assault allegations to aid their valuation lawsuit — is patently false and offensive. The evidence shows that Blatt admitted being drunk at the holiday party, making inappropriate comments to Pambakian, and “snuggling and nuzzling” her in a hotel bed. It further shows that Blatt apologized to Pambakian the following week, and later offered to resign over his misconduct. These are not the actions of an innocent man, nor is it the first time Blatt has been accused of mistreating women in the workplace.

To back that up that up, the motion points to a Gawker article describing supposed harassment and verbal abuse by an unnamed “CEO of a major dating site” owned by a corporation “in a glass building on the far side of town” (subsequent coverage has suggested that the piece was about Blatt).

Pambakian subsequently withdrew from the initial suit due to an arbitration agreement, but is now suing Blatt and Match for wrongful termination and sexual assault.

You can read the full motion below.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s streaming service Quibi, due to launch in April, has partnered with CBS News to modernize “60 Minutes”-style programming for the era of bite-sized video. Instead of an hour-long newsmagazine, CBS News will launch “60 in 6,” which will condense original news stories into 6-minute long episodes, designed for consumption on mobile devices.

The deal will see 60 Minutes producing one original story per week, as part of Quibi’s licensing agreement.

“This is a perfect opportunity to bring 60 Minutes’ style of storytelling, in-depth reporting, and investigative journalism to a new audience,” said 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens, in a statement. “We are excited to launch ’60 In 6,’ as our digital footprint is more important than ever,” he said.

CBS isn’t the first news partner coming to the upcoming streaming service. NBC will build out a full production team exclusively for its Quibi programming, which will include a 6-minute morning and evening news show for the service. The BBC and Quibi, meanwhile, are developing an international news show for millennials, that’s five minutes in length. And ESPN just agreed to do a sports highlights and news show.

“60 Minutes has been, is, and will continue to be the gold standard of storytelling news journalism,” added Jeffrey Katzenberg, Quibi founder and chairman of the board, in a statement. “Bringing their talent and resources to a new form of storytelling could not be more exciting for us at Quibi,” he said.

News programming is only one aspect to Quibi, which will also include a variety of entertainment offerings from big-name talent, like Sam Raimi, Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, and producer Jason Blum, among others. Quibi will also feature a show about Snapchat’s founding, an action-thriller starring Liam Hemsworth, a murder mystery comedy from SNL’s Lorne Michaels, a beauty docuseries from Tyra Banks, a Steven Spielberg horror show, a comedy from Thomas Lennon, a car-stunt series with Idris Elba and more.

Quibi’s premise is taking premium content and chopping it up into “quick bites” (hence the name), and delivering it to mobile viewers in both horizontal and vertical formats. The idea, essentially, is to build a Netflix for the Snapchat generation. This is a risky endeavor, given that the targeted demographic — Gen’s Y and Z — is quite happy with their Netflix subscriptions for higher-production value entertainment, and with YouTube for more casual video viewing from the creator community.

Quibi also seems to ignore the fact that most subscription-based video is still watched on TVs, not mobile devices. Meanwhile, on users’ phones, Quibi will have to compete with a range of other apps and games — including the new titles from Apple Arcade — as well as other time fillers, like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat.

That said, having Katzenberg at the helm has brought a lot of industry support to Quibi. The company has raised $1 billion from Disney, WarnerMedia, 21st Century Fox and others, and was looking to raise more. It also said this summer it had booked $100 million in ad sales pre-launch.

Quibi will launch in April 2020, and “60 in 6” will be available at that time. The service will cost $5 per month, or $8 to go ad-free.

This time it actually has insurance. Zero-fee stock trading app Robinhood is launching Cash Management, a new feature that earns users 2.05% APY interest on uninvested money in their account with the ability to spend it through a special Mastercard debit card. The waitlist opens today in the US with the first users to be admitted soon. “If you have $5000 in your account while you’re thinking about what to invest in, you’d have an extra $105 at the end of the year” thanks to Robinhood Cash Management’s interest, co-CEO Baiju Bhatt tells me.

The $7.6 billion-valuation startup first attempted something similar in December with Robinhood Checking, promising 3% interest. But the product turned into a PR disaster when the Securities Investor Protection Corporation that was supposed to insure users’ funds declared Robinhood ineligible, with its CEO noting it had never agreed to cover checking account. That led Robinhood to shelve the feature, scrub its site of any mention of Checking, and apologize.

