Year: 2019

The Disrupt Battlefield is one of the best parts of the conference. Twenty+ startups step on to the Disrupt Main Stage with a product, a pitch, and a dream. They have six minutes to convey how they’re going to fundamentally disrupt their industry, and six minutes of Q&A with world-renowned judges from the VC world.

Pride. Anxiety. Despair. Glory. Anything could happen on that stage, particularly with judges that are at the top of their game and can smell bull shit from a mile away.

This year, at Disrupt SF 2019, we’ll be joined by Ashton Kutcher, Ann Miura-Ko and Mamoon Hamid in the finals round of the Battlefield. And we couldn’t be more excited!

This won’t be Kutcher’s first time at Disrupt. He’s hung out with us a couple times before to discuss his investment strategy for Sound Ventures, and previously, A-Grade investments. This will be his first time as a Finals Judge for the Battlefield, however, and it’ll be fascinating to see the superstar investor work in real-time on the Main Stage.

Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner at Floodgate, will be returning as a Battlefield judge. Miura-Ko is a repeat member of the Forbes Midas List, the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, and has been called the most powerful woman in startups. Her portfolio includes Lyft, which went public this year, as well as Refinery29, Xamarin and Thinkful.

Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid will also be judging the Battlefield Finals. Hamid was a cofounder at Social Capital and a partner at US Venture Partners before joining Kleiner Perkins, and has invested in companies like Slack, Yammer, Box, and Figma.

We’re amped to have such amazing VCs join us for the final round of the Startup Battlefield competition. Join us at Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are still available at an early-bird rate, but that ends this week.

See you there!

Flipkart, the largest e-commerce platform in India, said Tuesday it has concluded the roll-out of a range of features to its shopping app in what is its biggest update in recent years.

Chief among these new features is access to Flipkart in Hindi language. Prior to the revamp of the app, Flipkart was available only in English, a language spoken by 10% of India’s 1.3 billion population.

Flipkart says it is hoping that the new features, which includes a video streaming service, would help it reach the next 200 million users in India.

The major bet on Hindi, a language spoken by more than 500 million people in India, illustrates a growing push from local and international companies operating in the country as they adapt their services and business models to go beyond the urban cities.

And that’s where much of the opportunity, which countless startups and companies have trumpeted to investors to successfully raise hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and venture capital in recent years, lies in the nation.

During an Oval Office press conference this week, the President told reports that the United States is currently not interesting in broaching the subject of Huawei as part of increasingly heated trade conversations with China. The statement appears to run counter to pat suggestions that he was willing to discuss the U.S. government’s blacklist of the electronics giant during trade talks.

“It’s a national security concern,” Trump said. “Huawei is a big concern of our military, of our intelligence agencies, and we are not doing business with Huawei. And we’ll see what happens with respect to China, but Huawei has been not a player that we want to talk about right now.”

Huawei’s U.S. blacklisting stems from both concerns over potential links to security and spying, as well as alleged sanctions violations. Trump has, however, previously conflated those issues brewing trade war between the superpowers, suggesting that a ban could be lifted with a new U.S.-China deal.

Recent discussions with Chinese President Xi Jinping helped ease restrictions against the company, which could be faced with devastating consequences if a full ban on partnerships with U.S. companies like Google is enacted. Trump also used the question to once again suggest that the toll of tariffs could be avoided if U.S. companies no longer relied on Chinese components and manufacturing.

The new comments appear to find Trump temporarily closing the door to discussions about Huawei in future meetings with the Chinese President, though he did not elaborate further.

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1. Children’s privacy costs just $170 million for Google in settlement with the FTC

The complaint from the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General’s office focused on YouTube’s use of cookies to track viewers of kids’ channels without getting permission from parents. Under COPPA regulations, websites and online services targeting children need to disclose their data collection practices and receive consent from parents.

In addition to the payment — a relatively small sum for YouTube-owner Google — the settlement requires the company to develop a system that allows channel-owners to identify content aimed at children.

2. Amazon unveils a new Fire TV Cube, soundbar and over a dozen Fire TV Edition products

The new products include a next-generation Fire TV Cube, a Fire TV Edition soundbar from Anker — its first foray into Fire TV Edition audio products — and 15 other Fire TV Edition products, including the first OLED Fire TV Edition smart TVs.

3. Porsche unveils the $150,900 Taycan Turbo electric sedan

Porsche has poured more than $1 billion into the development of its first all-electric vehicle.

