Year: 2020

Europe has greenlit Google’s $2.1BN acquisition of fitness wearable maker Fitbit, applying a number of conditions intended to shrink competition concerns over letting it gobble a major cache of health and wellness data following months of regulatory scrutiny of the deal.

While Google announced its plan to buy Fitbit over a year ago, it only notified the transaction to the Commission on June 15, 2020 — meaning it’s taken half a year to be given a caveated go-ahead by Europe. It is also now facing formal antitrust charges on its home turf — from more than one angle (though not related to Fitbit).

Under the terms of the EU’s clearance for ‘Gitbit’, Google has committed not use the Fitbit data of users in the European Economic Area for ad targeting purposes for a ten year period.

It says it will maintain a technical separation between health and wellness data collected via Fitbit wearables in a data silo kept separate from other Google data.

It has also committed to ensuring that regional users have an “effective choice” to grant or deny the use of health and wellness data stored in their Google Account or Fitbit Account by other Google services — such as Google Search, Google Maps, Google Assistant, and YouTube. But it’ll be interesting to see how much dark pattern design gets applied there.

Interestingly, the Commission says it may decide to extend the duration of the decade-long Ads Commitment by up to an additional ten years — if such an extension can be justified.

It further notes that clearance is conditional upon full compliance with all the commitments — the implementation of which will be monitored by a trustee, who must be appointed before the transaction can close.

This yet-to-be-appointed-person will have what the Commission couches as “far-reaching competences” — including access to “Google’s records, personnel, facilities or technical information”.

So EU regulators are taking a ‘trust but verify’ approach to letting this big tech merger steamroller on.

There are further competition focused commitments, too.

Here, Google has agreed to maintain access to Fitbit users’ data via a web API without charging third party developers for the access (of course subject to user consent).

It has also agreed to a number of commitments related to rival wearable makers’ access to Android APIs — saying it will continue free licensing for all core functionality competing devices need to plug into its dominant smartphone OS, Android.

Improvements in device functionality are covered under the agreement, per the Commission, so it’s intended to allow rival wearable makers to continue to be able to innovate without the risk of making a better/more capable device resulting in them being shut out of the Android ecosystem.

Google must also maintain API support in the Android Open Source Project version of its mobile platform.

Another concession the Commission has extracted from Google during this half year of investigation and negotiation is to say it won’t seek to circumvent the requirement to support rivals’ kit accessing Android via the API by degrading the user experience (such as by displaying warnings or error messages).

That’s — frankly — a pretty dysfunctional signal for a regulatory clearance to have to send. And it highlights the level of mistrust that has built up about how Google’s business operates.

Which in turn raises the existential question for EU regulators of why they are allowing themselves to bend over and let Google-Fitbit go ahead. Unsurprisingly, then, the Commission’s PR sounds a tad defensive — with EU lawmakers writing that the decision “is without prejudice to the Commission’s efforts to ensure fair and contestable markets in the digital sector, notably through the recently proposed Digital Markets Act” (DMA).

It also notes that the monitoring trustee will be entitled to share reports that it provides to the Commission with Google’s lead data protection supervisor, the Irish Data Protection Commission. (Though given the massive big tech-related case backlog on its desk — including a number of investigations into other elements of Google’s business — that’s unlikely to cause Mountain View any extra sleepless nights.)

The Commission does also say that commitments secured from Google include “a fast track dispute resolution mechanism that can be invoked by third parties”. So it’s clearly trying to go the extra mile to justify greenlighting further consolidation in a consumer digital services space that Google already massively dominates — at a time when US lawmakers are headed in the opposite direction. So, um…

Civil society in Europe (and beyond) has been raising a massive clamour about the Google-Fitbit acquisition ever since it was announced — urging the bloc’s regulators to stop the tech giant from gobbling Fitbit’s cache of health data, unless or until human rights protections can be guaranteed.

Today the Commission has sidestepped those wider rights concerns.

