Month: September 2020

Dgraph Labs, the startup behind the popular eponymous graph database, today announced the launch of its Slash GraphQL service. Slash GraphQL is a fully managed GraphQL backend service that is, of course, powered by Dgraph.

As Manish Jain, Dgraph’s CEO and founder (and one of the engineers behind Google’s massive graph database infrastructure), told me, the team considered simply launching a basic managed version of Dgraph. But the team decided to go well beyond this instead. Back in 2019, the team realized that GraphQL was becoming increasingly popular and that customers kept asking for it, Jain told me.

Image Credits: Dgraph

“I put together a team to build the official GraphQL support and then that led to the next thing, which is that as a database company, we need to do a hosted Dgraph,” he explained. “And so instead of just saying, ‘let’s do hosted Dgraph,’ we were like, ‘hey, why don’t we try to solve the GraphQL backend problem,’ which is where we see a bunch of struggle that’s happening.”

He acknowledged that simply launching a managed version of Dgraph would’ve been the natural thing to do, but building a managed GraphQL backend with support for authentication, backups, custom logic and other features seemed like the more satisfying solution.

Image Credits: Dgraph

For the developer, using Slash GraphQL means setting up a backend should be as easy as specifying the GraphQL schema and then clicking the deploy button. As you iterate, you can change your schema as needed, hit deploy again and then everything should simply work as expected.

“I think that’s the power that a native GraphQL database like the Dgraph can bring, because other solutions that are in the market are all GraphQL layers on top of other non-native GraphQL databases.”

One risk with using a backend-as-a-service tool like Slash GraphQL is lockin, something Jain is quite aware of. He argues that users can always take their databases out of the service as needed and switch to another hosted solution — or their own on-premises graph database — with minimal code changes.

Slash GraphQL essentially runs Dgraph on a Kubernetes infrastructure, with all the ancillary services necessary to power the service. Currently, the service runs on AWS, but Jain said the company plans to support GCP and Azure soon, too.

Huawei is planning to launch its proprietary Harmony operating system on smartphones in 2021, the firm announced at its annual developer conference in Dongguan on Thursday.

The readiness of HarmonyOS handsets will largely be contingent on the number of apps Huawei can attract within a short window. HMS Core, Huawei’s counterpart to Google Play Services and the toolkit helping developers build and manage apps, now includes 96,000 apps, the company said today. That’s up from 81,000 in July and 60,000 in March.

In comparison, both Google Play and Apple App Store have accumulated apps numbered in the millions.

To lure more apps into its ecosystem, Huawei announced that a beta version of its second-generation operating system — HarmonyOS 2.0 — for mobile developers will launch by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the beta version of HarmonyOS will go open-source for tablets, smartwatches, and in-car systems starting this week.

Huawei’s operating system has a current reach of 490 million users through the company’s family of hardware products.

The telecoms giant shipped 105 million handsets in the first half of 2020, down from 118 million in the same period of 2019 as consumers respond to Huawei phones’ loss of key Android features and a global economic downturn. Huawei’s consumer business, consisting mainly of smartphone sales, pulled in 255.8 billion yuan ($37.4 billion) in H1, up from 220.8 billion yuan the year before.

More updates to follow…

Curio, the burgeoning audio platform that offers a curated library of “expert” journalism, has closed a $9 million in Series A round funding.

The round is led by Earlybird, with participation from Draper Esprit, Cherry Ventures, and Horizons Ventures. It follows $2 million in previous backing from Cherry, 500 Startups and unnamed private angel investors, bringing the total amount raised to $11 million to date.

Founded in 2016 by Govind Balakrishnan, an ex-BBC strategist, and Srikant Chakravarti, a former solicitor, London-based Curio offers a curated library of journalism translated into and presented as audio, letting listeners get their daily fix of news and analysis. Over 50 publications are curated on the app including the likes of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Financial Times, and specialist titles such as Wired, MIT Technology Review, and Aeon.

The audio articles are narrated by professional voice actors. Listeners can browse by new stories, most played, categories, and publication, and also discover new tracks on playlists curated bi-weekly by the Curio editorial team. In addition, you can click on “read along” on the app to access the original text in via publisher’s website, therefore helping to drive traffic to the original publisher.

“We are here to help people learn through quality journalism and great stories,” says Balakrishnan. “Curio is a premium audio platform with a curated library of expert journalism. It provides listeners with stories and insights on critical topics shaping our world, helping them learn and grow.

“Journalism has come to be narrowly associated with breaking news. However it encompasses thoughtful opinions, insightful analyses and bold investigations. Some of the biggest ideas shaping our world are being discussed by opinion formers on our publisher partners, and offer an unprecedented opportunity for consumers to learn and grow. Audio allows people to go deeper and learn as they go about their everyday lives”.

