Month: September 2020

Facebook is getting back to its roots as a college-focused social network. The company announced today the launch of a new social networking platform, Facebook Campus, which offers college students a private place to connect with classmates, join groups, discover upcoming campus events, get updates from their school’s administration and chat with other students from their dorm, clubs or any other campus group.

The new platform requires a school email address (@.edu) to join and will live within a dedicated section of the Facebook app. It will be accessible from a tab at the bottom of the screen or from the “More” menu alongside sections like Watch, Dating, Gaming, News, Marketplace and others.

“We wanted to create a product where it was easy for classmates to meet each other, foster new relationships and also easily start conversations,” explains Facebook Campus Product Manager Charmaine Hung. “And we really think that Campus is more relevant than ever right now. With COVID-19, we see that many students aren’t returning to campus in the fall. Now, classes are being held online and students are trying to react to this new normal of what it’s like to connect to clubs and organizations that you care about, when you’re not together,” she added.

More broadly, Facebook likely wanted to address its “teen problem,” and Facebook Campus is its solution.

Facebook, according to reports, has been losing its grip on the younger demographic, as they’ve shifted their attention to other social apps, like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. According to a 2018 study from the Pew Research Center, only 51% of U.S. users ages 13 through 17 said they used Facebook, down from 71% who said the same in 2015. Meanwhile, a 2019 survey by Edison Research indicated that Facebook had lost 15 million users since 2017, with the biggest drop coming from the 12 to 34-year-old group.

Facebook Campus is built to bring these users back by offering a more exclusive place for private networking within Facebook. It’s similar, in some ways, to Facebook’s effort to address the needs of corporate users with Facebook Workplace. Instead of being new ideas for social networking, these platforms leverage Facebook’s existing technology, like News Feed and Groups, to deliver solutions for particular demographics.

At launch, Facebook Campus is only available at around 30 colleges and universities across the U.S. (see full list below), but the company plans to expand over time.

Some of the colleges have a deeper partnership with Facebook and have signed up to publish updates and news to their students’ Facebook Campus feed, as well. In these cases, the college or university may encourage various student leaders to join the network, too.

Facebook will market the new app both within its app and offline. Students may be prompted to join Campus through a prompt in News Feed if Facebook has enough data to indicate they’re likely a student at a supported college. For example, if a Facebook user regularly visited a supported university’s Facebook Page, Facebook may display the Facebook Campus sign-up prompt. There are also student-led incentive programs where students who increase enrollment are rewarded with Facebook Campus swag, like t-shirts and towels.

In addition to requiring a .edu email address, Facebook Campus requires a graduation year — and it will need to be no more than five years out from the present.

After signing up, students create their Facebook Campus profile. While this is linked on the back end to the student’s main Facebook profile, it lets them add college-specific details that won’t automatically appear anywhere else on Facebook. Here, Campus users can add their graduation year, dorm, major and minor, classes they’re taking, hometown, Instagram profile and more.

This information can only be viewed by other Facebook Campus users who attend the same school. It also helps power Campus’ student directory, where Facebook Campus users can search students by name, year, major or class, or browse to find classmates to add as friends, including those who are in their same dorm or clubs.

Within Facebook Campus, students can also discover and join Groups and Events for their school. These can be those associated with official student clubs or Greek organizations, those associated with a particular dorm or even those just focused on a particular interest, like photography, cooking, writing, hiking, etc. Students can create buy/sell groups or roommate search groups, too, or anything else not in violation of Facebook’s terms.

These groups and events essentially function like those on Facebook itself, with the exception being that they can only be viewed, joined and accessed by students.

Facebook Campus also has its own private Chat section, which is kept separate from Facebook and Messenger. These group chats work a little differently, as users don’t actually have to find and invite members. Instead, students in a particular group can opt to join its associated chat, if they choose.

All updates from your groups, clubs and events are in the Facebook Campus News Feed. But unlike on Facebook proper, students can’t post to their personal profile within Campus. They can only post to groups, events or chats.

Facebook says this decision helps cut down on spam and allows users to focus their energy on engaging with smaller communities they’re involved with.

A small handful of universities have already partnered with Facebook to distribute announcements to their Facebook Campus channel for their students to see. However, any school can choose to opt-in to this feature at launch.

At launch, the following universities and colleges will support Facebook Campus:

Benedict College; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; College of William & Mary; Duke University; Florida International University; Georgia Southern University; Georgia State University; Johns Hopkins University; Lane College; Lincoln University (Pennsylvania); Middlebury College; New Jersey Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Rice University; Sarah Lawrence College; Scripps College; Smith College; Spelman College; Stephen F. Austin State University; Tufts University; University at Albany – State University of New York; University of Hartford; University of Louisville; University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; Vassar College; Virginia Tech; Wellesley College; and Wesleyan University.

