Year: 2019

Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) is looking for answers from Amazon about its doorbell camera Ring and the company’s relationships with law enforcement agencies around the U.S. In a letter published on Thursday, he writes to the technology giant how partnerships like Ring’s raise “serious privacy and civil liberties concerns,” and asks Amazon to further detail the size and scope of its numerous deals with police.

The Senator’s attention was drawn to the issue following a recent report by The Washington Post. The report revealed that Ring had entered into some 400 video-sharing partnerships with U.S. police forces, which granted the police access to the footage from the homeowners’ internet-connected video cameras.

The police cannot tap into live or on ongoing footage, and the homeowners can choose to decline police requests, the report also said.

However, the partnerships raised concerns from privacy advocates who believe the program could threaten civil liberties, turn residents into informants, and subject innocent people to greater surveillance and risk, The Washington Post noted.

The same kind of network of surveillance cameras would draw more scrutiny if the police or the government had installed it themselves, but by working with Ring they’re not directly involved.

In a letter (see below) dated Thursday, September 5, 2019, Senator Markey questions the use targeted language that encourages Ring owners to opt in to the video-sharing program with police, as well as the way Amazon actively courts law enforcement to increase its use of the Ring system. Sen. Markey additionally points out that Amazon seems to be increasingly working with U.S. police forces, like it did when marketing its facial recognition product, Rekognition.

“The scope and nature of Ring’s partnership with police forces raise additional civil liberties concerns. The integration of Ring’s network of cameras with law enforcement offices could easily create a surveillance network that places dangerous burdens on people of color and feeds racial anxieties in local communities,” Sen. Markey wrote. “I am particularly alarmed to learn that Ring is pursuing facial recognition technology with the potential to flag certain individuals as suspicious based on their biometric information,” he continued, referencing a patent Ring applied for last year that would catch “suspicious” people on camera.

“In light of evidence that existing facial recognition technology disproportionately misidentifies African Americans and Latinos, a product like this has the potential to catalyze racial profiling and harm people of color,” Markey said.

The Senator asks Amazon to detail how long it’s been asking users to share video footage with police, how those policies have changed, and which police departments it’s working with. He also asked for information about how this data was being stored, what safeguards are in place, whether the police are sharing that footage with other entities, whether Rekognition capabilities were coming to Ring, and more.

Markey also wants Ring to review its consent prompts for video-sharing with experts to make sure it’s not manipulating consumers into these agreements with police.

And he wants to know if Ring has worked with any experts in civil liberties, criminal justice or other relevant fields to review its doorbells and social network Neighbors to ensure they don’t present unique threats to people of color or other populations.

Ring would not be the first to create a home for racial profiling among neighbors, though its connection to cameras makes it more of an actionable threat than other networks, like Nextdoor or Facebook Groups.

Nextdoor, for example, became well-known for issues around racial profiling, and eventually rolled out tools to try to stem the problem in its app. Crime-tracking app Citizen also faced controversies for creating a state of paranoid hypervigilance among its users — something that has long-term effects on how people perceive their world and those they share it with. And anyone in a Facebook Group for their neighborhood knows there will at some point be a post about a “suspcious” person with little evidence of any wrongdoing.

Sen. Markey gave Amazon until September 26, 2019 to respond to his questions.

Yesterday at TechCrunch’s Enterprise event in San Francisco, we sat down with three venture capitalists who spend a lot of their time thinking about enterprise startups. We wanted to ask what trends they are seeing, what concerns they might have about the state of the market, and of course, how startups might persuade them to write out a check.

We covered a lot of ground with the investors — Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures, and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners — who told us, among other things, that startups shouldn’t expect a big M&A event right now, that there’s no first-mover advantage in the enterprise realm, and why grit may be the quality that ends up keeping a startup afloat.

On the growth of enterprise startups:

Jason Green: When we started Emergence 15 years ago, we saw maybe a few hundred startups a year, and we funded about five or six. Today, we see over 1,000 a year; we probably do deep diligence on 25.

We’re in a price-hike homestretch, startup fans. Early-bird savings head south, and ticket prices head north in just a few short hours. Want to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Buy your passes by 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6 — avoid the costly stroke of midnight.

Wring even more savings out of the waning early-bird hours. How? Buy in bulk and score a group discount. Bring your entire squad and/or impress valued clients.

