Author: azeeadmin

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1. Spotify launches its streaming service in India

Just for India, Spotify users who do not pay for a subscription can play any song on demand on mobile. There are also playlists for India and a “Starring…” feature that includes music from Bollywood movies.

“Not only will Spotify bring Indian artists to the world, we’ll also bring the world’s music to fans across India,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek.

2. FTC creates antitrust task force to monitor tech industry

This isn’t necessarily a precursor to some big action like breaking up a big company or imposing rules or anything like that. It seems more like a recognition that the FTC needs to be ready to move quickly and decisively in tech matters.

3. This is the Stanford thesis presentation that launched Juul

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched the company.

4. We’re ready for foldable phones, but are they ready for us?

After years of prototypes, the age of foldables has finally arrived.

5. D-Wave announces its next-gen quantum computing platform

With the latest improvements, developers can use the machine to solve larger problems with fewer physical qubits — or larger problems in general.

6. How Amazon took 50 percent of the e-commerce market and what it means for the rest of us

Some thoughts from the former SVP of Walmart’s global e-commerce supply chain.

7. Steam fights for future of game stores and streaming

Cracks are starting to appear in Steam’s armor, threatening to make it the digital equivalent of GameStop — a once unassailable retail giant whose future became questionable when it didn’t successfully change with the times. (Extra Crunch subscription required.)

Financial technology company Affirm, which offers consumers an alternative to cash and credit when paying for large purchases, has scored a notable new partner: Walmart. The companies announced this morning that Affirm’s financing options would be made available in over 4,000 Walmart Supercenters across the U.S., and will roll out to Walmart.com in the weeks ahead.

Customers will be able to check their eligibility for an Affirm loan online before heading into Walmart to shop, and then receive their decision in real-time, without a hit to their credit score. (If they move forward and use the loan, that’s when it would impact credit).

If approved, the customer can opt for a repayment term of 3, 6 or 12 month installments on purchases ranging from $200 to $2,000. Customers are also shown the exact repayment amount they’ll owe, with the interest displayed in dollars not as an interest rate. There are no other hidden fees.

Walmart’s on-store shoppers will receive a unique barcode that’s scanned at checkout by a Walmart associate, the company says.

The offering will go live across Walmart Supercenters nationwide, except in Iowa, West Virginia and Puerto Rico, and will be soon available on Walmart.com. (Some items don’t qualify for financing with Affirm, including alcohol, tobacco, groceries, pharmacy, personal care, firearms and money services.)

Before today, Affirm had partnered with Walmart-owned businesses Allswell and Hayneedle, but this deal is one of its largest to date.

The company over the past few years has focused largely on e-commerce partnerships to grow its business and today works with a number of online brands, including Casper, Wayfair, Tradesy, The RealReal, Shopify, Reverb, Betabrand, Expedia, Eventbrite, and others.

San Francisco-based Affirm, run by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is now one of several businesses offering consumers point-of-sale loans and installment plans along with Sezzle, Klarna, Afterpay, Square and more. These services may help people with bad credit or low credit scores make bigger purchases they couldn’t otherwise afford, as they’re unable to apply for traditional credit.

Affirm, for instance, uses its own formula for calculating risk and approving loans, which involves data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. 

Other consumers may prefer Affirm and the like because of the flexibility of its payment plans and transparent pricing. (Affirm touts that it has no deferred interest, compounding interest or late fees, for example.)

But critics warn these businesses can hurt credit scores and entice people to overspend. They’re often referred to as modern-day loan sharks, rebranded for millennials – a generation wary of carrying credit card debt.

The company’s Gen X and younger user base could be one reason why Walmart chose to work with Affirm, as it needs a way to reach millennial shoppers.

“We are focused on providing customers transparent, easy, and convenient ways to pay, and offering Affirm both in stores and online is one way to do that,” said Daniel Eckert, Senior Vice President of Walmart Services & Digital Acceleration, in a statement. “Providing multiple ways to shop and finance select items with no hidden fees is an important way we deliver on our promise to help our customers save money and live better,” he added.

