Year: 2021

As energy prices continue to rise and more home owners look to the viability of things like solar, consumers will no doubt be searching for more ways to control their usage. Founded by ex-Tesla engineer Arch Rao, Span looks to address these questions, while asking, in a world of smart home devices, why the end-user access to grid energy has stayed stagnant for so long.

Span is a young company – founded roughly this time three years ago. This time last year, it raised a $10.1 million Series A, and by the end of the year, was  rolling out its products to homes across the U.S.

While not disclosing actual numbers, Rao tells me that Span, is “starting to capture a meaningful share of the storage market in the U.S. Especially in key markets like California.” Make of that what you will, but the company is particularly targeting solar users with a battery capture system.

Announced today, Span’s second product is a smaller and more versatile unit, simply calling the Span Smart Panel. The system is also notably cheaper than its first-gen predecessor, knocking the $5,000 MSRP down to $3,500. Your results may vary on the price, as power companies will often bundle this technology with other offerings like solar panels.

“This is part of the original vision that we thought about with Nest,” Nest co-founder and Span investor Matt Rogers said in an interview with TechCrunch. “There’s a lot you can do with your home. Nest and Google are heading in different directions. But the opportunity to understand the energy in your home and be the glue and the command center is still really real. Especially in this world where energy costs go up, and where solar and storage become pervasive. You can’t imagine a world in the future like that, that doesn’t have something like Span.”

The system plays nicely with most home electrical panels and offers minute control for circuits, as well as support for Ethernet, Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth connections. The company offers simple device control through a connected mobile app.

“What we’ve done is fundamentally reinvent the home electrical panel,” Rao tells TechCrunch. “We are not tied to a single use case. We are the backbone of everything in your home. Some homes have thermostats, some don’t. Some homes have solar, some don’t. But practically every home has an electrical panel that is still using technology that is 100 years old.”

Blue Origin is taking a novel approach to selling the first available private spaceflight seat on its New Shepard rocket, with an auction that will award the spot to the highest bidder. The company used a sealed bidding process for the first part of the contest, but it is now revealing the amount of the top bid and from here until June 10, all online bidding will happen in the open.

The current top bid for the coveted spot is at $1.4 million, after a bidding process that saw 5,200 applicants put in an offer, spanning bidders from 136 countries. Blue Origin will now be taking open bids on its website, and the current high bid (which is already up to $2 million as of this writing) will be displayed prominently for all to see.

On June 12, there will be one final, live online auction, among remaining participants who have registered and are willing to compete at whatever the high price is at the time. The winner then gets a seat on that first flight, which is currently set for July 20, and which will include other, yet-to-be-named passengers selected by Blue Origin.

The Jeff Bezos-founded space company has been working towards this moment for a long time, but this winning bid isn’t a direct payday for the private spaceflight venture: Instead, it’s donating the amount of the winning offer to its Club for the Future non-profit, which is aimed at encouraging kids to pursue a STEM education.

This will be Blue Origin’s first ever human spaceflight, and the fact that they’re opening up at least one seat to a member of the public means they’re extremely confident in the reliability of the suborbital, reusable New Shepard launch system.

A massive raise for the 3D printing industry this morning, as Massachusetts-based Formlabs has announced a $150 million Series E. The round, led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2, effectively doubles the value of the unicorn to $2 billion dollars.

The news comes during a kind of resurgence as the once-beleaguered industry is seeing a massive uptick in interest – and funding. Of note, Desktop Metal, Shapeways, Velo3D and Markforged have all announced places to go public via SPAC. The company notes a recent study that projects that the industry will hit more than $51 billion by 2026. The news arrives as technology is improving, materials are diversifying and companies are looking for ways to introduce additive manufacturing into mass production.

Founded in 2011 by MIT Media Lab students, Formlabs has been something of an anomaly in the world of 3D printing. The company adapted a formerly industrial method of additive manufacturing (stereolithography) to a desktop form factor. It was enough to keep the firm going amid a bubble burst for the industry.

