Author: azeeadmin

In the space of six months, one security researcher found thousands of files from dozens of computers, phones and flash drives — most of which contained personal information.

All the researcher did was scour the second-hand stores for donated and refurbished tech.

New research published by security firm Rapid7 revealed how problematic discarded technology can be. For his research, Josh Frantz bought 85 devices for $650, and found over 366,300 files, including images and documents.

After an analysis of each device, Frantz found email addresses, dates of birth, Social Security and credit card numbers, driver’s license data and passport numbers.

Only two devices were properly wiped, he said.

Shy of going into a forensic-level search, the researcher suggested he could have rinsed even more data from his cache of refurbished devices.

Although the responsibility arguably rests with the person who donates their device, Frantz said his research revealed many businesses also don’t wipe data from the devices people turn over — despite promises and guarantees to the contrary.

Discovering data from discarded drives seems only to be getting worse.

A similar experiment done in 2012 found half of the devices obtained still contained personal information. A recent study by the University of Hertfordshire reported two-thirds of the 200 USB drives bought from eBay had private and sensitive files — including wage slips, job applications, and even nude photos in some cases.

Worse, discarded devices can open people up to hacking. Researchers recently revealed that throwing away cheap Internet of Things devices can be recovered to obtain wireless network passwords, allowing an attacker to gain a foothold into a network.

It’s the latest reminder to dispose of devices properly after they’re no longer used. Data can reside on discarded computers and drives for years — often withstanding the elements. Even erasing a device to factory reset isn’t always enough to prevent data recovery.

Frantz listed among the favorite: a hammer, industrial shredding — or, for the extreme cases, thermite.

It’s not to say you shouldn’t donate. Just, maybe keep your hands the hard drive.

Marketing Evolution is announcing that it has raised $26.1 million in growth funding.

The New York City-headquartered company says it can measure marketing across different channels, delivering the data while the campaign is still running, to a dashboard full of recommendations on how to make the campaign more effective.

It recently introduced what it calls an automated data pipeline, with an “extensive process” for verifying that the data being used is timely and relevant.

“What is holding back marketing from realizing the vision of personal and profitable marketing is the mess of data marketer and media owners have spewed into the industry,” a spokesperson told me via email. “Organizing this data, and automating the flow of that data into representative and machine learning data sets have been the central focus of the investment.”

Customers who have used Marketing Evolution’s products include IBM, MillerCoors, NBCUniversal and the Radio City Rockettes.

The company was founded back in 2000 (“The Company was WAYYYY ahead of its time,” the spokesperson said) and has now raised a total of $50.7 million. This new round was led by Energy Impact Partners, with EIP Partner Lindsay Luger joining the board of directors.

EIP specializes in utility- and energy-related investments, which makes it an odd fit for a marketing technology company. But it sounds like Marketing Evolution is looking to expand into this industry.

“Utilities are constantly seeking ways to drive better engagement and enhance the customer experience,” Luger said in a statement. “Marketing Evolution’s platform, which has been proven across several consumer-facing industries, is a perfect solution to help utilities optimize their outreach and offer a better energy experience for all of us.”

Insight Venture Partners and Zetta Venture Partners also participated in the new funding.

Manufacturing has been one of the biggest and earliest adopters of robotics innovations in the last several years, but with that early movement has also come entrenchment: the industry is rife with expensive, oversized machines that often run on proprietary operating systems, making them hard to upgrade and use in consort with other robots.

Now a startup out of London called Automata is hoping to tap into an appetite for change, with the launch of a “desktop” robotic arm called Eva that it says is smaller, cheaper and easier to use than the rest — under $5,000 compared to a pricetag of $25,000 for the piece of equipment it’s aiming to replace — and it’s raised $7.4 million to help do that.

The funding, a Series A, is being led by Hummingbird Ventures, with participation also from firstminute Capital, Hardware Club, LocalGlobe, ABB, and Entrepreneur First. It will be used to expand Automata’s current team of 42, as well as to ramp up production of Eva, the company said. This brings the total raised by the startup to $9.5 million.

While many in the startup world of robotics come either from other robotics makers, or from mechanical engineering and artificial intelligence backgrounds (with teams comprising all three, and then some), Automata stands out for having a unique pedigree.

Its founders Suryansh Chandra and Mostafa ElSayed met and previously worked together at the prestigious architecture firm Zaha Hadid, founded by eponymous late architect who was known for her highly stylised, as well as very technical, approach to building design that pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and the physical properties of materials.