Here’s the 411 on group discounts:

• Group Innovator Pass: Buy five or more passes and get a 20% discount. Need 10 or more passes? Email us for a price quote at events@techcrunch.com.
• Group Founder Pass: Buy two or more passes and you’ll get a 10% discount. Note: You must be a (co)founder of a company (of any size).
• Group Investor Pass: Purchase two or more passes to get a 10% discount.
• Group Expo Only Pass: If you want to buy Expo Only passes in bulk (10 or more), email events@techcrunch.com for a price quote.
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Whether you bring your team or arrive solo, you’ll find incomparable networking opportunities at Disrupt SF. Head for Startup Alley to meet and greet our TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors selected 45 companies they felt represented the best early-stage startups in these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

You’ll find hundreds of other stellar startups exhibiting their tech and talent, and we’re here to help you make networking as painless as possible. First, get a jump on your research by reviewing our directory of exhibiting startups. Once you get a vetted handle on who you’d like to meet, take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform.

Available to attendees with Innovator, Founder or Investor passes, CrunchMatch automatically suggests suitable prospects based on profiles each user submits. Use it to send, accept or decline meeting requests. And you can use the service to reserve dedicated meeting spaces.

There’s so much more: Don’t miss Startup Battlefield as a group of standout startups compete for $100,000 on a world stage. And look at our conference agenda to see which of the many, many presentations, interviews, workshops and panel discussions we have on tap. So many choices and so little time.

So little time — just a few hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Avoid the price hike. Beat the deadline and buy your early-bird passes before 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

As rumors about Apple’s plans to launch a Tile competitor swirl, Tile today announced it’s teaming up with Google to make it easier for users to locate their lost items using their Android devices and Google Assistant. For the uninitiated, Tile is a small hardware accessory that you can attach to items like keys, purses, bags, wallets, and more, which can then be tracked using a combination of Bluetooth technology and the wider network of Tile users running the companion app on their phone.

The newly announced Google Assistant integration will make it possible for Android users to use voice commands to ring the Tile attached to the missing item. This is supported by way of Tile’s “direct ring” technology, which allows the platform to directly connect with then ring the lost item.

The Google Assistant integration will be similar to using any other smart home Action through the Assistant, Tile says, and will launch later this year.

“This is big news for Tile customers,” said CJ Prober, CEO of Tile, in a statement. “If you were to lose or misplace your wallet, remote, backpack – anything, Google will soon join your personal search party with a simple voice command.”

Tile’s announcement of Google Assistant integration comes at an interesting time.

Apple, which is hosting its iPhone event next week, has been found to be developing its own Tile competitor. Recently, code referencing a new tab labeled “Items” in iOS 13’s “Find My” app was also discovered, hinting at a forthcoming launch.

It’s unclear, of course, when Apple plans to actually unveil this hardware. But Tile, apparently, is looking to get ahead of any such announcement with its news for Android users.

Tile has grown to become one of the top makers of Bluetooth-powered lost item trackers on the market, with 22 million sold in 2018 and a user base that’s locating over 5 million items daily using its platform across 230 countries and territories around the world.

The company has since expanded beyond its consumer devices to provide location tracking to more products by way of partnerships with BLE chipmakers and other manufacturers.

As of today, that list also includes Sennheiser, which launched its new Momentum Wireless around-ear headphones (339 EUR) at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin today. The headphones will ship with Tile’s Community Fine technology built-in, so users can locate them if they become misplaced, lost or stolen.

Tile now has over 20 partnerships with the addition of Sennheiser, the company says.

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced this morning that she’s leading an investigation into Facebook over antitrust issues — in other words, whether Facebook used its social media dominance to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

In a statement, James said:

Even the largest social media platform in the world must follow the law and respect consumers. I am proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in investigating whether Facebook has stifled competition and put users at risk. We will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.

According to the announcement, that coalition includes the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.

Facebook already announced in June that it was facing an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission (separate from the privacy-related settlement with the FTC that it announced on the same day). It seems that most of the tech giants are facing antitrust scrutiny from the FTC and Department of Justice.

“People have multiple choices for every one of the services we provide,” Facebook’s vice president of state and local policy Will Castleberry said in a statement after the new investigation was announced. “We understand that if we stop innovating, people can easily leave our platform. This underscores the competition we face, not only in the US but around the globe. We will of course work constructively with state attorneys general and we welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate.”

Huboo, a U.K. startup that operates a multi-channel fulfilment service for e-commerce businesses of varying sizes, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Backing the majority of the round is London venture capital firm Episode 1, alongside a number of unnamed private individual investors.

Launched in November 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd after the pair had ran a number e-commerce experiments, Huboo aims to solve the fulfilment pain-point that most online stores face. The service promises to store your stock, and then “pick, pack and deliver it” automatically as customer orders are placed.