“Today, most 3D printing technology is still too expensive and difficult to use for widespread adoption,” CEO Max Lobovsky said in a press release tied to the round. “Our laser focus on improving the user experience and quality of these machines while bringing down the cost is central to our success and the growth of the industry. With this investment, we plan to expand our current portfolio of SLA and SLS technology and accelerate our product development to continue delivering on the expectations of the 3D printing industry.”

The large round will go toward increasing the company’s global headcount and helping Formlabs scale its technology toward mass production – a longstanding sticking point for most 3D printing tech.

The real estate sales market has been in an upswing this year, and today a startup that’s addressing one of homeowners’ biggest needs — repair and maintenance services, and specifically the stress of sorting these out when things break down — is announcing some funding on the heels of strong growth.

Super — which has built a business providing repair and maintenance for electrical and mechanical systems, appliances, and plumbing by way of a monthly subscription — has closed a growth round of $50 million.

The startup plans to use the funding to expand into new markets, to hire more people, and to continue adding more maintenance/repair services and partnerships into its wider home-warranty-by-subscription proposition.

CEO Jorey Ramer, who co-founded the company with Ryan Donnelly (VP of engineering), also said that another part of the investment will be used to enhance the AI tech that underpins Super’s service and pricing plans. More on that below.

The San Francisco-based company is currently active in some of the fastest-growing housing markets in the U.S.,  Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. (ironically not in SF itself), and it has grown revenue 7x since April 2019, when it previously raised money, a $20 million Series B. It’s not disclosing actual revenue numbers, nor user numbers.

This is latest Series C has a number of strategic backers that speaks to the bigger ecosystem of financial and insurance services that interlink with each other, and which are used by the average person in the course of home ownership. (Indeed, Super these days seems to refer to itself as an “insuretech”.)

Led by Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, the venture arm of the banking giant, others in the round included home construction giant Asahi Kasei, AAA – Auto Club Group (which also sells insurance), Gaingels, and REACH. The last of these is a scale-up service from Second Century Ventures, which is the investment fund of the National Association of Realtors. Aquiline Technology Growth, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Moderne Ventures and the HSB Fund of Munich Re Ventures — which all invested in Super’s previous $20 million round back in April 2019 — also participated.

The company has now raised $80 million in total, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.

As we have noted before, Ramer came up with the idea for Super when he himself moved to San Francisco after he sold his previous startup, Jumptap — an advertising network acquired by Millennial Media (which is now part of Verizon by way of its acquisition of AOL, just like TechCrunch). He’d been an apartment renter for all of his adult life, but when he moved to the Bay Area, he found himself buying property, and it came with more than a little reluctance because of the headache of taking care of his new home.

“I liked being a renter,” he said in an interview. “You pay a fee, and you know what to expect.” (“Super” is a reference to the superintendents that handle maintenance and repair in an apartment building, and to what Super hopes customers will think about its service.)

The route that Ramer decided to take for how to approach filling that gap, interestingly, is not unlike the challenges that Jumptap faced in the world of ad tech: instead of trying to build a services business from the ground up, he opted to build an integrated network that tapped into a number of small services enterprises already working in the business of maintaining homes. (The correlation here is that, rather than building a first-party behemoth, the approach is to knit together a number of online properties so that people looking to advertise can do so across a wide range of places in a network).

Super has created a kind of marketplace: the services businesses and individuals that Super engages with to carry out maintenance and repairs are all licensed and use its platform for free, essentially, and Super handles remuneration based on call-outs. For users, the call-outs come as part of their monthly plans, and they include different options based on which level of service they pay for.

The funding it’s announcing today will be used in part to enhance how those monthly plans work.

Not only are there algorithms that Super has built to determine how to price its services based on location, size of home and other factors; but there are features in the app that subscribers can use to interact with Super to report issues, call out maintenance people, and provide more detail about problems to improve faster, and in some cases, automated adjudication on issues.

Better tech for more responsive home services has been an interesting area of the market, but one that’s largely been ignored up to now, but as they have matured, AR and other computer vision breakthroughs have definitely helped to advance that game. (And a number of others are also tapping into that, including Hover, Nana, Jobber and more.)

The way that the service has been built to scale — working with contractors means adding in more kinds of coverage is easier than building from the ground up — also means that Super over time may well add more services into the mix.