 

 

It’s telling that HTC opted to set up shop in Hall 7 at MWC. Rather than holding court alongside the Samsungs and Huaweis of the world, the company mingled among the peripherals and accessory makers. While it’s true there was news around the Exodus One blockchain handset, the Vive was its real star of the show.

After debuting the Vive Pro Eye back at CES, the company went decidedly more lightweight at this week’s show, with the launch of the Focus Plus. The headset is HTC’s latest crack at standalone VR, more akin to Oculus Go or Quest.

The latest rig brings improved visuals and controllers that swap camera-based motion tracking for am ultrasonic feedback system. I spent a bit of time with the new rig this afternoon in Barcelona. Off the top, it’s worth mentioning that the show floor of the world’s largest mobile conference is not the best spot to test any consumer technology, really — let alone a new VR rig.

It’s also unfair to compare it to the pricier Pro Eye, which I took for a quick spin after for an impromptu Home Run Derby in the middle of the booth. The Snapdragon 835-powered (sams as the earlier model) rig serves different functions — though HTC was notable keen to demonstrate its potential versatility. As such, the two demos I tried were a healthcare simulator and a shoot ’n punch game.

The former is clearly an attempt to position the Focus Plus alongside the Hololens 2. Of course, the VR headset has very different potential applications than Microsoft’s AR device — and at $599, it’s not exactly cheap, but still a fraction of the Hololens’ asking price.

The SimforHealth medical app is an interesting one — it’s one in a long line of simulations aimed at helping medical professionals prep for real world situations. The controllers take some getting used to as analogs for real world actions like picking up objects. Also, I noted some issues with response time — it could have been the new technology, which isn’t as accurate as the more advanced camera tracking, or perhaps it was the setting. In either case, that, too, takes some getting used to.

Things went a bit better with Superhot VR. The company was using the title to demo both the Focus Plus and the also newly 5G Hub. The setup works better with more blunt force actions — things like punching and shooting — making Superhot a nice fit. Though wildly failing around, punching at imaginary baddies in a crowded booth proved a bit more problematic.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have unveiled the next Pokémon game in the main series. The new game will come in two variants later this year — Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield.

Nintendo announced the new game in a Pokémon Direct live stream. And if you’ve been playing Pokémon in the past, you’ll feel right at home. The design of the world and the characters looks just like Pokémon Let’s Go on the Nintendo Switch, but with more details.

There will be a new region called Galar and that vaguely looks like the U.K. In addition to cities, you’ll be walking around mountains, caverns and woods. And of course, there will be new monsters, new gym leaders, new fights and a blank Pokédex to fill.

Seeing this brand new world feels surreal when you think about the GameBoy days. Nintendo is probably going to sell a ton of games to new players and older players who still have fond memories of the early days of the franchise.

The new starting roster is made of three different monsters — Grookey, Scorbunny and Sobble. You’ll have plenty of time to think about your pick as the game should hit the stores at the end of 2019.

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched Juul, with the hopes of making the case that its purpose is to do no harm — or at least less harm.

The founders of Juul have told their story before — the two met and became friends over smoke breaks at Stanford University, and eventually decided to design an alternative product to cigarettes. Juul today released a video of that thesis, presented by James Monsees (MFA in Product Design) and Adam Bowen (MSME in Product Design).

Bowen and Monsees say they started with the principle of harm reduction, aiming to keep the “good” and eliminate the “bad” from cigarettes. The people they spoke to said they were attracted to the ritual of smoking, and the satisfaction of basic human cravings like an oral fixation. However, smokers were tired of smelling like a cigarette and complained that, even if they weren’t being judged, they felt judged. Of course, hanging over all of this like a storm cloud is the fact that smoking is inherently bad for your health.

Monsees says in his presentation:

“Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? What if smoking were safe? And even better, what if smoking wasn’t offensive to others?”

