Author: azeeadmin

Samsung’s not telling us anything we don’t already know with its latest teaser. But before I hop on yet another flight to San Francisco, it’s good to know I’m getting a little more bang for my (well, Verizon’s) buck.

In addition to the Galaxy S10, Samsung will also be offering a much better glimpse of its long-promised foldable phone at its SF event on February 20. A new animated teaser promises that “The Future Unfolds” at the event that’s currently a little over a week away.

If you’ll recall, the company offered a very fleeting glimpse of the product at its developers conference, but the product was shrouded in mystery — not to mention pretty unwieldy prototype hardware.

The most likely scenario for next week’s event is a more detailed glimpse at the future product, including a name— and perhaps even something approaching a release date. Most likely, however, the company and event will be largely focused on the details around its next flagship.

Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots.

Nuro has raised more than $1 billion from partners including SoftBank, Greylock Partners and Gaorong Capital.

“We’ve spent the last two and a half years building an amazing team, launching our first unmanned service, working with incredible partners and creating technology to fundamentally improve our daily lives,” Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said in a statement. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to take the next step in realizing our vision for local commerce and the broad application of our technology.”

Nuro’s focus has been developing a self-driving stack and combining it with a custom unmanned vehicle designed for last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. The vehicle, which was two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

“Nuro’s world-class team has successfully scaled their self-driving technology out of the lab and into the streets,” Michael Ronen, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers said in a statement. “In just two years Dave, Jiajun and team have developed Nuro from a concept into a real business using robotics to connect retailers to customers.”

The company partnered in 2018 with Kroger to pilot a delivery service in Arizona. The pilot, which initially used Toyota Prius vehicles, transitioned in December to the delivery bot. The autonomous vehicle called R1, is operating as a driverless service without a safety driver on board in Phoenix suburb Scottsdale.

The autonomous delivery service might get all the attention. But Nuro’s decision to license its self-driving vehicle technology to Ike, an autonomous trucking startup, is just as notable.

Ike now has a copy of Nuro’s stack, which is worth billions, based on this latest round. Nuro also has a minority stake in Ike.

Ike, which announced its own $52 million funding round last week, doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with the Nuro. Ike co-founder and CEO Alden Woodrow has explained to TechCrunch before that this copy was a “hard fork.”

This licensing deal shows that Nuro’s leadership team has an appetite for diversifying the business.

One of Mobile World Congress’s most anticipated reveals isn’t a phone at all. Microsoft is expected to announce the next generation HoloLens headset at an already-announced event on February 24, and the company’s doing a bit more to stoke the flames.

Granted, there’s really not much to see in this new teaser. Vague forms of chips and cables take shape out melted ice, rocks and air— frankly, it’s the kind of thing you release when you don’t actually want to show anything off.

Perhaps even more important than the video itself is the source. Technical Fellow Alex Kipman is one of the key people behind the original HoloLens, so who better to reveal the second gen? The original headset was ahead of the mixed reality wave, but now that A.R. is starting to catch on all over the industry, the timing could be right for a big second generation launch.

Reports have suggested a Qualcomm 850 chip and new Project Kinect Sensors. The headset is also said to be cheaper and smaller than its developer-focused predecessor, which could put Microsoft in prime position to push augmented reality forward.

More on what to expect from the show here.

Bumble, currently Tinder’s biggest rival in the dating app market, today launched its own version of Tinder’s “Boost” feature. On Bumble, it’s being called “Spotlight” and allows users to pay to bump their profile up to the front of the queue, in order to be seen by more people than they would otherwise.

Very much like Tinder Boost, the idea here is that getting to the front of the line will allow you to pick up matches more quickly, as you don’t have to wait until users swipe through other profiles before they see yours. Plus, depending on how far in the back of the line you are typically, Spotlight could help you be seen by those who would have never made it to your profile page at all.

Spotlight – or Boost, for that matter – isn’t something every dating app user needs.

Dating apps today organize their queues with profiles based on a number of factors – including things like profile popularity, whether you swipe right on everyone or are more selective, whether your photos are higher quality or blurry, and many other signals. If you tend to get matches easily on the apps, you may not need Spotlight. But if you suspect your profile is further down the line, or just want to make sure your profile is getting seen, the feature could help.

