Year: 2019

As Facebook continues to lay the foundation for getting some of the world’s largest payment processing and technology companies a seat at the global monetary policy table, the company faces significant obstacles to enacting its plans from both sides of the Congressional aisle.

In the second of what’s sure to be many (many many many) hearings in front of Congressional committees, David Marcus, the chief executive of Facebook’s new digital payments subsidiary, Calibra, faced hours of questions from Representatives on the House Financial Services Committee about the how and why of Facebook’s digital currency plans.

Facebook’s critics had questions about both sides of the company’s two-pronged approach to transforming the global financial services industry.

Marcus was able to avoid answering some of his toughest questioning by taking advantage of the grey area between Facebook’s role as the chief architect behind Libra (a financial instrument that uses blockchain technology to enable transactions using a digital currency managed by a consortium of private companies) and Calibra (the payments subsidiary that Facebook owns).

Marcus stated in his testimony, Facebook’s plans for Libra are entirely about getting the digital currency that the company is creating recognized by international financial bodies — skirting the oversight of U.S. banking and financial services regulators in favor of Switzerland’s “neutral” approach.

Representatives, rightly, have concerns about each step of the process, so it’s probably best to examine the currency that Facebook is hoping to create with its partners in the Libra Association and the Calibra subsidiary separately.

First, there are significant questions around the Libra Association that Facebook assembled itself, and the regulatory responsibility that Congress and various Federal agencies have to oversee the digital currency that it’s hoping to create.

The structural problems of the Libra Association and its currency

Concerns begin with the independence of the association Facebook selected to be its partners in the cryptocurrency. There are any number of ties between the corporations and investors that are on Libra’s existing governing body and Facebook. The fact that Facebook selected the initial charter members that paid $10 million for the privilege of being co-founders of the currency was not lost on Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the first term representative from New York.

“The membership is open, based on certain criteria,” Marcus said in his testimony responding to a question from Representative Ocasio Cortez about the membership of the Libra Association. “The first 27 members that have joined are companies that have shared that desire to build this network and solve problems.”

Representative Ocasio Cortez responded, “So, we are discussing a currently controlled by an undemocratically selection of largely massive corporations.”

The New York representative wasn’t alone in her criticism of the composition of the Libra Association, questioning whether Facebook would have undue influence over the organization.

Setting aside the independence of the Libra Association, Representatives also had some pertinent questions about the ways in which the currency is structured.

Libra’s currency is set up as a stablecoin whose value is set by the Association and is pegged to a basket of global currencies that provide a hedge against the the currency fluctuating in value as a result of speculative investment. Users pay in a certain amount of currency and receive an amount of Libra that they can spend at participating merchants or companies (a vast network considering that Mastercard, PayPal, and Visa are all participating in the Association).

Given the size of Facebook’s user base (which numbers in the billions), if every user put an average of $100 into the network, the Libra Association would vault into the ranks of the top 20 largest banks in America (assuming $100 billion in assets). That alone would warrant regulatory oversight by any number of Federal agencies, some representatives argued.

They also expressed concern about how the Libra Association and its membership could manipulate currencies and potentially displace the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.

“Sovereign currencies should remain sovereign and we do not want to challenge sovereign currencies,” said Marcus in response to a particularly sharp line of questioning. “We just want to augment their capabilities in the way they can be used.”

It’s an engineer’s answer to a question about the social function of currencies. Facebook can use the basket of currency structure to argue that Libra isn’t actually a currency, but instead rests atop of several currencies to provide more stability and access for its users — and make the system function more effectively. But should Libra’s adoption begin to accelerate, the organization behind it would be able to pick currency winners and losers and begin to leverage its holdings to potentially manipulate markets, some representatives feared.

“Facebook could destabilize currencies and governments,” said California Rep. Maxine Waters. “Facebook’s entry is troubling because it has already harmed vast numbers of people.”

For some members of the Finance Committee, the structure of the asset-backed currency itself makes it resemble a financial instrument that also demands regulation from government agencies. At varying times they compared the proposed currency to an Exchange Traded Fund (because it relies on a basket of currencies to create value) or an alternative fiat currency itself.