Back in 2004, when the presentation was given, Monsees and Bowen identified one of the strongest pillars of Juul’s value proposition as a cigarette replacement.

“It’s not the nicotine that’s really hurting you,” said Monsees. “It’s burning tobacco, the combustion and burning plant material.”

Professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health David Abrams, who has advised Juul but not been compensated by them, told the New Yorker that the stigma of cigarettes has followed e-cigarettes.

“Cigarettes were a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said. “Now, with vaping, we have a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and we cannot get the wolf out of our minds.”

Part of the reason we can’t get the wolf out of our minds is the fact that minors have taken up e-cigarettes, and Juul in particular, in staggering numbers. For young people, nicotine and nicotine addiction have a far more egregious affect on health than they would for an adult former smoker. To teenagers, nicotine is indeed a wolf.

And it’s this issue that poses the greatest existential threat to Juul Labs. The FDA has asked for Juul and other e-cig companies to create and enforce new policies that will stymie use of these products by minors, but thus far Commissioner Gottlieb doesn’t seem too impressed.

In the presentation from 2004, Bowen presents a slide that shows the future company’s predicted demographic. On a scale from social smokers to pack-a-day smokers, Monsees and Bowen estimated that it would pick up users across the spectrum, with the majority of adoption coming from social/light smokers.

Ten years later, however, when the thesis project had evolved into the Ploom which then evolved into the Juul we know today, the company made a marketing decision that surely still haunts them. The early marketing campaign for the device showed young, hip models using the device. To this day, the campaign is cited by critics of the company for starting the youth craze over the device, which the FDA calls an epidemic.

Juul Labs has taken action to reverse this trend, including a $30 million investment in youth prevention, removal of non-tobacco-flavored nicotine pods from retail stores, deleting its social media, enforcing stricter age verification for online sales, an offensive legal push against counterfeiters and copycats, and a new $10 million ad campaign focused on attracting smokers to ‘make the switch’ to Juul.

“It [underage use] is an issue we desperately want to resolve,” Chief Product Officer and co-founder James Monsees said in August. “It doesn’t do us any favors. Any underage consumers using this product are absolutely a negative for our business. We don’t want them. We will never market to them. We never have. And they are stealing life years from adult cigarette consumers at this moment, and that’s a shame.”

Whether Juul’s efforts will be enough to prevent further regulation remains to be seen.

But from an entrepreneurial perspective, it’s interesting to see the earliest seed of a company that has now become a behemoth in its respective industry. In fact, Juul has grown to the point where Altria, makers of Marlboro cigarettes, have invested $12.8 billion in the company.

Alongside the thesis video, Juul also released a video of present-day Monsees and Bowen recalling the product design process for Juul.

“We started this project with the firm belief that innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking,” said Bowen in the video. “I would tell people, anyone who would listen, ’50 years from now no one will smoke cigarettes, they’re going to look back and think ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe people used to do that.” And now I think that’s actually going to happen much faster. In large part because of the progress that we’ve made.”

Recently in a conversation, the length of term sheets came as a topic (I assure you, it was a riveting conversation). The complaint was that a term sheet which had recently been received was too long, and therefore the VC who sent it wasn’t being founder friendly. The travails of successfully raising money!

Actually though, a longer term sheet is much more founder friendly and good business practice, and founders should be leery of VCs bearing short contracts.

Historically (i.e. about 6 years ago), term sheets used to be staid affairs, printed on plain white paper in standard Times New Roman font right out of Word. It was a wretched and horrifying world until the cool VCs showed up, who added design accoutrements (Bolded section heads! Logos! Colors!) while claiming that they had a “single-page” term sheet for founders, implying that the term sheet’s simplicity and prettiness showed that they weren’t really investors, but more like a Brooklyn barista with an art side hustle (and a lot of cash).

Here’s the thing, term sheets have an incredibly important purpose, which is to set forth in clear language the terms of a deal. Unfortunately in modern venture capital, there are a lot of terms that have to be negotiated in any equity round, from financial terms to option pools, to board structure, to voting rights on major business decisions like selling the company, and much more. Simpler term sheets either relegate many of these items to “standard venture capital terms apply” or some other vague language, or just wholly don’t mention them at all.