That thesis appears to be resonating with users. Balakrishnan tells me that Curio’s largest subscriber group is 24-35 year olds and the services reaches roughly the same number of women and men. “Over 60% of our current subscribers are not existing podcast/audio listeners,” he says. “In this sense we see a big opportunity in helping a broader range of people who are interested in quality journalism”. Noteworthy, 70% of Curio’s audience is outside the U.S. and roughly 40% is non-western markets.

To that end, Curio says it will use the injection of capital to strengthen its position in the U.S. and U.K. markets, while also expanding to other English-speaking parts of the world, including India, Australia, and South Africa. It also has a number of co-produced series and guest curations in the pipeline, alongside what it describes as “AI-led” personalisation and commissioning based on over 2 million monthly data points.

Times Internet said on Thursday it reaches more than 557 million active users in India each month and over 111 million users a day as several of its digital offerings demonstrated strong growth in the past year.

The Indian conglomerate — which operates over three-dozen properties, including on-demand streaming services MX Player and Gaana, and newspapers Times of India and Economic Times — added 107 million monthly active users in the financial year that ended in March, it said.

Its platform clocked over 67 billion page views in FY 2020, up from 47 billion from the year prior.

MX Player, which has now amassed over 200 million monthly active users, and Gaana, which now reaches 185 million monthly active users, grew 75% in the year, Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet told TechCrunch in an interview.

These figures put Times Internet, a subsidiary of 182-year-old Bennett Coleman and Company Limited (BCCL), at the centre of the world’s largest open battleground (well, almost), which is otherwise dominated by Google, Facebook and Amazon.

According to analytics firm Comscore, Google reached 98% of the digital population in India on web (desktop as well as mobile) in the month of June. During the same month, Facebook reached 94.9% of the population, Times Internet 77.7% and Amazon settled at fourth place with 76%. (The figures do not include app usage data.)

Founded over 20 years ago, Times Internet had a huge headstart over nearly every firm that dominates the digital landscape today. But it largely failed to cash in on that for several years, critics say. Under the current leadership, however, the firm has followed a steady path and grown.

Comscore data for the month of May (Image credit: Times Internet)

Gajwani acknowledged that some of Times Internet’s offerings weren’t in great shape at the beginning of the last decade. “So we put a lot more emphasis on just product quality during 2013 to 2016. The next few years after that we also bought and built good products.”

“We’ve sold products or exited products where we didn’t think we could be competitive. We’ve got a reasonably strong portfolio now,” he added.

The most recent phase of Times Internet’s growth, said Gajwani, is the push to find revenue channels beyond ads. Gaana, MX Player, ET Prime (ad-free tier for Economic Times) and Times Prime (which bundles and resells a range of third-party subscription offerings) are helping it find subscribers, while MensXP’s e-commerce section, ETMoney, MagicBricks, GradeUp and Dineout are driving transactions.

Overall, Times Internet said its revenue grew 24% to $221.5 million in FY20. The firm did not disclose how much revenue it clocked from subscriptions, but said it had over 2 million paying subscribers and its transacting businesses grew 68%. Its ad business was also up 22%.

But its heavy reliance on ads means it has also been hit by the coronavirus, which slashed consumers’ spendings across the industry, resulting in advertisers cutting their budget.

Gajwani said the month of March saw a “big drop” in ad revenue for the firm, but the next three months were “soft” and July and August delivered a big rebound. “The gains of July and August have now made up for the losses of April, May, June in terms of our net year over year,” he added.

The virus and New Delhi’s ban on Chinese apps in recent months haven’t been a complete downer. Both MX Player and Gaana are attempting to fill the void left by the ban on TikTok in India and have received better traction than some of the more heavily-funded firms such as Twitter-backed ShareChat, according to mobile insight firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.

MX TakaTak, the short-video app from MX Player, has amassed over 10 million daily active users and 45 million monthly active users, it claimed earlier this week. Users have uploaded more than 15 million videos on the app and clocked over a billion views within a month, it said.

Moving forward, Gajwani said the firm will also continue to try to deepen its relationship with users. “The number of people who consumed two or more of our businesses grew 48%. And the number of people who consumed three or more of our businesses, grew 120%,” he said, without disclosing the number of users.

BCCL has engaged in conversations with investors in recent months to sell stake in Times Internet, a person familiar with the matter said. The deal, if secured, would make Times Internet — which employs more than 6,000 people, up from 5,000 last year — financially stronger to explore more acquisition opportunities, the person said. Gajwani declined to comment. Bloomberg first reported about the talks.