“What exactly is this? Is it fish or fowl? And it seems to me that it’s more of a platypus and it evolves in its different parts,” said Rep. Bill Huizenga, of Michigan.

For Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the foreign currency risk that users could be exposed to presents an opportunity for the government to exercise oversight under investment laws passed in 1940. “They will have some degree of volatility,” said Marcus in his testimony.

“This looks to me exactly like an exchange traded fund. Backed by a series of short term instruments in foreign currency… it even has a creation and remittance mechanism,”  says Himes. If that’s true, then the Libra Association would be subject to regulations under the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Marcus says that the instrument behind Libra isn’t an exchange traded fund, because the users that will transact using the cryptocurrency through services like Facebook’s Calibra, aren’t going to be speculating on the currency’s rise in value. However, that logic seems to be slightly faulty given that all of the members of the Libra Association are expected to generate returns from the assets that are held in Libra and invested in the short term basket of currencies.

What’s the matter with Calibra?

If the Libra Association and its mechanism for establishing a stablecoin creates one knot for regulators to untie, then the actual transaction mechanism that Facebook is proposing in the form of the Calibra subsidiary is yet another.

Here again a host of issues raise their head for members of Congress… Some are associated with Facebook’s perennial privacy problems and the history of predatory behavior that reared its head yet again with the company’s $5 billion fine for continuing violations.

MROthers are related to the company’s policy of what conservative critics called “social engineering” which saw Facebook boot some controversial users from its platforms (potentially denying them access to the benefits of Libra). Still another batch of concerns rests on Facebook’s ability to properly implement the know your customer (KYC) regulations that are required of banks and other financial services institutions.

The concern about Facebook’s propensity for de-platforming was topmost in the mind of Wisconsin’s Republican Representative Duffy

“Can Milo Yiannopoulos or Louis Farrakhan use Libra?” Duffy asked. “I bring that up because both of those two individuals have been banned from Facebook.”

Marcus could only respond “I don’t know yet.”

Rep. Duffy compared the potential for Facebook to engage in the same kind of social engineering to grant access to its new payment network as the experiments that China is conducting with its social credit scoring.

“For this system, I think you’re going to see a lot of pushback from both sides,” said Duffy. “I’m also concerned about the data privacy and how we’re going to use that data… How we spend our money is really powerful information and you have access to that too.”

Calibra may face anticompetitive challenges too. Facebook has said that its payment processing app will be the only one that’s directly integrated with the company’s other social networking and communication tools, but that other potential wallets would be interoperable. The exclusive access to Facebook gives Calibra an automatic advantage over other potential payment tools and opens the company up to receive a whole host of transaction information that it would otherwise not be privy to.

And while Facebook is restricting wallet access on its platform to its own digital payments service, it’s giving free rein to developers to build other apps for Libra’s payment platform without vetting them at all.

It’s a situation that could lead to another Cambridge Analytica-style scandal for Facebook and is yet another hole in the company’s oversight.

The appropriate response 

The Libra project is hugely ambitious and its critics have several valid concerns about its execution. Some of the concerns about the risk that it poses are justified and it could, indeed, become a systemic player in the global financial system more quickly than its proponents are willing to accept. All of that doesn’t mean that it should necessarily be thrown out or dismissed because of the potential dangers it poses, some economists argued.

The hard work of governing demands appropriate oversight (which Facebook has been calling out for — although it’s arguably doing it in the jurisdictions that will have the lightest touch over its activities).

No less an expert than the acting International Monetary Fund chair, David Lipton, has said as much in recent discussions over the role that Libra should play (or could play) in the global monetary system.

“Risks include the potential emergence of new monopolies, with implications for how personal data is monetized; the impact on weaker currencies and the expansion of dollarization; the opportunities for illicit activities; threats to financial stability; and the challenges of corporates issuing and thus earning large sums of money — previously the realm of central banks,” Lipton said of Facebook’s proposed digital currency, according to Bloomberg. “So, regulators — and the IMF — will need to step up”

But stepping up does not mean regulating Facebook’s currency out of existence.

“We look back at the the history of technology and innovation, and a conclusion is you never know at the beginning how valuable a technology will be,” Lipton said. “It requires experimentation and adaptation over years and often decades.”