To use Spotlight, Bumble users must pay 2 Coins (bought through a separate in-app purchase). 1 coin is $0.99 in the U.S., or £1.99 in the U.K. Spotlight will then show your profile to more users for the next 30 minutes. Your profile is not flagged or labeled in any way, so no one knows you used Spotlight to be promoted. However, the user who purchased Spotlight will know it’s active as they’ll see stars appear across the top part of the Bumble app while it’s enabled.

Spotlight represents another way that Bumble continues to challenges Tinder head-on by rolling out similar features, after already co-opting the swipe-to-like and the super-like, for example.

The move also comes just following another successful quarter by Match Group, led by the earnings from its flagship app Tinder.

Combined with its other dating app properties, Match pulled in $457 million in revenue, up 21 percent year-over-year, and topping analyst estimates. Tinder reported its paying subscriber base grew to 4.3 million as of year-end, out of a total user base that tops 50 million. (The company doesn’t disclose the number of users it has.)

Bumble, meanwhile, today says it has now reached 50 million worldwide users, with 84,000 new users being added daily.

Spotlight is one of several in-app purchases offered by Bumble, alongside the recently launched option to access more profile filters, for example, as well as free features, like Snooze, which let you take a digital detox from online dating.

This weekend, the Trump administration shed more light on the “American A.I. Initiative,” a plan the President is set to sign today, in hopes of helping keep the U.S. at the forefront of innovation. The executive order highlights, in its own words, “bold, decisive actions” for maintaining American’s role in developing the artificial intelligence set to touch every aspect of modern life.

Such initiatives are both welcome and needed, but, as The New York Times and others have noted, however, the plan lacks some key details on how it will accomplish this. The list of omissions includes, perhaps most notably, any new funding to help accomplish any of this.

Setting aside money for things like R&D is a key aspect in assuring that this sort of thing is more than simply lip service for those concerned the country is at risk of falling behind. The move comes in the wake of several initiatives by other countries, most notably China’s 2017 AI initiative, which set aside billions to maintain its technological foothold.

The plan, while vague, does get some things right. Better educating the American workforce is a key part of bracing for the seismic changes such technology will bring. The initiative is a decent first step, but the government is going to have to invest more in order to build its technology natively, as company like Google, Amazon and Microsoft gain increasing public pushback for contracted jobs with the state.

Lunar Way, the Nordic banking app that’s riding new EU regulation to help inject more competition into the region, has raised €13 million in new funding. The round is led by SEED Capital, with participation from Greyhound Capital, Socii Capital and a number of individual investors from the financial services industry.

It also comes shortly after Lunar Way announced it had attained a PISP payments license, meaning that the fintech can offer a more comprehensive banking feature-set, including making payments out of third-party bank accounts on a user’s behalf.

This, says Lunar Way founder Ken Villum Klausen, also paves the way for the startup to crack open the “Nordic clearing system monopoly,” which has traditionally made it difficult for new banking entrants.

“The new payment license grants us the option to instruct underlying banks to do payments, pay bills or even pay in a retail environment from their accounts,” explains Klausen. “So when you sign up, you’re able to connect to an existing bank-account in the sign up flow. And after that control all your finances through our platform”.

In addition, Lunar Way has a PSD2 AISP license, so that it is regulated to “co-own the transaction data,” which Klausen says Lunar Way can use in it the company’s PFM features and for new products.

“The [Lunar Way] product offers all the fundamentals from a banking app. You can pay bills, transfer money, set a budget, do saving-goals, manage your card etc. We also have a few subscription-based credit lines, where you pay a monthly fee [for credit],” he says.

In Denmark, Lunar Way also acts as a “NemKonto” — or national Danish account — a type of bank account that the Danish government stipulates by law that all citizens and businesses must have.

Adds Klausen: “It has taken a few years to build our app to suit the different demands of the Nordic countries, but now we are a serious competitor to traditional banks. Our aim is — and have always been — to fundamentally change the status quo of banking. We’re now welcoming more than 10,000 new users a month and counting, which is substantial considering the fact that the Nordics’ total addressable market is 27 million people”.

Meanwhile, Lunar Way says it will use the funding to help accelerate the banking app’s growth, in a bid to reach further scale across the Nordics. I also understand the fintech is already gearing up for a new funding round pegged for later this Summer.