At best it believes it’s kicked the can down the road a decade or, max, two. And by 2030 (or 2040) it will hope that rules it’s just proposed to put strictures on digital gatekeepers like Google will be in a position to prevent future abuse in check.

The EU’s oft stated preference is to regulate tech giants, not to break up their empires — or, as it turns out, stand in the way of further empire expansion.

Commenting on the Google-Fitbit clearance in a statement, Vestager said: “We can approve the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google because the commitments will ensure that the market for wearables and the nascent digital health space will remain open and competitive. The commitments will determine how Google can use the data collected for ad purposes, how interoperability between competing wearables and Android will be safeguarded and how users can continue to share health and fitness data, if they choose to.”

Taking questions from a European parliament committee last week, Vestager signalled the inexorable looming clearance of Gitbit — saying the US and Europe have a different approach to dealing with market-dominating tech giants. “In Europe we do not have a ban of monopolies,” she told MEPs. “They have a different legal basis in the U.S. We would say you’re more than welcome to be successful but with success comes responsibility — which is why we have article 102 [against abusing a dominant position].”

It’s also why the Commission has felt the need to propose new regulation to strengthen competition enforcement in digital markets — though it’ll most likely be years before the DMA is adopted.

And in the meanwhile EU regulators are letting Google expand its dominance of people’s private information by bagging up Fitbit’s treasure trove of sensitive health data — for full exploitation later.

So plenty will say the Commission is just fiddling round the margins and giving big tech a bypass for competition enforcement.

While 2020 won’t be remembered fondly by many of us for much of anything, it was a blockbuster year for enterprise M&A with the top 10 deals totaling an astounding $165.2 billion.

This is the third straight year I’ve done this compilation. Last year the number was $40 billion. The year prior it was $87 billion. Those numbers pale in comparison to 2020’s result.

Last year’s biggest deal — Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion — would have only been good for fifth place on this year’s list. And last year’s fourth largest deal, where VMware bought Pivotal for $2.7 billion, wouldn’t have even made this year’s list at all.

The 2020 number was lifted by four chip company deals totaling $106 billion alone. Consider that the largest of these deals at $40 billion matched last year’s entire list. But let’s not forget the software company acquisitions, which accounted for the remainder, three of which were via private equity deals.

It’s worth noting that the $165.2 billion figure doesn’t include the Oracle-TikTok debacle, which remains for now in regulatory limbo and may never emerge from it. Nor does it include two purely fintech deals — Morgan Stanley acquiring E-Trade for $13 billion or Intuit snagging Credit Karma for $7.1 billion — but we did include the $5.3 billion Visa-Plaid deal because as it involved an enterprise-y API company we felt like it fit our criteria.

Keep in mind as you go through this year’s list that it appears to be an outlier year in terms of total deal flow. Most years have maybe one or two megadeals, which I would define as over $10 billion. There were six this year. And there were a host of unlisted deals worth between $1 billion and $3.2 billion, several of which would have made it to the list in quieter years.

Without further adieu, here is this year’s Top 10 deals in M&A organized from smallest to largest:

10. Vista snags Pluralsight for $3.5B

This deal happened just this week as we were writing the story, vaulting into 10th place past the $3.2 billion Twilio-Segment deal. Vista has been active as always and it has added Pluralsight, an online education platform for IT pros with plans to take it private again. At a time when more people are online, this deal seems like a wise move.

9. KKR acquires Epicor for $4.7B

This was one of those under-the-radar private equity deals, but one with a bushel of money changing hands. Epicor, hardly a household name, is a mature ERP company dating back to the early 1970s. The company has been on a rocky financial road for much of the 21st century. This could be one of those deals where KKR sees a way to squeeze life from maintenance contracts. Otherwise this one is hard to figure.

8. Insight Partners nabs Veeam for $5B

In yet another private equity deal, Insight acquired Veeam, a cloud data backup and recovery startup based in Switzerland for $5 billion. This one was one of the earliest deals of 2020 and set the tone for the year. The firm had previously invested $500 million into Veeam and apparently liked what it saw and bought the company. Unlike the Epicor deal, Insight probably plans to invest in the company with an end goal of going public or flipping it for a profit at some point.