“The things we would do are things your super would do,” Ramer said. “So that might include fixing plumbing, but might also potentially include cleaning carpets, which you could think of as maintenance. Painting is another interesting area. It seems like it might be a cosmetic thing, but if you do not paint, you risk dry rot. It’s also preventative care. So if we, say, cover 100% maintenance you could imagine that included, too.”

One area where it’s unlikely to move is general contract work, say rebuilding a bathroom or kitchen, or adding in a new room in your loft: the focus it seems will remain on the essentials of keeping your home working.

But aside of expanding the services directly on its own platform, there are also potentially opportunities for how Super might work with partners. AAA for example has a notable business not just in roadside assistance but also insurance coverage. Ramer describes Super as “roadside assistance for your home,” and he points out that it’s a natural partnership to sell those alongside each other.

Similarly, Wells Fargo, as a mortgage lender, is a natural complement, providing a route to its customers to help maintain the properties that they’re in the process of paying off to the bank. This in turn also becomes a kind of insurance policy to the bank itself, as it keeps the homes it is financing in better shape.

“Wells Fargo embraces innovation, and we’re excited to support a tech-forward platform like Super which brings further advancement to the home services market,” said Matthew Raubacher, managing director for WFSC’s Principal Technology Investments Group, in a statement. “The challenges of ongoing repairs and maintenance resonates with every homeowner, and Super provides an experience that is convenient for the customer, while boosting job visibility for local contractors and businesses. We look forward to seeing them continue to widen their geographic footprint and expand their product offering.”

Unbounce, a Vancouver startup best known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, added a new wrinkle this morning when it announced it has acquired Snazzy.ai, an early stage automated copywriting startup. The two companies did not share the terms.

Unbounce Chief Strategy Officer Tamara Grominsky says that her company focuses on helping customers convert their customers into sales, and with Snazzy, it gets some pretty nifty technology based on GPT-3 artificial intelligence technology.

“We’re focused right now on building conversion intelligence software that will allow marketers to work with machines to really unlock their true conversion potential, […] and we saw a huge opportunity with Snazzy to focus particularly on the content creation and copy creation space to help us accelerate that strategy,” Grominsky explained.

She points out that the product is really aimed at the marketing generalist charged with overseeing landing pages, and who is responsible for a range of tasks including writing copy. “The average Unbounce customer isn’t a specialized copywriter, so they don’t spend [their work] day writing copy. They’re what we would consider a marketing generalist or really someone who’s responsible for a wide range of marketing responsibilities,” she said.

Snazzy co-founder Chris Frantz says the tech is really about getting people started, and then they can tweak the results as needed. “The hardest part has always been to get that first line, that first page, the first couple of words in — and we eliminate that entirely. That might not always result in amazing copy, but on the plus side you can always click the button again and give it another try,” he said.

Frantz says that with so much competition in the space, he and his co-founder felt they could build a market much faster as part of a larger and broader marketing platform solution like Unbounce.

“I love Tamara’s vision for the future of Unbounce. I think she has a very ambitious vision. She sold me on that very early on in the process. At the same time, there was a lot of competition in the space, and to have a key differentiator with a company like Unbounce, which has a decade of marketing experience and a lot of trust within this community, I think it’s a very powerful wedge that we can use to further grow our audience,” Frantz said.

The tool lets you write a range of copy from landing pages to Google ad copy. The company launched in alpha last October and already had 30,000 customers, which Grominsky says Unbounce hopes to convert into customers. The good news for those customers is that the company plans to leave Snazzy as a stand-alone product, while incorporating the tech into the platform in ways that make sense in the coming year.

At the end of March, TechCrunch reported that buzzy startup Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — had raised $150 million in a round of funding that values the fintech at $2 billion.

Well, that deal has closed and in the end, Miami-based Pipe confirms that it has actually raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round that was “massively oversubscribed,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst.

“We had originally allocated $150 million for the round, but capped it at $250 million although we could have raised significantly more,” he told TechCrunch.

As we previously reported, Baltimore, Maryland-based Greenspring Associates led the round, which included participation from new investors Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, Horizon Capital, 3L and Japan’s SBI Investment. Existing backers such as Next47, Marc Benioff, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, MaC  Ventures and Republic also put money in the latest financing.

