Author: azeeadmin

Coinbase, the world’s most valuable crypto company, is gearing up to add more cryptocurrencies to its exchange thanks to its latest acquisition.

We already know the firm wants to a glut of new crypto assets, but today it announced it has snapped up blockchain intelligence startup Neutrino in an undisclosed deal that seemed destined to help further that goal.

Based in Italy, Neutrino helps map blockchain networks, and in particular crypto token transactions, to pull in information and insight. With the rise of thefts, that includes a major focus on services for law enforcement agencies to track stolen digital assets while it also includes tracking ransomware and analyzing ‘darknets.’ Other solutions include tracking services for investment and finance companies to help find rising tokens and assets, an area Coinbase could clearly capitalize on as it goes after security token offerings.

The company and its eight staff will relocate to Coinbase’s London office from where they will continue to service clients whilst becoming part of the Coinbase business. Initially, the startup’s primary remit will be security and theft-prevention but further down the line its smarts and technology will put to discovering and analyzing new asset listings for Coinbase.

“By analyzing data on public blockchains, Neutrino will help us prevent theft of funds from peoples’ accounts, investigate ransomware attacks, and identify bad actors. It will also help us bring more cryptocurrencies and features to more people while helping ensure compliance with local laws and regulations,” Coinbase’s engineering director Varun Srinivasan wrote in a brief blog post announcing the deal.

Srinivasan added that Neutrino’s technology is “the best we’ve encountered in this space.”

Coinbase has raised more than $500 million from investors, including its most recent $300 million Series E round in October that gave it a valuation of $8 billion. The purchase of Neutrino is its eleventh acquisition to date, according to Crunchbase. Most of those deals have tended to be talent-led deals as Coinbase seeks to suck up more expertise and engineering skills to support its growing business.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new UK startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level.

Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls “AI triangulation” — simultaneously applying artificial intelligence algorithms to oversee, monitor and defend an organization’s network appliances, endpoints, and ‘investigator bots’ covering multiple microservices — has raised $6.4 million in seed funding.

David Atkinson — the startup’s CEO and founder who had previously been the commercial director for Darktrace and before that helped pioneer new cybersecurity techniques as an operative at the UK’s Ministry of Defense — said that Senseon will use the funding to continue to expand its business both in Europe and the US. 

The deal was co-led by MMC Ventures and Mark Weatherford, who is chief cyber security strategist at vArmour (which itself raised money in recent weeks) and previously Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Others in the round included Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon, a security startup incubator in London.

As Atkinson describes it, triangulation was an analytics concept first introduced by the CIA in the US, a method of bringing together multiple vectors of information to unearth inconsistencies in a data set (you can read more on triangulation in this CIA publication). He saw an opportunity to build a platform that took the same kind of approach to enterprise security.

There are a number of companies that are using AI-based techniques to help defend against breaches — in addition to Darktrace, there is Hexadite, a remediation specialist acquired by Microsoft, Amazon’s working in the field, and many others. In fact I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any IT security company today that doesn’t claim to or actually use AI in its approach.

Atkinson claims, however, that many AI-based solutions — and many other IT security products — take siloed, single-point approaches to defending a network. That is to say, you have network appliance security products, endpoint security, perhaps security for individual microservices so on.

But while many of these work well, you don’t always get those different services speaking to each other. And that doesn’t reflect the shape that the most sophisticated security breaches are taking today:

As cybersecurity breaches  and identified vulnerabilities continue to grow in frequency and scope — with hundreds of millions of individuals’ and organizations’ data potentially exposed in the process, systems disabled, and more — we’re seeing an increasing amount of sophistication on the part of the attackers.

Yes, those malicious actors employ artificial intelligence. But — as described in this 2019 paper on the state of cybersecurity from Symantec — they are also taking advantage of bigger “surface areas” with growing networks of connected objects all up for grabs; and they are tackling new frontiers like infiltrating data in transport and cloud-based systems. (In terms of examples of new frontiers, mobile networks, biometric data, gaming networks, public clouds, and new card skimming techniques are some of the specific areas that Experian calls out.)