The city council in Portland, Oregon passed legislation Wednesday that’s widely regarded as the most aggressive municipal ban on facial recognition technology so far.

Through a pair of ordinances, Portland will both prohibit city bureaus from using the controversial technology and stop private companies from employing it in public areas. Oakland, San Francisco and Boston have all banned their governments from using facial recognition tech, but Portland’s ban on corporate uses in public spaces breaks new ground.

City Council Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty linked concerns around high-tech law enforcement tools to ongoing protests in Portland, which have taken place for more than three months. Last month, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed that it used a small aircraft to surveil crowds near the protest’s epicenter at the Multnomah County Justice Center in downtown Portland.

Hardesty called the decision to ban local law enforcement from employing facial recognition tech “especially important” for the moment Portland now finds itself in.

“No one should have something as private as their face photographed, stored, and sold to third parties for a profit,” Hardesty said. “No one should be unfairly thrust into the criminal justice system because the tech algorithm misidentified an innocent person.”

The ACLU also celebrated Wednesday’s vote as a historic digital privacy win.

“With today’s vote, the community made clear we hold the real power in this city,” ACLU of Oregon Interim Executive Director Jann Carson said. “We will not let Portland turn into a surveillance state where police and corporations alike can track us wherever we go.”

Portland’s dual bans on the public and private use of facial recognition may serve as a roadmap for other cities looking to carve out similar digital privacy policies — an outcome privacy advocates are hoping for.

“Now, cities across the country must look to Portland and pass bans of their own,” Fight for the Future’s Lia Holland said. “We have the momentum, and we have the will to beat back this dangerous and discriminatory technology.”

Even as more than 150 million people are using digital payment apps each month in India, only about 20 million of them invest in mutual funds and stocks. A startup that is attempting to change that figure by courting millennials has just received a big backing.

Bangalore-headquartered Groww said on Thursday it had raised $30 million in its Series C financing round. YC Continuity Fund, the growth-stage investment fund of Y Combinator, led the round, while existing investors Sequoia India, Ribbit Capital and Propel Ventures participated in it. This is the Continuity Fund’s first investment in India. The new rounds brings three-year-old startup Groww’s total raise-to-date to $59 million.

Groww allows users to invest in mutual funds, including systematic investment planning (SIP) and equity-linked savings. The app, which maintains a very simplified user interface to make it easier for its largely millennial customer base to comprehend the investment world, offers every fund that is currently available in India.

In recent months, the startup has expanded its offerings to allow users to buy stocks of Indian firms and digital gold, said Lalit Keshre, co-founder and chief executive of Groww, in an interview with TechCrunch. Keshre and other three co-founders of Groww worked at Flipkart prior to this startup.

The startup has amassed over 8 million registered users for its mutual fund offering, and over 200,000 users have bought stocks from the platform, said Keshre. The new fund will allow Groww to further expand its reach in the country and also introduce new products, he said.

One of those products is the ability to allow users to buy stocks of U.S.-listed firms, he said. The startup is already testing this with select users, he said.

“We believe Groww is building the largest retail brokerage in India. At YC, we have known the founders since the company was just an idea and they are some of the best product people you will meet anywhere in the world. We are grateful to be partners with Groww as they build one of the largest retail financial platforms in the world,” said Anu Hariharan, partner at YC Continuity, in a statement.

More than 60% of Groww users come from smaller cities and towns of India and 60% of these have never made such investments before, said Keshre. And that’s where the growth opportunities lies.

“India is seeing increased participation of retail investors in financial markets — with 2M new stock market investors added in the last quarter alone,” said Ashish Agrawal, Principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.

In recent years, a number of startups such as INDWealth and Cube Wealth have emerged in India to offer wealth management platforms to the country’s growing internet population. Many established financial firms such as Paytm have also expanded their offerings to include investments in mutual funds.

Lucid just launched its first production vehicle, and it looks impressive. But let’s talk about the new website, too. It features a remarkable buying experience that lets shoppers build a 3D car online and experience it in VR at a Lucid dealership.

Right now, minutes after its launch, the site is laggy at time. I expect it will improve.

Using the tool is just like building a character in a video game. Select a model, add some color, and spin the model around to get another look. Don’t like how the black looks? Change it to red, and the image updates in place. Zoom in, zoom out, and change the wheels. The image updates as you go.

Video games have had this feature for years. This isn’t a new concept. And some automakers have similar features that allow shoppers to change colors and trim pieces, but none I’ve seen have gone nearly as far as Lucid. Mercedes-Benz’s online shopping tool might be the closest, but it lacks the 3D range of view found on Lucid’s tool.