Likewise, Zaha Hadid is a firm that has long had a connection to more artistic end of architecture, and it was when the two were working on a project for the Venice Biennale (a huge and prestigious contemporary art event) that they found themselves wishing for a precision machine that could help them build the individual panels they needed for a structure. It was the kind of problem that would have been potentially easier to address for a series of buildings — tapping into economies of scale — but harder for a one-off work for an art event.

Out of that problem, however, was born the idea of Automata.

“We realised we were spending 10 percent of our time on design, and 90 percent on solving problems around how to build that design,” said Chandra, the CEO, when I interviewed him and ElSayed in their offices in Islington, North London.

He added he knew that predicament was not just limited to the Biennale project. The firm had worked with foundries to design panels for larger buildings, but even in those cases “when it came to working with robots, the process was opaque. Robots just weren’t there yet for non-technical people to work with them.”

When Automata first started building prototypes of robotic arms, ElSayed said that the startup originally thought that the target customers would be people “like ourselves” — those working in fields that might benefit from being able to create more physical objects, like panels, but on a bespoke level, similar to the way that 3d printers are used today. “It turned out manufacturers had the most need for it, though,” he said.

“One day our inbox blew up with big industrial companies and tiny SMEs who were all interested in testing our prototype,” Chandra said.

There are three key innovations that Automata has brought to Eva. One is the rebuilding of the gearbox that runs the machine. It turns out that this has seen very little innovation even as we have seen an explosion in other aspects of robotics technologies like computer vision and autonomous movement. “The last time a gear box was invented for an industrial robot was in 1957,” Chandra added.

The company’s huge markdown on pricing is partly a result of that, and partly because it turns out that smaller machines that are built from the ground up with more readily available, new components can be much cheaper to make. There is also an element of industry entrenchment that the startup is trying to combat. “We were able to put together our first prototypes for £500 when they were more basic,” ElSayed said, noting that the basic price of equipment against which Automata’s Eva is competing is around $25,000. “They are that price because that is the price model that the industry works on, based on its current component supply chain.”

The other big area that Automata has rethought with Eva is the software that controls the machine, which is called Choreograph. Yes, this one is also proprietary, but it is a step in the right direction: it is cloud-based, and a company can essentially log in and control and monitor their Eva robot from any web-based interface, on any device. It also lets the user import designs and patterns from other 3D design programs as a starting point for programming their Eva for a particular job. All of this means shorter production runs and more flexible, on-demand manufacturing is closer to being a reality.

The third is in the building of the robot itself. Automata is working with UK robotics manufacturer Tharsus to implement its designs to build its hardware, rather than taking on that risk itself.

Hardware is not the easiest bet to make in the world of startups — it’s capital intensive and there have been many failures. But given the fundamental problems that Automata is tackling, in an area that has largely been left alone for decades, makes it a bet worth taking, say its backers.

“Suryansh and Mostafa bring a visionary perspective to robotics and an endearing determination to turn the traditional manufacturing model on its head by fostering a new dimension of productivity, whilst simultaneously lowering the costs for developed and high-labour cost countries,” said Barend Van den Brande, founding partner at Hummingbird Ventures, in a statement.

“Automata is a company making fundamental changes in the robotics space,” said Robin Klein, cofounder and General Partner at LocalGlobe. “By offering an industrial quality, lightweight robot capable of being set up and operational in a matter of hours, Automata is encouraging businesses to embrace automation like never before.”

In its latest move beyond ride-hailing, Southeast Asia’s Grab has started to offer financing to SMEs and micro-insurance to its drivers.

The launch comes just weeks after Grab raised $1.5 billion from the Vision Fund as part of a larger $5 billion Series H funding round that’ll be used to battle rival Go-Jek, which is vying with Grab to become the top on-demand app for Southeast Asia’s 600 million-plus consumers.

Grab acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business in 2018 and it has spent the past year or so pushing a ‘super app’ strategy. That’s essentially an effort to become a daily app for Southeast Asia and, beyond rides, it entails food delivery, payments and other services on demand. Financial services are also a significant chunk of that focus, and now Grab is switching on loans and micro-insurance for the first time.

Initially, the first market is Singapore, but the plan is to expand to Southeast Asia’s five other major markets, Reuben Lai,  who is senior managing director and co-head of Grab Financial, told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Money20/20 conference in Singapore. Lai declined to provide a timeframe for the expansion.