The investment comes about 2 ½ months after Pipe raised $50 million in “strategic equity funding” from a slew of high-profile investors such as Siemens’ Next47 and Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Group, Shopify, Slack, HubSpot, Okta and Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya. With this latest round, Pipe has now raised about $316 million in total capital. The new funding was raised at “a significant step up in valuation” from the company’s last raise.

As a journalist who first covered Pipe when they raised $6 million in seed funding back in late February 2020, it’s been fascinating to watch the company’s rise. In fact, Pipe claims that its ability to achieve a $2 billion valuation in just under a year since its public launch in June of last year makes it the fastest fintech to reach this valuation in history. While I can’t substantiate that claim, I can say that its growth has indeed been swift and impressive.

Hurst, Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia founded Pipe in September 2019 with the mission of giving SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. (Pipe describes its buy-side participants as “a vetted group of financial institutions and banks.”)

The goal of the platform is to offer companies with recurring revenue streams access to capital so they don’t dilute their ownership by accepting external capital or get forced to take out loans.

More than 4,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform since its public launch in June 2020, with just over 1,000 of those signing up since its March raise, according to Hurst. Tradable annual recurring revenue (ARR) on the Pipe platform is in excess of $1 billion and trending toward $2 billion, with tens of millions of dollars currently being traded every month. When I last talked to the company in March, it had reported tens of millions of dollars traded in all of the first quarter.

“Growth has been insane,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “This speaks to why we managed to raise at such a high valuation and attract so much investor interest.”

Image Credits: Pipe

Over time, Pipe’s platform has evolved to offer non-dilutive capital to non-SaaS companies as well. In fact, 25% of its customers are currently non-SaaS, according to Hurst — a number he expects to climb to over 50% by year’s end.

Examples of the types of businesses now using Pipe’s platform include property management companies, direct-to-consumer companies with subscription products, insurance brokerages, online pharmacies and even sports/entertainment-related organizations, Hurst said. Even VC firms are users.

“Any business with very predictable revenue streams is ripe for trading on our platform,” Hurst emphasizes. “We have unlocked the largest untapped asset class in the world.”

He emphasizes that what Pipe is offering is not debt or a loan.

“Other companies in this space are dealing in loans and they’re actually raising debt and giving companies money — like reselling debt,” Hurst said. “This is what differentiates us so massively.”

The startup has been operating with a lean and mean strategy and has a current headcount of 34. Pipe plans to use its latest capital in part to double that number by year’s end.

“We haven’t actually spent a penny of our prior financing,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “But we’re seeing huge demand for the product globally, and across so many different verticals, so we’re going to use this capital to not only secure the future of business obviously but to continue to invest into growing all of these different verticals and kick off our global expansion.”

Image Credits: Pipe co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst / Pipe

Ashton Newhall, managing general partner of Greenspring Associates, described Pipe as “one of the fastest-growing companies” his firm has seen.

The startup, he added, is “addressing a very large TAM (total addressable market) with the potential to fundamentally shift the financial services landscape.”

In particular, Greenspring was drawn to Pipe’s alternative financing model.

“While there are many companies that service specific niches with traditional lending products, Pipe isn’t a lender,” Newhall told TechCrunch. “Rather, it’s a trading platform and does not actually raise any money to give to customers. Instead, Pipe connects customers directly with institutional investors to get the best possible pricing to trade their actual contracts in lieu of taking a loan.”

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion.

eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS startups with a focus on productivity and workflows. For instance, Front, Aircall and Spendesk all started with eFounders.

There have been a few exits, such as TextMaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy and Briq. Those exits are included in the total valuation of eFounders companies —  exit values are freezed as of date of exit. But Front, Aircall and Spendesk could represent even more massive successes down the road.

“When we started in 2011, there was an existing model that was Rocket Internet. We liked the entrepreneurship spirit but we didn’t like the philosophy,” co-founder and CEO Thibaud Elzière told me.

Instead of copying Rocket Internet altogether, they altered the business model quite drastically on three different aspects:

• They try to come up with original startup ideas, not copycats;
• They want to work with entrepreneurs, not consultants-turned-entrepreneurs;
• Their portfolio companies should be able to operate on their own after 12 to 18 months.