Senseon’s antidote has been to build a new platform that “emulates how analysts think,” said Atkinson. Looking at an enterprise’s network appliance, an endpoint, and microservices in the cloud, the Senseon platform “has an autonomous conversation” using the source data, before it presents a conclusion, threat, warning or even breach alert to the organization’s security team.

“We have an ability to take observations and compare that to hypothetical scenarios. When we tell you something, it has a rich context,” he said. Single-point alternatives essentially can create “blind spots that hackers and manoeuvre around. Relying on single-source intelligence is like tying one hand behind your back.”

After Senseon compiles its data, it sends out alerts to security teams in a remediation service. Interestingly, while the platform’s aim is to identify malicious activity in a network, another consequence of what it’s doing is to help organizations identify “false positives” that are not actually threats, to cut down on time and money that get wasted on investigating those.

“Organisations of all sizes need to get better at keeping pace with emerging threats, but more importantly, identifying the attacks that require intervention,” said Mina Samaan of MMC Ventures in a statement. “Senseon’s technology directly addresses this challenge by using reinforcement learning AI techniques to help over-burdened security teams better understand anomalous behaviour through a single holistic platform.”

Although Senseon is only announcing seed funding today, the company has actually been around since 2017 and already has customers, primarily in the finance and legal industries (it would only give out one customer reference, the law firm of Harbottle & Lewis).

You’d be forgiven for not knowing Amazon has operated in China for more than a decade, but perhaps not for much longer. The company is reportedly in talks to merge its China-based import business with local peer Kaola, the cross-border shopping platform run by Chinese internet behemoth NetEase, Caijing reported (link in Chinese) on Tuesday.

The deal, which NetEase initiated and will occur through a stock swap, had been signed at the end of 2018 but negotiations had been difficult, sources told Caijing.

The timing of the marriage is interesting since Amazon recently snagged a deal with Western Union to better serve unbaked shoppers across Asia (which did not include mainland China). Amazon also connects Chinese sellers to consumers worldwide, and just last week, WorldFirst, a London-based payments firm that relies heavily on working with Amazon small and medium-sized merchants, got bought by Alibaba, a direct rival to Amazon. 

According to Caijing, the NetEase merger won’t affect Amazon’s export-led unit.

NetEase Kaola declined to comment on the matter. Amazon China cannot be immediately reached for comments.

Amazon entered China in 2004 after it bought out local book-selling business Joyo for $75 million. In 2014, it started offering an overseas shopping service to capture Chinese consumers’ growing appetite for imported goods. Since then the titan has devised various marketing gimmicks — including its annual Black Friday campaign — to lure shoppers, but the business was never able to establish a commanding position in China where big guns like Alibaba and JD.com dominate.

According to research firm iResearch, Amazon held less than 1 percent of the Chinese commerce market in 2016. Within the arena of imports, Amazon China claimed about 6 percent share by the second quarter of 2018, while Alibaba’s Tmall Global took the lead at 29 percent, per data from research company Analysys. NetEase Kaola and JD.com trailed behind at 22.6 percent and 13.7 percent, respectively.

Despite a weak presence in China, Amazon’s massive global reach could be a coveted asset for its local rivals. “Netease needs to procure more inventory and it’s hard because they don’t do marketing as well as Alibaba overseas,” Ivy Shen, vice president with Shenzhen-based cross-border ecommerce startup Azoya, told TechCrunch.

“Kaola is also opening more offline stores so it might need more capital to expand, and Amazon can provide that capital. The cross-border market isn’t big enough for Amazon, but offline retail could be,” added Shen.

NetEase is best-known as China’s second-largest game publisher after Tencent, but its success dates back to the PC-era where it ran a popular news portal and email business. The Hangzhou-based company has over the years been re-inventing itself, leaping into a broad range of ventures including music streaming, a segment that rivals Tencent’s QQ Music; comics, which it sold to Bilibili, an anime streaming business backed by Tencent and Alibaba; and ecommerce, a unit that has driven much of its growth recently and contributed about 27 percent of its overall revenues during the latest quarter.