The above image is a shot of Georgia Tech’s latest robot posed next to a penny. The 3D printed bot is roughly two millimeters in length — or about the size of the world’s smallest ants, per the school. The tiny devices are designed to move using vibration from a variety of sources, ranging from ultrasound to more traditional speakers.

With the proper source, the bristles allow them to move four times their own size in roughly a second by moving the legs up and down. Different sized legs react differently, responding to a variety of different frequencies The actuators that generate the vibration are outside of the robot, however, since batteries small enough to be housed on their bodies simply don’t exist.

The research team believes robots of this size could ultimately prove useful for a variety of different tasks, ranging from environmental sensing to human body repair. For now, however, we’re just dealing with some tiny prototypes.

“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” assistantships professor Azadeh Ansari said in a release tied to the news. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”

Fintech startup N26 is raising $170 million a few months after raising $300 million. While it’s technically structured as a new round, the company considers today’s new funding as an extension of the Series D round.

N26 has only reached out to existing investors. All the investors in the Series D round are investing again, as well as a few investors that have been around for a while. So that’s Insight Venture Partners, GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund), Tencent, Allianz X, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital and Greyhound Capital.

“It’s a raise in valuation of about 30%. It’s only existing investors that participated. We didn’t go external as it is also quite quickly after the round that we did earlier this year,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “But I think it’s a good testament of the development of the company over the last couple of months.”

With this new influx of funding, N26 has now reached a post-money valuation of $3.5 billion. The company has raised $670 million in total. And N26 says that it is now the highest valued German startup and one of the highest valued fintech startups in the world.

N26 has been building a retail bank that works better. The company lets you sign up from your phone, get a card that you can control from your phone and make purchases all around the world without any foreign transaction fee. And the company has managed to attract 3.5 million customers all around Europe.

More recently, N26 launched its challenger bank in the U.S. The company plans to expand to Brazil in the coming months and launch more products to make it easier to manage your money. Many features will be based on Spaces, which are sub-accounts that let you separate your money in multiple pools and eventually share Spaces with other people.

I chatted with N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf about the future of N26. Here’s our interview, which was edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: You announced N26 You already. What’s the idea behind it?

Valentin Stalf: We launched it yesterday or the day before yesterday. There are different card colors and we’re differentiating our premium tier [N26 Metal] a little bit more from the mid tier [N26 You]. I think it was a little bit similar.

But now, N26 You is more individual. And then it’ll come together in a couple of weeks when we launch additional cards for one account. You can have different colors. And then, with Spaces, I think we're trying to build the most flexible bank account to live and think your way.

And then, in the next quarter we’ll do an app update with a transaction-based timeline.

TC: Does it mean that because of the new colors, people will get multiple cards and attach one card to one Space for instance?

Stalf: In the end, you’ll be able to attach the cards freely to different Spaces. It’s not even that important that you attach one card to one Space. Sometimes, people want to have multiple cards. But if you only use one card, then you can swap a transaction to a different Space.

TC: Now that you’re bringing perks from N26 Metal to N26 You, what does it mean for Metal customers? Do you just get a different card?

Stalf: I think with Metal, we’ll go more and more in the premium direction.

We also mentioned that we’ll be relaunching our insurance packages. The new package will be based on traveling but also mobility. You’ll have a lot of things in the mobility space including scooter riding.

TC: Let’s talk about product. You talked about Shared Spaces and multiple cards. There’s a redesign that is coming out in the next few months, what will it look like?

Stalf: With the app update that we’re doing, it’s not just a design update of the front end, it’s really an update of the way we talk to our customers and how we present transactions. We’ll be changing what you see in the app timeline.

We want to give you more context and we cant to make it smarter. We’ll integrate customer support interactions, we’ll integrate transactions that didn’t work… These features will launch over time.

We’re launching the infrastructure and then we’re launching each of the features. For instance, you’ll have the opportunity to start a customer service interaction directly from a transaction, straight to live chat.

And it’s coming together with Shared Spaces. It’s also something that needs to be reflected in the timeline in a smart way. Some of the transactions that might show up in your timeline might not be done by yourself but maybe by someone else.