While Facebook’s early days saw it targeting Ivy League schools, the company says these first Facebook Campus schools were selected for diversity’s sake. That is, diversity of the student population, diversity of geography and diversity of school specialties (like liberal arts). They also represent a mix of public and private schools.

Facebook Campus, notably, won’t include advertising in its Feed. But it will support Facebook’s advertising business. Advertisers won’t be able to specifically target Facebook Campus users, but they can target users by interest — even if the only place the user indicated they had that interest was within Campus. For example, a user who joined a cooking club in Facebook Campus could be targeted by an advertiser looking to reach users interested in cooking.

Hung said Facebook hasn’t tested Facebook Campus before today, even with small groups. Instead, this launch is considered a pilot for the new experience. The company did spend time conducting roundtables with universities and with student groups to gain product insight and feedback, however.

 

NASA wants to procure samples of lunar soil from private contractors, the agency announced today in a blog post by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. This is part of the agency’s overall ambitions around returning humans to the Moon by 2024, and establishing a sustained human research presence there. NASA is asking for proposals from commercial space companies to offer up their proposals for collecting a small amount of rocks or dirt from “any location” on the Moon’s surface, along with a photo of the collection process and resulting sample.

The proposals ask only that private companies collect the material – they’re not responsible for actually getting it back to Earth for study. They will need to do an “in-place” handoff of the collected sample to the agency – on the Moon, but that’s much less of a challenge than shipping it all the way back here, and the specifics around retrieval will be handled by NASA “at a later date.”

Some stipulations and specifics to keep in mind: NASA wants the retrieval of the materials to take place before 2024, along with the ownership handoff. This is also open to companies internationally, so it’s not just for U.S. private space companies, and it’s also possible that NASA will make more than one award under the program. In terms of payouts, winning companies will get 10 percent o the total contract value at the time of the award, another 10 percent at launch of their retrieval vehicle, and the final 80 percent once the sample is collected and handed off.

There are a number of companies working on extraterrestrial resource collection, so this call could get some interesting applicants. It’s worth noting that this is separate from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which offers contracts for transporting experiments to the lunar surface aboard landers – but you can bet some of those startups and companies will be vying for the chance to use said landers and robotic rovers in development to pick up some Moon dirt for NASA.

In the early days, Microsoft had misgivings about calling the Surface Duo a phone. Asked to define it as such, the company has had the tendency to deflect with comments like, “Surface Duo does much more than make phone calls.” Which, to be fair, it does. And to also be fair, so do most phones. Heck, maybe the company is worried that the idea of a Microsoft Phone still leaves a bitter taste in some mouths.

The Duo is an ambitious device that is very much about Microsoft’s own ambitions with the Surface line. The company doesn’t simply want to be a hardware manufacturer — there are plenty of those in the world. It wants to be at the vanguard of how we use our devices, going forward. It’s a worthy pursuit in some respects.

After all, for all of the innovations we’ve seen in mobile in the past decade, the category feels static. Sure there’s 5G. Next-gen wireless was supposed to give the industry a temporary kick in the pants. That it hasn’t yet has more to do with external forces (the pandemic caught practically everyone off guard), but even so, it hardly represents some radical departure for mobile hardware.

What many manufacturers do seem to agree on is that the next breakthrough in mobile devices will be the ability to fit more screen real estate into one’s pocket. Mobile devices are currently brushing up against the upper threshold of hardware footprint, in terms of what we’re capable of holding in our hands and willing to carrying around in our pockets. Breakthroughs in recent years also appear to have gotten us close to a saturation point in terms of screen-to-body ratio.

Foldable screens are a compelling way forward. After years of promise, the technology finally arrived as screens appeared to be hitting an upper limit. Of course, Samsung’s Galaxy Fold stumbled out of the gate, leaving other devices like the Huawei Mate X scrambling. That product finally launched in China, but seemed to disappear from the conversation in the process. Motorola’s first foldable, meanwhile, was a flat-out dud.

Announced at a Surface event last year, the Duo takes an entirely different approach to the screen problem — one that has strengths and weaknesses when pitted against the current crop of foldables. The solution is a more robust one. The true pain point of foldables has always been the screen itself. Microsoft sidesteps this by simply connecting two screens. That introduces other problems, however, including a sizable gap and bezel combination that puts a decided damper on watching full-screen video.

Microsoft is far from the first company to take a dual-screen approach, of course. ZTE’s Axon M springs to mind. In that case — as with others — the device very much felt like two smartphones stuck together. Launched at the height of ZTE’s experimental phase, it felt like, at best, a shot in the dark. Microsoft, on the other hand, immediately sets its efforts apart with some really solid design. It’s clear that, unlike the ZTE product, the Duo was created from the ground up.

The last time I wrote about the Duo, it was a “hands-on” that only focused on the device’s hardware. That was due, in part, to the fact that the software wasn’t quite ready at the time of writing. Microsoft was, however, excited to show off the hardware — and for good reason. This really looks and feels nice. Aesthetically, at least, this thing is terrific. It’s no wonder that this is the first device I’ve seen in a while that legitimately had the TechCrunch staff excited.