It’s been an eventful fall for Perigee CEO and founder Mollie Breen. The former NSA employee participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in September, and she just closed her first seed round on Thanksgiving, giving her a $1.5 million runway to begin building the company.

Outsiders Fund led the round with participation from Westport, Contour Venture Partners, BBG Ventures, Innospark Ventures and a couple of individual investors.

Perigee wants to secure areas of the company like HVAC systems or elevators that may interact with the company’s network, but which often fall outside of the typical network security monitoring purview. Breen says the company’s value proposition is about bridging the gap between network security and operations security.

As Breen explained when we spoke in September around her Battlefield turn, the solution learns normal behavior from the operations systems as it interacts with the network, collecting data like what systems and individuals normally access it. It can then determine when something seems off and cut off an anomalous act, which may be indicative of hacker activity, before it reaches the network.

She said this has been a security blind spot for companies, often caught between building operations and the network security team. Perigee provides a set of analytics that gives the security team visibility into this vulnerable area.

Breen says as a female founder getting funding, she is acutely aware how rare that is, and part of the reason she wanted to publicize this funding round was to show other women who are thinking about starting a company that it’s possible, even if it remains difficult.

She plans to grow the company to about six people in the next 12 months, and Breen says that she thinks deeply about how to build a diverse organization. She says that starts with her investors, and includes considering diversity in terms of gender, race and age. She believes that it’s crucial to start with the earliest employees, and she actively recruits diverse candidates.

“I write a lot of cold emails, particularly around hiring and that’s partly because with job listings it’s all inbound and you can’t necessarily guarantee that that is going to be diverse. And so by writing cold emails and really following up with those people and having those conversations, I have found a way of actually making sure that I’m talking to people from different perspectives,” she said.

As she looks ahead to 2021, she’s thinking about the best approach to office versus remote and she says it will probably be mostly remote with some in-person. “I’m really balancing at this point in time, how do we really make the connections, and make them strong and genuine with a lot of trust and do that with balancing some elements of remote, knowing that is where the industry is going and if you’re going to be a company and in a post-2020 world, you probably need to adopt to some element of remote working,” she said.

Royalties aside, songwriters are often unsung heroes of music making. Sure, some — like Carole King and Jimmy Webb — become well-known in their own right, but more often than not, names are relegated to the liner notes.

A new feature in Spotify seeks to correct that — or at least offers listeners a way to take deeper dives into the catalogues of the people behind their favorite songs. Songwriter Hub is a new offering that aggregates information about some of the industry’s biggest and most prolific songwriters. Some are big names in their own right. Others not so much.

Accessible via the Browse tab, the Hub features songwriter playlists, podcasts and devoted songwriter pages. That last bit includes the likes of Gregg Wattenberg, Ant Clemons, Noonie Bao, Sia, Bebe Rexha, Irving Berlin, Ashley Gorley, Meghan Trainor, Fraser T Smith, Missy Elliott, Teddy Geiger, Ben Billions and Justin Tranter.

“Having a hub for songwriters is extremely important because people need to know who these people are who are helping create the soundtrack to our lives,” Ariana Grande/Cardi B/Meek Mill writer Nija says in a press release tied to the news. “Songwriters deserve to be praised for their contributions just as much as artists & producers. A lot of times we get the short end of the stick, so I’m glad that there’s a place where people can see who’s writing their favorite songs.”

The feature arrives today.

Adobe is launching an update to its Spark social media design tool today that will bring more than 10,000 new design assets to the service. This update, which follows the launch of animations in Spark in September, also brings a small UI change with it to accommodate this new feature, but for the most part, you can think of design assets as an extension to what a lot of users were already doing with icons in Spark.

