Month: September 2020

Facebook has offered a little detail on extra steps it’s taking to improve its ability to detect and remove hate speech and election disinformation ahead of Myanmar’s election. A general election is scheduled to take place in the country on November 8, 2020.

The announcement comes close to two years after the company admitted a catastrophic failure to prevent its platform from being weaponized to foment division and incite violence against the country’s Rohingya minority.

Facebook says now that it has expanded its misinformation policy with the aim of combating voter suppression and will now remove information “that could lead to voter suppression or damage the integrity of the electoral process” — giving the example of a post that falsely claims a candidate is a Bengali, not a Myanmar citizen, and thus ineligible to stand.

“Working with local partners, between now and November 22, we will remove verifiable misinformation and unverifiable rumors that are assessed as having the potential to suppress the vote or damage the integrity of the electoral process,” it writes.

Facebook says it’s working with three fact-checking organizations in the country — namely: BOOM, AFP Fact Check and Fact Crescendo — after introducing a fact-checking program there in March.

In March 2018 the United Nations warned that Facebook’s platform was being abused to spread hate speech and whip up ethnic violence in Myanmar. By November of that year the tech giant was forced to admit it had not stopped its platform from being repurposed as a tool to drive genocide, after a damning independent investigation slammed its impact on human rights.

On hate speech, which Facebook admits could suppress the vote in addition to leading to what it describes as “imminent, offline harm” (aka violence), the tech giant claims to have invested “significantly” in “proactive detection technologies” that it says help it “catch violating content more quickly”, albeit without quantifying the size of its investment nor providing further details. It only notes that it “also” uses AI to “proactively identify hate speech in 45 languages, including Burmese”.

Facebook’s blog post offers a metric to imply progress — with the company stating that in Q2 2020 it took action against 280,000 pieces of content in Myanmar for violations of its Community Standards prohibiting hate speech, of which 97.8% were detected proactively by its systems before the content was reported to it.

“This is up significantly from Q1 2020, when we took action against 51,000 pieces of content for hate speech violations, detecting 83% proactively,” it adds.

However without greater visibility into the content Facebook’s platform is amplifying, including country-specific factors such as whether hate speech posting is increasing in Myanmar as the election gets closer, it’s not possible to understand what volume of hate speech is passing under the radar of Facebook’s detection systems and reaching local eyeballs.

In a more clearly detailed development, Facebook notes that since August, electoral, issue and political ads in Myanmar have had to display a ‘paid for by’ disclosure label. Such ads are also stored in a searchable Ad Library for seven years — in an expansion of the self-styled ‘political ads transparency measures’ Facebook launched more than two years ago in the US and other western markets.

Facebook also says it’s working with two local partners to verify the official national Facebook Pages of political parties in Myanmar. “So far, more than 40 political parties have been given a verified badge,” it writes. “This provides a blue tick on the Facebook Page of a party and makes it easier for users to differentiate a real, official political party page from unofficial pages, which is important during an election campaign period.”

Another recent change it flags is an ‘image context reshare’ product, which launched in June — which Facebook says alerts a user when they attempt to share a image that’s more than a year old and could be “potentially harmful or misleading” (such as an image that “may come close to violating Facebook’s guidelines on violent content”).

“Out-of-context images are often used to deceive, confuse and cause harm. With this product, users will be shown a message when they attempt to share specific types of images, including photos that are over a year old and that may come close to violating Facebook’s guidelines on violent content. We warn people that the image they are about to share could be harmful or misleading will be triggered using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and human review,” it writes without offering any specific examples.

Another change it notes is the application of a limit on message forwarding to five recipients which Facebook introduced in Sri Lanka back in June 2019.

“These limits are a proven method of slowing the spread of viral misinformation that has the potential to cause real world harm. This safety feature is available in Myanmar and, over the course of the next few weeks, we will be making it available to Messenger users worldwide,” it writes.

On coordinated election interference, the tech giant has nothing of substance to share — beyond its customary claim that it’s “constantly working to find and stop coordinated campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate across our apps”, including groups seeking to do so ahead of a major election.

“Since 2018, we’ve identified and disrupted six networks engaging in Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in Myanmar. These networks of accounts, Pages and Groups were masking their identities to mislead people about who they were and what they were doing by manipulating public discourse and misleading people about the origins of content,” it adds.