Depending on which transaction you do, we move more details into the timeline directly based on what we think is important. So let’s say it’s a transaction in a new country, you might want to see the exchange rate in the timeline directly. If it’s rent, sending the same amount every month, you don’t need to see more details. It just needs to say rent — okay fine.

TC: What did you promise when you raised some more money? New countries, user numbers, improved monthly transaction volume?

Stalf: We have an opportunity that we build a bank that has more than 50 million users around the globe. Today, we only have 3.5 million users but we’re accelerating.

From a country perspective, we have agreed already that we go to Brazil. There’s no plan after Brazil yet. Now let’s focus on the U.S., then on Brazil, then next year we’ll find out what’s the feedback from these two markets.

Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in Southeast Asia, announced today that it has been acquired by 8×8 in a deal worth about $125 million. The acquisition will help San Jose, California-based 8×8 expand in Asia, where Wavecell already has offices in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Wavecell’s cloud API platform, which includes SMS, chat, video and voice messaging, is used by companies such as Paidy, Lalamove and Tokopedia. It has relationships with 192 network operators and partners like WhatsApp and claims its infrastructure is used to share more than two billion messages each year.

The terms of the deal includes $69 million in cash and about $56 million in 8×8 common shares. Founded in 2010, Wavecell’s investors included Qualgro VC, Wavemaker Partners and MDI Ventures.

In a prepared statement, 8×8 CEO Vik Verma said “8×8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native, technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact center delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs. We’re excited to welcome the Wavecell employees to the 8×8 family. We now have a significant market presence in Asia and expect to continue to expand in the region and globally in order to meet evolving customer requirements.”

Taylor Host has been operating his artificial intelligence startup out of Hong Kong for more than two years. The American entrepreneur has clients from Europe, North America and Asia, but he settled in the city for its adjacency to Southeast Asia and mainland China’s massive market.

Miro, which Host co-founded in 2017 with a British software engineer, had bootstrapped to six employees before raising a small note investment. Backed by Silicon Valley-based SOSV, it’s now seeking $2 million in a new funding round. As trade tensions between China and the U.S. drag on, the company is considering relocating for the first time because being a Hong Kong entity starts to turn off western investors.

Miro uses computer vision to tag images and videos of runners for the brands they wear. It then attributes that data — sporting goods purchases — to consumers profiles that are part of its clients’ customer relations management (CRM) system. Miro’s AI processes data in markets around the world, but China data, in particular, is desirable for western sports brands.

The Chinese rising middle-class has been fueling a marathon fever in recent years as they search for a healthier lifestyle. When they participate in a race, Miro’s sensors could be tracking their shoes and outfits for event organizers and sponsors. The technology has so far been used in nearly 500 events around the world and analyzed more than 10 million athletes — while most of the technical development has been conducted in Hong Kong.

“My co-founder and I both spent a considerable amount of time in Hong Kong. The majority of our team would call themselves Hong Kong Chinese, so we have a very strong foothold in Hong Kong and we love it here,” Host told TechCrunch over a phone interview.

“Lately though, it’s become very difficult to rationalize keeping the business in Hong Kong. There’s a number of reasons for that, but I think the ones that stand out are geopolitical.”

For one, Host has sensed a “dramatic” sentiment change among western investors towards Hong Kong, where a contentious extradition bill triggered a wave of mass protests recently. At the heart of the issue are fears that the special administrative region is ceding autonomy to Beijing. Critics cite examples of the disappearance of a Hong Kong bookseller and a Financial Times journalist’s visa denied by the local government.

In an alarming move, the U.S. government stated the extradition bill “imperils the strong U.S.-Hong Kong relationship” that includes a special trade arrangement independent from that of mainland China.

Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam announced in early July that the bill was “dead“, but the die has been cast as concerns linger for Hong Kong’s autonomous status. Businesses in the territory now risk being dragged into the U.S.-China trade war.

In March, Miro won a pitch competition at SXSW and has since attracted institutional investors of all sizes. But two of its potential backers based in the U.S. have decided to leave the negotiation table seeing Hong Kong as a risk.

“Not a single firm has overlooked the issue of us being a Hong Kong-based company,” said Host. “There is zero appetite from the U.S. investors who we have talked to to invest in our Hong Kong entity right now.”