Image Credits: Adobe

“For our users, who are everyday entrepreneurs and marketers, they want to create professional-looking content — and they certainly don’t have design experience,” Adobe Spark product manager Justin Church told me. “The rollout of these tens of thousands of new design assets that we’re coming up with will really empower them to create standout social posts and things like Instagram stories that are more original and creative than they’ve ever been able to so far.”

As Church noted, a lot of users opt for working with Spark’s templates to get started, but there’s also a large set of users who start from scratch and they will especially benefit from the ability to quickly pull in frames, illustrations, brushes and more.

Image Credits: Adobe

Adobe has a large in-house content design team that designed some of its own assets and curated others from outside resources. Those assets were all tagged, to make them discoverable, which now makes it easy to find them in Spark’s search feature. As of now, these results are not personalized yet — or set to match with what’s already in your current design — but the team is exploring how to use AI to help users find the right assets for their specific designs.

Unsurprisingly, given the broad range of users, Adobe opted for a very broad range of assets (and styles) with which to start. The plan is to expand this set of assets over time, of course, and the team will look closely at which categories are popular, but the company also plans to release new assets in time for specific holidays and around special events.

Oscar, the New York-based health insurance upstart at the vanguard of a wave of venture capital healthcare investment made in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, has raised another $140 million in financing.

The new capital means that Oscar has raised what would be the equivalent of $1 million a day for the entirety of 2020.

The company’s last funding round, a $225 million haul, came just a few short months ago in June.

Given the list of investors in the round, which was led by Tiger Global Management and includes Dragoneer, Baillie Gifford, Coatue, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Lakestar and Reinvent; it’s likely going to be one of the last times the company taps private markets before an eventual public offering.

“Since 2017, Oscar has seen annualized membership growth of more than 70%,” said Mario Schlosser, co-founder and chief executive of Oscar, in a statement. “As we continue to rapidly scale our business, this capital will help us deliver on our commitment to bring accessible and affordable care to even more Oscar members across the country.”

Heading into the new year, the company said it will be available in 18 states and 286 counties across its Individual and Family Plans, Medicare Advantage and Small group products. As of September 30, 2020, Oscar had approximately 420,000 members across 15 states, the company said.

Oscar was one of the first insurers to offer virtual care services (launching the practice as early as 2014). Now nearly half of all Oscar member visits to a primary care practitioner are made with an Oscar-recommended doctor. Roughly 38% of the company’s subscribing members who have one or more medical visits use the company’s virtual care services, Oscar said.

Today, American securities watchdog the SEC  href="https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-321">announced that Robinhood, a free-to-trade broker that has grown rapidly in recent years, has paid a $65 million fine to settle charges relating to some of its historical business practices. The actions at issue occured between 2015 and 2018, with the SEC alleging that the company “made misleading statements and omissions in customer communications” about how it generated “its largest revenue source” – specifically, payment for order flow.

The SEC also said that the well-funded unicorn “falsely claimed in a website FAQ between October 2018 and June 2019 that its execution quality matched or beat that of its competitors,” when it reality it was executing customer trades at “inferior trade prices that in aggregate deprived customers of $34.1 million even after taking into account the savings from not paying a commission.”

Robinhood did not admit or deny the SEC charges, per the government body.

Reached for comment, Robinhood’s Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher said via email that the $65 million settlement “relates to historical practices that do not reflect Robinhood today.” The company, in a somewhat rare on-the-record statement added that it has “significantly improved [its] best execution processes, and have established relationships with additional market makers to improve execution quality.”

Robinhood listed five execution venues in its most recent payment for order flow filings.

TechCrunch has covered Robinhood’s payment for order flow incomes in recent quarters, as the company has scaled both its userbase and trading volumes, generating growing revenue from how its customer orders are executed.

In Q2 2020, for example, Robinhood’s revenues from payment for order flow sources doubled to around $180 million from a Q1 2020 result of around $90 million. Of course, those numbers come several years after the quarters noted in the settlement announcement.