Robinhood Cash Management’s debit cards, featuring the same design from the scrapped Checking launch

Now despite Bhatt claiming “Cash Management is a brand new program built from the ground up”, it will offer the exact same debit card design and network of 75,000 ATMs . It’s even using an identical promo image for its half-translucent green, black, white, and American flag debit card designs. But each user’s funds will be covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation up to $1.25 million. To get around the $250,000 FDIC limit per bank, Robinhood is partnering with five banks that it will spread a user’s cash across as necessary to bundle up to that sum. Robinhood earns money by taking a chunk of the interchange fees from transactions on its debit card run in partnership with Sutton Bank, and from a few paid by the five banks cash gets swept into.

To help it avoid further regulatory missteps, Robinhood yesterday added former SEC commissioner Dan Gallagher as its first independent board member. He joins the startup’s recently hired COO, CFO, Chief Compliance Officer, VP of risk & compliance, and VP of legal & regulatory to bring more supervision to Robinhood.

Baiju Bhatt Vlad Tenev Co- Founders and Co-CEOs (from left): Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev

The opt-in feature prevents users from missing out on earning interest if they keep money in their Robinhood account, and makes funds from stock sales quickly accessible via the debit card for spending or withdrawal. That convenience could give Robinhood an edge as its loses one if its key differentiators. Last week, its top incumbent competitors Charles Schwab, E*Trade, and AmeriTrade all dropped their $4.95 to $6.95 fees on stock trades to match Robinhood’s free offering. That makes Cash Management and Robinhood Crypto even more critical to its continued grow. That’s necessary to justify the $7.6 billion valuation from its recent $323 million Series E raise led by DST Global that brings it to $860 million in total funding.

How Robinhood Cash Management Works

“We decided the best thing to do is giving people the peace of mind that their money is held at these banks, while trying to pay back the very best interest rates” Bhatt tells me. [Disclosure: I know Robinhood’s co-founders from college together]

With Cash Management, once users deposit cash into the Robinhood accounts and opt into the program, they’re eligible to earn interest. Any balance on their account including returns from sales of securities or cryptocurrencies is swept into the FDIC-insured partner banks via Promontory’s debit suite system. If one of those banks folds, the FDIC will make customers whole up for up to $250,000, equaling $1.25 million across all five working with Robinhood.

There the cash earns a variable annual percentage yield (APY) that may fluctuate based on market factors like the Fed funds rate. Currently Robinhood offers a 2.05% APY, but refused to compare it to competitors. However, it ranks relatively high amongst popular banking options like these according to Bankrate, especially given it has no minimum balance:

• BMO Harris – 2.20% APY, $5,000 Minimum Balance
• BBVA – 2.15% APY, $10,000 Minimum Balance
• UFB Direct – 2.15% APY, $25,000 Minimum Balance
• Sallie Mae – 2.00% APY, No Minimum Balance
• State Farm Bank – 2.00% APY, No Minimum Balance
• TIAA Bank – 2.00% APY, $500 Minimum Balance
• Wells Fargo – 1.95% APY, $25,000 Minimum Balance
• Investors eAccess – 1.90% APY, No Minimum Balance

Cash Management users can select from the four debit cards styles that are accepted anywhere that takes Mastercard, plus 75,000 ATMs. It also works with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. There’s no foreign transaction fees, maintenance fee, or account minimum.

A variety of new Cash Management features are being added to the Robinhood app. You can get notifications and emails for all your transactions, and lock the card from your phone if you suspect fraud. You can also opt for location protection, which alerts you if your card is used too far away from your phone. An in-app ATM finder shows users where they can get cash out without a fee.

“Partially we want this to be a good business but we also want this to be a big part of customer’s lives” says Robinhood VP of product Josh Elman. Instead of nickel and diming Cash Management users, the startup monetizes by charging its partners. But the bigger strategy is to get more users on Robinhood in hopes some will subscribe to Robinhood Gold. There users pay a variable monthly fee depending on how much they want to borrow from the startup to trade on margin.

Robinhood co-CEO Baiju Bhatt speaks with TechCrunch’s Josh Constine at Disrupt SF 2018

“I think the main takeaway over the last year has been that since last December, our company has been very committed to building an organization on that has a really strong culture [of compliance]” Bhatt concludes. “We’ve grown the leadership team over the last year with experience from risk and finance backgrounds. We think that’s reflected pretty clearly in how Robinhood operates and the diligence that went into building this new program.”