The challenge is that once the term sheet is signed, it becomes the blueprint by which the legal counsels for the VC and founder begin to write up the legal contracts that allows the VC to buy equity in the startup. When term sheets are clear, precise, and comprehensive, the lawyers just go to work and turn those agreed-upon terms into legal language in relatively short order.

When there are key terms that are “standard” or absent from a term sheet though, lawyers do what lawyers have to do: they negotiate for their respective party. Suddenly a term that seems fairly standard is up for debate, and unless a founder (and their VC) is paying very close attention to the legal process (from experience, no one really is), then the legal bills for the round can spiral very, very rapidly. That can pose a double whammy for a startup, since many VCs continue to charge the legal fees of conducting a round to the startup they are investing in.

I’ve seen founders in absolute sticker shock after seeing the legal costs of their round total into the upper tens of thousands of dollars because their lawyers racked up time trying to plow through term after term that could have been made clearer by the parties up front.

So, what’s more founder friendly: a longer term sheet that sets the deal terms clearly up front and likely saves the founder legal costs, or a shorter (but color!) term sheet that can end up costing far more down the line?

This is mostly a problem for first-time founders raising their first round of capital. I have a sinking feeling that many VCs take advantage of this naiveté to get better terms than they might have gotten otherwise had they actually walked through all the language up front. In later rounds, founders either ask all the right questions about the next round of capital, or their other existing investors figure this out on their behalf.

It’s good legal practice to always get all material terms figured out before your lawyers start writing contracts, whether in fundraising, or customer contracts, or what have you. You can’t always predict if there is something else that will end up being a disagreement, but getting most of the terms squared away will save legal time, and that is money ultimately in your pocket.

Side note: Extra Crunch published part two of five of our comprehensive guide to legal issues facing startups, this time focused on intellectual property. Don’t miss out on part one which focused on corporate issues.

Extra Crunch’s first conference call is today

We are hosting the first conference call for Extra Crunch subscribers today at 2pm EST / 11am PST. Call-in details are being sent out to members by email roughly one hour in advance. Today, Eric Eldon and I will talk briefly about Extra Crunch, and then TechCrunch social and product maestro Josh Constine is going to talk about the strategic issues confronting the social giants. Join us!

More SoftBank Vision Fund sadness

Written by Arman Tabatabai

Get out your popcorn because there’s more drama involving SoftBank’s giant Vision Fund and its LP base. Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund stated that it no longer planned to invest in the Vision Fund. Despite previous discussions with SoftBank, the fund plans to instead put its money into infrastructure across areas like energy, healthcare, and education.

With assets of roughly $15 billion under management, Bahrain’s fund is small potatoes when it comes to SoftBank, and its contribution likely would have been much smaller than those of its Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia counterparts. However, after recent reports that Persian Gulf LPs are growing frustrated with the Vision Fund and are putting more money to work in infrastructure, Bahrain’s decision could indicate a broader change in sentiment towards the Vision Fund. Just look at the comment the CEO of Bahrain’s Fund gave to Reuters:

“We talked with them and with many people, but it shows we’ve not seen something we think we can add value to or it could add value to us.”

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has wanted to scale up the size of Vision Fund II, but that dream may well be fading as more large wealth managers decline to engage.

Steam and video game streaming

Extra Crunch writer Chris Morris had a dive into the challenges facing Steam yesterday. Steam is facing two trends. First, publishers are increasingly getting smart about owning their customer relationship, which is hard to do with the design of Steam’s platform. The second is that video game streaming is getting closer to reality, and that doesn’t bode well for a game store. Plus, developers want to keep more of their revenue, and Steam takes a lot.