In summing up the changes, Facebook says it’s “built a team that is dedicated to Myanmar”, which it notes includes people “who spend significant time on the ground working with civil society partners who are advocating on a range of human and digital rights issues across Myanmar’s diverse, multi-ethnic society” — though clearly this team is not operating out of Myanmar.

It further claims engagement with key regional stakeholders will ensure Facebook’s business is “responsive to local needs” — something the company demonstrably failed on back in 2018.

“We remain committed to advancing the social and economic benefits of Facebook in Myanmar. Although we know that this work will continue beyond November, we acknowledge that Myanmar’s 2020 general election will be an important marker along the journey,” Facebook adds.

There’s no mention in its blog post of accusations that Facebook is actively obstructing an investigation into genocide in Myanmar.

Earlier this month, Time reported that Facebook is using US law to try to block a request for information related to Myanmar military officials’ use of its platforms by the West African nation, The Gambia.

“Facebook said the request is ‘extraordinarily broad’, as well as ‘unduly intrusive or burdensome’. Calling on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to reject the application, the social media giant says The Gambia fails to ‘identify accounts with sufficient specificity’,” Time reported.

“The Gambia was actually quite specific, going so far as to name 17 officials, two military units and dozens of pages and accounts,” it added.

“Facebook also takes issue with the fact that The Gambia is seeking information dating back to 2012, evidently failing to recognize two similar waves of atrocities against Rohingya that year, and that genocidal intent isn’t spontaneous, but builds over time.”

In another recent development, Facebook has been accused of bending its hate speech policies to ignore inflammatory posts made against Rohingya Muslim immigrants by Hindu nationalist individuals and groups.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying its hate speech rules to T. Raja Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, along with at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence — citing sourcing from current and former Facebook employees.

Edtech just keeps on booming.

Today, Owl Ventures, a San Francisco-based education technology fund whose portfolio includes Byju’s, Labster, Masterclass and Quizlet, announced that it has closed a pair of investment vehicles totaling $585 million.

Owl Ventures IV is a $415 million investment vehicle which will be used to invest in edtech startups Series A and beyond. The firm also formed its first ever opportunity fund at $170 million to work as a growth-stage bank for existing portfolio companies. With over $1.2 billion in assets under management, Owl Ventures claims that it is the largest venture capital fund in the world focused solely on edtech.

The new funds allow Owl Ventures to cut larger checks. Traditionally, the firm cut checks that were between $5 million to $35 million. Now, it can write investments up to $50 million in companies. The opportunity fund will exist to back existing investments throughout their lifetime.

“Edtech as a sector is really exploding and emerging,” said Ian Chiu, the managing partner at Owl Ventures. “It’s not that COVID is the reason for that. It’s more that COVID has accelerated that.”

Acceleration in mind, Owl Ventures has benefitted from focusing on the then-quite sector since 2014. This year, it saw exponential growth in a number of its portfolio companies. One of its investments, Byju’s, became the most valuable edtech startup in the world. Another one of Owl’s investments, White Hat Jr., got acquired by Byju’s about 18 months after launching. The intra-portfolio activity shows growth, and opportunity for exits.

Chiu is optimistic about the exit environment over the next five years.

“As these companies start to eclipse or get over $100 million in terms of revenue, many of them are going to be in prime position to go public,” he said. “There’s a handful of companies in our portfolio who fall into that bucket.”

Owl Ventures will continue to make international investments in education technology businesses across a number of categories, from recruiting to re-skilling.

Chiu also showed interest in the emerging cohort of startups that focus on education as a direct-to-consumer play.

In addition to the new funds, Owl announced that it has hired a number of new team members from all around the world: former Sequoia India investor Kriti Bansal, former TCV analyst John Azubuike, and former investor at George Soros’ Family Office Jenny Wang. The firm’s summer intern, Emily Bennettt, will join the team once she graduates from Harvard Business School.

Now with over $1.2 billion in assets under management, Owl Ventures says that it is the largest venture capital fund in the world focused solely on edtech.

Four years after the Great Recession, France’s newly elected socialist president François Hollande raised taxes and increased regulations on founder-led startups. The subsequent flight of entrepreneurs to places like London and Silicon Valley portrayed France as a tough place to launch a company. By 2016, France’s national statistics bureau estimated that about three million native-born citizens had moved abroad.