No longer a scrappy startup, the budding fintech giant must now grapple with much greater regulatory scrutiny. With over 6 million users, the SEC won’t stand for it putting people’s finances in in jeopardy.

Part of me wishes Sony had gone for something a little flashier. The PlayStation Unicorn or PlayStation Trebuchet or something. But there’s something to be said for consistency. Simplicity. The next version of Sony’s perennial favorite gaming console will be, drumroll…the PlayStation 5.

The company notes that nothing is particularly revelatory in this morning’s reveal. That information, it seems, is still coming. And there’s still plenty of time and lots of gaming-centric shows in which the company can spill more about the system. “These updates may not be a huge surprise,” SIE President and CEO Jim Ryan writes, “but we wanted to confirm them for our PlayStation fans, as we start to reveal additional details about our vision for the next generation.”

There’s a smattering of additional details. Ryan highlights the upcoming system’s controllers, for one thing. There’s new haptic feedback on board, in place of the more traditional rumble technology that’s been around for some time. That should give a better approximation of the simulated experiences during game play.

Also new is “adaptive triggers,” which are being added to the L2 and R2 buttons. Ryan again,

Developers can program the resistance of the triggers so that you feel the tactile sensation of drawing a bow and arrow or accelerating an off-road vehicle through rocky terrain. In combination with the haptics, this can produce a powerful experience that better simulates various actions. Game creators have started to receive early versions of the new controller, and we can’t wait to see where their imagination goes with these new features at their disposal.

The PlayStation 5 will be available in time for the 2020 holiday season. More information soon, one assumes. 

Security breaches and other activity that causes network surges and outages are all on the rise in the enterprise, and today, a startup called Forward Networks, which has built a clever way to help businesses monitor their network traffic to identify when things are going wrong, has raised a round of $35 million to continue expanding its business to meet that demand.

The money, a Series C, is being led by Goldman Sachs, which in this case is both a strategic and financial investor. David Erickson, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, said the investment bank started out as a customer, and Joshua Matheus, MD for technology at Goldman Sachs, was so pleased with the results that he recommended that the bank also invest in the company. Others participating in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Threshold Ventures (previously DFJ Venture) and A. Capital, the three investors that were behind Forward Networks’ previous round of $16 million in 2017.

Erickson, along with other co-founders Nikhil Handigol, Brandon Heller and Peyman Kazemian, were all Stanford PhDs, and the company’s technology is based around work that they had done there around mathematical modelling. Here, that concept is applied to a company’s network to create essentially a replica of a company’s network architecture, which is in turn used to simulate individual processes and apps running on the network to figure out how they interact and what would represent “normal” versus “abnormal” behavior, which in turn is applied both in real time to monitor the network, and to predict what might happen on it. This is not a fixing platform per se, but in developer operations, there is a fundamental need and gap in the market for products that help engineers identify what is not working right in order to know what to try to fix.

If you are familiar with Honeycomb.io — a devops platform for running apps to determine when and where bugs or conflicts might arise (which itself recently raised funding) — this seems to be taking a similar approach but on a network scale.

Considered together, it seems that we’re starting to see a new wave of services and platforms designed to provide more granular and intelligent pictures of how apps and networks behave in our modern technology landscapes.

Erickson tells me that today, the vast majority of Forward Networks’ customers are using the product to monitor on-premises rather than cloud architectures.

“We launched a public cloud product for AWS towards the end of last year, which today is in use by customers, but the dominant use case for us is on-prem,” Erickson said, who said that while the media (ahem) loves to talk about cloud, in many cases large enterprises have actually been slower to migrate processes in cases where legacy services still work well, and they still harbour distrust of public cloud security and reliability. “We see growth towards the cloud but it’s baby steps.”

The company has been growing steadily and today its network monitoring covers some 75,000 devices. In that context, Goldman Sachs is a significant client, with some 15,000 devices in its network alone.

Looking ahead, Erickson said that the funding would be used in part for R&D and in part to continue its business development. The are a number of other solutions and services out there that have identified the opportunity of providing better network management as a route to identifying security threats and other risks, so that also presents an opportunity for M&A for Forward, although Erickson declined to comment further on that.