When eFounders come up with a new project, they act as a sort of third co-founder. The startup studio tries to find a CEO and a CTO. In exchange for a third of equity, the eFounders core team helps take the project off the ground. When the startup raises a seed round, eFounders moves on from day-to-day activities and focuses on new projects.

And it’s been working well. With 30 portfolio companies, there are now 1,500 people working for an eFounders-backed company. Combined, they generate $131 million in annual recurring revenue.

As for the next 10 years, Elzière doesn’t think eFounders can simply increase the cadence and launch more and more projects. “It’s a model that isn’t scalable — it’s hand crafted,” he said.

There are two ways to expand. First, eFounders is going to focus on more verticals. That’s why the startup studio partnered with Camille Tyan so that he would be in charge of fintech projects. You can imagine another studio for blockchain startups, another one for AI startups, etc.

“We want to remain focused on software with a B2B angle — not enterprise but long-tail B2B. We don’t pretend to be a general-purpose studio, but we can acquire specific skills and knowledge on specific topics,” Elzière said.

If there are some liquidity events with some of the most successful eFounders companies, the startup studio is also going to use part of its cash to invest in other companies. This eFounders fund would focus on seed investments in SaaS companies with a hands-on approach.

But having more money isn’t necessarily a bad thing as SaaS products today don’t look like SaaS products from ten years ago.

“Creating a SaaS company today is a lot more complicated and more expensive,” Elzière said. “People who use Notion tell you that Notion is slow because it takes more than 100 milliseconds to load a page. People expect the same thing in consumer apps and in SaaS when it comes to performance, design and experience.”

“Companies raise more and more money because there’s a lot of money available, but also because it takes more and more time and skills in order to build a product,” he added.

End-to-end encrypted email provider ProtonMail has officially confirmed it’s passed 50 million users globally as it turns seven years old.

It’s a notable milestone for a services provider that intentionally does not have a data business — opting instead for a privacy pledge based on zero access architecture that means it has no way to decrypt the contents of ProtonMail users’ emails.

Although, to be clear, the 50M+ figure applies to total users of all its products (which includes a VPN offering), not just users of its e2e encrypted email. (It declined to break out email users vs other products when we asked.)

Commenting in a statement, Andy Yen, founder and CEO, said: “The conversation about privacy has shifted surprisingly quickly in the past seven years. Privacy has gone from being an afterthought, to the main focus of a lot of discussions about the future of the Internet. In the process, Proton has gone from a crowdfunded idea of a better Internet, to being at the forefront of the global privacy wave. Proton is an alternative to the surveillance capitalism model advanced by Silicon Valley’s tech giants, that allows us to put the needs of users and society first.”

ProtonMail, which was founded in 2014, has diversified into offering a suite of products — including the aforementioned VPN and a calendar offering (Proton Calendar). A cloud storage service, Proton Drive, is also slated for public release later this year.

For all these products it claims take the same ‘zero access’ hands off approach to user data. Albeit, it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to compare e2e encrypted email with an encrypted VPN service — since the issue with VPN services is that they can see activity (i.e. where the encrypted or otherwise packets are going) and that metadata can sum to a log of your Internet activity (even with e2e encryption of the packets themselves).

Proton claims it doesn’t track or record its VPN users’ web browsing. And given its wider privacy-dependent reputation that’s at least a more credible claim vs the average VPN service. Nonetheless, you do still have to trust Proton not to do that (or be forced to do that by, for e.g., law enforcement). It’s not the same technical ‘zero access’ guarantee as it can offer for its e2e encrypted email.

Proton does also offer a free VPN — which, as we’ve said before, can be a red flag for data logging risk — but the company specifies that users of the paid version subsidize free users. So, again, the claim is zero logging but you still need to make a judgement call on whether to trust that.

From Snowden to 50M+

Over ProtonMail’s seven year run privacy has certainly gained cache as a brand promise — which is why you can now see data-mining giants like Facebook making ludicrous claims about ‘pivoting’ their people-profiling surveillance empires to ‘privacy’. So, as ever, PR that’s larded with claims of ‘respect for privacy’ demands very close scrutiny.