The risk of backing Miro, which processes seas of data with image recognition capabilities, is more pronounced than funding companies with little or no core technology as intellectual property is one of the main targets of the U.S.-China negotiations.

“Foreign venture capitalists have become more vigilant about investing in Chinese AI and chips companies, even when they don’t own core technology,” Joe Chan, founding partner of Hong Kong-based MindWorks Ventures, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Meanwhile, the trade war has had a tangential impact on U.S. fundings for Chinese startups that focus on education, lifestyle and other non-deep tech sectors, according to a handful of investors who we have spoken to in recent months.

Southeast Asia gains

With the help of legal and tax consultants, Miro has recently shifted to a U.S. entity by registering in Delaware but will keep its operations in Hong Kong. It’s a move which, in Host’s words, has “pleased and allowed the company to move forward” with some of its interested U.S. investors.

“It was a requirement of our conversations with those U.S. investors that they are investing in a U.S. — not Hong Kong — entity,” the founder noted. “If you are dead set on your company being the biggest company in your industry, why would you even consider being in a place that has so much uncertainty and risk?”

For China-based companies whose cross-border business is anchored in Asia, Southeast Asia could be a safe haven from the trade war. As Chan observed, some Chinese startups have intended to move to Singapore “to become less politically sensitive.”

Miro is also hedging risks by looking to Southeast Asia, which many would argue is emerging as a winner from the U.S.-China fight. Like China, the region has a burgeoning middle class that is getting into running and a range of other hobbies and habits that will spawn startup ideas.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of chatter about the rise of the region with a population of 640 million. A few big-name global investors, including Warburg Pincus and TPG Capital, have set aside new funds over the past few months to back Southeast Asian startups. Corporate investors including Tencent, Alibaba, Didi Chuxing and JD.com, are also clamoring to gain a foothold in this rising part of the continent, as we wrote two years ago.

“On a macro level, the trade war certainly has a substantial impact on China’s economy, so we are seeing a lot more money flowing to Southeast Asia,” said Chan.

“For example, some manufacturers have moved to Indonesia where labor is cheaper. China’s tech industry — and this is not entirely linked to the trade war — is reaching saturation and dominated by the BAT [Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent], so the window of opportunity is small. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia is still in development.”

In a way, the trade war has accelerated the shift of attention from China to neighboring countries. The momentum was what brought Miro to visit one of the region’s largest tech conferences Techsauce recently.

“Nobody is talking about the trade war out here in Bangkok. We are talking about how Southeast Asia is exploding. And that is not just Chinese investors. It’s western investors too,” said Host.

It’s been hard to get away from FaceApp over the last few days, whether it’s your friends posting weird selfies using the app’s aging and other filters, or the brief furore over its apparent (but not actual) circumvention of permissions on iPhones. Now even the Senate is getting in on the fun: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has asked the FBI and the FTC to look into the app’s data handling practices.

“I write today to express my concerns regarding FaceApp,” he writes in a letter sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and FTC Chairman Joseph Simons. I’ve excerpted his main concerns below:

In order to operate the application, users must provide the company full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data. According to its privacy policy, users grant FaceApp license to use or publish content shared with the application, including their username or even their real name, without notifying them or providing compensation.

Furthermore, it is unclear how long FaceApp retains a user’s data or how a user may ensure their data is deleted after usage. These forms of “dark patterns,” which manifest in opaque disclosures and broader user authorizations, can be misleading to consumers and may even constitute a deceptive trade practices. Thus, I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it.

In particular, FaceApp’s location in Russia raises questions regarding how and when the company provides access to the data of U.S. citizens to third parties, including potentially foreign governments.

For the cave-dwellers among you (and among whom I normally would proudly count myself) FaceApp is a selfie app that uses AI-esque techniques to apply various changes to faces, making them look older or younger, adding accessories, and, infamously, changing their race. That didn’t go over so well.

There’s been a surge in popularity over the last week, but it was also noticed that the app seemed to be able to access your photos whether you said it could or not. It turns out that this is actually a normal capability of iOS, but it was being deployed here in somewhat of a sneaky manner and not as intended. And arguably it was a mistake on Apple’s part to let this method of selecting a single photo go against the “never” preference for photo access that a user had set.