In the world of blockchain, it is the sector of Fintech where most think Satoshi’s invention will have the greatest impact. And in finance there are few more elite worlds than those of asset management. So it’s of some significance that a two-year long project to disrupt and open up this world using blockchain has now come to fruition.
Last Friday in Zug — a small provincial Swiss town which has embraced crypto startups — the Melonport startup consciously chose to dissolve itself and release its Melon protocol on the world of asset management. It will now build its company on a blockchain protocol it doesn’t control. The precedents for this kind of move in the tech world are many. It’s not unheard for a startup to release an Open API and let other potential competitors to build on it, while hoping they will be good enough to beat others. And Redhat, long ago, built a huge company on top of the open-source Linux software.
What is different here is that Melonport built the Melon Protocol on the Ethereum blockchain, but it will no longer have the majority say on how that protocol develops. No-one will technical ‘own’ the Melon Protocol, but the founders of Melonport have entrusted its development to an independent ‘Melon Council’, which will provide governance and direction as it develops. What was Melonport will now morph into a new company called Madeeba to built tools on top of its creation. Madeeba will hold one seat on the Melon Council.
Fans of Stars Wars will have to forgive me, but it’s not unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi becoming stronger in ‘The Force’ by allowing Darth Vader to kill him off. Augur is the only major crypto platform to do the same as Melonport: letting the community run the software. Augur has grown steadily too, showing this methodology can work.

Melon will now be an open-source protocol on the Ethereum blockchain for on-chain asset management. This pioneering blockchain software system is designed to allow literally anyone to set up, and manage, an asset management fund.
Melonport founder and now Madeeba founder Mona El Isa told me: “We always promised we would step back and hand over the protocol to a decentralized governance process. This is designed to consider all the stakeholders, the token holders, the developers, and the users (the managers and investors).”
Blockchain technology has the potential to radically transform business and allow community-owned networks. However, getting the governance right is key in this space. That’s why creating a system which prevents co-option and capture by vested interests is so important. Other blockchains, such as EOS, have been criticized for being in thrall to a limited number of nodes, for instance.
The Melon Council is composed of the Melon Technical Council (MTC) and representatives of Melon Exposed Businesses (MEB). The first seats of the MTC have been assigned by the outgoing Melonport team to:
• Will Harborne (Director of Operations at Ethfinex)
• Nick Munoz-McDonald (Former Head of Audit at Solidified)
• KR1 (represented by Janos Berghorn)
• Matthew Di Ferrante (Founder ZK Labs)
• Woorton (represented by Zahreddine Touag)
• Martin Lundfall (Formal Verification Researcher at Dapphub/MakerDAO)
• Fabian Gompf (VP Technology Partnerships at Parity)
• Former Melonport team / Madeeba (represented by Jenna Zenk)
Each Melon Council member will be issued a token that represents their membership into the Melon Council. They will then be able to use that token to make proposals and vote on key issues.
The Melon Council will also be powered by aragonOS, a Solidity framework on the Ethereum blockchain, which allows anyone to create, manage and participate in complex decentralized organizations.
The Melon Council DAO says this will allow decision making within the Melon Council to remain secure and transparent to the community. The members of the Melon Council will be able to vote on-chain on matters such as inviting new members into the Council, adjusting the amgu price, updating the Melon protocol.eth ENS subdomains, and updating protocol parameters. The Melon Council will also be able to use Aragon tools to make their decisions about inflation spending transparent.
“We’re doing this so show that we were serious about building a decentralized system. If we stuck around everyone would be relying on us to be the sole maintainer of the protocol, or they might suspect we have some kind of bigger influence,” El Isa continued.
In the race towards decentralized asset management, there have been other attempts to create new vehicles, such as Iconomy, CoinBlock, but its fair to say none has been as successful or as long-lived as the Melonport project.
Madeeba will now aim to build a user-friendly product, “so anyone could setup a fund and not even feel you’ve enter into the blockchain space,” says El Isa. A sea of hands (belonging to both traditional and non-traditional asset managers) went up in the room when people were asked if they would pilot both Madeeba and the protocol.
Travis Jacobs – the lead Melon protocol developer and who’s worked on blockchain since 2011 – told me he said he decided to work on Melon, to have an effect in an industry that is “sort of shuttered and only accessible to an elite few. It was a great opportunity to spread a democratic effect so anyone could set up an investment fund.”
In dissolving itself in favor of anon source protocol on which it plans to build its own products, the example set by Melonport could have wider ramifications in the nascent blockchain world.
The next time anyone sees a startup announce that it’s working on a ‘blockchain protocol to rule them all’ the next question to be asked should be: how will that protocol operate for others, and how will it be governed? Because governance has become one of, if not the key questions the brave new world of blockchain must answer.