Those who remained fought back: The Family was an early accelerator that encouraged French entrepreneurs to adopt Silicon Valley’s startup methodology, and the 2012 creation of Bpifrance, a public investment bank, put money into the startup ecosystem system via investors. Organizers founded La French Tech to beat the drum about native startups.

When President Emmanuel Macron took office in May 2017, he scrapped the wealth tax on everything except property assets and introduced a flat 30% tax rate on capital gains. Station F, a giant startup campus funded by billionaire entrepreneur Xavier Niel on the site of a former railway station, began attracting international talent. Tony Fadell, one of the fathers of the iPod and founder of Nest Labs, moved to Paris to set up investment firm Future Shape; VivaTech was created with government backing to become one of Europe’s largest startup conference and expos.

Now, in the COVID-19 era, the government has made €4 billion available to entrepreneurs to keep the lights on. According to a recent report from VC firm Atomico, there are 11 unicorns in France, including BlaBlaCar, OVHcloud, Deezer and Veepee. More appear to be coming; last year Macron said he wanted to see “25 French unicorns by 2025.”

According to Station F, by the end of August, there had been 24 funding rounds led by international VCs and a few big transactions. Enterprise artificial intelligence and machine-learning platform Dataiku raised a $100 million Series D round, and Paris-based gaming startup Voodoo raised an undisclosed amount from Tencent Holdings.

We asked 12 Paris -based investors to comment on the state of play in their city:

• Alison Imbert, partner, Partech
• Alexandre Mordacq, partner, 360 Capital Partners
• Emmanuel Delaveau, partner, Partech
• Boris Golden, partner, Partech
• Jean de La Rochebrochard, managing partner, Kima Ventures
• Paul Bolardi, associate, AXA Venture Partners
• Shiraz Mahfoudhi, Speedinvest
• Guillaume Dupont, founding partner, CapHorn
• Martin Mignot, partner, Index Ventures
• Bartosz Jakubowski, principal, Alven
• Pierre Entremont, founding partner, Frst Capital
• Pierre-Eric Leibovici, founding partner, Daphni

Alison Imbert, Partech

What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally?

All the fintechs addressing SMBs to help them to focus more on their core business (including banks disintermediation by fintech, new infrastructures tech that are lowering the barrier to entry to nonfintech companies).

What’s your latest, most exciting investment?

77foods (plant-based bacon) — love that alternative proteins trend as well. Obviously, we need to transform our diet toward more sustainable food. It’s the next challenge for humanity.

What are you looking for in your next investment, in general?
Impact investment: Logistic companies tackling the life cycle of products to reduce their carbon footprint and green fintech that reinvent our spending and investment strategy around more sustainable products.

Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about?
D2C products.

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
100% investing in France as I’m managing Paris Saclay Seed Fund, a €53 million fund, investing in pre-seed and seed startups launched by graduates and researchers from the best engineering and business schools from this ecosystem.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders?
Deep tech, biotech and medical devices. Paris, and France in general, has thousands of outstanding engineers that graduate each year. Researchers are more and more willing to found companies to have a true impact on our society. I do believe that the ecosystem is more and more structured to help them to build such companies.

How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city?
Paris is booming for sure. It’s still behind London and Berlin probably. But we are seeing more and more European VC offices opening in the city to get direct access to our ecosystem. Even in seed rounds, we start to have European VCs competing against us. It’s good — that means that our startups are moving to the next level.

Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work?
For sure startups will more and more push for remote organizations. It’s an amazing way to combine quality of life for employees and attracting talent. Yet I don’t think it will be the majority. Not all founders are willing/able to build a fully remote company. It’s an important cultural choice and it’s adapted to a certain type of business. I believe in more flexible organization (e.g., tech team working remotely or 1-2 days a week for any employee).

Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times?
Travel and hospitality sectors are of course hugely impacted. Yet there are opportunities for helping those incumbents to face current challenges (e.g., better customer care and services, stronger flexibility, cost reduction and process automation).

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?
Cash is king more than ever before. My only piece of advice will be to keep a good level of cash as we have a limited view on events coming ahead. It’s easy to say but much more difficult to put in practice (e.g., to what extend should I reduce my cash burn? Should I keep on investing in the product? What is the impact on the sales team?). Startups should focus only on what is mission-critical for their clients. Yet it doesn’t impact our seed investments as we invest pre-revenue and often pre-product.