The company announced its launch into financial services last year and that, Lai confirmed, was a purely offline effort. Now the new financial products announced today will be available from within the Grab app itself.

Grab is also planning to develop a ‘marketplace’ of financial products that will allow other financial organizations to promote services to its 130 million registered users. Grab doesn’t provide figures for its active user base.

Grab announced a platform play last summer that allows selected partners to develop services that sit within its app. Some services have included grocery delivers from Happy Fresh, video streaming service Hooq, and health services from China’s Ping An.

On the heels of becoming the latest investor in Ola, today Hyundai announced another key deal to further its ambitions in next-generation automotive services. Yandex, the Russian search giant that has been working on self-driving car technology, has inked a partnership with Hyundai to develop software and hardware for autonomous car systems.

This is Yandex’s first partnership with a carmaker, and specifically, Yandex will be working with Hyundai Mobis, the car giant’s OEM parts and service division, where the plan is “to create a self-driving platform that can be used by any car manufacturer or taxi fleet.” Mobis supplies Hyundai as well as its partly-owned Kia and fully-owned Genesis subsidiaries, along with other automakers.

“This is our first partnership, and a clear validation of the intensive development of our self-driving platform. We have already performed thousands of rides in our autonomous taxi service fulfilled without a driver in the driver’s seat,” Dmitry Polishchuk, who heads up Yandex’s self-driving car efforts, said to TechCrunch in an email. “We are excited to combine the experience of Hyundai Mobis in the automotive industry with Yandex’s technological achievements. This should help us to accelerate the pace of self-driving tech development.” In terms of future partnerships, Yandex notes that the agreement is “not exclusive, and we are open to work with other partners.”

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a Yandex spokesperson told TechCrunch. To give some context, Hyundai Motors is the third-largest automotive company in the world, and it describes Mobis as the sixth-largest OEM. In addition to the $300 million stake it announced earlier today in India’s ride-sharing upstart Ola, it’s forged financial and strategic partnerships with a string of other companies building technology for autonomous systems, including WayRay, SoundHound, and Aurora.

Yandex, meanwhile, has been working on self-driving car tech since 2017, equipping Toyota models for a series of pilots in closed-campus environments in Russia, Tel Aviv and most recently Las Vegas, Nevada (during the CES show, where cars-as-the-latest-hardware has become a dominant theme). Yandex said that its pilots so far have been so-called “robotaxi” efforts: that is, there are safety engineers sitting in the driver’s seat, but the cars have been operating autonomously otherwise.

Yandex — similar to Baidu in China and Google, well, globally — initially made its name in search but has diversified into a variety of areas over the years, including maps and ride-sharing services.

Yandex.Taxi is now active in 15 countries — Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Israel, the Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, Uzbekistan, Finland, and Estonia — and that service is one obvious application for this partnership. Similar to Uber (which handed off some operations to Yandex in 2017), Yandex is looking at self-driving technology — which is part of the bigger Yandex.Taxi operation — as one way of expanding its fleet in the years to come.

Although Hyundai, similar to other automakers, has been chipping away at self-driving with multiple partnerships with third parties, this deal is breaking new ground for Yandex, which has been in many ways pigeonholed as “Russia’s Google” but has for years been looking for ways to expand its profile and reach into more countries outside its home market.

FlexClub, a South African startup that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services, closed a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital.

The company will use the financing to add team members and expand off the continent through a partnership with Uber Mexico.

The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues to produce unique mobility solutions shaped around local needs.

FlexClub touts itself as a “gig economy investment platform” that is creating new asset classes in emerging markets, according to chief executive and co-founder Tinashe Ruzane.

That asset class, for now, is ride-hail vehicles. FlexClub allows investors to go on the site and purchase a car (ultimately managed and serviced by FlexClub). The startup then connects that car to an Uber driver who uses earnings to pay a weekly rental charge.

Those fees generate monthly, fixed-rate interest income for the investor. The driver has the option of buying the car after the 12 months, with a descending purchase price over time.

FlexClub’s platform manages the investment, rental income, and disbursement of funds across all parties. The startup also handles insurance, maintenance, and upkeep of the cars.

Ruzane envisions this as a model to finance multiple assets classes in emerging markets — where lending options are fewer for individuals who may not have credit histories.

“Our goal is to make this completely passive… where investors can invest in different kinds of assets on our platform, login to a dash, and see this is how my five cars in South Africa are doing, my vans in Mexico, my motorbikes in Indonesia — with a diversified portfolio around the world,” he explained.