While the Surface Duo is, indeed, a phone, it’s one that represents exciting potential for the category. And equally importantly, it demonstrates that there is a way to do so without backing into the trappings of the first generation of foldables. In early briefings with the device, Surface lead Panos Panay devoted a LOT of time to breaking down the intricacies of the design decisions made here. To be fair, that’s partially because that’s pretty much his main deal, but I do honestly believe that the company had to engineer some breakthroughs here in order to get hardware that works exactly right, down to a fluid and solid hinge that maintains wired connections between the two displays.

There are, of course, trade-offs. The aforementioned gap between screens is probably the largest. This is primarily a problem when opening a single app across displays (a trick accomplished by dragging and dropping a window onto both screens in a single, fluid movement). This is likely part of the reason the company is positioning this is as far more of a productivity app than an entertainment one — in addition to all of the obvious trappings of a piece of Microsoft hardware.

The company took great pains to ensure that two separate apps can open on each of the screens. And honestly, the gap is actually kind of a plus when multitasking with two apps open, creating a clear delineation between the two sides. And certain productivity apps make good use of the dual screens when spanning both. Take Gmail, which offers a full inbox on one side and the open selected message on the other. Ditto for using the Amazon app to read a book. Like the abandoned Courier project before it, this is really the perfect form factor for e-book reading — albeit still a bit small for more weary eyes.

There are other pragmatic considerations with the design choices here. The book design means there’s no screen on the exterior. The glass and mirror Windows logo looks lovely, but there’s no easy way to preview notifications. Keep in mind the new Galaxy Fold and Motorola Razr invested a fair amount in the front screen experience on their second-generation devices. Some will no doubt prefer to have a device that’s offline while closed, and I suppose you could always just keep the screens facing outward, if you so chose.

You’ll probably also want to keep the screens facing out if you’re someone who needs your device at the ready to snap a quick photo. Picture taking is really one of the biggest pain points here. There’s no rear camera. Instead, I’m convinced that the company sees most picture taking on the device as secondary to webcam functionality for things like teleconferencing. I do like that experience of having the device standing up and being able to speak into it handsfree (assuming your able to get it to appropriate eye level).

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But when it came to walking around, snapping shots to test the camera, I really found myself fumbling around a lot here. You always feels like you’re between three and five steps away from taking a quick shot. And the fact of the matter is the shots aren’t great. The on-board camera also isn’t really up to the standards of a $1,400 device. Honestly, the whole thing feels like an afterthought. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled after using the Note 20’s camera for the last several weeks, but hopefully Microsoft will prioritize the camera a bit more the next go-round.

Another hardware disappointment for me is the size of the bezels. Microsoft says they’re essentially the minimal viable size so as to not make people accidentally trigger the touchscreen. Which, fair enough. But while it’s not a huge deal aesthetically, it makes the promise of two-hand typing when the device is in laptop mode close to impossible.

That was honestly one of the things I was excited for here. Instead, you’re stuck thumb-typing as you would on any standard smartphone. I have to admit, the Duo was significantly smaller in person than I imagined it would be, for better and worse. Those seeking a fuller typing experience will have to wait for the Neo.

The decision not to include 5G is a curious one. This seems to have been made, in part, over concerns around thinness and form factor. And while 5G isn’t exactly mainstream at this point in 2020, it’s important to attempt to future proof a $1,400 device as much as possible. This isn’t the kind of upgrade most of us make every year or so. By the time the cycle comes back around, LTE is going to feel pretty dated.

Battery life is pretty solid, owing to the inclusion of two separate batteries, each located beneath a screen. I was able to get about a day and a half of life — that’s also one of the advantages of not having 5G on board, I suppose. Performance also seemed solid for the most part, while working with multiple apps front and center. For whatever reason, however, the Bluetooth connection was lacking. I had all sorts of issues keeping both the Surface Buds and Pixel Buds connected, which can get extremely annoying when attempting to listen to a podcast.

These are the sorts of questions a second-generation device will seek to answer. Ditto for some of the experiential software stuff. There was some bugginess with some of the apps early on. A software update has gone a ways toward addressing much of that, but work needs to be done to offer a seamless dual-screen experience. Some apps like Spotify don’t do a great job spanning screens. Spacing gets weird, things require a bit of finessing on the part of the user. If the Duo proves a more popular form factor, third party developers will hopefully be more eager to fine tune things.

There were other issues, including the occasional blacked out screen on opening, though generally be resolved by closing and reopening the device. Also, Microsoft has opted to only allow one screen to be active at a time when they’re both positioned outward so as to avoid accidentally triggering the back of the touch screen. Switching between displays requires doubling tapping the inactive one.