What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two.
There is no reason to be hopeless. Crises have happened in the past. Humanity has faced other pandemics. Humans are resilient and resourceful enough to adapt to a new environment and new constraints.

Salesforce has been adding artificial intelligence to all parts of its platform for several years now. It calls the underlying artificial intelligence layer on the Salesforce platform Einstein. Today the company announced some enhancements to its field service offering that take advantage of this capability.

Eric Jacobson, VP of product management at Salesforce says that when COVID hit, it pretty much stopped field service in its tracks during April, but like many other parts of business, it began to pick up again later in the quarter, and people still needed to have their appliances maintained.

“Even though we’re sheltering in place, the physical world still has physical needs. Hospitals still have to maintain their equipment. Employees still need to have equipment replaced or repaired while working at home, and people still need their washing machine [or other appliances] repaired,” Jacobson said.

Today’s announcements are designed in some ways for a COVID world where efficiency is more critical than ever. That means the field service tech needs to be prepared ahead of time on all of the details of the nature of the repair. He or she has to have the right parts and customers need to know when their technician will be there.

While it’s possible to do much of that in a manual fashion, adding a dose of AI helps streamline and scale that process. For starters, the company announced Dynamic Priority. Certainly humans are capable of prioritizing a list of repairs, but by letting the machine set priority based on factors like service agreement type or how critical the repair is, it can organize calls much faster, leaving dispatchers to handle other tasks.

Even before the day starts, technicians receive their schedule and using machine learning, can determine what parts they are most likely to need in the truck for the day’s repairs. Based on the nature of the repair and the particular make and model of machine, the Einstein Recommendation Builder can help predict the parts that will be needed to minimize the number of required trips, something that is important at all times, but especially during a pandemic.

“It’s always been an inconvenience and annoyance to have somebody come back for a follow up appointment. But now it’s not just an annoyance, it’s actually a safety consideration for you and for the technician because it’s increased exposure,” Jacobson explained

Salesforce also wants to give the customer the same capability, they are used to getting in a ride share app, where you can track the progress of the driver to your destination. Appointment Assistant, a new app gives customers this ability, so they know when to expect the repair person to arrive.

Finally, Salesforce has teamed with ServiceMax to offer a new capability to get the big picture view of an asset with the goal of ensuring uptime, particularly important in settings like hospitals or manufacturing. “We’ve partnered with a long-time Salesforce partner ServiceMax to create a brand new offering that takes industry best practice and builds it right in. Asset 360 builds on top of Salesforce field service and delivers those specific capabilities around asset performance insight, viewing and managing up time and managing warranty processes to really ensure availability,” he said.

As with all Salesforce announcements, the availability of these capabilities will vary as each in various forms of development. “Dynamic Priority will be generally available in October 2020. Einstein Recommendation Builder will be in beta in October 2020. Asset 360 will be generally available in November 2020. Appointment Assistant will be in closed pilot in US in October 2020,” according to information provided by the company.

Seedrs — the UK’s first full-function private equity secondary market to launch back in 2017 — is launching its secondary market offering to all private businesses. The idea is that this will allow founders, employees and early investors to realize secondary liquidity without having to wait for an IPO or exit event. Seedrs has offered secondary shares on its platform for the last three years, but previously this was only open to those already working directly with Seedrs .

Investors will now be able to list their shares directly on the Secondary Market in a “direct listing” and sell to the Seedrs investor network; sell their shares via a “secondary campaign” to a community of customers and existing shareholders, or sell via a “private listing” and access the Seedrs network of institutional investors and funds.

To date, Seedrs has raised a total of $40 million in funding from investors, including Augmentum Fintech and Schroders plc (formerly Woodford Investment Management). The platform’s most notable exits include Pod Point, Wealthify, and FreeAgent .

Prior to this opening up, the Seedrs Secondary Market was running at 22,000 secondary transactions and has been averaging £500k/month in secondary trades over the last 6 months. In 2020, Revolut shareholders sold over £1.5m in shares at a 598% average profit on the market. The Secondary Market service has now added dynamic pricing to allow shares to be sold at price premiums and discounts.

Earlier this year Seedrs and Capdesk created a joint initiative whereby any business listed on Capdesk could sell shares and adjust the cap table via Seedrs marketplace.