The money is starting to flow from India’s largest startup exit. Ola has added a major name to its ongoing financing round after it confirmed that Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal has invested 650 crore INR (around $92 million) into the Indian ride-hailing business.

The deal rumored in January when Paper.vc, an intelligence service that sifts through company filings in India, noticed that Bansal had committed to investing 150 crore. Today, eight-year-old Ola not only confirmed the pairing, but it revealed that the actual size of Bansal’s investment is significantly higher. It represents his most prominent and largest investment to date, and his first major deal since he left Flipkart following its sale to Walmart for $16 billion last year.

An Ola spokesperson confirmed that Bansal will not take an advisory role nor will he be involved in operations.

The investment is part of an ongoing Series J round of financing that is likely to exceed $1 billion and would value Ola, which competes fiercely with Uber in India, at around $6 billion. Bansal’s commitment comes a month after existing investor Steadview Capital put $75 million towards the round.

Here’s what Bansal — who started Flipkart with co-founder Binny Bansal in 2007 — had to say on the deal:

Ola is one of India’s most promising consumer businesses, that is creating deep impact and lasting value for the ecosystem. On one hand, they have emerged as a global force in the mobility space and on the other, they continue to build deeper for various needs of a billion Indians through their platform, becoming a trusted household name today.

I have known Bhavish as an entrepreneur and as a friend over these years and I have great respect for what he and the team at Ola have built in just 8 years! I am personally thrilled to be part of the Ola journey and I look forward to contributing to their success.

Aggarwal, Ola’s CEO, in turn, lauded Bansal as “an icon of entrepreneurship.”

“His investment is a huge encouragement for all of us at Ola and our mission to serve a billion people,” he said in a statement. “I personally look forward to learning from Sachin’s journey, his mentorship and guidance, as we look to build one of the most impactful global businesses out of India.”

Ola is locked in a dog fight with Uber, which has made India its highest priority market outside of the U.S. Uber started slowly in India, but it is pushing hard in the country having opened a dedicated local R&D center and hired a country management team that operates outside of the rest of its Asia Pacific business.

To battle its U.S. rival, Ola has expanded nationwide to cover over 100 cities and towns. It has also expanded beyond just cars, developed its own mobile money service, invested in other startups and pushed other strategies to appeal to local customers.

Flipkart’s exit money may be moving back into the ecosystem, but the company is running without the two men who founded it. Sachin Bansal left around the time of the deal while Binny Bansal (the two are not related) resigned following an incident of “serious personal misconduct” just months after the Walmart acquisition was finalized.

Binny has set up a fund — expect to see more Walmart capital flowing back into Indian startups — but his newest project is a venture aimed at helping India’s most promising founders to scale their businesses.

Eight years after raising its first $30 million fund, 212 is back in the market with a $30 million first close for its latest fund focused on investments in Turkish and Eastern European startups. 

Looking to invest in business-to-business software as a service startups, financial services technologies, and marketplace businesses, the firm has already launched four companies which have captured regional and global attention, says Numan Numan, one of the firm’s co-founders and managing directors.

212 has Iyzico, one of the largest payment processing businesses in Turkey; Insider, a southeast asian-focused e-commerce enabled platform, is another portfolio win (it raised $11 million in follow-on financing from no less illustrious a firm than Sequoia Capital).

Two other companies that have gained traction are Hotel Runner, a service bringing hotels and online travel agencies into a marketplace with technology service vendors that already has 55,000 hotels registered in over 160 different countries; and a supply chain management company called Solvoyo.

It’s still early days for the firm, but its focus on “companies that are ready to sell internationally and are already selling,” is paying dividends, Numan said.

All of the firm’s portfolio companies are generating half of their revenues outside of the Turkish market.