FlexClub currently operates in South Africa and has relationships with several car dealers. It generates revenue by charging a percentage of the rental income to investor club members. “We don’t disclose revenue figures but we have $3 million in assets under management in South Africa,” Ruzane said.

Nairobi based Savannah Fund and South African angel investor Michael Jordaan joined lead investor CRE in the $1.2 million round.

“We think there’s a transformation of urban mobility in frontier markets…from Uber to scooters to motorbike markets,” says CRE Venture Capital partner Pardon Makumbe. “There’s also a massive young international employee population that is ready to work for Uber or other fulfillment and logistics companies…but the price point to own the producing asset, i.e., a car, can be prohibitive,” he said.

Makumbe highlighted informal scenarios where ride-hail drivers in markets such as South Africa borrow cars from friends or family members on uncertain terms. “FlexClub is solving this supply-demand problem by productizing and standardizing the exchange between asset owners and those who use the asset,” he said.

FlexClub will begin work matching investors to cars and Uber drivers in Mexico in April. A representative of Uber Mexico confirmed the partnership to TechCrunch.

FlexClub spun off of Ruzane’s time at Uber as head of vehicle solutions for EMEA—where he worked on programs to extract the friction out of driver, car arrangements. On why the global ride-hail company didn’t hold programs like FlexClub in house, “I think the board took the view that Uber should not be directly involved in the provision of vehicles,” Ruzane said.

That paved the way for him and partners Rudolf Vavruch and Marlon Gallardo to co-found FlexClub in 2018. Ruzane drew inspiration for the startup from U.S. digital marketplace startups, such as Roofstock.com. He also underscored emerging market specific supply-demand and credit gaps as influences for founding FlexClub.

Africa’s digital mobility markets have produced some unique product options for Uber and other ride-hail companies. Uber Africa was early to adopt cash payments (as a way to attract card-less passengers) and has experimented with image based direction systems. Uber Africa and Taxify have also joined startups such as Nigeria’s Gokada and Uganda’s Safeboda to offer motorcycle and tuk-tuk ride-hail services in Africa—adapting to common use of two and three wheel taxis on the continent.

Those sub-sectors are also on the table for FlexClub, according to CEO Tinashe Ruzane. “We’re starting with cars…but expect to move to other asset classes affecting gig workers in emerging markets, including other transit options,” he said.

A turbulent 2018 for China’s gaming market hasn’t held back newcomers. Bytedance, the world’s most valuable startup behind a collection of rising new media apps including TikTok and Jinri Toutiao, is making a further push into video games after it took control of a mobile game developer through a roundabout deal.

According to a business registration filing, Shanghai Mokun has become wholly owned by Beijing Zhaoxi Guangnian, a second-tier subsidiary of Bytedance. Mokun is a mobile game developer previously owned by 37 Interactive Entertainment, a publicly listed games publisher that earmarked $791 million in revenue last year, which makes the Shanghai-based company about one-sixth the size of Activision Blizzard.

Zhang Lidong, a veteran journalist-turned senior vice president at Bytedance, has taken the helm as Mokun’s legal representative.

The price of the deal is undisclosed. A spokesperson from Bytedance declines to comment on the transaction. TechCrunch has reached out to 37 IE and will update the story if we hear back.

This isn’t the first time Bytedance has shown interest in the lucrative gaming market. Last month, TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin released its first in-app “mini-game” and Toutiao had already rolled out such lite games on its personalized news distribution platform in September.

These stripped-down forms of apps within a super app have been a sought-after way for Chinese tech giants to lock users in rather than sending them to download a stand-alone app. Bytedance’s foray into mini-games comes as a likely move to take on Tencent’s WeChat messenger, which had amassed 400 million MAUs on its own army of mini-games by January. On the other hand, Tencent is getting nervous about ByteDance’s rise and made inroads into short videos after trying its hand at several TikTok-like apps.

Though best-known for WeChat, Tencent has been generating the bulk of its income from video games for years and is the world’s largest games publisher by revenues, according to market researcher Newzoo. Tencent’s asset of more than 1 billion MAUs on WeChat and about 800 million MAUs on QQ, its legacy messenger from the PC era, allows the giant to conveniently convert social media users into gamers. Users can, for instance, easily log in and invite friends to play games via their WeChat or QQ accounts.

