Author: azeeadmin

AWS today launched Amazon AppFlow, a new integration service that makes it easier for developers to transfer data between AWS and SaaS applications like Google Analytics, Marketo, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake and Zendesk. Like similar services, including Microsoft Azure’s Power Automate, for example, developers can trigger these flows based on specific events, at pre-set times or on-demand.

Unlike some of its competitors, though, AWS is positioning this service more as a data transfer service than a way to automate workflows and while the data flow can be bi-directional, AWS’s announcement focuses mostly on moving data from SaaS applications to other AWS services for further analysis. For this, AppFlow also includes a number of tools for transforming the data as it moves through the service.

“Developers spend huge amounts of time writing custom integrations so they can pass data between SaaS applications and AWS services so that it can be analysed; these can be expensive and can often take months to complete,” said AWS principal advocate Martin Beeby in today’s announcement. “If data requirements change, then costly and complicated modifications have to be made to the integrations. Companies that don’t have the luxury of engineering resources might find themselves manually importing and exporting data from applications, which is time-consuming, risks data leakage, and has the potential to introduce human error.”

Every flow (which AWS defines as a call to a source application to transfer data to a destination) costs $0.001 per run, though, in typical AWS fashion, there’s also cost associated with data processing (starting at 0.02 per GB).

“Our customers tell us that they love having the ability to store, process, and analyze their data in AWS. They also use a variety of third-party SaaS applications, and they tell us that it can be difficult to manage the flow of data between AWS and these applications,” said Kurt Kufeld, Vice President, AWS. “Amazon AppFlow provides an intuitive and easy way for customers to combine data from AWS and SaaS applications without moving it across the public Internet. With Amazon AppFlow, our customers bring together and manage petabytes, even exabytes, of data spread across all of their applications – all without having to develop custom connectors or manage underlying API and network connectivity.”

At this point, the number of supported services remains comparatively low, with only 14 possible sources and four destinations (Amazon Redshift and S3, as well as Salesforce and Snowflake). Sometimes, depending on the source you select, the only possible destination is Amazon’s S3 storage service.

Over time, the number of integrations will surely increase, but for now, it feels like there’s still quite a bit more work to do for the AppFlow team to expand the list of supported services.

AWS has long left this market to competitors, even though it has tools like AWS Step Functions for building serverless workflows across AWS services and EventBridge for connections applications. Interestingly, EventBridge currently supports a far wider range of third-party sources, but as the name implies, its focus is more on triggering events in AWS than moving data between applications.

According to a new WSJ report, Bill Gurley, among the most famous of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, looks to be stepping way from Benchmark, the early-stage venture firm that was founded in 1995 and which Gurley joined soon after, in 1999. According to its sources, he will not be investing the firm’s 10th venture firm, which is targeting $425 million in capital commitments.

Gurley’s apparent segue out of the firm won’t surprise many. Benchmark — which has always run a fairly small operation — has routinely groomed new investors as veterans of the firm have moved on. When Benchmark raised its last fund — another $425 million vehicle in 2018 — it parted ways with Mitch Lasky and Matt Cohler, who’d joined the firm in 2007 and 2008.

The firm’s cofounders — Bob Kagle, Kevin Harvey, Andy Rachleff, and Bruce Dunlevie — also stepped away years ago from actively investing on behalf of Benchmark, with Kagle saying in 2011 that he wanted to sail more, while Harvey got into the wine-making business, whee he has since developed at least seven estate vineyards from Santa Cruz to Mendocino under his company’s brand, Rhys Vineyards.

Each continues to list himself publicly as a general partner at the firm and, on rare occasion, to represent Benchmark on a board of directors, as happened with Dunlevie, who joined the board of 10-year-old WeWork when Benchmark led the company’s $17 million Series A round in 2012. Dunlevie is now part of a special committee of WeWork’s board of directors that is suing SoftBank for alleged breaches of contract related to its recent decision to cancel a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares.

Still, Gurley’s presence will be missed. He is the longest-standing partner of Benchmark and certainly the highest profile, thanks partly to an active presence on Twitter, along with Gurley’s highly regarded blog posts and, earlier in his career, a regular column with Fortune magazine.

He is also credited with some of the firm’s most lucrative investments, including, most profitably, a $10 million Series A bet in 2011 on a then-nascent Uber — a deal that has gone on to produce many billions of dollars in returned capital to Benchmark’s investors.

The deal also sullied Gurley’s reputation to an extent, after he engineered the ouster of Uber’s cofounding CEO, Travis Kalanick, raising questions both about how founder friendly Benchmark is and also why, if Uber was being mismanaged, Benchmark waited so long to take action.

Gurley had also become renowned in recent years for warning founders to take their companies public sooner, and to stop spending frivolously. At a Goldman Sachs technology conference in 2018, he cautioned — not for the first or last time — that easy money was making founders less and less accountable to their investors while also driving up valuations to undeserving heights. “Watch out,” he’d said on stage. “It’s a dangerous time.”

As the most senior member of Benchmark, Gurley has been credited with maintaining the firm’s unwavering focus on early-stage investments, turning down hundreds of millions of investing capital to raise fund after fund in the range of $400 million while other firms have established bigger and more numerous funds to manage — and likely had a harder time returning as much capital to backers.

In fact, Benchmark raised one $1 billion fund during the go-go dot.com days, after an investment in eBay established the young outfit as a top firm. But Benchmark quickly reverted back to smaller vehicles, deciding it was mistake.

We reached out earlier today to Gurley for comment on his plans and have yet to heard back.

Other general partners at Benchmark include its newest hire, general partner Chetan Puttagunta, along with GPs Sarah Tavel, Eric Vishria, and Peter Fenton, who will become the most senior partner on the team in Gurley’s absence, having joined Benchmark in 2006 from Accel, where Fenton was an investor previously.