LOS ANGELES, CA – AUGUST 16: Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt attends the 2014 Creative Arts Emmy Awards press room held at the Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on August 16, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Tommaso Boddi/WireImage)

4. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is coming to Disrupt SF 2019

Gordon-Levitt isn’t just the star of movies like “500 Days of Summer” — he’s also the founder of production company HitRecord, which he’s trying to turn into “GitHub for creativity.”

5. Ginger, an MIT spin-out providing app-based mental health coaching to workers, raises $35M

Ginger works with companies and their healthcare providers to provide employees with an app-based way to connect with coaches to talk through their issues and suggest ways forward.

6. Mental health websites in Europe found sharing user data for ads

Europeans going online to seek support for these issues are having sensitive health data tracked and passed to third parties, according to Privacy International’s findings.

7. Light Phone’s founders discuss life beyond the smartphone

The company has run two successful crowdfunding campaigns for a pair of minimalist phones designed to augment or replace the smartphone. Today the startup announced that it will be shipping its second version of the handset. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Creators of child-directed content will be financially impacted by the changes required by the FTC settlement, YouTube admitted today. The settlement will end the use of children’s personal data for ad-targeting purposes, the FTC said. To address creators’ concerns over their businesses, YouTube also announced a $100 million fund to invest in original children’s content.

The fund, distributed over three years, will be dedicated to the creation of “thoughtful” original content for YouTube, the company says.

“We know these changes will have a significant business impact on family and kids creators who have been building both wonderful content and thriving businesses, so we’ve worked to give impacted creators four months to adjust before changes take effect on YouTube,” wrote YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki in a blog post. “We recognize this won’t be easy for some creators and are committed to working with them through this transition and providing resources to help them better understand these changes.”

YouTube plans to share more information about the fund and its plans in the weeks ahead.

In addition, YouTube said today it’s “rethinking” its overall approach the YouTube kids and family experience.

This could go towards fixing some of the other problems raised by the consumer advocacy groups who prompted the FTC investigation. The groups weren’t entirely pleased by the settlement, as they believed it was only scratching the surface of YouTube’s issue.

“It’s extremely disappointing that the FTC isn’t requiring more substantive changes or doing more to hold Google accountable for harming children through years of illegal data collection,” said Josh Golin, the Executive Director for the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), a group that spearheaded the push for an investigation. “A plethora of parental concerns about YouTube – from inappropriate content and recommendations to excessive screen time – can all be traced to Google’s business model of using data to maximize watch time and ad revenue,” he added.

Google already began to crack down on some of these concerns, independent of an FTC requirement, however.

To tackle the scourage of inappropriate content targeting minors, YouTube in August expanded its child safety policies to remove — instead of only restrict, as it did before — any “misleading family content, including videos that target younger minors and their families, those that contain sexual themes, violence, obscene, or other mature themes not suitable for younger audiences.”

Separately, YouTube aims to address the issues raised around promotional content in videos.

For example, a video with kids playing with toys could be an innocent home movie or it could involve a business agreement between the video creator and a brand to showcase the products in exchange for free merchandise or direct payment.

The latter should be labeled as advertising, as required by YouTube, but that’s often not the case. And even when ads are disclosed, it’s impossible for young children to know the difference between when they’re being entertained and when they’re being marketed to.

There are also increasing concerns over the lack of child labor laws when it comes to children performing in YouTube videos, which has prompted some parents to exploit their kids for views or even commit child abuse.

YouTube’s “rethinking” of its kids’ experience should also include whether or not it should continue to incentivize the creation of these “kid influencer” and YouTube family videos, where little girls and boys’ childhoods have become the source of parents’ incomes.

YouTube’s re-evaluation of the kids’ experience comes at a time when the FTC is also thinking of how to better police general audience platforms on the web, where some content is viewed by kids. The regulator is hosting an October workshop to discuss this issue, where it hopes to come up with ways to encourage others to develop kid-safe zones, too.

While investors are already writing big checks for meditation startups, Elevate Labs founder and CEO Jesse Pickard said that none of the existing meditation apps can replace the experience of working with a human coach.

“This experience where you have somebody that meets with you is wildly better than any digital product that’s out there,” Pickard said. “The problem is, it’s not affordable to 99% of the planet.”

So Elevate Labs is launching a new mobile app today called Balance, which is designed to replicate the experience of working with a live meditation coach.