But Microsoft has added a number of neat tricks like App Groups, which are a quick shortcut to fire up two apps at once. As for why Microsoft went with Android, rather than their own Windows 10, which is designed to be adaptable to a number of different form factors, the answer is refreshingly pragmatic and straightforward. Windows 10 just doesn’t have enough mobile apps. Microsoft clearly wants the Duo to serve as a proof of concept for this new form factor, though one questions whether the company will be able to sufficiently monetize the copycats.

For now, however, that means a lot more selection for the end user, including a ton of Google productivity apps. That’s an important plus given how few of us are tied exclusively to Microsoft productivity apps these days.

As with other experimental form factors, the first generation involves a fair bit of trial and error. Sure, Microsoft no doubt dogfooded the product in-house for a while, but you won’t get a really good idea of how most consumers interact with this manner of device — or precisely what they’re looking for. Six months from now, Microsoft will have a much better picture, and all of those ideas will go into refining the next generation product.

That said, the hardware does feels quite good for a first generation device — even if certain key sacrifices were made in the process. The software will almost certainly continue to be refined over the course of the next year as well. I’d wait a bit on picking it up for that reason alone. The question, ultimately becomes what the cost of early adoption is.

In the grand scheme of foldable devices, maybe $1,400 isn’t that much, perhaps. But compared to the vast majority of smartphone and tablet flagships out there, it’s a lot. Especially for something that still feels like a first generation work in progress. For now, it feels like a significant chunk of the price is invested in novelty and being an early adopter for a promising device.

Stock trading app Robinhood has seen rapid growth during the pandemic, leading it to raise hundreds of millions more dollars in funding — most recently in a $200 million round that valued the company at $11.2 billion.

And the content side of the business has been growing as well. The company acquired the financial podcast and newsletter MarketSnacks early last year, rebranding it as Robinhood Snacks. Now it says the Snacks newsletter has 20 million subscribers, while the podcast has nearly 2 million monthly listeners. And a shorter version of the podcast, the Snacks Minute, was one of Spotify’s most popular podcasts of the summer.

The next step: Launching a video series, also called Robinhood Snacks, which will be available on the Robinhood/Robinhood Snacks YouTube and Instagram accounts.

Snacks founders Jack Kramer and Nick Martell still host the podcast and they’ll be hosting the video series as well. Like the rest of their content, it’s a news-focused show, filmed from their living rooms and quickly edited by the Robinhood SNacks team.

“We’re starting with two videos a week for now, until we get the hang of it,” Kramer told me. But the goal is to get to a daily publication schedule in the “near future.”

He argued that video seemed like the best way to reach new, younger audiences who might not be reading the newsletter or listening to the podcasts. The approach will be similar to other Robinhood Snacks products, analyzing two big financial stories in under three minutes, and in a way that should be accessible to normal viewers.

Kramer suggested that just as Robinhood is trying to “democratize finance for all,” Robinhood Snacks is trying to deliver financial news in “a totally new way.” As Martell put it, they want Snacks to be useful to experienced investors while remaining accessible to people who don’t know “what an earnings report [is], don’t know revenues from profit, and maybe are confused about why the Tiffany’s acquisition isn’t going through.”

“When we’re covering news, we’re focused on: How is this relevant to listeners as consumers?” Kramer added. “How is this relevant to investors as a potential investor in the company stock? And how is this interesting and relevant to consumers with regard to trends that play in the story that we’re telling. It’s not just earnings per share.”

The ultimate goal, he said, is to make finance “as culturally relevant as music, sports and the arts.”

Primary care health tech startup Carbon Health has added a new element to its “omnichannel” healthcare approach with the launch of a new pop-up clinic model that is already live in San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Brooklyn and Manhattan, with Detroit to follow soon – and that will be rolling out over the next weeks and months across a variety of major markets in the U.S., ultimately resulting in 100 new COVID-19 testing sites that will add testing capacity on the order of around an additional 100,000 patients per month across the country.

So far, Carbon Health has focused its COVID-19 efforts around its existing facilities in the Bay Area, and also around pop-up testing sites set up in and around San Francisco through collaboration with genomics startup Color, and municipal authorities. Now, Carbon Health CEO and co-founder Even Bali tells me in an interview that the company believes the time is right for it to take what it has learned and apply that on a more national scale, with a model that allows for flexible and rapid deployment. In fact, Bali says the they realized and began working towards this goal as early as March.

“We started working on COVID response as early as February, because we were seeing patients who are literally coming from Wuhan, China to our clinics,” Bali said. “We expected the pandemic to hit any time. And partially because of the failure of federal government control, we decided to do everything we can to be able to help out with certain things.”

That began with things that Carbon could do locally, more close to home in its existing footprint. But it was obvious early on to Bali and his team that there would be a need to scale efforts more broadly. To do that, Carbon was able to draw on its early experience.