A massive database storing millions of credit card transactions has been secured after spending close to three weeks exposed publicly to the internet.

The database belongs to Paay, a card payments processor based in New York. Like other payment processors, the company verifies payments on behalf of selling merchants, like online stores and other businesses, to prevent fraudulent transactions.

But because there was no password on the server, anyone could access the data inside.

Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database. He told TechCrunch that he estimates there are about 2.5 million card transaction records in the database. After TechCrunch contacted the company on his behalf, the database was pulled offline.

“On April 3, we spun up a new instance on a service we are currently in the process of deprecating,” said Payy co-founder Yitz Mendlowitz. “An error was made that left that database exposed without a password.”

Two records from the exposed database. TechCrunch has blacked out the full credit card number in the record to prevent fraud.

The database contained daily records of card transactions dating back to September 1, 2019 from a number of merchants. TechCrunch reviewed a portion of the data. Each transaction contained the full plaintext credit card number, expiry date, and the amount spent. The records also contained partially masked copy of each credit card number. The data did not include cardholder names or card verification values, making it more difficult to use the credit card for fraud.

Mendlowitz disputed the findings. “We don’t store card numbers, as we have no use for them.” TechCrunch sent him a portion of the data showing card numbers in plaintext, but he did not respond to our follow-up.

It’s the third payments processor this year to admit a security lapse. In January, Sen found another payments processor with an exposed database storing 6.7 million records. Earlier this month, another researcher found two payment sites for paying court fines and utilities also left a cache of data exposed for several months.

Mendlowitz said the company was informing between 15 and 20 merchants, and that the company has engaged an unnamed forensic auditor to understand the scope of the security lapse.

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap’s presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the team’s ambitions, while others I’ve talked to say the company’s posturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the industry’s advance.

Regardless of its impact, Magic Leap carries outsized weight, leading one to question what would happen to other AR companies if the company’s situation worsened.

The company announced layoffs today, with reports indicating that it is dismissing around 1,000 employees — about half of the company. Magic Leap’s added news of a major pivot to enterprise makes it seem like that wasn’t its primary strategy over the past year. From my perspective, the company looks like it is on a path to a fire sale and will be dependent on executing a dramatic turnaround, which grows tougher under current economic conditions.

Magic Leap has few users, so a theoretical shutdown would likely have a lesser impact than other unicorn flare-outs; still, losing a company on the forefront of a technology lauded by many as the next ubiquitous platform will certainly impact others that are striving to bring this tech to market.

The impact for startups moving forward would be nuanced. Without a substantial software suite of its own, Magic Leap relied heavily on developer partnerships, though in recent months many of those seemed to promote enterprise use cases. AR/VR startups are already in a rough position, and one less developer platform could force more companies to de-prioritize headset-based platforms and shift their focus to mobile.

China-based electric car startup Byton has furloughed about half of the 450 employees who work at its North American headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., putting the release date of the automaker’s upcoming M-Byte vehicle into question.

Byton told TechCrunch the furloughs were the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intention is to bring these furloughed employees back, the company said without providing a timeline.

“Given the impact of the pandemic on the global economy and the auto industries we, like several companies, have had to take action to face the challenge,” a Byton spokesperson wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “The furloughs have affected all areas within Byton’s U.S. operations. Employees in China have not been furloughed.”

Electrek was the first to report the furloughs.

The furloughs come as the company is preparing to bring its M-Byte electric SUV into volume production later this year. The vehicle, perhaps best known for its massive 48-inch wraparound digital dashboard, will be produced at Byton’s factory in Nanjing, China. The M-Byte will be sold in China, the U.S. and Europe.

Byton previously said sales will begin in China in the second half of 2020, followed by the U.S. The vehicle will come to the first European markets in the first half of 2021. However, the COVID-19 pandemic – and the ensuing furloughs and cuts — could delay Byton’s timeline.

Byton told TechCrunch is it evaluating the impact of COVID-19 on production of the M-Byte. Byton’s China factory reopened in mid-February and is now nearly fully operational, according to the company. 

Byton has raised about $820 million from investors that include the company’s founding team, FAW Group, Nanjing Qiningfeng New Energy Industry Investment Fund and CATL.

The startup has been working to close a Series C round of fundraising for months now. The company told TechCrunch it is in the “final stage” of the round, which will include investors FAW Group and the industrial investment fund of Nanjing municipal government, Myoung Shin Co. of South Korea MS Autotech and Japanese enterprise Marubeni Corporation .

Ever since it first started rolling out, 5G skeptics have attempted to link the next-gen cellular technology to all manner of health issues. Most recently, it’s become an easy scapegoat for the global COVID-19 pandemic, given the rapid rise of both.

Conspiracy theories have gained such a foothold that vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands by destroying cell towers in various European countries. In its latest bid to tamp down on the spread of false information pertaining to the novel coronavirus, Twitter today expanded its COVID-19 guidance to include the topic.

“We’re prioritizing the removal of COVID-19 content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm,” a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. “As we’ve said previously, we will not take enforcement action on every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19. Since introducing these new policies on March 18, we’ve removed more than 2,200 Tweets. As we’ve doubled down on tech, our automated systems have challenged more than 3.4 million accounts which were targeting discussions around COVID-19 with spammy or manipulative behaviors.”

The note seems to leave open the possibility of leaving up some share of 5G claims that don’t “potentially cause harm.” Still, the gray area is fairly wide, when considering activities like property destruction seemingly caused in the name of 5G-related conspiracy.

“We have broadened our guidance on unverified claims that incite people to engage in harmful activity,” the company wrote on social media, “could lead to the destruction or damage of critical 5G infrastructure, or could lead to widespread panic, social unrest or large-scale disorder.”