What’s interesting here is that publishers (and I mean big, AAA publishers) are increasingly comfortable with the notion that they can attract customers to their own independent store fronts and don’t have to pay the Steam tax in order to get in front of customers. What concerns me is that indie developers both don’t have the leverage to negotiate with Steam and don’t have the marketing budgets or fanbases to reach out to a wide audience. That’s not a great world, and an opportunity I think to figure out how to create a more even playing field for independent game creators.

The chip space keeps getting hotter as Korea’s SK leads round for Chinese chipmaker

Written by Arman Tabatabai

TechCrunch writer Rita Liao reported overnight that the A.I.-focused Chinese chipmaker Horizon Robotics raised a $600 million round led by subsidiaries of Korea’s SK Group, including its semiconductors segment.

We’ve previously discussed the intensifying global competition in the chip space, and SK’s investment shows that no one wants to miss out on the next innovative technology like previous incumbents who now find themselves playing catch up.

It’s worth noting that Intel’s venture arm, Intel Capital, is also an investor in Horizon and led their previous fundraise, as Horizon seems to offer up another opportunity for the US chip giant to make up lost ground in AI chip innovation and to gain share in the Chinese market now that they have canceled a partnership with China’s state-backed chipmaker Unisoc.

The data point is another positive for Chinese chipmakers, who seem to still have access to foreign capital on top of more than enough domestic — often state-backed — investments. The city of Beijing just raised its first venture fund with $1.5 billion focused on chips, A.I., and other areas, while China is reportedly nearing the closing of its second state-backed semis fund that some estimate might be nearly $50 billion in size.

More news

Written by Arman Tabatabai

California may have canceled HSR, but China is moving forward with an IPO

While US high-speed rail (HSR) projects continue to fall flat on their face, China Railway Corporation is now planning to IPO its Beijing to Shanghai HSR line within the next year. There’s always some financial risk with publicly-traded infrastructure, but the line’s securely profitable and the deal should help shore up the finances of its owner as it plans to make its largest rail investments ever this year.

Japan’s antitrust investigation is the latest in Asia’s new wave of regulatory scrutiny

Japan is reportedly initiating an antitrust investigation into the country’s biggest ecommerce platforms. Investigators will be looking to see whether Amazon Japan, Rakuten and SoftBank-subsidiary Yahoo! Japan launched benefit programs that ultimately are subsidized by and cut into the revenue of its small-to-midsize vendor suppliers.

The investigation is the latest in Japan’s broader effort to increase regulatory scrutiny on big tech, a global trend that seems to be permeating Asia as seen in our previous discussions on India. While it’s unclear how the heightened scrutiny will impact companies’ perception of these markets, it’s certainly clear that the “move fast and break things” playbook is getting tougher to run.

Obsessions

• We have a bit of a theme around emerging markets, macroeconomics, and the next set of users to join the internet.
• More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

On the heels of news that TikTok has reached 1 billion downloads, the company today is launching new initiative designed to help inform users about online safety, TikTok’s various privacy settings and other controls they can use within its app, and more. Instead of dumping this information in an in-app FAQ or help documentation, the company will release a series of video tutorials that are meant to be engaging and fun, in order to better resemble the other content on TikTok itself.

The safety series, called “You’re in Control,” will star TikTok users and will make use of popular memes, in-app editing tricks and other effects, just like other TikTok videos do.

The videos will focus on a range of privacy, safety and well-being settings and other safety-related policies. This includes TikTok’s Community Guidelines, how in-app reporting works, plus other settings for protecting your privacy, control comments, those to manage your screen time, and more.

They’re not exactly your traditional how-to videos, however.

Instead, the videos showcase what’s often a more serious issues – like being overrun with unwanted messages – in a humorous fashion. For example, in the video about configuring your message controls, angry commenters are depicted as shouting passengers on an airplane while the user is depicted by an overwhelmed flight attendant.

“Too many DMs?,” the video asks. The flight attendant snaps his fingers, which causes most of the passengers to disappear. The scene returns to peace and quiet. It’s a simple enough analogy for TikTok’s younger user base to understand.