And Turkey itself is experiencing a surge in venture capital investment. There are roughly 15 investment firms in Turkey focused on technology companies, Numan says. “We still have a shortage of money and the ecosystem is still new,” he says. “We are the first proper institutional fund in Turkey and we set it up in December 2011.”

Global companies can come from anywhere, says Numan, and increasingly founders of startups are staying put rather than try to navigate the U.S. immigration system that’s becoming increasingly draconian. “They end up setting up in Berlin or in Lisbon or somewhere in Europe  that makes it easier to do that,” Numan says. 

Foreign investors are also beginning to take note of what’s happening in Turkey, says Numan. Roughly 20 different venture capital firms have come on to syndicate deals with the Turkish firm.

The two partners in the fund, Numan and his co-founder Ali Karabey both cut their teeth in finance in New York. Numan was a banker at Goldman Sachs while Karabey worked for Morgan Stanley.

The two began by setting up angel networks in the country and then helped create the nation’s first accelerators. It was after the accelerators had launched that Numan and Karabey decided it was time to raise the first fund. Since that time, Numan says that interest in Turkish companies has grown exponentially.

“The Turkish market is active enough to warrant dedicated exposure on the ground,” says Numan.

Meet Metronaut, an app for smartphones and tablets that could change the way you play classical music. The startup behind the app, Antescofo, raised a $4.5 million funding round (€4 million) and has attracted 160,000 downloads.

Daphni and OneRagTime are leading the round, with Nobuyuki Idei, Yann LeCun, Sophie Gasperment and Thibault Viort also participating.

Metronaut lets you play a music instrument with a professional orchestra playing all the other instruments with you. It isn’t just an audio player — the app leverages your device microphone to listen to your music and adjust the tempo of the other instruments.

The startup has recorded professional musicians in a studio so that you can play the flute without hearing the flute coming out of your speakers or headphones.

And if you still need to practice, you can set your own tempo while you learn your part — nothing will be distorted. You can record your performance, annotate the score and track your progress.

The company is betting on a freemium model. You can download the app for free and play for 10 minutes per month. If you want to experience the app without any limit, you need to buy a monthly subscription for $10 per month.

While the app works with dozens of instruments, most people use it to play the piano, the violin or the flute. Singers can also use the app.

And content is key with this service. People will keep subscribing if there’s enough content for their own instruments in the catalog. So let’s see if Antescofo is going to use today’s funding round to record even more content and turn the app into an essential service for musicians.

Huawei’s founder has come out fighting against the U.S. government after he claimed that “there’s no way the US can crush us.”

Ren Zhengfei, who founded the telecom company in 1987, doesn’t often make public statements, but, in a rare interview with the BBC, he defiantly claimed that Huawei’s business is growing stronger amid pressure from the U.S. government, which is pursuing criminal charges over alleged business dealings in Iran. Under those charges, CFO Meng Wanzhou was arrested during a trip to Canada.

“The world needs Huawei because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we could just scale things down a little bit,” Ren told the BBC via a translator. “Because the U.S. keeps targeting us and finding fault with us, it has forced us to improve our products and services.”

Ren called the arrest of Meng — his daughter, who may be extradited to the U.S. — a “politically-motivated act [that] is not acceptable.”

“There’s no impact on Huawei’s business due to Meng Wanzhou’s loss of freedom, in fact, we are growing even faster,” he said. “They may have thought that if they’ve arrested her, Huawei would fall but we didn’t fall. We are still moving forward.”

In a rare interview, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei spoke to the BBC about pressure from the US government and the arrest of his daughter, the company’s CEO, in Canada

Legislation bans the government and contractors from using Huawei kit — which includes a range networking equipment and infrastructure tech as well as smartphones — but the U.S. has also sought to convince its international allies to follow suit. Australia, New Zealand and Japan have done so, the latter banned ZTE and Huawei equipment in December, while espionage heads from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. — fellow Five Eyes members — were said to have agreed to do so, too, at the end of 2018.

