Author: azeeadmin

It may have entered the game later than other leading regions such as Europe and North America, but Latin America’s fintech industry is dynamic and growing fast. The sector was recently given a valuation of more than $150 billion and continues to expand year-on-year.

And while the longer-term impact of COVID-19 on the sector is yet to be determined, there’s no doubt that the demand for certain fintech solutions is on the rise. As smaller financial institutions across the region are under pressure to digitize, many are calling on fintechs to help them along this journey. In addition, a number of SMEs are seeking out digital loan services to help them get through the crisis.

The sector’s speedy expansion has meant that regulators in LatAm are under increasing pressure to enact legislation that addresses the murky waters of fintech activity, providing confidence to consumers and investors alike. However, regulation across the region must be careful to not quash innovation, while startups must figure out how to be agile in an environment which is becoming increasingly regulated. Let’s take a closer look at what impact regulation has had so far in LatAm, and what needs to happen to strike a balance between sector growth and public trust.

The development of fintech regulation across LatAm

Mexico is currently leading the way when it comes to fintech regulation in LatAm, thanks to its comprehensive 2018 fintech Law. The law covers most fintech activities, including crowdfunding, virtual wallet, transactions carried out with cryptocurrencies and open banking. In addition, Mexico has certain financial laws that regulate financial entities in their execution of transactions using fintech. The law also provides a regulatory sandbox for both licensed and non-licensed companies.

Brazil is the furthest ahead after Mexico, as it individually legislates crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending, while a special congressional commission is working on a broader legislative strategy. Brazil’s Central Bank also endeavors to make open banking legislation effective by the third quarter of 2020, which will pave the way for a thriving open banking ecosystem.

The same day Donald Trump took to Twitter to threaten to regulate or shut down social media sites, the U.S. appeals court in Washington D.C. dismissed a lawsuit accusing top tech companies of silencing conservative voices. Filed in 2018 by nonprofit Freedom Watch and rightwing gadfly Laura Loomer, the suit accused Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google of stifling first amendment rights.

The suit alleged that four of tech’s biggest names “have engaged in a conspiracy to intentionally and willfully suppress politically conservative content.” It specifically cited Loomer’s ban from Twitter and Facebook, following a tweet about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Also noted is her inability to grow an audience base and revenue on Google’s YouTube, suggesting that after Trump’s election “growth on these platforms has come to a complete halt, and its audience base and revenue generated has either plateaued or diminished.” Apple’s alleged role is less clear.

In the ruling, District Judge Trevor McFadden notes that Freedom Watch and Loomer failed to back up a claim that the companies were “state actors,” involved with the regulation of free speech.

“The Plaintiffs do not show how the Platforms’ alleged conduct may fairly be treated as actions taken by the government itself,” the judge writes. “Facebook and Twitter, for example, are private businesses that do not become ‘state actors’ based solely on the provision of their social media networks to the public.”

In other words, the companies cannot violate the first amendment, because banning users doesn’t constitute government abridgment of free speech. Per the decision, “Freedom Watch fails to point to additional facts indicating that these Platforms are engaged in state action and thus fails to state a viable First Amendment claim.”

WarnerMedia’s new streaming service HBO Max launched today with couple of conspicuous absences from the list of supported devices — Max is not yet available on Roku or Amazon’s Fire TV.

It sounds like this isn’t just a technical issue that will be fixed imminently. WarnerMedia’s vice president of communications Chris Willard told USA Today that “there is no deal in place” to bring the service to those platforms.

In a statement sent out this afternoon, Amazon suggested that the disagreement revolves around bringing HBO Max to Prime Video Channels, and around HBO’s somewhat confusing distribution strategy. (For those of you who haven’t been following along: The HBO Now app is being updated as HBO Max, which includes HBO, plus a bunch of other content. At the same time, HBO will continue to operate as a standalone brand.)

The company said that by not making Max available through Prime Video Channels, WarnerMedia’s parent company AT&T “is choosing to deny those loyal HBO customers access to the expanded catalog.”

Here’s Amazon’s full statement:

With a seamless customer experience, nearly 5 million HBO streamers currently access their subscription through Amazon’s Prime Video Channels. Unfortunately, with the launch of HBO Max, AT&T is choosing to deny these loyal HBO customers access to the expanded catalog. We believe that if you’re paying for HBO, you’re entitled to the new programming through the method you’re already using. That’s just good customer service and that’s a priority for us.