Fortunately the Senator’s team is not worried about this or even the unfounded (we checked) concerns that FaceApp was secretly sending your data off in the background. It isn’t. But it very much does send your data to Russia when you tell it to give you an old face, or a hipster face, or whatever. Because the computers that do the actual photo manipulation are located there — these filters are being applied in the cloud, not directly on your phone.

His concerns are over the lack of transparency that user data is being sent out to servers who knows where, to be kept for who knows how long, and sold to who knows whom. Fortunately the obliging FaceApp managed to answer most of these questions before the Senator’s letter was ever posted.

The answers to his questions, should we choose to believe them, are that user data is not in fact sent to Russia, the company doesn’t track users and usually can’t, doesn’t sell data to third parties, and deletes “most” photos within 48 hours.

Although the “dark patterns” of which the Senator speaks are indeed an issue, and although it would have been much better if FaceApp had said up front what it does with your data, this is hardly an attempt by a Russian adversary to build up a database of U.S. citizens.

While it is good to see Congress engaging with digital privacy, asking the FBI and FTC to look into a single app seems unproductive when that app is not doing much that a hundred others, American and otherwise, have been doing for years. Cloud-based processing and storage of user data is commonplace — though usually disclosed a little better.

Certainly as Sen. Schumer suggests, the FTC should make sure that “there are adequate safeguards in place to protect the privacy of Americans…and if not, that the public be made aware of the risks associated with the use of this application or others similar to it.” But this seems the wrong nail to hang that on. We see surreptitious slurping of contact lists, deceptive deletion promises, third-party sharing of poorly anonymized data, and other bad practices in apps and services all the time — if the federal government wants to intervene, let’s have it. But let’s have a law or a regulation, not a strongly worded letter written after the fact.

Schumer Faceapp Letter by TechCrunch on Scribd

Altitude Angel, a U.K. startup that provides safety, data and traffic management systems for drones, is launching a de-confliction service for drone flights — available via its developer API platform.

“The dynamic system will continuously monitor the airspace around an aircraft for the ‘unexpected’ such as other aerial vehicles or changes to airspace (such as a Temporary Flight Restriction/Dynamic Geofence around a police incident),” it writes of the new service.

“After identifying a potential conflict, CRS will make the necessary routing adjustments, allowing the drone to maintain an appropriate separation standard between other airspace users or fly around restricted airspace so it can continue safely (and efficiently) to its destination.”

The global Conflict Resolution Service (CRS) has two components: Strategic de-confliction, which will launch first, on July 23, letting drone operators submit flight plans to the startup to determine whether there are any conflicts with other previously submitted flight plans, or against ground and airspace geofenced areas available in Altitude Angel’s worldwide data feeds.

If a conflict is identified Altitude Angel says its CRS will propose alterations to the take-off time and/or route to “eliminate the conflict” — suggesting, as it puts it “minimally invasive changes to permit the mission to continue unobstructed”.

The service also supports ‘private’ modes for fleet operators who only want to check for conflicts against their own drones or customers.

The second component — which will launch in late September — is called Tactical de-confliction. This will provide information to drone pilots or the drone itself to ensure separation is maintained during the in-flight phase.

“We’re bringing in commercially available data feeds of every piece of manned air traffic available today. So that’s every commercial flight, that’s in some instances police helicopters, medical choppers etc etc. So the tactical service will then supplement that drone on drone collision data [from the Statistical CRS] with drone on manned aviation,” says CEO Richard Parker.

The UK startup, which also provides data to power geofencing services for drones (drone maker DJI is among its customers) is positioning its software and services business as an enabling layer for unmanned traffic management (UTM) companies, national organizations and fleet operators to embed into their own products, says Parker.

“What we’re doing is going beyond what a typical UTM company sees as its own customers and then providing the flight plans that we’ve received out to everybody,” he tells TechCrunch. “So, for example, Uber might use the [CRS] service to register all of Uber’s flights and Amazon might use the service to register all of Amazon’s flights — but together, via the API, they effectively can avoid each other.

“So that’s a service which connects everybody together, and only tells you when there’s conflict that’s expected to occur.”

Clearly, the Strategic de-confliction component will increase in utility as it gains more users — enabling it to increase the visibility it can provide of what’s being flown where and when.