However, just this week, Huawei won a reprieve in the U.K. this week when the Financial Times reported that British intelligence chiefs believe that concerns around spying — the U.S. has accused Huawei of acting as a proxy to Beijing — can be managed. That could leave U.K. operators free to move ahead and work with the Chinese company to build out their 5G networks.

That apparent vote of confidence, which is in stark contrast to the U.S. position, could see Huawei double down on its efforts and presence in the U.K.

“We will continue to invest in the U.K, we still trust in the U.K. and we hope that the U.K. will trust us even more. We will invest even more in the U.K. because, if the U.S. doesn’t trust us, then we will shift our investment from the U.S. to the U.K. on an even bigger scale,” Ren told the BBC.

The U.K’s about-turn is something of a surprise. Pressure from the U.S. saw Vodafone pause purchases from Huawei while a government panel report published last year could “provide only limited assurance that any risks to UK national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks have been sufficiently mitigated.”

I first encountered the founders of Litho, a new hardware and software startup developing a new finger-worn controller, at London’s Pitch@Palace last April. The event sees startups pitch in front of the British royal family and other esteemed guests, and naturally the company’s young founders, 24-year-old Nat Martin (CEO) and 25-year-old Charlie Bruce (CTO), were a little overawed by the occasion, just like many of the other founders pitching that day. However, perhaps unbeknown to them, Litho was also one of the more notable companies, not least because, as the saying goes, hardware is hard.

Fast forward to today and the young company is ready to show the world the first publicly available iteration of what it has been building: an innovative finger-worn device that provides control over various “spatial interactions” and should find applications ranging from AR and VR to the smart home and the control of other IoT devices. The next stage for Litho is to offer the controller and access to its SDK to developers who join the startup’s beta programme for $199/£179.

“Computing is increasingly structured around the real world rather than the desktop,” says Litho’s Nat Martin. “With the advent of smart devices such as lights, thermostats, and door locks, physical things are becoming digitally connected. Equally, with the advent of AR, digital things are becoming physically anchored in the real world. These are two sides of the same coin — digital interactions are entering physical space”.

However, the status quo is for the smartphone to be the primary interface for these spatial interactions, but smartphones were designed to interact with 2D content on screens and are therefore struggling to make the leap. “Trying to interact with objects in the real world through a smartphone is like trying to do heart surgery with a spork,” says Martin. “More often than not our phones end up being a frustrating barrier to the digital world, rather than a tool to enable interactions with it”.

To solve this problem requires a combination of hardware and software, while the Litho device itself is described as an unobtrusive finger-worn controller that connects via Bluetooth Low Energy to a smartphone or AR headset. The controller has a capacitive touch surface on the underside, which allows for precise 2D input, scrolling and tapping. But, more significantly, it also has an array of motion sensors and provides haptic feedback.

The Litho SDK uses the popular 3D game development platform Unity, and Martin says developers will be able to make apps that can not only identify the direction (/vector) in which the wearer is pointing, but what they are pointing at in the real world. It also provides an interaction framework of off-the-shelf solutions for core interactions, including templates for tools such as object creation, movement and deletion, making it easier for developers to quickly build “delightful and intuitive experiences”.

“Having an input device designed from the ground up for 3D interaction opens a whole new paradigm of mobile interactions,” he adds. “Instead of an awkward and frustrating interface, developers can create precise yet effortless interactions in 3D space. This opens up a whole new range of use cases — architects and designers can create precise 3D models in the context of the real world, and gamers can create a virtual theme park in their back garden simply by pointing and drawing. At home, instead of opening up a smartphone app, searching for the right bulb, and operating a virtual dimmer, you can simply point and swipe to dim your lights”.

Meanwhile, Litho has already picked up a number of notable investors. The burgeoning startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from U.S. venture firm Greycroft, Paul Heydon (an early investor in Unity and Supercell), and Chris Albinson (who co-led investments in DocuSign, Pinterest and Turo), along with several other unnamed angel investors.