Meanwhile, a statement from Roku also pointed to unresolved issues:

As the No. 1 streaming platform in the U.S. we believe that HBO Max would benefit greatly from the scale and content marketing capabilities available with distribution on our platform. We are focused on mutually positive distribution agreements with all new OTT services that will deliver a quality user experience to viewers in the more than 40 million households that choose Roku to access their favorite programs and discover new content. Unfortunately we haven’t reached agreement yet with HBOMax. While not on our platform today, we look forward to helping HBOMax in the future successfully scale their streaming business.

Emmanuel Bamfo is used to fighting uphill battles. Still, his latest fight, with the city of San Francisco, may well destroy his business if he doesn’t win it and quickly.

Bamfo is the cofounder and CEO of Globe, a year-old, six-person startup that connects customers with rooms in people’s mostly urban homes. Think Airbnb, except that Globe isn’t anyone looking for days- or months-long stays but instead for a day break in between commitments.

Globe evolved from an earlier company called Recharge that tried convincing hotels to let its customers rent their rooms by the hour and even minute, and had raised around $2.5 million in seed funding. When hotels pushed back on the idea of cleaning their rooms so frequently, the nascent outfit entered into the popular accelerator program Y Combinator last summer and came out as a company that connects customers to home owners instead.

Growth at Globe had been slow but steady since, with more than 10,000 hosts around the world signing up to rent out rooms in their homes.

Then came COVID-19. Some hosts kept providing space to guests. One tech worker, Abe Disu, recently told the New York Times that he rented out his San Francisco apartment through Globe about 70 times between August and April, earning about $50 per hour after cleaning costs. (“Someone books your space, you do a tight clean-up, and boom, you’ve made $90,” says Bamfo.)

More expressed concerns about germs. “I thought we were dead,” says Bamfo,

Instead of give up, Bamfo — educated by Y Combinator and his own experience with pivoting — began to position Globe as a platform for people who needed an escape from quarantine. The pitch: Globe can help individuals find that quiet place to make calls, away from roommates and children. It offers a reprieve from loved ones for a much-needed hour or two.

It’s an appealing proposition on some levels. Who doesn’t long for a change in scenery at his point? Still, there is a pandemic, and safety is concern. Indeed, though Bamfo says Globe has layered in policies specific to COVID-19 — it’s cleaning checklist for hosts has grown longer and customers have to send in pictures of thermometer readings that show they don’t have a fever — the city of San Francisco, at least, doesn’t think they go far enough.

The city sent Globe a letter last week noting that the company’s hourly rental business appears to violate the shelter-in-place order it instituted in March and that it extended indefinitely last week with some modifications that do not apply to Globe’s business. It says it’s prepared to take action, too. If has warned Globe that if it doesn’t immediately half its business, the startup — and its founders, Bamfo and Erix Xu, who is a former senior engineering director at Reddit — risk “fine, imprisonment or both, pursuant to San Francisco Administrative Code section 7.17(b) and California Penal Code section 148.”

It adds that the “California Penal Code section 409.5 also authorizes the City to close down properties constituting a menace to public health. Likewise, failure to abide by the San Francisco Planning Code is a nuisance and is punishable by fines of up to $1,000 per day. Likewise, failure to abide by Chapter 41A of the Administrative Code is punishable by fines of
up to $484 per day.”

It’s a bitter if somewhat unsurprising development for Globe, which is based in San Francisco, and counts the city as its biggest market. Bamfo and Xu have limited resources, and a drawn-out shut-down could very easily become permanent. Still, it’s hard to see how the company avoids a bigger blow-up if it doesn’t comply very soon — or the city doesn’t instead begin to relax some of its policies.

Right now, Bamfo seems to be counting on the latter, and perhaps for good reason. Yesterday, for example, California Governor Gavin Newsom said that barbershops and hair salons can begin accepting customers again in many California counties. San Francisco and neighboring counties have maintaining more sweeping restrictions for now, but that could change in a matter of weeks.

In the meantime, Bamfo — who says he was “shocked” by the city’s letter — is engaging in a game of chicken. He says that while Globe works on an official response, one that it will send by Tuesday of next week, the company is continuing to make its service available in its hometown.

Noting that neither Airbnb nor hotels have received the same feedback from the city, he says that Globe “doesn’t want to focus on regulations, fines, and threats of jail time. We want instead to elevate this discourse around solutions.”