Update: It’s worth noting that the SEC news comes less than a day after the Massachusetts Securities Division filed a complaint against Robinhood, alleging that it “engaged in acts and practices in violation of the Act and Regulations by aggressively marketing itself to Mass investors without regard for the best interests of its customers and failing to maintain the infrastructure and procedures necessary to meet the demands of its rapidly growing customer base.”

The state is seeking censure of Robinhood, improvement to its governance, along with monetary restitution and other financial penalties. The Massachusetts complaint can be read here.

Impacts

Robinhood has had an explosive, if occasionally rocky year. The company has had bouts of downtime during key market moments, had to reform its options-trading service after the suicide of a user, and has seen growth from its incomes from order flow slow.

But despite those matters, the company’s 2020 trajectory has been little short of impressive. Its rapid revenue helped the company raise hundreds of millions of dollars this year at expanding valuations, and made Robinhood a 2021 IPO candidate.

It’s hard to imagine that today’s news will fuly derail Robinhood’s growth; if the charges had dealt with a historical period more close to the current day, perhaps the impact would be larger. Robinhood’s competitors — Public.com raised $65 million the other day — could capitalize on the news.

Canoo, the Los Angeles-based electric vehicle startup that will make its debut later this month on the Nasdaq as a publicly traded company, revealed Thursday an all-electric multi-purpose delivery vehicle. 

The electric delivery vehicle, which includes a high roof height, storage lockers and a software as a service platform to manage fleets, is targeted at both small businesses and large last-mile delivery companies such as package delivery fleets, retailers, major corporations and logistics companies.

This latest vehicle — its second to debut since 2019 — aims to showcase Canoo’s flexibility and its intent to produce products for consumers and business-to-business applications. All of Canoo’s vehicles share that same underlying architecture; it’s the cabins, or top hats, that differ.

Other variations of the multi-purpose delivery vehicle will follow, and Canoo plans to announce a service network at a later date.

Canoo started as Evelozcity in 2017, founded by former Faraday Future executives Stefan Krause  and Ulrich Kranz. The company rebranded as Canoo in spring 2019 and debuted its first vehicle several months later. It was this first vehicle, as well as Canoo’s plan to offer it only as a subscription, that captured the attention of investors, companies and the media.

The first vehicle, which looks more like a microbus than a traditional electric SUV, is the “skateboard” architecture that houses the batteries and the electric drivetrain in a chassis underneath the vehicle’s cabin. That architecture caught Hyundai’s interest earlier this year. The Korean automaker announced in February plans to jointly develop an electric vehicle platform with Canoo, based on the startup’s proprietary skateboard design. The platform will be used for future Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles as well as the automaker group’s so-called “purpose-built vehicles.” The PBV, which Hyundai showcased at CES 2020, is a pod-like vehicle that the company says can be used for various functions in transit, such as a restaurant or clinic.

This new delivery vehicle will be offered initially in two sizes. Canoo said more variants will follow and that major corporations — or presumably whatever company is willing to put up the money — will have the option to co-develop a custom vehicle with Canoo to meet their specific requirements.

The electric delivery vehicle will start at about $33,000. Future customers will have to wait though. Canoo said availability will begin in 2022, with scaled production and launch planned for 2023. Customers can pre-order the multi-purpose delivery vehicle for a refundable deposit of $100 per vehicle.

Following its U.S. commercial debut, Canoo said it plans to launch the multi-purpose delivery vehicle in other markets such as Canada, Mexico and Europe.

The delivery vehicle was designed with the ergonomics of the driver in mind and with attention to detail to help them be happier and more productive at work, according to Canoo Executive Chairman Tony Aquila, who added that the vehicle is affordable and offers greater cargo capacity than the current electric delivery offerings in its class.

“We aim to lower the total cost of ownership and increase return on investment for everyone from local small business owners to large fleets,” Aquila said in a statement. 