Nissan has turned its old Leaf batteries into an off-grid camping companion.

The automaker’s Nissan Energy subsidiary worked with camper manufacturer Opus to create the ultimate “smart” pop-up trailer that integrates cells recovered from its first-generation electric vehicles to provide off-grid power. Add in one to two recharges of the accompanying 400W solar panel accessory and campers can listen to tunes and use their smartphones and other devices, including a microwave, for about 7 days, the companies said. The battery pack can be recharged by the solar panel in 2 to 4 hours.

The Nissan x OPUS concept camper debuted this week at the The Caravan, Camping and Motorhome Show in the UK. Inside the smart camper — code for LED lighting and USB sockets for charging — is a veritable glamping wonderland. You can almost smell the pour-over coffee.

Unlike many other concepts that debut at auto shows, components of the Nissan x OPUS are actually coming to market. The Air Opus is already available with a base price of £15,995 (a bit more than $20,000). The Nissan Energy ROAM product will launch in European markets later this year. Pricing for the ROAM wasn’t immediately available.

This isn’t the first time Nissan’s ROAM unit has shown up in a concept product either. It was featured earlier this year in Nissan’s NV300 concept van designed for woodworkers. Nor is this Nissan’s first foray into the secondary battery market. In November, Nissan launched Nissan Energy to create an ecosystem for owners of its electric vehicles. The idea is for owners to be able to connect their cars with energy systems to charge their batteries, power homes and businesses or feed energy back to power grids. The company said at the time, that it will also develop new ways to reuse electric car batteries.

“The Nissan x OPUS concept is a real-world example of how Nissan Energy ROAM can integrate into our lifestyles – in this case the hugely popular leisure activity of camping,” Nissan Energy managing director Francisco Carranza said in a statement.

The concept pairs the Air Opus, a novel off-road pop-up camper that inflates in 90 seconds, with Nissan Energy’s portable power pack called ROAM. The ROAM unit is mounted in a special compartment at the front of the camper, where it can provide a power supply to both the 230-volt circuit and the 12-volt circuit. The battery pack can also be removed and recharged via a standard 230v domestic socket, or by plugging into a solar panel accessory.

The ROAM unit has a storage capacity of 700Wh and a power output for 1kW. That’s enough power to keep smartphones charged and the lights on. The Nissan x Opus camper has a 230v outlet, USB sockets, a 4G mobile WiFi hotspot for up to 10 devices; and even a digital projector with pull-up screen to watch movies. There’s also a 230v portable microwave and a two-burner gas stove and a fridge.

You can watch the marketing video here.

Netflix comedy series “Friends From College” will not return for a third season. The show’s co-creator Nicholas Stoller announced the news earlier today on Twitter.

Friends from College will not be returning for a third season. Thanks to everyone who watched it. Happy Presidents’ Day!

— nicholasstoller (@nicholasstoller) February 19, 2019

Despite a very poorly-reviewed first season (the Guardian referred to it as TV’s “most hateable show”),”Friends From College’s” second season was better received. But apparently that wasn’t enough to save the show, which followed a group of Harvard graduates.

In a statement to Hollywood Reporter, Netflix said “We’re grateful to creators Nick Stoller and Francesca Delbanco for creating a wise, funny and supremely relatable show. We also want to thank the hard-working crew, and we raise a glass to the amazingly talented cast including Keegan-Michael Key, Fred Savage, Cobie Smulders, Nat Faxon, Annie Parisse, Jae Suh Park, and Billy Eichner.”

The news that Netflix is bidding adieu to “Friends From College” came a few hours after it confirmed that “The Punisher” and “Jessica Jones” will not be renewed, the last two Marvel shows after it cancelled “Iron Fist,” “Luke Cage,” and “Daredevil.” Netflix’s purge of Marvel shows may be related to the end of its deal with Disney, which plans to produce its own superhero content for its new upcoming streaming service.