Globe Living Receives Unwelcome News from San Francisco by TechCrunch on Scribd

Augmented reality filters on Instagram are picking up some new tricks with the latest update to Facebook’s Spark AR platform.

Spark AR has been making pretty consistent updates to the feature sets developers can play with in creating AR filters since it exited closed beta on Instagram last year. Today, Facebook added some new functionality to the platform on Instagram, allowing creators to build more complex filters to entice users with. Creators can now build filters that respond visually to music or allow users to apply effects to media from their camera roll. In addition to the new features, Facebook has also created AR Sticker templates that can allow creators to customize AR filters quickly.

The new AR Music feature allows developers to create filters that interact with music, be that tunes that are uploaded directly, selected from Instagram’s music selection tool or just audio that’s playing in the background. It’s a pretty logical step for Instagram, bringing equalizer-style visual effects into filters and pushing users to bring music and AR into their Stories simultaneously.

Bringing gallery selection tools to Instagram’s filters allow users to spin new AR effects on previously captured photos or video. With Media Library, one can easily grab an old photo or video and toss a filter on it, with Gallery Picker, users can transform a visual filter with media from their gallery allowing for a level of customization that could promote more consistent usage of singular filters among users.

You can see what they look like in action on Instagram’s blog announcing the updates.

Facebook has talked a big game about augmented reality’s future across all of its platforms, but over the past several years the company has had a rough time making the camera a meaningful platform inside the Facebook app, leaving much of the development advances to Instagram which has always had the advantage of a hefty reliance on both its in-app camera and visual filters. These new updates are iterative but partially address one of the big underlying usability issues with AR filter effects: they often aren’t dynamic enough to encourage reuse. Bringing audio effects and greater customizability will allow developers to build filters that can hopefully have new life instilled in them again and again based on user creativity.

These new updates to Spark AR Studio are available today.

This week, Verizon Communications CEO Hans Vestberg joined us for an episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Vestberg is leading the company through the midst of one its biggest rollouts to date with the push into 5G connectivity. In our discussion, he spoke about how he’s managing the organization during this global crisis, his thoughts on work from home and acquisition strategy, and the ways in which 5G will change the way we work and live.

(Disclosure: Verizon Communications is TechCrunch’s parent company.)

Extra Crunch members can check out a partial transcript of the conversation (edited for length and clarity) or watch it in its entirety via YouTube video below.

Extra Crunch Live features some of the brightest minds in tech and VC, including Aileen Lee, Roelof Botha, Kirsten Green and Mark Cuban. Upcoming episodes will include Aaron Levie from Box, GGV’s Hans Tung and Jeff Richards, Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz and others. Extra Crunch members can submit questions to speakers in real time, so please sign up here if you haven’t already.

His initial reaction to news of the lockdown

We’re a large company with 135,000 employees in 70 different countries around the globe. So, of course, we had an early warning when it started actually in Asia. We have employees in Asia, so we got the feeling that this could be really serious. It was early in the first week of February, we moved to the highest emergency or crisis level in the company. That means that we go to a certain crisis mode on how we organized and how we galvanized the company.

That’s usually put into place every time there is a big national disaster because you need to split between people taking care of the crisis and people taking care of running the business. So we were very early on with that. In the beginning of February, we started the emergency crisis operations center that was taking care of employee questions and prioritization of important things. At the same time, we continued to run the business. That was the first thing we did very early on.

The other thing we did very early on is that we understood that this was something unprecedented. I mean, you have been in crisis before. I mean, I’ve been in the telecom crisis, and we’ve been in the banking crisis when everything just went boom. This is something totally different. You cannot use any of your historical experience when it comes to this pandemic, which actually impacts each and every one of us when it comes to health. So I was honest, and thought that they’re going to be a lot of questions. We decided very early on to run our noon live webcast to our employees. We are on our… I think it’s the 11th week, where at noon every day, we run the webcast for all our employees. That was two of the first things we did.

We didn’t think we were going to run for 11 weeks on the new live webcast, but we have done it because we see there’s a very good tool to communicate with all our employees.

Rivian is hiring an insurance agency data manager, a job posting that suggests the all-electric automaker is planning to offer its own insurance to customers.

The job was first posted by RivianForums, which also reached out to TechCrunch with the tip. Roadshow/CNET also reported about this new position. Rivian wouldn’t provide more details about its plans, but did confirm it has some job postings in the area of insurance.