Indeed, Canoo is promising returns to companies that order one of its delivery vehicles, claiming that customers can achieve between $50,000 to $80,000 improvement on return on capital over six to seven years, depending on the use case, as compared to other top selling delivery vehicles.

Canoo also pushes the flexibility of its delivery vehicle, noting that it can be built with different workstations, will be offered in several different battery pack sizes that range between 40 and 80 kilowatt-hours, and have a bi-directional onboard charger, which can be used to power equipment and tools. 

Canoo also touted the tech in the vehicle, notably an advanced driver assistance system, over-the-air software updates and a software-as-a-service platform to help fleets manage assets, route plan, run diagnostics and support drivers. 

Stripe recently made headlines with its entrance into the banking world with Stripe Treasury. The news follows Google’s banking and payments announcement along with IPO bound companies such as Airbnb, DoorDash and Affirm all mentioning “financial services” in S-1 filings — a clear signal of how the sector will continue to stay red hot for the coming years.

What do all of these companies have in common? The subtle, almost unnoticeable, embedding of financial services. There has been an influx of new fintechs democratizing how to embed financial services across the spectrum, from investing, insurance, lending to banking. While many of these companies are in their nascent stages, they are achieving increasingly high valuations. Why?

Because today, customers yearn for greater personalization and less friction while brands are looking for ways to improve monetization seamlessly. The ability to be at the right place at the right time, supporting consumers and merchants alike, where they want, how they want it and when they want it — cannot be understated.

At the heart of embedded finance is the benefit of enabling any brand or merchant to rapidly, and at low cost, integrate innovative financial services into new propositions and customer experiences. To avoid developing noncore product additions in-house, companies will look to “building blocks” (or APIs) to take advantage of the big opportunity to extend customer lifetime value and address a wider variety of needs in one place.

This holds true for startups, digitally native brands and established brands, online and offline. For fledgling fintech startups or brands that want to provide financial services to their customers, working with APIs are often a no-brainer given the costs associated with building integrations in-house.

But imagine if you are a global airline company and the benefit of not having to staff a know-your-customer compliance or fraud detection team. Or for lenders who can minimize risk and increase speed by not having to request a pay stub or personal information verification?

The end goal is to earn and build customer loyalty while generating new revenue streams. Historically, established brands have been served by banks with co-branded and “affinity” programs or partnerships. But this “offline” model is usually white-label or very “human-in-the-loop” with limited and inflexible capabilities. However, APIs can change this — a great example is Starbucks Rewards, heralded as a successful case of data, rewards and loyalty. No longer are brands just reselling leads, businesses can now directly participate in the product and distribution to improve margins.

Today, embedded finance is being used in a variety of ways: In the product (e.g., Tesla’s insurance offering), in distribution channels (e.g., a startup selling insurance during car purchases), and in the technology layer (or building blocks) to improve the overall functionality (e.g., a lender leveraging a data API for instant underwriting).

We typically separate building blocks into two buckets: providers (“plug and play” applications) and enablers (those that help financial services to be offered).

Image Credits: Cathay Innovation (opens in a new window)

Image Credits: Cathay Innovation (opens in a new window)

There are many new entrants and it’s not one size fits all. Some have data advantages, some distribution while some enable new greenfield opportunities via delivery of the customer experience. While these “digital wrappers” around financial services infrastructure seem to be working, the question remains — who will become a market leader? Do enablers eventually become providers?

A new startup called Gawq wants to tackle the problem of fake news and the “echo chamber” problem created by social media, where our view of the world is shaped by manipulative algorithms and personalized feeds. Through Gawq’s newly launched mobile news app, it aims to present news from a range of sources, while allowing users to filter between news, opinion, paid content, and more, as well as compare sources, check facts, and even review the publication’s content for accuracy.

The idea for Gawq comes from Joshua Dziabiak, co-founder and now board member at the now profitable insurance tech startup The Zebra. Dziabiak stepped down from his day-to-day role this March, and founded Gawq shortly after.