Jeff Kelisky, CEO at Seedrs said in addition to primary raises, the company is adding 30 new companies to the Secondary Market every month.

“Access to secondary liquidity is increasingly critical in the private company investment ecosystem, especially in the current climate, where we are seeing businesses staying private for longer. As we build out our full-scale marketplace for private equity investment, we see secondaries in private businesses as an essential and expected ingredient in the investment journey,” he said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Seeds says it has seen an increased demand from investors wanting to use the Secondary Market and fielded more inquiries from private businesses and their shareholders wanting to access it.

Online child safety startup SafeToNet, has been the first to launch its secondary campaign. It secured a £2.5M primary funding round from 150 investors, followed by an additional £300,000 in secondaries made available from its founders and employees.

In a statement Richard Pursey, co-Founder of SafeToNet said: “We were delighted after hitting our £2.5M fundraising target so quickly, to be able to offer more investors a chance to join our community via a secondary share sale. It’s really important for us to provide an exit opportunity to some of our existing shareholders, while also continuing the growth journey of SafeToNet as an independent business. This has also been a great way for us to welcome new investors on board, building up our customer community with passionate brand advocates, without having to part with any additional equity.”

Speaking exclusively, co-founder and Chairman Jeff Lynn told Techcrunch: “It’s something we’ve been working on for a while. We were letting people do secondary trading off the back of campaigns where we’d already done the primary. Now we’re starting to work with companies that haven’t done anything with us, to help facilitate secondaries for some of their early investors and employees. The demand and interest has been super high.”

“I think it’s probably indicative of the evolution ecosystem as we now get to the point where a lot of that wave of tech businesses that were funded the first part of 2010 are still growing, doing well, but not necessarily an IPO, so there’s a lot of desire for early investors to get some liquidity and we’re trying to offer that.”

He noted that competitor Crowdcube has been helping companies facilitate secondary offerings, but that Seedrs was also doing direct listings on the secondary market, “so we’re allowing investors from companies to come in and simply sell shares directly through the secondary market without ever doing the full campaign. And we’re also baking it into our institutional product. So bringing, bringing secondary offerings into what we call our anchor investor service, which allows a puts deals in front of a range of about 350 institutional quasi-institutional investors.”

Globally the secondary market, especially for tech companies, has been growing as private equity service providers consolidate.

Data protection and data privacy have gone from niche concerns to mainstream issues in the last several years, thanks to new regulations and a cascade of costly breaches that have laid bare the problems that arise when information and data security are treated haphazardly.

Yet that swing has also thrown up a whole series of issues for organisations and business functions that depend on sharing and exchanging data in order to work. Today, a startup that has built a new way of exchanging data while still keeping privacy in mind — starting first by applying the concept to the “marketing industrial complex” — is announcing a round of funding as it continues to pick up momentum.

InfoSum, a London startup that has built a way for organizations to share their data with each other without passing it on to each other — by way of a federated, decentralized architecture that uses mathematical representations to organise, “read” and query the data — is today announcing that it has raised $15.1 million.

Data may be the new oil, but according to founder and CEO Nick Halstead, that just means “it’s sticky and gets all over the place.” That is to say, InfoSum is looking for a new way to use data that is less messy, and less prone to leakage, and ultimately devaluation.

The Series A is being co-led by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. A number of strategics using InfoSum — Ascential, Akamai, Experian, British broadcaster ITV and AT&T’s Xandr — are also participating in the round. The startup has raised $23 million to date.

Nicholas Halstead, the founder and CEO who previously had founded and led another big data company, DataSift (the startup that gained early fame as a middleman for Twitter’s firehose of data, until Twitter called time on that relationship to push its own business strategy), said in an interview that the plan is to use the funding to continue fuelling its growth, with a specific focus on the US market.

To that end, Brian Lesser — the founder and former CEO of Xandr (AT&T’s adtech business that is now a part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia), and previous to that the North American CEO of GroupM — is joining the company as executive chairman. Lesser had originally led Xandr’s investment into InfoSum and had previously been on the board of the startup.

InfoSum got its start several years ago as CognitiveLogic, founded at a time when Halstead was first starting to get his head around the problems that were becoming increasingly urgent in how data was being used by companies, and how newer information architecture models using data warehousing and cloud computing could help solve that.