This is then followed by a screen recording that shows you how to turn off messaging within the TikTok app’s settings.

Other videos have a similar style.

A barking, growling dog is used to demonstrate Restricted Mode, for instance. A noisy crowd overlooking someone’s shoulder is the intro on the video about using comment controls.

Another video encourages the use of screen time controls, asking “can’t put your phone down?” and shows someone so wrapped up in their phone they aren’t watching where they’re walking.

But the video about the Community Guidelines is maybe the most cringe-y, as it feels a bit like your parents reminding you to “play nice.” However, it still manages to set a tone for what TikTok wants to promote – a community for “positive vibes” where everyone feels “safe and comfortable.”

At launch, there are seven of these short-form videos in the safety series, which will launch in the TikTok app in the U.S. and U.K on Wednesday. In time, the company plans to add other tutorials and expand the series across its global markets, it says.

Of course, TikTok needs more than a series of videos to make its app a safe and welcoming community, the way it desires. It also needs a combination of policies, settings, controls, technology, moderation, and more, the company says.

That said, a focus on user education is an important aspect to this larger goal – and it stands in stark contrast to how Facebook intentionally made its privacy settings so complex and difficult to find and use for so many of its earlier years, that people gave up trying.

How well TikTok can execute on user privacy and safety as the app grows still remains to be seen. For now, it tends to be talked about as either a wholesome and fun video experience, or an online cesspool filled with hateful content and child predators. It’s an app on the internet, so both versions of this story are likely true.

There is no large user-generated content site – even those run by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – that has figured how to properly police the hatefulness and evil contained in humanity. But TikTok, at least, takes care not to showcase that content in its main feed – you have to seek it out directly (or train its algorithm by never clicking on anything wholesome.)

But, so far, TikTok has been better reviewed by child safety advocates than you might expect. For instance, Common Sense Media – a nonprofit that provides unbiased and trusted advice about all sorts of media, including apps – said that the app, used with parental supervision, can be “a kid-friendly experience.”

The launch of the video series comes at a time when TikTok’s growth is surging. The app recently surpassed a billion installs across the iOS App Store and Google Play, including Lite versions and regional variations, but excluding Android installs in China, according to data from Sensor Tower.

Roughly 25 percent of those installs are from India, the report said. And around 663 million of TikTok’s total installs occurred in 2018, which made the app the No. 4 most downloaded non-game for the year.

However, installs alone don’t tell the story of how many people actually use the app or how often. And a chunk of these could be the same user installing the app on multiple devices, or even bots used to push the app up the charts. In addition, parents often download the app their tween or teen is using for monitoring purposes, but don’t engage with the app or its content on a regular basis.

 

 

 

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review.

The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in a data center near your home. When you sign up to Shadow, you don’t even have to get a box. You can simply subscribe to the service without any hardware device and use the company’s apps instead.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you can access a gaming PC in a data center and interact with this computer. Right now, Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You can optionally get more storage with an extra subscription. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

Most subscribers now access Shadow using one of the company’s apps on Windows, macOS or Linux. You can also connect to your virtual machine from your iOS or Android phone or tablet. And now, you can also buy the Shadow Ghost if you want to use the service on a TV or without a computer.

I first used Shadow during the early days of the service back in early 2017. My first experience of the service felt like magic. Thanks to my high-speed fiber connection, I could play demanding games on a laptop. The best part was that the laptop fan would remain silent.

But it wasn’t perfect. Nvidia driver updates failed sometimes. Or your virtual machine would become completely unaccessible without some help from the customer support team.

In other words, the concept was great but the service wasn’t there yet.

Things have changed quite drastically after years of iteration on the apps, the streaming engine, the infrastructure and even the GPUs in the data centers. Blade co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me that the service has been working fine for just a few months.

It’s no surprise that those technical improvements have led to less churn, more referrals and more subscriptions. In July 2018, the startup had 20,000 subscribers. Now, there are 65,000 subscribers. There’s even more demand, but the company has had a hard time keeping up with new machines in data centers.