Although Altitude Angel does not pretend it will be able to offer a comprehensive view of absolutely every artificial thing in the sky.

“One of the things we think is rife in the UTM industry today is false claims,” says Parker. “It would be really easy for us to market this wrongly — we could have done this to say this service guarantees no drones will ever crash. That’s simply not true. What it does guarantee, however, is any drone that has submitted a plan to us is going to be told up front whether it’s likely to conflict with another one.

“And when the tactical service comes online, again, we will be extremely clear — providing everything else you might conflict with is using that service then we can provide that separation.”

He points out that not even Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) can see all air traffic all of the time. So the CRS is pitched as a way for drone operators to increase awareness of what else might be flying in the vicinity — thereby reducing the risk of collision or a safety incident.

As regards the dynamic tactical de-confliction component of the CRS, which is designed to alert drone operators to unexpected craft in their vicinity, Altitude Angel says this is based on “tried and trusted safety technology”.

The core platform underpinning it has been in operation since 2016, according to Parker — and was originally used by general aviation pilots to request access to transit Class D airspace, meaning it’s “racked up thousands of requests” and had “a lot of scrutiny” globally, including from national air traffic services.

“It’s an extremely reliable and robust service,” he claims.

Altitude Angel is also layering on its GuardianUTMS airspace management platform. While Parker flags that the company’s enterprise background is in massive distributed cloud systems — ergo, it’s used to handling something along the lines of 7M-10M API requests per month.

“So we think we’ve got a reasonably robust and reliable system,” he says. “One which can also tolerate failure and it can do a lot of self-healing. From an infrastructure perspective it’s very robust, and from an application perspective it’s been doing a lot of operational use cases and load for one of the world’s most trusted and respected ANSPs.”

“Usage is still increasing. We’re still learning from that. But again our main primary goal is to get this out, get it used, monitor it, make sure that we improve it over time. It’s kind of a crawl, walk and run type service,” he adds.

All Altitude Angel’s current customers are signed up to go live with the CRS — which Parker suggests will translate into some 5,000 to 6,000 flights per month feeding the de-confliction service.

“We’re then going to connect in our additional flights that have been shared with us as well so I think we’re talking about a fairly significant proportion of all of the flights that are being shared with any UTM today,” he continues. “What we’re then going to be doing is working with our ANSP customers to see if the permission requests that they’re currently managing can also be connected into that network. And I think that’s a really interesting area to explore.

“Because again we’re only doing this because, ultimately, everyone in the industry wants to go beyond line-of-sight, everyone wants to be able to have a more automated flight system. But the reality is the infrastructure just isn’t there on the ANSP and regulatory side — and the technology isn’t there, from a safety management perspective, on the commercial side either.

“So that’s the gap that we’re trying to plug here so that more people can access to do that.”

While it might make more sense for drone de-confliction platforms to be run by national bodies, rather than a commercial entity, Parker isn’t worried that regulators will swoop in and claim the space because the business is positioning itself to play multiple roles: Helping drone operators integrate and adapt to changeable regulations, while also making sure it can take on a gateway service role for ANSPs should governments decide a regulator should provide UTM.

“The technology that we provide to our customers we provide on our own developer platform for the commercial industry to use but we also provide a version of that same system, effectively, to ANSPs to be able to offer that service nationally,” he says.

“I think it’s important to recognize that many of those ANSPs aren’t required to do this yet. So they’re not necessarily deploying those foundations… The key piece that might be an interesting angle is that our commitment to those developer customers, and people who are using our commercial technology, is to abstract them away from whatever local regulations and differences might occur internationally.”

“In the UK, if the government suddenly turns around to [UK air traffic operator] NATS and says hey you guys have to provide UTM services for the whole country it won’t be us that are operating the service but we’re very much hopeful that we’ll have the opportunity to provide NATS with the technology to actually provide that capability to the rest of the industry,” he adds, noting that Altitude Angel is already providing airspace user portal technology to NATS. 

“So, again, we’ve got this commercial side of the business — which is all about enabling those folks to integrate with the regulated community, and then we’ve got a technology capability [Guardian UTMS] that’s what we’re pushing to ANSPs to enable them to open up the skies and work with and embrace drones within their airspace estate.”