“I saw the opportunity for data collaboration in a more private way, helping enable companies to work together when it came to customer data,” he said. This eventually led to the company releasing its first product two years ago.

In the interim, and since then, that trend, he noted, has only gained momentum, spurred by the rise of companies like Snowflake that have disrupted the world of data warehousing, cookies have started to increasingly go out of style (and some believe will disappear altogether over time), and the concept of federated architecture has become much more ubiquitous, applied to identity management and other areas.

All of this means that InfoSum’s solution today may be aimed at martech, but it is something that affects a number of industries. Indeed, the decision to focus on marketing technology, he said, was partly because that is the industry that Halstead worked most closely with at DataSift, although the plan is to expand to other verticals as well.

“We’ve done a lot of work to change the marketing industrial complex,” said Lesser, “but its bigger uses cases are in areas like finance and healthcare.”

Adtech giant and self-styled ‘free speech champion’, Facebook, has threatened to pull the plug on the public sharing of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Australia.

The aggressive threat is Facebook’s attempt to lobby against a government plan that will require it and Google to share revenue with regional news media to recompense publishers for distributing and monetizing professionally produced content on their platforms.

Consultation on a draft of the mandatory code — which Australia’s lawmakers say is intended to address “acute bargaining power imbalances” between local news businesses and the adtech duopoly — closed on August 28, with a final version expected imminently from Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and then due to be put before parliament.

Facebook’s threat thus looks timed to turn the heat up on lawmakers as they’re about to debate the details of the code. However dangling the prospect of blocking professionally produced news in an attempt to thwart a law change that’s not in its commercial interests will do nothing to reduce lawmakers’ concerns about the level of market power being wielded by tech giants.

Last month Google also warned that if Australia goes ahead with the plan then the quality of regional search results and YouTube recommendations will suffer — becoming “less relevant and helpful” if the law goes into effect.

Both platform giants are essentially saying that unless the bulk of professional reportage can be freely distributed on their platforms, leaving them free to monetize it via serving ads and through the acquisition of associated user data, then unverified user generated content will be left to fill the gap.

The clear implication is that lower grade content — and potentially democracy-denting disinformation — will be left to thrive. Or, in plainer language, the threat boils down to: Give us your journalism for free or watch your society pay the price as our platforms plug the information gap with any old clickbait.

“The ACCC presumes that Facebook benefits most in its relationship with publishers, when in fact the reverse is true. News represents a fraction of what people see in their News Feed and is not a significant source of revenue for us. Still, we recognize that news provides a vitally important role in society and democracy, which is why we offer free tools and training to help media companies reach an audience many times larger than they have previously,” writes Facebook in the same blog post where it threatens — as a ‘last choice’ — to pull the plug on content it describes as playing “a vitally important role in society and democracy” because it doesn’t want to have to pay for it.

Facebook’s calculus is clearly elevating its own commercial interests above free speech. And indeed above democracy and society. Yet the tech giant’s go-to defence for not removing all sorts of toxic disinformation and/or hateful, abusive content — or indeed lying political ads — from circulating on its platform is a claim that it’s defending ‘free speech’. So this is a specially rank, two-faced kind of platform hypocrisy on display.

Last year the comic Sacha Baron Cohen slammed Facebook’s modus operandi as “ideological imperialism” — warning then that unaccountable Silicon Valley ‘robber barons’ are “acting like they’re above the reach of law”. Well, Australians are now getting a glimpse of what happens when the mask further slips.

The ACCC has responded to Facebook’s flex with a steely statement of its own, attributed to chair Rod Sims.

“Facebook’s threat today to prevent any sharing of news on its services in Australia is ill-timed and misconceived,” he writes. “The draft media bargaining code aims to ensure Australian news businesses, including independent, community and regional media, can get a seat at the table for fair negotiations with Facebook and Google.”

“Facebook already pays some media for news content. The code simply aims to bring fairness and transparency to Facebook and Google’s relationships with Australian news media businesses,” he adds.

“As the ACCC and the Government work to finalise the draft legislation, we hope all parties will engage in constructive discussions.”

A similar battle is playing out in France over Google News, following a recent pan-EU law change which extended copyright to news snippets. France has been at the forefront of implementing the change in national law — and Google has responded by changing how it displays news media content in Google News in the country, switching to showing headlines and URLs only (so removing snippets).