Shadow is currently available in France, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and parts of the U.S. The company simply can’t accept customers from anywhere in the world because they need to live near a data center with Shadow servers.

Playing with the Shadow Ghost

The original Shadow box was a bit clunky. You could hear the fan, you had to rely on dongles if you wanted to pair a Bluetooth device or connect to a Wi-Fi network and there was no HDMI port — only DisplayPort. Internally, Blade has been debating whether the company needs another box.

In 2017, it was too hard to explain the product without some sort of physical device — you can replace a PC tower with a tiny box. But now that gamers understand the benefits of cloud gaming, there’s no reason to force you to buy a box.

And yet, the Shadow Ghost can be a useful little device in some cases. For instance, while the company has released an Android TV app and is testing a new app for the Apple TV, your current TV setup might not be compatible with Shadow. Or maybe you primarily use a laptop and you want to create a desktop PC setup with a display, a keyboard, a mouse and a Shadow Ghost.

Everything has been improved. It is now a fanless device that consumes less than 5W when it’s on. It has an Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, an audio jack and a single HDMI port. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have finally been integrated in the device.

When you boot up the device, you get a menu to connect to a Wi-Fi network or control your Bluetooth devices. You can also change some streaming settings, like in the app launcher.

Once you press the start button, the video stream starts and it feels like you’re using a Windows computer. With Steam’s Big Picture mode, you get a convenient setup for couch gaming. I had no issue playing demanding games, such as Hitman 2. It works perfectly fine with a Wi-Fi connection and a Bluetooth controller.

Using the Shadow Ghost feels just like using the Shadow app on a computer. So it’s hard to say whether you need the Shadow Ghost or not. It depends on your setup at home and how you plan on using the service.

Last summer, Blade planned to manufacture 5,000 units. But now that the user base has grown significantly, that first batch could disappear in no time. It is available starting today for $140.

A gold rush

Cloud gaming is a hot space right now. While some companies have been experimenting with this concept for a while (Nvidia, Sony), it feels like everyone is working on a new service of some sort. Maybe the next Xbox is going to be about streaming a game from a data center. Maybe Amazon will offer a game library in the cloud as part of your Amazon Prime subscription.

Emmanuel Freund believes that it could be an opportunity for Shadow. Everybody is going to talk about cloud gaming if Apple and Google announce new services. But the startup has years of experiences in the space and has tried hard to compensate when it comes to latency and internet speeds.

It’s going to be harder to compete on content though. Game publishers and console manufacturers could start releasing exclusive titles on their cloud gaming services. That’s why Blade is thinking about new gaming experiences and exclusive content that would make Shadow more than a technical service.

(Controller for scale)

Cequence Security, a startup that helps companies protect applications against business logic attacks, announced a $17 million Series B investment today.

The round was by led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Shasta Ventures, the firm that had led the company’s $8 million A round last year. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $30 million, according to the company.

What the company does, according to CEO Larry Link, is protect applications against attacks that look like they could be normal behavior, yet are actually trying to do harm to a service. Specifically, it looks for automated bot attacks on business logic such as content scraping, account takeovers, reputation bongs, shopping bots, fake account creation and denial of inventory.

The company has a three-part approach to protecting applications from these kinds of attacks. First, the discovery phase where it finds vulnerabilities are in an application. Next, it detects who is taking advantage of these openings, and finally it defends against the attack and helps turn them away.

Deepak Jeevankumar, who is leading the investment for Dell, sees a seasoned leader in Link, who spent 5 years running sales at Palo Alto Network, helping build the company into a powerhouse. Jeevankumer also likes the technical team, which helped build Symantec’s anti-malware platform. “It’s the perfect combination of top-notch go-to-market leadership and cyber technologists that is winning the confidence of many Fortune 100 customers in a short period of time,” he told TechCrunch.