And while it’s clearly absurd for an adtech giant like Facebook to try to cloak the fact that its business model relies on stripping away people’s privacy with claims to the contrary, in Proton’s case the privacy claim is very strong indeed — since the company was founded with the goal of being “immune to large scale spying”. Spying such as that carried out by the NSA.

ProtonMail’s founding idea was to build a system “that does not require trusting us”.

While usage of e2e encryption has grown enormously since 2013 — when disclosures by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, revealed the extent of data gathering by government mass surveillance programs, which were shown (il)liberally tapping into Internet cables and mainstream digital services to grab people’s data without their knowledge or consent — growth that’s certainly been helped by consumer friendly services like ProtonMail making robust encryption far more accessible — there are worrying moves by lawmakers in a number of jurisdictions that clash with the core idea and threaten access to e2e encryption.

In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, ‘Five Eyes’ countries steadily amped up international political pressure on e2e encryption. Australia, for example, passed an anti-encryption law in 2018 — which grants police powers to issue ‘technical notices’ to force companies operating on its soil to help the government hack, implant malware, undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government.

While, in 2016, the UK reaffirmed its surveillance regime — passing a law that gives the government powers to compel companies to remove or not implement e2e encryption. Under the Investigatory Powers Act, a statutory instrument called a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) can be served on comms services providers to compel decrypted access. (And as the ORG noted in April, there’s no way to track usage as the law gags providers from reporting anything at all about a TCN application, including that it even exists.)

More recently, UK ministers have kept up public pressure on e2e encryption — framing it as an existential threat to child protection. Simultaneously they are legislating — via an Online Safety Bill, out in draft earlier this month — to put a legally binding obligation on service providers to ‘prevent bad things from happening on the Internet’ (as the ORG neatly sums it up). And while still at the draft stage, private messaging services are in scope of that bill — putting the law on a potential collision course with messaging services that use e2e encryption.

The U.S., meanwhile, has declined to reform warrantless surveillance.

And if you think the EU is a safe space for e2e encryption, there are reasons to be concerned in continental Europe too.

EU lawmakers have recently made a push for what they describe as “lawful access” to encrypted data — without specifying exactly how that might be achieved, i.e. without breaking and/or backdooring e2e encryption and therefore undoing the digital security they also say is vital.

In a further worrying development, EU lawmakers have proposed automated scanning of encrypted communications services — aka a provision called ‘chatcontrol’ that’s ostensibly targeted at prosecuting those who share child exploitation content — which raises further questions over how such laws might intersect with ‘zero access’ services like ProtonMail.

The European Pirate Party has been sounding the alarm — and dubs the ‘chatcontrol’ proposal “the end of the privacy of digital correspondence” — warning that “securely encrypted communication is at risk”.

A plenary vote on the proposal is expected in the coming months — so where exactly the EU lands on that remains to be seen.

ProtonMail, meanwhile, is based in Switzerland which is not a member of the EU and has one of the stronger reputations for privacy laws globally. However the country also backed beefed-up surveillance powers in 2016 — extending the digital snooping capabilities of its own intelligence agencies.

It does also adopt some EU regulations — so, again, it’s not clear whether or not any pan-EU automated scanning of message content could end up being applied to services based in the country.

The threats to e2e encryption are certainly growing, even as usage of such properly private services keeps scaling.

Asked whether it has concerns, ProtonMail pointed out that the EU’s current temporary chatcontrol proposal is voluntary — meaning it would be up to the company in question to decide its own policy. Although it accepts there is “some support” in the Commission for the chatcontrol proposals to be made mandatory.

“It’s not clear at this time whether these proposals could impact Proton specifically [i.e. if they were to become mandatory],” the spokesman also told us. “The extent to which a Swiss company like Proton might be impacted by such efforts would have to be assessed based on the specific legal proposal. To our knowledge, none has been made for now.”

“We completely agree that steps have to be taken to combat the spread of illegal explicit material. However, our concern is that the forced scanning of communications would be an ineffective approach and would instead have the unintended effect of undermining many of the basic freedoms that the EU was established to protect,” he added. “Any form of automated content scanning is incompatible with end-to-end encryption and by definition undermines the right to privacy.”