The idea is that by outsourcing fulfilment, online shops can focus on the parts of the business where most value is added, such as customer service and choosing what products to develop and/or sell, by outsourcing fulfilment with confidence.

However, according to Huboo’s founders, except for larger e-commerce stores, the market is woefully underserved, with most fulfilment providers too expensive and uninterested in servicing smaller businesses. The only other option, they claim, is Amazon’s “Fulfillment by Amazon” (FBA), which they say is viable only for goods sold on Amazon because of discounts the e-commerce giant offers.

“Packing boxes and queuing in the post office were a horrible side effect of our [e-commerce] experimentation, and we needed to offload this if we weren’t to waste hours each day or abandon the whole e-commerce research project,” says Bysh.

“Luckily this is a solved problem, or so we thought… but we called around some fulfilment companies and discovered that they had no interest in our business, our items were too cheap and our volumes too low. And they weren’t very tech savvy, often basing their business on 3rd party warehouse management software, and limited marketplace integrations”.

The pair decided to change tact. Instead of attempting to find the next pure e-commerce opportunity, as their e-commerce experiments had intended, they began trying to figure out a way to “shatter the traditional economics of fulfilment”. The potential prize is a “huge chunk” of what Bysh frames as a “multi-billion, largely uncontested” market.

“We did some research on the market opportunity and determined that in the U.K. alone the opportunity was around £1 billion of more or less uncontested fulfilment business,” he says.

The key was to build systems that are flexible enough for Huboo to work with sellers, regardless of what they sell, how many they sell, and whether or not the goods are sold new or “re-commerced”. “We have clients that ship a couple of items a day and other that ship thousands. Items range in price for a few pounds to hundreds,” explains Bysh.

Products fulfilled by Huboo already span items such as vitamins, CBD oils, headphones, bingo tickets, electronic bagpipes, antiques, coffee, electronics, clothes (new and used), and beauty products. Clients include startups, subscription businesses, and individuals selling niche or boutique products.

Bysh says that serving this part of the fulfilment market is made possible via a combination of bespoke technology and algorithms, leading to “massive process optimisation” and reducing client management costs through SaaS sign-ups, on-boarding, and support.

But it’s not just about tech-driven optimised processes. Part of Huboo’s proposition is achieved through something as simple as a modular approach the company has designed to organise its warehouses. This sees every client given a designated space within a hub a and hub manager who understands their business.

From a revenue model perspective, Huboo is attempting to align its own interests with that of sellers. The startup provides two months of free storage to all clients for every new inventory shipment, so if sellers manage and maintain turnover they won’t need to pay for storage again.

“When a seller sells, we fulfil, which means they pay us primarily when they are earning. That’s where 80% of the revenue comes from,” explains Bysh.

Meanwhile, Huboo generates additional revenues from a small administrative subscription and optional services, such as packaging. The latter will grow when “Hubstore” is launched later this year, offering upgrades and customisations in a single click. This will include related services, such as tech to help expand to additional sales channels and increase sales.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week, we recorded on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, a show that saw talks from Box’s Aaron Levie, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar and venture capitalists Maha Ibrahim, Rebecca Lynn and Jason Green. The latter, the founder of Emergence Capital, joined us before his panel for a special episode of Equity focused almost entirely on enterprise tech. Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with Kate.

Before we jumped too deep into the enterprise pool, we had to review some news from one of the most-talked about companies. The co-working giant, legally known as The We Company, is said to have halved its IPO exceptions to a minuscule $20 billion! Ok that’s not really that small but compared to its most recent valuation of $47 billion, we’re a bit shocked.

Next, we ran through the IPO pipeline. Cloudflare is expected to go public next Friday. Datadog will come after that. WeWork is reportedly kicking off its roadshow next week, but given this week’s reports, that could be delayed.

After that, Green gave us his take on Box, the file sharing business in which he was an early investor in. If you haven’t heard, activist investor Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in the business this week. Green explains what that means and what he think is next for the company. Levie, of course, spoke on stage at the enterprise event. In short, the executive said his goal is to continue building a sustainable business.

Finally, we dove into the latest trends in startups. Enterprise still isn’t sexy but it’s much sexier than it’s been in the past. Why? Because all the enterprise startups want to build consumer friendly tools. Tune in to hear what Green thinks of the consumerization of the enterprise and all the startup madness.

UCWeb, a subsidiary of Chinese giant Alibaba, plans to launch an e-commerce service in India in the coming months.