“We have been doing on-site, we have been going to nursing homes, we have been working with companies to help them reopen,” he told me. “At this point, I think we’ve done more than 200,000 COVID tests by ourselves. And I think I do more than half of all the Bay Area, if you include that the San Francisco City initiative is also partly powered by Carbon Health, so we’re already trying to scale as much as possible, but at some point we were hitting some physical space limits, and had the idea back in March to scale with more pop-up, more mobile clinics that you can actually put up like faster than a physical location.”

To this end, Carbon Health also began using a mobile trailer that would travel from town to town in order to provide testing to communities that weren’t typically well-served. That ended up being a kind of prototype of this model, which employs construction trailers like you’d see at a new condo under development acting as a foreman’s office, but refurbished and equipped with everything needed for on-site COVID testing run by medical professionals. These, too, are a more temporary solution, as Carbon Health is working with a manufacturing company to create a more fit-for-purpose custom design that can be manufactured at scale to help them ramp deployment of these even faster.

Carbon Health is partnering with Reef Technologies, a SoftBank -backed startup that turns parking garage spots into locations for businesses, including foodservice, fulfilment, and now Carbon’s medical clinics. This has helped immensely with the complications of local permitting and real estate regulations, Bali says. That means that Carbon Health’s pop-up clinics can bypass a lot of the red tape that slows the process of opening more traditional, permanent locations.

While cost is one advantage of using this model, Bali says that actually it’s not nearly as inexpensive as you might think relative to opening a more traditional clinic – at least until their custom manufacturing and economies of scale kick in. But speed is the big advantage, and that’s what is helping Carbon Health look ahead from this particular moment, to how these might be used either post-pandemic, or during the eventual vaccine distribution phase of the COVID crisis. Bali points out that any approved vaccine will need administration to patients, which will require as much, if not more infrastructure than testing.

Meanwhile, Carbon Health’s pop-up model could bridge the gap between traditional primary care and telehealth, for ongoing care needs unrelated to COVID.

“A lot of the problems that telemedicine is not a good solution for, are the things where a video check-in with a doctor is nearly enough, but you do need some diagnostic tests – maybe you might you may need some administration, or you may need like a really simple physical examination that nursing staff can do with the instructions of the doctor. So if you think about those cases, pretty much 90% of all visits can actually be done with a doctor on video, and nursing staff in person.”

COVID testing is an imminent, important need nationwide – and COVID vaccine administration will hopefully soon replace it, with just as much urgency. But even after the pandemic has passed, healthcare in general will change dramatically, and Carbon Health’s model could be a more permanent and scalable way to address the needs of distributed care everywhere.

A major European Commission review of a Code of Practice aimed at combating the spread of disinformation online has concluded the self-regulatory instrument is failing to deliver enough transparency or accountability from the tech platforms and advertisers signed up to it.

EU lawmakers suggested today that a swathe of shortcomings identified with the current approach won’t be fixed without legally binding rules.

Although how exactly they will seek to tackle disinformation in forthcoming legislative packages, such as the Digital Services Act or the European Democracy Action Plan, remains to be seen.

Signatories to the Code of Practice on Disinformation include: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, TikTok and Twitter, along with the trade association representing online platforms (EDIMA).

A number of trade associations representing the advertising industry and advertisers are also signed up (namely: the European Association of Communications Agencies and the French, Czech, Polish and Danish national associations affiliated with it; the IAB Europe; and the World Federation of Advertisers plus its Belgian national association, the Union of Belgian Advertisers).

“The Code of Practice has shown that online platforms and the advertising sector can do a lot to counter disinformation when they are put under public scrutiny. But platforms need to be more accountable and responsible; they need to become more transparent. The time has come to go beyond self-regulatory measures. Europe is best placed to lead the way and propose instruments for more resilient and fair democracy in an increasingly digital world,” said Věra Jourová, VP for values and transparency, commenting on the assessment of the code in a statement.

In another supporting statement, Thierry Breton, commissioner for the Internal Market, added: “Organising and securing our digital information space has become a priority. The Code is a clear example of how public institutions can work more efficiently with tech companies to bring real benefits to our society. It is a unique tool for Europe to be assertive in the defence of its interests and values. Fighting disinformation is a shared responsibility, which the tech and advertising sector must fully assume.”

Must do better

On the positive side, the Commission review argues that the two-year-old Code of Practice on Disinformation has enabled “structured cooperation” with platforms which has boosted transparency and accountability (albeit, not enough), as well as providing a “useful” framework to monitor them and push for improvements in their policies on disinformation.

And, indeed, the Commission credits the Code with prompting “concrete actions and policy changes by the platforms aimed at countering disinformation”.

However the list of shortcomings identified by the review is long.

This is not surprising given the degree of wiggle room inherent in the approach, as we said at the time it launched. tl;dr: Getting adtech giants to agree to broad-brush commitments to do a vague something about a poorly defined set of interlinked issues vis-a-vis information shaping and manipulation gave plenty of space for platforms to cherry pick reported actions to make a show of ‘complying’. The Code also contains pretty glaring gaps.