However earlier this year France’s competition watchdog slapped down the tactic — saying Google’s unilateral withdrawal of snippets to deny payment to publishers is likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant market position, which it asserted “seriously and immediately damaged the press sector.”

Google’s share of the search market in Europe remains massively dominant — with the tech giant taking greater than 90% marketshare. (Something that underpins a number of regional antitrust enforcements against various aspects of its business.)

In Australia, Facebook’s position as a news distributor appears to be less strong, with the ACCC citing the University of Canberra’s 2020 Digital News Report which found that 39% of Australians use Facebook for general news, and 49% use Facebook for news about COVID-19.

However information and disinformation do not distribute equally, with plenty of studies indicating a faster spread for fake news — which suggests Facebook’s platform power to distribute bullshit is far greater than its role in informing societies by spreading bona fide news. That in turn makes its threat to block genuine reportage an antisocial weaponization of its dominance of social media.

Cosmose, a platform that tracks foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores to help companies predict customer behavior, announced today it has raised a $15 million Series A. The round was by Tiga Investments, with participation from returning investors OTB Ventures and TDJ Pitango, who co-led Cosmose’s seed round last year. The company said its valuation is now more than $100 million.

The Series A will be used for product development and geographic expansion, starting with Southeast Asian markets this year, followed by the Middle East and India. Chief executive officer Miron Mironiuk, who founded Cosmose in 2014, said its goal is to break even and generate profit by 2021.

Cosmose has offices in Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York and Warsaw, where is software engineering team is based. Most of the stores its tech is currently use in are in China and Japan, and its clients include companies like Walmart, Marriott, Samsung, and LVMH.

As companies try to recover from the impact of COVID-19, Mironiuk said Cosmose’s platform has helped clients make decisions about when to reopen stores and what kind of inventory to stock, and how to increase revenue. For example, ‘some shops wanted to connect with customers who used to shop in their physical locations and encourage them to buy online,” he said. “Hotels in Japan were focused on promoting their in-house restaurants to local residents to make up for the lost revenue.” The company is also working with Boston Consulting Group on a report called “COVID-19 offline retail recovery traffic in China” for publication next week.

Mironiuk said that a PwC audit of the platform’s accuracy completed in December 2019 confirmed its ability to track customers within 1.6 meters of their location in a store, and that its data ecosystem now comprises of more than one billion smartphones and 360,000 stores. Cosmose’s plan is to grow that to two billion smartphones and 10 million stores by 2022.

The company offers three main products: Cosmose Analytics, which tracks customers’ movements inside brick-and-mortar stores; Cosmose AI, a data analytics and prediction platform to help retailers create marketing campaigns and increase sales; and Cosmose Media, for targeting online ads.

Cosmose does not require hardware installation, which means no regular maintenance is required after Cosmose maps a store, and helps it differentiate from rivals.

There are other companies that also analyze foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores, including RetailNext and ShopperTrak, but being tracked might alarm customers who are concerned about their privacy. Mironiuk said all of the smartphone data Cosmose AI gathers is anonymized, so the company doesn’t know who shoppers are. The platform uses alphanumeric IDs called OMNIcookies, does not collect personal data like phone MAC addresses, mobile numbers, or email addresses, and follows data privacy laws in each of the countries it operates in. It also allows shoppers to opt-out of tracking.

In a press statement about the investment, Raymond Zage, the CEO and founder of Tiga Investments, said “I was attracted by the strong results Cosmose is already achieving for some of the world’s recognizable brands, while simultaneously ensuring user privacy is protected. Cosmose team is saving stores while enhancing consumer experience.”

Javed, a middle-aged man, worked as a driver before losing that job earlier this year as coronavirus spread across India, prompting New Delhi to enforce a nationwide lockdown and temporarily curb several business activities.

There are millions of people like Javed in India today who have lost their livelihood in recent months. They are low-skilled workers and are currently struggling to secure another job.

An Apple alum thinks he can help. Through his app startup Apna, Nirmit Parikh is helping India’s workers learn new skills, connect with one another, and find jobs.

Parikh’s app is already changing lives. Javed, who could barely speak a few words in English before, recently posted a video on Apna app where he talked about his new job — processing raisins — in English.

In less than one year of its existence, Apna app — available on Android — has amassed over 1.2 million users.