“It started as a passion project and then it transformed into a business,” Dziabiak explains. “I wanted to do something that had a larger social impact. And this idea — this problem — has surfaced and been magnified in really big ways over the past year, especially,” he says.

When news is served up through social media channels, people are presented with their own version of reality, as the algorithms begin to filter out the news that doesn’t engage them and show them more of what does. Over time, this system led some publishers to pursue clicks and outrage with over-the-top, sensational headlines, but it also spawned a network of publications that would slant and bias the news in ways that better connected them with an either right- or left-leaning audience.

As a result, the media environment overall began to center itself around eyeballs and not necessarily news quality, Dziabiak says. While there is still quality journalism being created, it can sometimes be hard to find among all the noise.

“I believe journalists and content creators need a new measure for success. One that is based on the core ethics of journalism, and not the number of clicks or shares,” Dziabiak notes.

Image Credits: Gawq

The Gawq name is meant to be a reminder of how today’s headlines often scream for our attention. But it misses the mark for an app about news accuracy. At its core, Gawq is a news aggregator where you are not meant to “gawk” at headlines, but actually read and consider the news with a more critical eye.

At launch, the app organizes over 150 different top media sources of all types and sizes, including those that lean one way or the other. The publishers cover topics like U.S. and world news, politics, sports, business, tech, entertainment, science, lifestyle news, and more.

Gawq also organizes the day’s news without using any sort of algorithms or personalization engines, but instead by topic. As you read, you click to compare coverage of the story with other sources to get a better idea of how different outlets are writing about the same topic. With a clever red and blue slider bar at the top of the screen, you can drag your finger over to the red side to see the coverage from right-leaning sources, or you can drag it to the blue side to see the more left-leaning coverage.

The company says it uses data from three different nonprofits who audit media — AllSides, Media Bias Fact Check, and Ad Fontes Media —  to determine if sources are “right” or “left.”

Image Credits: Gawq

Just below the slider bar are the related fact checks to the topic at hand, for easy reference.

While Gawq will allow users to toggle some news sources on or off within the app’s settings, it uses language that deters you from doing so by reminding you that it works best when you maintain a “diverse set of media.”

In addition, Gawq introduces a “smart labels” feature to automatically identify and tag non-news — like op-ed’s, sponsored content, or even celeb gossip, if you hate that sort of thing. You can toggle these on or off, too, if you want to hide anything that’s not hard news.

Another nice feature — for the news consumer at least, if not the publisher — is that Gawq loads articles by default into a “reader mode” that strips the ads and distractions that tend to fill the pages on news websites these days. You can still click to view the article on the website, if you prefer.

While much of the above is related to how the news is presented to the reader, Gawq’s bigger bet is that it can create a Wikipedia-like community of news reviewers who will rate stories for adherence to journalistic practices. This is a more ambitious and perhaps overly optimistic endeavour.

On every article, users can click a review button that walks them through a short quiz where they’re asked to rate the story’s balance, the details provided, and whether the headline was clickbait. Users then add a comment and submit their report. This review process was built off the core ethics of journalism as defined by the Society of Professional Journalists, Dziabiak says.

Image Credits: Gawq

Likely, only a minority of Gawq users would rate the stories. But over time and with scale, the reviews could help give outlets an accurate rating on news accuracy and their tendencies towards sensationalism, in the eyes of news consumers. That data may have external value, but for now, Gawq’s business model is “TBD,” Dziabiak admits.

The problem Gawq aims to tackle is a difficult one. And arguably, those who need to widen their worldview will be least likely to download a new app to do so. They’re often passive news consumers who have sat back ingesting news (and often, outrage and lies) from ever-personalized social media feeds. They then click on one favorite news TV channel for everything else. But there is a growing number of people who want a more neutral media landscape, and Gawq can help them find it with how it positions news as right, left or centered when comparing sources.

The startup is currently self-funded and has a small team of engineers, mostly working on a contract basis. Gawq has not ruled out future investment, however.

The app is a free download on iOS and Android.