By comparison, 500 million users stream short-form videos on Douyin each month. Many of them may have already seen in-stream ads for games on the video app, which has become a popular marketing channel for small game developers, according to several media-buying agencies TechCrunch previously spoke to. Worldwide, TikTok has collected an estimated 1 billion downloads. This considerable global reach, which Tencent lacks, may eventually give Bytedance an edge in games distribution if the company decides to launch the effort overseas.

Ride-hailing platform Ola announced today that it has raised $300 million from Hyundai and Kia as part of a strategic partnership focused on electric vehicle development.

This brings the company’s total raised to $3.8 billion according to Crunchbase. Ola’s last funding was announced just three weeks ago, when the company said it had raised $56 million in early funding by investors including Tiger Global and Matrix India (two of its earliest backers) to spend on its recently spun-out electric vehicle business called Ola Electric Mobility.

In a press release, Ola said the partnership will build “India-specific” electric vehicles and infrastructure customized for Ola’s fleet and operating and management software. It also includes new financing programs, such as loans and installment payments, for driver who want to purchase the EVs.

Ola Electric Mobility’s challenges including building EV infrastructure (and gathering related data, including maps) for India’s sprawling and diverse landscape. One incentive is the government’s stated goal of making 30 percent of the country’s vehicles electric by 2030, though it hasn’t formalized that policy yet.

Ola’s announcement said that “data accumulated during service operation will allow the companies to make constant vehicle improvements to better meet local needs and specifications.” For Hyundai, the partnership represents an opportunity to move beyond being an auto-maker to taking control of all parts in the “mobility value chain,” including production, fleet operation and services.

Ola’s goal is to increase its drivers from 1.3 million to two million and offer one million EVs by 2022. Its other EV programs include a pledge to add 10,000 rickshaws for use in cities.

Google is holding a press event at the Game Developers Conference today in San Francisco. The conference starts at 10 AM Pacific Time, 1 PM Eastern Time, 5 PM in London and 6 PM in Paris.

While many game companies rely on Google Cloud Platform for their server and infrastructure needs, today’s conference is going to be different.

The company has been working on something called Project Stream for more than six months. In its initial technical test, the company let you play Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in your Chrome web browser. The game would run on a server in a data center near you, and you’d see the video stream in your browser and interact with your character from your computer.

And it sounds like Google is ready to launch its cloud gaming service for real. So let’s see how Google plans to sell this service and the initial game lineup.

Facebook released new figures about its attempts to stop the spread of videos after a shooter livestreamed his attacks on two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques last Friday, killing 50 people.

In a blog post, Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said that the video was viewed less than 200 times during the live broadcast, during which no users reported the video. Including views during the live broadcast, the video was viewed about 4,000 times before it was removed from Facebook. It was first reported 29 minutes after it started streaming, or 12 minutes after it had ended. Sonderby said a link to a copy was posted onto 8chan, the message board that played a major role in the the video’s propogation online, before Facebook was alerted to it.

Before the shootings the suspect, a 28-year-old white man, posted an anti-Muslim and pro-facism manifesto. Sonderby said the shooter’s personal accounts had been removed from Facebook and Instagram, and that it is “actively identifying and removing” imposter accounts.

Facebook’s new numbers come one day after the company said it had removed about 1.5 million videos of the shooting in the first 24 hours after the attack, including 1.2 million that were blocked at upload, and therefore not available for viewing. But that means it failed to block 20 percent of those videos, or 300,000, which were uploaded to the platform and therefore could be watched.

Both sets of figures, while meant to provide transparency, seem unlikely to quell criticism of the social media platform’s role in spreading violent videos and dangerous ideologies, especially since Facebook Live launched three years ago. They call into question why the platform is still heavily reliant on user reports, despite its AI and machine learning-based moderation tools, and why removals don’t happen more quickly, especially during a crisis (and even routine moderation takes a deep psychological toll on the human monitors tasked with filling in the gaps left by AI). The challenges of moderation on a platform of Facebook’s scale (it now claims more than 2 billion monthly users).

Sonderby also said that the company has hashed the original Facebook Live video to help detect and remove other visually similar videos from Facebook and Instagram. It has also shared more than 800 visually-distinct video related to the attack through a database it shares with members of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). “This incident highlights the importance of industry cooperation regarding the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online,” he wrote.

Other online platforms, however, have also struggled to stop the video’s spread. For example, uploaders were able to use minor modifications, like watermarks or altering the size of clips, to stymie YouTube’s content moderation tools.