In a statement to TechCrunch, a UCWeb spokesperson said the firm plans to build an e-commerce service around content platform in India. The spokesperson added that UCWeb has no intention to compete with existing e-commerce businesses in the country, and that Alibaba Group was not overseeing the development of the service.

UCWeb, which is known for its popular mobile browser UC Browser, would leverage its “extensive user communities in India,” to build the e-commerce business, the spokesperson said. “The new service is in line with our strategy to enrich the experience for users and clients alike.”

UC Browser, used by more than 430 million users worldwide, counts India as one of its key markets where it has over 130 million users. According to third-party analytics firm StatCounter, UC Browser commanded over 23% of the mobile browser market share in India, lagging only behind Google Chrome, whose market share has ballooned in recent years to 63%.

UC Browser, has however, remained in the top 15 apps in India based on number of downloads downloads through Google Play Store in last three months, according to app research firm SensorTower.

In recent years, UCWeb has been working to bulk up UC Browser to expand its offering beyond mobile browsing. Today it works with over 120,000 bloggers and over 700 media outlets to produce content that it then serves to UC Browser users.

UCWeb has launched a number of apps in recent years that are aimed at users who are trying to download videos from the web. Vmate, a UCWeb-owned app that offers similar functionalities, recently secured $100 million commitment from parent firm Alibaba.

On the sidelines of a company event on Thursday, Huaiyuan Yang, Vice President of UCWeb Global Business, told news agency PTI that the firm would partner with existing players for its upcoming e-commerce service. Alibaba owns about 30% of payments and e-commerce firm Paytm.

“We have Alibaba’s e-commerce gene in us. We are actually trying to start innovative business model related to e-commerce,” he told PTI.

The last few hours of serious euro-savings are upon us, startuppers. In the States, we’d say it’s time to fish or cut bait. What we’re trying to tell you is that super early bird pricing for Disrupt Berlin 2019 ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your passes now and save up to €600 or pay more tomorrow. Note that staying home is not an option.

Come to Berlin and join more than 3,000 of your kindred startup spirits from more than 50 countries. You’ll benefit from the words and wisdom of tech’s most influential leaders, investors, makers and shakers. Folks like these…and lots more phenomenal speakers.

Enjoy a fireside chat with Oscar Pierre, the CEO and co-founder of Glovo. Pierre’s bonafides are fascinating — he got his start as an aerodynamics engineer for Airbus. We can’t wait to hear how he transitioned to lead a major on-demand delivery platform with more than 1,000 employees and service in 124 cities across 21 countries.

​Quick, what company single-handedly changed the tech startup investment game? If you said SoftBank Vision Fund, well good on ya, mate. Fund partner David Thevenon will join us on stage, and we can’t wait to hear his take on ride-hailing and mobile transportation platforms. We also want to know if SoftBank board members are hands-on or hands-off when it comes to letting executive teams make decisions.

There are plenty more reasons and ways to attend Disrupt Berlin. Why not take a shot at startup glory? One application form is all it takes to apply to both Startup Battlefield and the TC Top Picks program.

Think you have what it takes to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your company on the world’s most famous startup stage? It won’t cost you anything to apply or to participate. If you’re chosen, you’ll receive rigorous pitch coaching, so you’ll be ready to go head-to-head against some of the best early-stage startups. Who will win the $50,000 prize?

Not ready for a pitch competition quite yet? No worries. Apply to be a TC Top Pick. If you make the cut, you’ll get a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, a VIP experience and loads of investor and media attention.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but the super early-bird ticket pricing disappears in just a few hours. Buy your passes now before the deadline strikes tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Remember, staying home  is not an option.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Xiaomi said on Friday it has shipped over 100 million smartphones in India, its most important market, since beginning operations in the nation five years ago. The company cited figures from research firm IDC in its claim.

The Chinese giant, which has held the top smartphone vendor position in India for eight straight quarters now, said its budget smartphone series Redmi and Redmi Note were its top selling lineups in India.

“It’s a testament to the love we have received from millions of Mi Fans since our inception. There have been brands who entered the market before us, yet are nowhere close to the astounding feat we have achieved,” said Manu Jain, VP of Xiaomi and MD of the company’s India business, in a statement.

As competition in its home market intensified, India has emerged as the most important market for Xiaomi in recent years. When the Chinese firm entered the nation, for the first two years, it relied mostly on selling handsets online to cut overhead. But in the years since, it has established presence in brick-and-mortar market, which continues to drive much of the general sales in the nation.

Last month, Xiaomi said the company is on track to building presence in 10,000 physical stores in the country by the end of the year. It expects offline market to drive half of its sales by that time frame.

More to follow…