Two years on the Commission agrees more effort is needed and commissioners said today it will take steps to address shortcomings in forthcoming legislative, without offering further detail.

The assessment groups the Code’s shortcomings into into four broad categories:

1. inconsistent and incomplete application of the Code across platforms and Member States;
2. lack of uniform definitions;
3. existence of several gaps in the coverage of the Code commitments;
4. limitations intrinsic to the self-regulatory nature of the Code;

Among the laundry list of problematic issues it identifies are:

• Technical disparities in what’s offered across EU Member States
• Failure to distinguish between measures aimed at scrutinising ad placements on platforms’ own sites vs third party sites
• No sign of consistent implementation of restrictions on ad accounts promoting verified fake/misleading info
• Questions over how well platforms are collaborating with third-party fact checkers and disinformation researchers
• Questions over whether limits on ad placement are being enforced against websites that blatantly purvey misinformation
• A lack of effective and joined up participation across the adtech chain to enable enforcement of ad placement limits against bad actors
• Insufficiencies of implementation in ‘ad transparency’ policies for political ads and issue ads
• Failure to ensure disclosure labels remain on ads that are organically shared
• Limited functionality of the APIs offered for ad archives, questions over the completeness and quality of the searchable information
• A lack of uniform registration and authorisation procedures for political ads
• Reporting on bot/fake account activity being aggregated and provided at a global level, with no ability to see reports at EU Member State level
• A lack of reporting on bot/fake account activity involving domestic not foreign actors
• Insufficient information about tools intended to help users find trustworthy content, including a lack of data to demonstrate efficacy
• Lack of a universal, user-friendly mechanism for reporting disinformation and being adequately informed of the outcome
• A lack of consistent use of fact-checkers across platforms and in all EU Member states and languages

The assessment also identifies gaps in what the code covers — such as types of manipulative online behavior that fall outside the current scope (such as hack-and-leak operations; impersonation; the creation of fictitious groups or fake parody accounts; the theft of existing artefacts; deep fakes; the purchase of fake engagements; and the involvement of influencers).

“The experience gained through the monitoring of the Code shows that the scope of its commitments may be too narrow,” it suggests, adding: “The vagueness of the Code’s commitments in this respect creates serious risks of incomplete action against disinformation.”

Microtargeting of political ads is also discussed in the assessment as a gap.

On this it writes:

The Commission also notes that the European Cooperation Network on elections is “currently investigating the issue in depth”. “This work will inform the European Democracy Action Plan, which will look into the issue of micro-targeting in political campaigns to ensure greater transparency on paid political advertising,” it adds.

Containers have become a ubiquitous cornerstone in how companies manage their data, a trend that has only accelerated in the last eight months with the larger shift to cloud services and more frequent remote working due to the coronavirus pandemic. Alongside that, startups building services to enable containers to be used better are also getting a boost.

StackRox, which develops Kubernetes-native security solutions, says that its business grew by 240% in the first half of this year, and on the back of that, it is announcing today that it has raised $26.5 million to expand its business into international markets, and to continue investing in its R&D.

The funding, which appears to be a Series C, has an impressive list of backers. It is being led by Menlo Ventures, with Highland Capital Partners, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures all also participating. Sequoia and Redpoint are previous investors, and the company has raised around $60 million to date.

HPE is a strategic backer in this round:

“At HPE, we are working with our customers to help them accelerate their digital transformations,” said Paul Glaser, VP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Head of Pathfinder. “Security is a critical priority as they look to modernize their applications with containers. We’re excited to invest in StackRox and see it as a great fit with our new software HPE Ezmeral to help HPE customers secure their Kubernetes environments across their full application life cycle. By directly integrating with Kubernetes, StackRox enables a level of simplicity and unification for DevOps and Security teams to apply the needed controls effectively.”

Kamal Shah, the CEO, said that StackRox is not disclosing its valuation, but he confirmed it has definitely gone up. For some context, according to PitchBook data, the company was valued at $145 million in its last funding round, a Series B in 2018. Its customers today include the likes of Priceline, Brex, Reddit, Zendesk and Splunk, as well as government and other enterprise customers, in a container security market that analysts project will be worth some $2.2 billion by 2024, up from $568 million last year.

StackRox first got its start in 2014, when containers were starting to pick up momentum in the market. At the time, its focus was a little more fragmented, not unlike the container market itself: it provided solutions that could be used with Docker containers as well as others. Over time, Shah said that the company chose to hone its focus just on Kubernetes, originally developed by Google and open-sourced, and now essentially the de-facto standard in containerisation.