Coinbase is taking advantage of its significant user base to give you more information about trading behavior and price correlation. Given that there are now 15 different cryptocurrencies on Coinbase that you can trade, the new features should provide some signals.

In addition to price and variation information, you can see what Coinbase customers with large balances are currently doing. You get a buy/sell percentage for each asset.

Behind the scene, Coinbase looks at users with a Coinbase balance in the top 10%. The exchange then counts how many users in that pool have increased or decreased their positions over the last 24 hours. The signal is updated every two hours.

Coinbase is also calculating two other data points — the average hold time and the popularity of each asset. This time, the company relies on the entire Coinbase user base to tell you how long people keep a specific asset before selling it or sending it to another address.

Unfortunately, when you transfer your assets to a hardware wallet or a more secure wallet, Coinbase considers that you’re no longer “holding” that asset because it’s no longer on your Coinbase account.

Finally, Coinbase is looking at price data to find out if prices of multiple assets are correlated. For instance, if Crypto X and Crypto Y have a correlation of 0%, it means that they go up and down in parallel. A negative correlation means that two assets move in opposite directions. This feature could help you build a more balanced portfolio of cryptocurrencies.

Netflix said on Wednesday that it will roll out a cheaper subscription plan in India, one of the last great growth markets for global companies, as the streaming giant scrambles to find ways to accelerate its slowing growth worldwide.

The company added 2.7 million new subscribers in the quarter that ended in June this year, it said today, far fewer than the 5 million figure it had forecasted earlier this year.

The company said lowering its subscription plan, which starts at $9 in the U.S., would help it reach more users in India and expand its overall subscriber base.

Netflix started to test a lower-priced subscription plan in India and some other markets in Asia late last year. The plan restricts the usage of the service to only one mobile device and offers only the standard definition viewing (~480p). During the period of testing, which was active as of two months ago, the company charged users as low as $4.

The company did not specify the exact amount it intends to charge for the mobile only, cheaper plan. During the testing period, Netflix also provided users the option to get a subscription that would only last for a week. The company also did not say if it intends to bring the cheaper plan to other markets. TechCrunch has reached out to Netflix for more details.

“After several months of testing, we’ve decided to roll out a lower-priced mobile-screen plan in India to complement our existing plans. We believe this plan, which will launch in Q3, will be an effective way to introduce a larger number of people in India to Netflix and to further expand our business in a market where Pay TV ARPU is low (below $5),” it said in its quarterly earnings report.

The India challenge

Selling an entertainment service in India, the per capita GDP of which is under $2,000, is extremely challenging. The vast majority of companies that have performed exceedingly well in the nation offer their products and services at a very low price. Just look at Spotify, which entered India earlier this year and for the first time decided to offer full access to its service at no cost to local users. Even its premium option that features playback in higher quality costs Rs 119 ($1.6) per month.

That’s not to say that winning in India, home to more than 1.3 billion people, can’t be rewarding. Disney-owned streaming service Hotstar, which offers 80% of its content catalog at no cost, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users.

In fact, Hotstar set a global record for most simultaneous views to a live event — about 25.3 million users — during the recently concluded ICC cricket world cup. It broke its own previous records. Hotstar’s free offering comes bundled with ads, while its ad-free premium option costs Rs 999 ($14.5) for a year-long access.

Amazon, another global rival of Netflix, bundles its Prime Video streaming service in its Prime membership, which includes access to faster delivery of packages and its music service, for Rs 999 a year.

For Netflix, the decision to lower its pricing in India comes at a time when it has hiked the subscription cost in many parts of the world. In the U.S., for instance, Netflix said earlier this year that it would raise its subscription price by up to 18%.

During a visit to India early last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said the country could eventually emerge as the place that would eventually add the next 100 million service to his platform. “The Indian entertainment business will be much larger over the next 20 years because of investment in pay services like Netflix and others,” he said.

So far, Netflix has largely tried to lure customers through its original series. (Many popular U.S. shows such as NBC’s “The Office” that are available on Netflix’s U.S. catalog are not available in its India palate.) The company, which has produced more than a dozen original shows and movies for India, this week unveiled five more that are in the pipeline.