“We continue to see the value that Forward Networks’ platform brings to large enterprises running complex networks,” said Bill Krause, board partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “They have solved a critical business problem, which presents a real growth opportunity.”

Smartphone maker Vivo, broadcaster CCTV, and internet giant Tencent said today they are suspending all cooperation with the National Basketball Association, becoming the latest Chinese firms to cut ties with the league after a tweet from a Houston Rockets executive supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters offended many in the world’s most populous nation.

Vivo, which is a key sponsor for the upcoming exhibition games to be played in Shanghai and Shenzhen this week, said in a statement on Chinese social networking platform Weibo, that it was “dissatisfied” with Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey’s views on Hong Kong.

In a tweet over the weekend, Morey voiced his support for protesters in Hong Kong. He said, “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” Even as he quickly moved to delete the tweet and the NBA attempted to smoothen the dialogue, Morey’s views had offended many in China, which maintains a low tolerance for criticism of its political system.

In a statement, the NBA said it was “regrettable” that Morey’s views had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China.” This stance from the NBA, which has grown accustomed to seeing its star players speak freely and criticize anyone they wish including the U.S. president Donald Trump, in turn, offended many.

Earlier today, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said it was also suspending broadcasts of the league’s games to be played in China.

In a statement today, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver tried to steer the league from the controversy. “It is inevitable that people around the world — including from America and China — will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences. However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way,” he said.

China remains a key strategic nation for the NBA. According to official figures, more than 600 million viewers in China watched the NBA content during the 2017-18 season. The league’s five-year partnership with Chinese tech giant Tencent for digital streaming rights of matches is reported to be worth $1.5 billion.

In a statement issued today, Tencent Sports said it was “temporarily suspending” the pre-season broadcast arrangements. Over the weekend, Chinese sportswear maker Li-Ning Company and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank suspended their cooperation with Houston Rockets team.

Users on Twitter reported today that e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com appear to have taken a stand, too. Searches in Chinese for “Houston Rockets” and “Rockets”, which previously surfaced NBA franchise products, now return no results.

In an unrelated event, several Chinese services banned an episode of satirical animated show “South Park” last week. In the episode, titled “Band in China”, the show criticized China’s policies on free speech and U.S. corporates’ efforts to bow down to the world’s most population nation to avoid any repercussions.

In a statement on Monday, South Park creators issued a mock apology. They said, “like the NBA, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom. Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful! We good now China?”

Contentstack, a startup that offers a headless CMS platform for enterprises, today announced that it has raised a $31.5 million Series A round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital also participated in this round.

The company says that it saw its revenue grow by 4x in the first half of 2019 compared to the same time period last year. Without a baseline, that’s not exactly a meaningful number for a startup founded in 2018, of course, but sales cycles in the enterprise are notoriously long and the company does have a number of marquee customers like Shell, Walmart and Cisco.

The Contentstack founding team, Neha Sampat, Nishant Patel and Matthew Baier, recently sold Built.io to Software AG . “With Contentstack, the opportunity feels even larger, but there is also a strong sense of urgency,” said Sampat when I asked her about why she decided to raise at this point, which comes relatively late for a company with Contentstack’s ambitions. “Being able to do more right now and scale the company’s operations to match the opportunity right in front of us required more resources than the company’s organic growth would provide us.”

Sampat also noted that she believes that brands are not realizing that their customers don’t want billboards but customized experiences across channels. Yet, at the same time, they often don’t know what’s working and how to get the most value out of the content they create.

“The belief that a single platform or product can ‘do it all’ is being replaced with the realization you can do more, better by bringing together the best technologies the market has to offer,” she said. “This wasn’t an option before, because integrations were so complex and clunky. But now, with the emergence of extensible content experience platforms, companies can actually get to market FASTER using this approach, compared to using a single-vendor approach that wasn’t built for the modern era.”

The company tells me that it is getting traction across industries, but retail, travel/hospitality, sports/entertainment and tech are doing especially well.

Like most companies at the Series A stage, Contentstack says it will use the new funding to scale its sales and marketing team and build out its partner ecosystem and community around the product. Sampat also tells me that the company plans to expand beyond its core regions of the U.S., India and Europe by moving into the APAC region in the first half of 2020, mostly with a focus on Australia and New Zealand.