“We made a bet on Kubernetes at a time when there were multiple orchestrators, including Mesosphere, Docker and others,” he said. “Over the last two years Kubernetes has won the war and become the default choice, the Linux of the cloud and the biggest open source cloud application. We are all Kubernetes all the time because what we see in the market are that a majority of our customers are moving to it. It has over 35,000 contributors to the open source project alone, it’s not just Red Hat (IBM) and Google.” Research from CNCF estimates that nearly 80% of organizations that it surveyed are running Kubernetes in production.

That is not all good news, however, with the interest underscoring a bigger need for Kubernetes-focused security solutions for enterprises that opt to use it.

Shah says that some of the typical pitfalls in container architecture arise when they are misconfigured, leading to breaches; as well as around how applications are monitored; how developers use open-source libraries; and how companies implement regulatory compliance. Other security vulnerabilities that have been highlighted by others include the use of insecure container images; how containers interact with each other; the use of containers that have been infected with rogue processes; and having containers not isolated properly from their hosts.

But Shah noted, “Containers in Kubernetes are inherently more secure if you can deploy correctly.” And to that end that is where StackRox’s solutions attempt to help: the company has built a multi-purposes toolkit that provides developers and security engineers with risk visibility, threat detection, compliance tools, segmentation tools and more. “Kubernetes was built for scale and flexibility, but it has lots of controls so if you misconfigure it it can lead to breaches. So you need a security solution to make sure you configure it all correctly,” said Shah.

He added that there has been a definite shift over the years from companies considering security solutions as a optional element into one that forms part of the consideration at the very core of the IT budget — another reason why StackRox and competitors like TwistLock (acquired by Palo Alto Networks) and Aqua Security have all seen their businesses really grow.

“We’ve seen the innovation companies are enabling by building applications in containers and Kubernetes. The need to protect those applications, at the scale and pace of DevOps, is crucial to realizing the business benefits of that innovation,” said Venky Ganesan, partner, Menlo Ventures, in a statement. “While lots of companies have focused on securing the container, only StackRox saw the need to focus on Kubernetes as the control plane for security as well as infrastructure. We’re thrilled to help fuel the company’s growth as it dominates this dynamic market.”

“Kubernetes represents one of the most important paradigm shifts in the world of enterprise software in years,” said Corey Mulloy, General Partner, Highland Capital Partners, in a statement. “StackRox sits at the forefront of Kubernetes security, and as enterprises continue their shift to the cloud, Kubernetes is the ubiquitous platform that Linux was for the Internet era. In enabling Kubernetes-native security, StackRox has become the security platform of choice for these cloud-native app dev environments.”

Unity, the company behind the popular real-time 3D engine, today officially launched its Cloud Content Delivery service. This new service, which is engine-agnostic, combines a content delivery network and backend-as-a-service platform to help developers distribute and update their games. The idea here is to offer Unity developers — and those using other game engines — a live game service option that helps them get the right content to their players at the right time.

As Unity’s Felix The noted, most game developers currently use a standard CDN provider, but that means they must also develop their own last-mile delivery service in order to be able to make their install and update process more dynamic and configurable. Or, as most gamers can attest, the developers simply opt to ship the game as a large binary and with every update, the user has to download that massive file again.

“That can mean the adoption of your new game content or any content will trail a little bit behind because you are reliant on people doing the updates necessary,” The said.

And while the Cloud Delivery Service can be used across platforms, the team is mostly focusing on mobile for now. “We are big fans of focusing on a certain segment when we start and then we can decide how we want to expand. There is a lot of need in the mobile space right now — more so than the rest,” The said. To account for this, the Cloud Content Delivery service allows developers to specify which binary to send to which device, for example.

Having a CDN is one thing, but that last-mile delivery, as The calls it, is where Unity believes it can solve a real pain point for developers.

“CDNs, you get content. Period,” The said. “But in this case, if you want to, as a game developer, test a build — is this QA ready? Is this something that is still being QAed? The build that you want to assign to be downloaded from our Cloud Content Delivery will be different. You want to soft launch new downloadable content for Canada before you release it in the U.S.? You would use our system to configure that. It’s really purpose-built with video games in mind.”

The team decided to keep pricing simple. All developers pay for is the egress pricing, plus a very small fee for storage. There is no regional pricing either, and the first 50GB of bandwidth usage is free, with Unity charging $0.08 per GB for the next 50TB, with additional pricing tiers for those who use more than 50TB ($0.06/GB) and 500TB ($0.03).

“Our intention is that people will look at it and don’t worry about ‘what does this mean? I need a pricing calculator. I need to simulate what’s it going to cost me,’ but really just focus on the fact that they need to make great content,” The explained.

It’s worth highlighting that the delivery service is engine-agnostic. Unity, of course, would like you to use it for games written with the help of the Unity engine, but it’s not a requirement. The argues that this is part of the company’s overall philosophy.

“Our mission has always been centered around democratizing development and making sure that people — regardless of their choices — will have access to success,” he said. “And in terms of operating your game, the decision of a gaming engine typically has been made well before operating your game ever comes into the picture. […] Developer success is at the heart of what we want to focus on.”