The job is to lead Rivian’s property and casualty (P&C) insurance agency, a position that entails recruiting, training, coaching and managing employed licensed sales agents and an insurance customer care team, according to the posting on Rivian’s website. The employee will also sell insurance products and provide feedback to partners on opportunities, the posting said.

The posting, which seeks someone with more than 10 years of experience and who is a licensed in P&C in multiple states, suggests this will be a global product. The job is curiously based at the automaker’s factory in Normal, Ill., and not at its Plymouth, Mich. headquarters.

The move appears to follow Tesla’s lead. Last August, Tesla  launched an insurance product, promising owners of its electric vehicles to deliver rates 20% and even as high as 30% lower than other insurance providers. The product known as Tesla Insurance is only available to owners in California. The business will expand to additional U.S. states in the future, Tesla has said.

Editor’s note: Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a seven-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz is partnering with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course over the next few weeks. 

Week three of a16z’s Crypto Startup School focuses on understanding how to capture value and design proper incentives within the decentralized framework. We learn how familiar ideas like network effects and mechanism design can hold unique power for crypto networks.

In the first presentation, Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Ali Yahya discusses “Crypto Business Models.” Yahya explains that the consensus mechanisms of blockchains create trust among independent participants in decentralized networks.

At first glance, this may seem at odds with the idea of capturing value, since none of the factors that allow companies to build moats in traditional industries — trade secrets, intellectual property, or control of a scarce resource — apply in crypto.

This leads to the “value-capture paradox” — how can easy-to-replicate, open-source code be defensible in a competitive landscape?

The answer is that network effects are just as powerful, if not more so, in crypto than in traditional industries. This is due to the economic flywheel enabled by tokens, which incentivize participants and coordinate all economic activities in crypto networks. Combined with the ability of developers to build on each others’ networks using autonomously executing smart contracts, this should result in winner-take-all dynamics, contrary to what might seem intuitive in open source, Yahya says.

In the next lecture, Sam Williams, founder and CEO of decentralized storage system Arweave, gives an overview of “Mechanism Design,” a field of study that has become newly relevant with the development of Bitcoin and subsequent blockchains that require carefully designed incentives for network participants.

Williams uses examples to show that economic incentives, when designed properly, can persuade self-interested people to exhibit useful behaviors at fair market value with minimal central planning. This provides a new tool to bootstrap decentralized networks.

He cautions, however, that poorly conceived incentive systems can overpower moral frameworks in ways that can be dangerous. This could be harmful, he says, in decentralized protocols, since self-executing code may not be easily altered to curtail unintended consequences.

Williams closes with a case study of his company, Arweave, and the way it created an endowment-style financial incentive system to build a platform where data can be secured forever. This kind of model opens the door to new kinds of community-owned networks that can’t be manipulated by central owners.

When Docker sold off its enterprise division to Mirantis last fall, that didn’t mark the end of the company. In fact, Docker still exists and has refocused as a cloud-native developer tools vendor. Today it announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft around simplifying running Docker containers in Azure.

As its new mission suggests, it involves tighter integration between Docker and a couple of Azure developer tools including Visual Studio Code and Azure Container Instances (ACI). According to Docker, it can take developers hours or even days to set up their containerized environment across the two sets of tools.

The idea of the integration is to make it easier, faster and more efficient to include Docker containers when developing applications with the Microsoft tool set. Docker CEO Scott Johnston says it’s a matter of giving developers a better experience.

“Extending our strategic relationship with Microsoft will further reduce the complexity of building, sharing and running cloud-native, microservices-based applications for developers. Docker and VS Code are two of the most beloved developer tools and we are proud to bring them together to deliver a better experience for developers building container-based apps for Azure Container Instances,” Johnston said in a statement.

Among the features they are announcing is the ability to log into Azure directly from the Docker command line interface, a big simplification that reduces going back and forth between the two sets of tools. What’s more, developers can set up a Microsoft ACI environment complete with a set of configuration defaults. Developers will also be able to switch easily between their local desktop instance and the cloud to run applications.

These and other integrations are designed to make it easier for Azure and Docker common users to work in in the Microsoft cloud service without having to jump through a lot of extra hoops to do it.

It’s worth noting that these integrations are starting in Beta, but the company promises they should be released some time in the second half of this year.