“Even with meditation increasingly getting into the mainstream, it’s a fairly difficult practice to adhere to,” Pickard said. “We take away a lot of that indecision and present you with a path that is unique to you … People live all sorts of different lives: Some people care about stress, some people care about sleep, some people care about focus. But when you and I go into any of the other major apps , we’re getting the exact same recording.”

With Balance, on the other hand, you’re not just browsing through a library of prerecorded content. Instead, the app starts out by asking you about your goals, your meditation experience and more. You’ll then get a set of introductory meditations that may look familiar, but Pickard said that each meditation is actually “a combination of dozens and dozens of clips woven together that’s personalized to you.”

For example, I told the app that I already had experience with meditation, and that my top goal was to stay focused. As a result, my first meditation skipped most of the introductory explanations, and the main exercise was designed to help me focus on the sound of my breath.

Pickard said the app will continue to ask you questions about your experience over time, which in turn will lead to more personalization. The meditations are narrated by coach Leah Santa Cruz, who’s also involved in writing the content, and there are other meditation experts on the Balance team.

The app’s initial 10-day meditation course is free. After that, to get access to additional meditations you’ll need to pay $11.99 per month, $49.99 per year or $199.99 for a lifetime subscription. In addition to the meditations, Balance also includes a guided activity designed to help people sleep.

On top of launching a new app, Elevate Labs is also announcing that it’s raised a $7.1 million Series B led by Keesing Media Group, with participation from Oakhouse Partners.

Under its old name MindSnacks, the company built language-learning games before shifting focus to Elevate, a “brain training” app that has supposedly been downloaded 25 million times and won Apple’s App of the Year Award in 2014. Pickard (who, thanks to the magic of Craigslist, was my roommate for about a year when I was first starting at TechCrunch) said that unlike most of the other apps that are marketed as improving your mind, Elevate focuses on trainable skills like reading, writing and math — rather than, say, improving your memory.

“We’ve been extremely careful about [not] venturing into untrainable skills — things like improving your attention span, those activities are not as provenly teachable,” he said.

It’s been a while since the company has raised outside funding — seven years since MindSnacks announced a Series A from Sequoia. Pickard said the company actually raised another bridge round in 2015, then “buckled down for a number of years and really just had to build a business that actually was sustainable.”

Apparently that’s paid off — he said Elevate Labs was cashflow positive last year. With a total of $17.1 million in funding, the plan now is to continue supporting and growing Elevate while also launching Balance and building a whole line of related apps.

“We think there’s a really huge brand to be built around mental fitness,” Pickard said.

The FTC is imposing a historic fine of $170 million for YouTube’s violation of the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The settlement agreement will put increased responsibility on both YouTube and the content creators themselves to properly identify any child-directed content on the platform, as YouTube is now prohibited from collecting personal data from viewers of any of those videos. Creators who fail to comply with this new requirement may be penalized directly, the FTC revealed at a press conference this morning. This could include both civil penalties and their removal from the YouTube platform.

These specific consequences weren’t detailed in either the FTC or YouTube’s earlier statements about the settlement agreement, and serve to put the creator community on notice.

“We would have strong penalties in future cases against content creators and channel owners, as well — particularly when we would have a situation where the channel owner was specifically asked ‘are you child-directed?,’  and the channel owner said ‘No,” said Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Andrew Smith.

The ability to target children’s videos using behavioral advertising technology has been a profitable business for creators, so changes that require creators to dial things back could have encouraged some to try to skirt the new rules.

That was a concern, the FTC said, which is why it will continue to review YouTube content.

The regulator says when the order is fully implemented, it will perform a sweep of YouTube to identify any child-directed content that continues to collect personally identifiable information. It wouldn’t say how this sweep would work, on a technical level, or how it will be able to keep up with the huge influx of new content YouTube sees every day.

The FTC also promised other “consequences” for content creators who are not sincere or forthcoming about their content, which could include “being kicked off the YouTube platform,” it said.

YouTube isn’t likely to let it come to that, however.

“We also think that YouTube has a strong incentive to police its platform both to avoid future enforcement actions by the FTC, but also because it’s offering this platform to content creators,” Smith said. “And if the FTC is bringing independent piecemeal actions against content creators, for violating COPPA, that may get that may discourage content creators from posting content on YouTube,” he added.

YouTube, itself, did not specify what sort of enforcement it would take itself against non-compliant creators, only that further information would be shared with the community ahead of the start of these new data practices — in about four months’ time.