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to put huge stress on people’s and businesses’ finances, and in an effort to meet some of the crunch, today PayPal and Visa announced an expansion of a service to get cash into people’s hands faster. Instant Transfer — a service where PayPal lets people and businesses quickly access transferred funds by moving them to bank accounts (cutting down waiting time from days to seconds) — is expanding globally to both domestic and cross-border payments in international markets.

This will mean that consumers and businesses globally that send or receive money by PayPal, Venmo or Xoom, or via Braintree, Hyperwallet and iZettle product solutions (all of which are part of PayPal), will now be able to opt for the Instant Transfer option to get electronic funds faster. PayPal’s services use Visa Direct for making the payouts.

The service is a progression and expansion of Instant Transfers, which PayPal launched in March 2019, initially in the US.

The likes of Stripe and Square, as well as payments providers in other regions like Europe, have also launched products over the years to cut down the waiting time it typically takes for transferred funds to become usable by recipients over their platforms.

But in recent months that kind of feature has taken on an increased urgency. Businesses and individuals are living in leaner times, with many out of work and commerce gripped in general with a slowdown in buying and selling (despite the fact that some businesses, especially larger ones, have in fact seen a boost). All of that means that the turnaround time of needing to use the money that you receive from a contact has shortened, and more simply become significantly more necessary.

PayPal said that a recent survey it conducted found that 76% of small businesses in the US have reported that they are struggling with cash flow shortages, and 91% said the having real-time settlement could help with some of that.

There is another reason why PayPal is rolling this out globally and that is for more competitive edge in what is now a very crowded payments market. E-commerce, as we have pointed out before, is a very localised affair, with consumers and businesses in each country converging around their own preferred methods for making and receiving payments, which may or may not be the same as those in other markets (and that’s before you consider the the places where money gets spent also vary massively country by country).

That is something that PayPal has tried to address both through the launch of its own services, as well as via investments in other interesting startups. By offering Instant Transfers within its own products, it’s one way of bringing more people to using and transacting on its own platforms — which gives PayPal better returns even as it works on making PayPal a more flexible service that can be integrated and used with a number of other services, even those that seemingly compete with it.

“Sending money to loved ones or giving small businesses real-time access to earnings is critical during these challenging times,” said Jack Forestell, CPO, Visa, in a statement. “By partnering with PayPal on a global scale, we are bringing together two trusted brands to provide hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses globally with quick and secure payment options that can help them maintain financial stability.”

Visa Direct has had a big boost in business already this year, Visa said, growing by some 80% in Q3 — underscoring the need for faster access to funds that are being sent virtually. Speeding up settlement is an important thing to get right for e-commerce businesses that are hoping to present themselves as a viable replacement or proxy for doing transactions the old fashioned way, in person, regardless of how the pandemic or social distancing measures play out in the longer term.

“Digital is quickly becoming the preferred way for people and businesses to move money,” said Jim Magats, SVP Omni Payments, PayPal, in a statement.  “While the global pandemic has dramatically accelerated the shift to digital, we see this move to digital as a long-term change that will outlast the pandemic. We’re excited to expand our partnership with Visa to help more customers around the world get faster access to their funds, which is all the more critical during these challenging times.”

Orchard, the tech-forward residential real estate platform, has today announced the close of a $69 million Series C funding led by Revolution Growth. Existing investors FirstMark Capital, Navitas, Accomplice and Juxtapose also participated in the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $138 million.

Orchard (formerly Perch) launched in 2017 on a mission to digitize the entire experience of buying or selling a home. They focused initially (and still) on ‘dual trackers’, which essentially means that they are home buyers who are also in the process of selling their existing home.

As you might expect, the process of doing both at the same time can be incredibly tedious and, at times, costly. Orchard makes an offer on the buyers’ home with a price that’s guaranteed for 90 days — the company says the vast majority of those homes sell at market price before that 90-day period is over.

Orchard’s product suite also includes tools for searching for homes, title and mortgage.

The search products, in particular, stand out among a crowded space of property search tools. For example, Orchard users can search homes by the room that’s most important to them, putting the Kitchen or the Backyard as the lead image on their listings. Orchard also uses machine learning to suggest more personalized listings.

Orchard cofounder and CEO Court Cunningham had this to say in a prepared statement:

In the same way Amazon has fundamentally changed retail, and Carvana has innovated the car buying experience, Orchard is putting the customer first and modernizing the home buying and selling transaction. We’re thrilled to have a partner in Revolution Growth who has extensive experience working with transformative growth stage consumer businesses that are upending traditional industries. In the year ahead, we’ll be launching an exciting suite of new products and services that further modernize the home purchase experience, while also offering our services to new markets throughout the country.

In the release, the company said it would be using the investment to further expand the product portfolio and grow the team in markets like New York, Texas, Colorado and Georgia, as well as move into new states.