One of the things that Jeevankumer liked about this approach was how it differed from more traditional application security strategy. “Traditional web application firewalls, DDOS products, RASP/IAST/DAST application security vendors can’t look in to these business logic level attacks as they focus on code-level issues. We are seeing enterprises moving a good part of their cyberspend in to this ‘business logic security’ category,” he said.

While it’s still early days for the company, which came out stealth in November, it is attracting large deals with an average size of $500,000, according to Link. Part of this is investment is going to go toward building its sales and marketing team to create awareness and sell directly to companies like financial services, social media, retail and gaming that could benefit from this kind of protection.

The company was founded in 2014, but spent a fair amount of time building the product before going to market for the first time last year. It currently has 34 employees working out of its Sunnyvale, California headquarters. That number is expected to increase fairly substantially with the new investment.

The rapid rise of Slack has ushered in a new wave of apps, all aiming to solve one challenge: creating a user-friendly platform where coworkers can have productive conversations. Many of these are based around real-time notifications and “instant” messaging, but today a new startup called Threads coming out of stealth to address the other side of the coin: a platform for asynchronous communication that is less time-sensitive, and creating coherent narratives out of those conversations.

Armed with $10.5 million in funding from Sequoia, the company is launching a beta of its service today.

Roussau Kazi, the founder and CEO who cut his social networking teeth working for six years at Facebook (with a resulting number of patents to his name around mechanics of social media), says that the mission of Threads is to become more inclusive when it comes to online conversations. “After a certain number of people get involved in an online discussion, conversations just break and messaging becomes chaotic,” he said.

And if you have ever used Twitter, or even been in a popular channel in Slack, you will understand what he is talking about. When too many people begin to talk, the conversation gets very noisy and it can mean losing the “thread” of what is being discussed, and seeing conversation lurch from one topic to another, often losing track of important information in the process.

And there is an argument to be made for whether a platform that was built for real-time information is capable of handling a difference kind of cadence. Twitter, as it happens, is trying to figure that out right now. Slack, meanwhile, has itself introduced threaded comments to try to address this too — although the practical application of its own threading feature is not actually very user friendly.

Threads answer is to view its purpose as addressing the benefit of “asynchronous” conversation: topics and conversations that can stretch out over hours, days or even longer, around specific topics. Threads doeesn’t want to be the place you go for red alerts or urgent requests, but where you go when you have thoughts about a work-related subject and how to tackle it.

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These resulting threads can in turn be looked at as straight conversations, or as annotated narratives. For now, it’s up to users themselves to annotate what might be important to highlight for readers, although it sounds like Kazi would like to incorporate over time more features that might use natural language processing to summarize and pull out what might be worth following up or looking at if you only want to skim read a longer conversation.

Indeed, in this initial launch, the focus is all about what you want to say on Threads itself — not trying to compete against the likes of Slack, or Workplace (Facebook’s effort in this space), or Teams from Microsoft, or any of the others in the messaging mix. There are no integrations of other programs to bring data into Threads from other places, but there is a Slack integration in the other direction: you can create an alert there so that you know when someone has updated a Thread.

“We don’t view ourselves as a competitor to Slack,” Kazi said. “Slack is great for transactional conversation but for asynchronous chats, we thought there was a need for this in the market. We wanted something to address that.”

The company was actually formed in 2017, and for months now it has been running closed, private version of the service to test it out with a small amount of users. So far, however, the company sizes have ranged between 5 and 60 employees, Kazi tells me.

“By using Threads as our primary communications platform, we’ve seen incredible progress streamlining our operations,” says Perfect Keto & Equip Foods Founder and CEO, Anthony Gustin. “Internal meetings have reduced by at least 80 percent, we’ve seen an increase in participation in discussion and speed of decision making, and noticed an adherence and reinforcement of company culture that we thought was impossible before. Our employees are feeling more ownership and autonomy, with less work and time that needs to be spent — something we didn’t even know was possible before Threads.”

Kazi said that the intention is ultimately to target companies of any size, although it will be worth watching what features it will have to introduce to help handle the noise, and continue to provide coherent discussions, when and if they do start to tackle that end of the market.