So while Proton is rightly celebrating that a steady commitment to zero access infrastructure over the past seven years has helped its business grow to 50M+ users, there are reasons for all privacy-minded folk to be watchful of what the next years of political developments might mean for the privacy and security of our data.

After IFA became one of an extremely small number of in-person trade shows in 2020, the gfu Consumer & Home Electronics GmbH is pulling the plug on this year’s event. Initially planned for September 3-7 at the Messe in Berlin, the large-scale consumer electronics trade show is going on hiatus.

Among other concerns, organizer are citing the emergency of Covid-19 variants and concerns around the speed and consistency with which vaccines have been rolled out globally.

“Ultimately, several key global health metrics did not move as fast in the right direction as had been hoped for – from the rapid emergence of new COVID-19 variants, for example in South Asia, to continued uncertainties about the speed of the rollout of vaccination programmes around the world,” the organization said in a press release. “This in turn is adding uncertainty for the companies that were committed or interested in coming to Berlin, as well as media and visitors – all of whom have to plan well ahead with regards to budgets, investments and travel – not just for IFA, but all similar events around the world.”

Another key issue here is the Messe Berlin (convention center) has been – and continues to be – used as both an emergency medical facility and a vaccination center. The planned Berlin Photo Week at ARENA Berlin and SHIFT Mobility events will continue. IFA, meanwhile, is set to return on September 2, 2022.

The news comes as a number of high profile exhibitors have opted not to exhibit in-person at MWC late next month in Barcelona. The list, thus far, includes Qualcomm, Google, IBM, Nokia, Sony, Oracle, Ericsson, Samsung and Lenovo. As with IFA before it, MWC’s organizers are citing a number of safety precautious and likely – given travel restrictions, MIA exhibitors and a general sense of caution even among vaccinated people – a scaled back event.

MWC will be something of a hybrid event, with both online and in-person exhibits. IFA, meanwhile, appears to be canceled outright. The Berlin show is notably different than other consumer trade shows in that it is partially open to the public.

The past year has been utterly devastating to the music industry generally, and live music in particular. Artists who make a living touring have been forced to find alternative ways to make ends meet, while those among us who once frequented live events have been looking for ways to plug the hole created by wide-scale shutdowns.

A number of music-related platforms have spent much of the pandemic looking to offer some semblance of the concert-going experience, ranging from live venues to services like Bandcamp. Today, Spotify is announcing the launch of a new feature designed to provide a live-show experience remotely. Venues in many areas are beginning to reopen, but even fans may be cautious to return to packed, indoor events.

The streaming service is announcing a series of shows starting with dates this month and next, including names like The Black Keys, Rag’n’Bone Man, Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, Leon Bridges and girl in red. Spotify is billing them as “prerecorded livestreams” — a bit of an oxymoron, that. I recognize that livestream has become kind of a catchall, but it loses some meaning when the thing isn’t, you know, live.

Rather than streaming straight from a venue, the service is taking the somewhat novel approach of letting the artist choose the spot for the pre-recorded show. That means live-show venues in the case of The Black Keys and something more creative for Antonoff, who shot his segment on a bus traveling from Brooklyn to Springsteen’s old stomping ground, Asbury Park, New Jersey (greetings).

“We have always been a band that loves to play live in venues of all shapes and sizes,” The Black Keys said in a release tied to the news. “The past year has been tough for musicians and fans alike, so we wanted to find a way to share this live performance of songs from our new project, Delta Kream, from a place we love, the Blue Front Café, the oldest active juke joint in America. We’re excited to be a part of this new initiative with Spotify that will give fans a great way to connect with their favorite artists.”

The shows run 40-75 minutes and run $15 a pop. The price seems a bit high to stream a pre-recorded concert, but fans of the groups will likely appreciate what’s being billed as an “intimate” look at one of their favorite artists — though intimacy is, in part, limited as the company will be selling unlimited tickets to the events. The service isn’t revealing how large of a cut artists will get, simply telling TechCrunch, “All artists will receive a guaranteed fee for their participation in the livestream.”

Streaming the shows requires a Spotify account — either premium or free.