Once the customer customizes a vehicle to their liking, they can save the file to their Lucid profile and go to a Lucid showroom to experience it in VR. These showrooms — Lucid expects to build 20 in the United States — will have a display with Lucid seats and VR headsets. Lucid employees will load the customers saved vehicle into the VR system, and the shopper will be able to experience the car before it’s built.

This tool seems purpose-built for the COVID-19 age. It gives shoppers significantly more insight into a vehicle before going to the dealership. And then, when at the dealership, shoppers can experience the car without getting in a car.

For Lucid, this experience is dramatically more immersive than what Tesla offers shoppers.

General Keith Alexander, who oversaw the National Security Agency when Edward Snowden revealed the shocking extent of its illegal wiretapping and data collection programs, has joined Amazon’s board as a director.

Gen. Alexander’s duties on the audit committee and anywhere else he might be needed are not spelled out anywhere. He is currently co-CEO of IronNet Security, the firm he founded six years ago. Before that he was head of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command.

He is perhaps best remembered by the general public as having helped build and operate an enormous set of secret programs for domestic surveillance in the security-first post-9/11 era. There’s a bit more to running the country’s cybersecurity infrastructure than that, of course, but the Snowden leaks ended up defining the end of his career in government intelligence.

Amazon itself has faced accusations of surveilling and profiling its own users via network of Alexa-powered devices (and internet infrastructure, and buying habits, and emotion-monitoring smartwatches), and while it may get a few tips from the more experienced Gen. Alexander, it is more likely his expertise and connections within the wide world of intelligence and military matters that the company seeks.

That sort of thing is helpful when trying to make lucrative deals with the feds, something of a sore spot with Amazon since it lost the excruciatingly drawn-out bid process for the $10 billion JEDI contract to Microsoft. (The award is still being challenged.)

Gen. Alexander will join former and current executives from the likes of Pepsico, Starbucks, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bridgewater Associates, and others on the board director rolls.

I’ve reached out to Amazon for further information and comment and will update this post if I hear back.

TechCrunch interviewed the General on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt not too long ago to find out how he perceives the need to balance security and privacy.

After years of development, Lucid Motors took the wraps off the Air, an electric luxury sedan that was unveiled Wednesday in a live streamed event.

The Air combines high-end features with eye-popping performance specs and technology that puts it in the same luxury category as a Mercedes S Class. The Air will range in price from as high as $169,000 for its flagship Dream variant to just below $80,000 for the base model, not counting the $7,500 federal tax credit.

The vehicle will have four variants in all, each with slightly different battery ranges that fall between 517 miles and about 400 miles. The Air will be loaded with 32 sensors, a driver-monitoring system and an Ethernet-based architecture all for its advanced driver assistance system, which is designed to support hands-free driving on highways.

Inside the Air, is a simple — not stark — design that balances technology and the needs of the driver. A 34-inch curved glass 5K display sits in front of the driver, appears to float above the dashboard. Another center touchscreen is retractable. Meanwhile, a few physical controls remain on the steering wheel and just above the center screen.

The Air’s design comes across as precise and thoughtful, not jammed with buttons, touchscreens and toggles.TechCrunch hasn’t been inside the production version of the vehicle just yet. But we have loads of photos to share. Check out the inside and exterior of the Air below.

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Lucid Motors provided Wednesday a peek of the next vehicle in its all-electric lineup — an SUV called the Lucid Gravity.

The Lucid Gravity follows the Air, a luxury all-electric sedan that was revealed Wednesday in a live streamed event. The Gravity, which will have the same underlying vehicle platform as the Air, is already well into the design process. The company has a working prototype, which was spotted this summer out in the wild. Lucid Motors CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson later confirmed the SUV’s existence. This is the first time the company has publicly shared photos of the SUV.

Not much is known about the SUV, although the photos released Wednesday provide a few hints of what is to come.

The Air and Gravity share a few design features, notably the outline of the trunk and single long taillight, features that Lucid’s vice president of design Derek Jenkins told TechCrunch in a recent interview would show up in future vehicles.

“The opening of the trunk is on sides of the vehicle and so that allows this super clean rear end, and a single piece taillight, which I think is very distinctive,” said Jenkins describing the Air. At the time, Jenkins noted that future vehicles would likely have same the long light blade that can be seen on the Air. Photos of the SUV don’t show the front, leaving that feature a mystery for now.

The photos also show a rooftop storage unit, suggesting that Lucid is creating a line up of accessories to go with its electric vehicles.

While Lucid hasn’t disclosed when the SUV would come to market, Rawlinson has said the company’s next vehicle would go into production in 2023.

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