The startup announced on Tuesday it has raised $8 million in its Series A financing round led by Lightspeed India and Sequoia Capital India . Greenoaks Capital and Rocketship VC also participated in the round.

In an interview with TechCrunch last week, Parikh said that these workers lack an organized community. “They are daily-wage workers. They rely on their friends to find jobs. This makes the prospects of them finding a job very difficult,” he said.

“The most powerful thing for me about Apna is its communities — I’ve seen people help each other start a business, learn a new language or find a gig! Communities harbinger trust and make the model infinitely scalable,” said Vaibhav Agrawal, a Partner at Lightspeed India, in a statement.

The other issue they struggle with is their skillset. “An electrician would end up working decades doing the same job. If only they had access to upskilling courses — and just knew how beneficial it could be to them — they would stand to broaden their scope of work and significantly increase their earnings,” said Parikh.

Apna is addressing this gap in multiple ways. In addition to establishing a community, and rolling out upskilling courses, the startup allows users — most of whom are first time internet users — easily generate a virtual business card. The startup then shares these profiles with potential employers.

In the last one month, Parikh said Apna has facilitated more than 1 million job interviews — up more than 3X month-on-month. During the same period, more than 3 million professional conversations have occurred on the platform.

Parikh said he plans to use the fresh capital to expand its offerings, and help users launch their own businesses. He also plans to expand Apna outside of India.

There are over 250 million blue and grey collar workers in India and providing them meaningful employment opportunities is one of the biggest challenges in our country, said Harshjit Sethi, Principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.

“With internet usage in this demographic growing rapidly, further catalysed by the Jio effect, apps such as Apna can play a meaningful role in democratizing access to employment and skilling. Apna has built a unique product where users quickly come together in professional communities, an unmet need so far,” he added.

A handful of other players are also looking for ways to help. Last month, Google rolled out a feature in its search engine in India that allows users to create their virtual business card. The Android-maker also launched its jobs app Kormo in the country.

This one is unusual: Laird Superfood, a five-year-old, 100-person, Sisters, Ore.-based startup that was cofounded by famed surfer Laird Hamilton and which makes plant-based packaged beverage products, filed today to raise up to $40 million in an IPO.

We’d reported on this company early last year in large part because it had attracted backing from WeWork, the co-working company that famously made a number of bets that were very afield from its business (including a maker of wave pools) before suffering a major meltdown last fall.

In fact, according to Crunchbase, WeWork Labs provided Laird Superfood with a whopping $32 million — the bulk of the $51 million it has raised altogether, per Crunchbase. (WeWork founder Adam Neumann has said that he surfed with Hamilton in Hawaii.)

At that time, WeWork’s investment was the strangest thing about the business, a largely direct-to-consumer business that makes “superfood” coffee creamers, beverage supplements like “performance mushrooms,” and Peruvian coffee beans, among an assortment of other things like teas and hot chocolate.

This IPO may be even more curious. Founded by Hamilton and another surfer, Paul Hodge, the company is very young to be going public by today’s standards (biotech startups notwithstanding). The company booked $19 million in sales for the 12 months ended June 30, but it lost $9 million over that same period and at the rate it is spending money, including on sales and marketing, it will see a net loss of $10 million this year.

Management says it has $13.1 million in cash on hand and investments. It would have more if it hadn’t spent $7.5 million buying back Series A-1 preferred shares in November 2019 that were purchased for twice that price. (The investor that sold its shares was also relieved of its commitment to fund another $10 million. It’s easy to imagine this was WeWork but we don’t know this.) Because of that outlay, the company actually probably did pretty well last year; it just can’t state it that way.

Still, we’re a little intrigued by this one. The company’s only outside shareholder that owns more than 5% of the company is Danone Manifesto Ventures, the corporate venture arm of the global food and beverage company. It owns 13.4% of the company. Why wouldn’t Danone, which looks to have invested $10 million in the business in April, just buy out Laird Superfood outright?

It could be that there’s much more than meets the eye here (or is reflected in its S-1). We’re certainly not opposed to companies trying to go public much sooner than has been in the case in recent years. The company is probably smart to take advantage of a hot market. We’re just wondering if this food company is completely baked.

Hamilton owns 13.2% of the startup. Hodge meanwhile owns 6.4%. Canaccord Genuity and Craig-Hallum Capital Group are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms are included in the filing.