At that point, YouTube says it will limit data collection on child-directed content and stop serving personalized ads the videos. It will also turn off comments and notifications on these children’s videos. YouTube creators, meanwhile, will have a new checkbox where they’ll need to inform YouTube if their content is aimed at children in order to meet the new guidelines.

YouTube, additionally, plans to use machine learning techniques to identify other child-directed content — like videos featuring kids’ characters, toys, and games, for example. It will then automatically bucket those items as also being children’s content and will limit the data collection taking place on those videos, too.

To be in violation of COPPA, the creator would have to leave this checkbox unchecked and avoid getting flagged through YouTube’s automated systems. (Or return to their videos to disable the designation at some point, perhaps.)

YouTube will have more to share on the impacts to creators, the changes they’ll need to make, and its plans for a new $100 million fund for kid-friendly YouTube content, in the coming weeks.

All eyes are on the next iPhone, but Apple could also be working on a new Apple TV. The device could be announced next week, or maybe later this fall.

The anonymous Twitter account @never_released shared the codename of a new Apple TV — AppleTV11,1 or J305AP. They have been accurate when it comes to finding codenames of various unreleased Apple products in the past.

MacRumors has separately found a reference to AppleTV11,1 in an internal build of the upcoming major iOS release, iOS 13. @never_released adds that the new Apple TV could feature an A12 Bionic system on a chip.

The current Apple TV 4K runs on an A10X Fusion system on a chip. That chip was originally designed for the 10.5-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro that was released in 2017.

A spec bump would make a lot of sense as Apple is about to launch Apple Arcade, its gaming subscription service that works on iOS, macOS and tvOS. For a flat monthly fee, you’ll be able to play games on your iPhone and seamlessly switch to a Mac or an Apple TV.

It’s unclear whether the next Apple TV will have more important changes. For instance, Apple could use this opportunity to update the remote.

Many have also been asking for a more affordable Apple TV device. As Apple is about to launch Apple TV+, its subscription streaming service with original content, the company will likely try to make the service available to as many people as possible. But the A12-powered device looks like an update to the Apple TV 4K.

Let’s Do This is a YC alumni startup form 2018 which is a marketplace for endurance events, from a 5k fun run or an IronMan triathlon. It’s now raised a $5M seed round with Serena Williams and Usain Bolt participating. The round was led by Pete Flint (Partner at NFX, formerly Trulia, LastMinute).

Other investors include YCombinator, Shasta, Index, and FJ Labs. Other angels were Paul Buchheit (YC, Gmail), Yuri Sagalov (YC, AeroFS), Simon Nixon (MoneySupermarket), Tim Thackrah (Elmsleigh), Paul Radcliffe (Marathon World Record Holder) and Andy Philips (Booking.com).

The platform lists 30,000 races of all distances and disciplines and claims to be the largest marketplace for endurance events in the world, offering key information about the races and exclusive booking perks for members such as free cancellation protection.

They have recently agreed a partnership with Hearst to power all race listings across Runner’s World, Men’s Health and Women’s Health in the US and the UK.

Serena Williams, the 22 time Grand Slam Champion, said in a statement: “I’ve seen first-hand the incredible impact these events can have on making people fitter, healthier and happier. I love that Let’s Do This is not only making events like these more accessible but also helping to support athletes of all different fitness levels. Women are especially less likely to participate in marathons and obstacle races, so it’s really important there’s a platform encouraging people to step out of their comfort zones and make a positive difference in their lives.”

In a statement Flint said: “This is a $30bn global market with enormous growth potential and already 100 million people crossing a finish line in the US each year. In just 18 months they’ve gone from launch to building the world’s best online marketplace to find, learn about, and book your next race. With over 30,000 events across the US, UK, and Australasia, this team is just getting started.”

Usain Bolt, World Record holder in the 100m, 200m and 4 x 100m, said: “Throughout my career I’ve been lucky enough to inspire people to follow their dreams, get off the couch and get exercising. That’s what attracted me to Let’s Do This. It’s a company that is totally committed to changing the world and inspiring more people to get out there. Like me, their team doesn’t believe in limits and is totally committed to being the best in the world. It’s a really natural fit with what I care about and what I believe in so I am very happy to be supporting their mission to inspire more people to have epic experiences.”

The company was founded by childhood friends Alex Rose and Sam Browne who got into the space at University. Their team consists of people from Facebook, Google, Oracle, Deliveroo or SkyScanner.