Austin Soldner and Michael Schaecher, the co-founders of the new sunglasses brand Futuremood, met at the newly formed San Francisco research and development lab created by the high end audio tech developer Bose.

The two were tasked with working on Bose’s sunglasses wearable and bonded over a shared interest in sneakers and fashion. Over many conversations the two men realized that there was an opportunity to use technology to rewrite the sunglasses playbook and launch the first new brand to the market since Oakley came on the scene.

There was also an opportunity to bring the materials science and tech-forward strategies that sneaker companies have developed to an industry that hadn’t seen any real technical revolutions in decades.

Enter Futuremood “Auras”, which the company bills as the first glasses scientifically tested and proven to alter your mood.

Using technology developed by the lens manufacturer Zeiss, Futuremood’s first glasses come in four different colors — a relaxing green, a refreshing blue, an energizing red, and a focusing yellow. The company is launching its eyewear in two different styles a boxy, chunky frame and a more traditional rounded frame.

Image Credits: Futuremood (opens in a new window)

Any mood altering effects are thanks to Zeiss’ halochrome lens technology, which the lens manufacturer has been working with — and publishing papers on — to suss out the science behind its claims that the use of filtered light can change the way folks feel.

There’s some preliminary research that the company has done, but the science is still largely unproven (Zeiss conducted two studies at European universities). 

Schaecher and Soldner are believers and the two longtime tech execs see these lenses as a window into a wider world of material science experimentation and product development that they’re hoping to bring to market with Futuremood.

“If you think about sneakers and where Nike and Adidas got to where they are today, it was through innovation in product design and materials and branding and marketing and all of that had been missing from the sunglasses space,” Schaecher said.

The second marketing hire at Airbnb and the first marketing hire at the now-defunct Munchery, Schaecher knows a thing or two about branding. Meanwhile, Soldner, the founder of Playground.fm, and a former product designer at Jawbone, is the technical expert and lead designer for all of Futuremood’s frames.

“We really saw an opportunity to push the envelope in technical innovation and product innovation,” said Schaecher. “We have a backlog of stuff to push the envelope of what sunglasses are.”

One thing sunglasses are is a very very big business. Consumers spent $14.5 billion on sunglasses in 2018, according to the market research firm, Grand View Research.

If Futuremood can capture even a fraction of that market with its unique spin on sunglasses, it’ll be in good shape.

As with any good direct to consumer product, Futuremood’s difference begins with its packaging. Tapping in to the mood-altering “wearable drugs” aesthetic, the company’s product is packaged in boxes with the same bright hues as the sunglasses. Inside there’s a cloth to clean the glasses, a velvet pouch to hold them and a scented pack of incense matches and a vaguely tarot-esque card with information on the glasses and the sensation they’re meant to evoke (there’s even a Spotify playlist to listen to).

In an email, Scaecher described the sensation as “not as subtle as CBD, but not as s trong as a shot of tequila or glass of Rosé.

“Austin and I are really into different ways of self care and taking moments and… we thought there was an opportunity to bring delight and joy,” with the packaging, Schaecher said. “We don’t expect people to be firing up Spotify playlists and incense matches every time they wear things.”

Futuremood has been mostly bootstrapped to date, and like everything else in the year of our lord 2020, the company’s plans were pushed back by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Our lenses are made in Zeiss’ Italian factory and the glasses were made outside of Shenzhen,” said Schaecher. “We quarantined the first order for two weeks. Zeiss was right in that region of Italy was getting hit hard. We’ve been delaying since then.. It’s hard to put into words what it’s like to grind on something for eighteen months… and then have to delay launching.”

Even with the pandemic, though, the company moved ahead with the design for its second product and that gives a hint for where Schaecher and Soldner want to go with their business. “We have our second product line and that is not mood-altering glasses,” said Schaecher. “That’s a traditional sunglasses line that uses titanium alloy metals that are more commonly seen in aerospace than in eyewear.”

The design aesthetic is also more in the luxury vein, which Schaecher teased was akin to something that would be more at home in a Cartier showroom rather than a direct to consumer brand’s digital storefront.

Right now, the company is going direct to consumers through its website, but it’s looking at the potential for some retail collaborations and field marketing when the country opens back up for business.

As for the mood-altering effects and whether “wearable drug” can win market share, Schaecher is pretty optimistic. “People definitely have reactions,” he said. “It’s a fun, new thing that’s never existed before.”

Image Credits: Futuremood