We know by now that modern website attacks are typically automated, as armies of bots knock on doors until they inevitably find vulnerabilities and take advantage. PerimeterX, a San Francisco startup wants to protect sites from these automated assaults. Today, it announced a $43 million Series C.

The round was led by Scale Venture Partners . New investor Adams Street Partners joined existing investors Canaan Partners, Vertex Ventures and Data Collective in the round. Ariel Tseitlin, a partner at Scale will be joining the company’s board under the terms of the deal. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $77 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Omri Iluz, co-founder and CEO at PerimeterX says bots have become the preferred way of hackers to attack websites and mobile apps, and his company has developed a way to defend against that kind of approach. It uses an approach called behavioral fingerprinting to blunt these automated attacks.

“Once we gain visibility into the behavior of the user, we are able to discern between normal behavior and an anomalous behavior that looks like it’s coming from an automated tool,” he said. The solution looks at attributes like mouse movements and swipes. It also analyze the hardware to understand the graphics driver and audio driver of whatever device the bot is purporting to be.

To achieve this kind of identification requires massive amounts of data and PerimeterX uses machine learning to help understand normal behavior and shut down anomalous behavior in an automated fashion.

The company was founded in 2014 and currently has 140 employees. Ariel Tseitlin from Scale Venture Partners, whose firm is leading the round, says as companies reach this level of maturity, the Series C money tends to go into sales and marketing to push the revenue pedal and scale the company.

“While there is a lot of opportunity in R&D, generally at this stage most of the dollars are going for sales and marketing, so hiring more salespeople, hiring more marketers more sales ops.
That’s where a big part of the expansion comes from, and that tends to be pretty closely correlated to revenue growth, and pretty closely correlated to just greater growth in general,” he explained

We wrote about Signal Sciences’ funding last week, a company that also works to protect web apps using a firewall approach. Iluz says that the two companies often work together in the same customers, rather than competing because they attack the problem differently.

The UK government has said it could legislate to require age verification checks on users of dating apps, following an investigation into underage use of dating apps published by the Sunday Times yesterday.

The newspaper found more than 30 cases of child rape have been investigated by police related to use of dating apps including Grindr and Tinder since 2015. It reports that one 13-year-old boy with a profile on the Grindr app was raped or abused by at least 21 men. 

The Sunday Times also found 60 further instances of child sex offences related to the use of online dating services — including grooming, kidnapping and violent assault, according to the BBC, which covered the report.

The youngest victim is reported to have been just eight years old. The newspaper obtaining the data via freedom of information requests to UK police forces.

Responding to the Sunday Times’ investigation, a Tinder spokesperson told the BBC it uses automated and manual tools, and spends “millions of dollars annually”, to prevent and remove underage users and other inappropriate behaviour, saying it does not want minors on the platform.

Grindr also reacting to the report, providing the Times with a statement saying: “Any account of sexual abuse or other illegal behaviour is troubling to us as well as a clear violation of our terms of service. Our team is constantly working to improve our digital and human screening tools to prevent and remove improper underage use of our app.”

We’ve also reached out to the companies with additional questions.

The UK’s secretary of state for digital, media, culture and sport (DCMS), Jeremy Wright, dubbed the newspaper’s investigation “truly shocking”, describing it as further evidence that “online tech firms must do more to protect children”.

He also suggested the government could expand forthcoming age verification checks for accessing pornography to include dating apps — saying he would write to the dating app companies to ask “what measures they have in place to keep children safe from harm, including verifying their age”.

“If I’m not satisfied with their response, I reserve the right to take further action,” he added.

Age verification checks for viewing online porn are due to come into force in the UK in April, as part of the Digital Economy Act.

Those age checks, which are clearly not without controversy given the huge privacy considerations of creating a database of adult identities linked to porn viewing habits, have also been driven by concern about children’s exposure to graphic content online.

Last year the UK government committed to legislating on social media safety too, although it has yet to set out the detail of its policy plans. But a white paper is due imminently.

A parliamentary committee which reported last week urged the government to put a legal ‘duty of care’ on platforms to protect minors.

It also called for more robust systems for age verification. So it remains at least a possibility that some types of social media content could be age-gated in the country in future.

Last month the BBC reported on the death of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who killed herself in 2017 after being exposed to self-harm imagery on the platform.

Following the report, Instagram’s boss met with Wright and the UK’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, to discuss concerns about the impact of suicide-related content circulating on the platform.

After the meeting Instagram announced it would ban graphic images of self-harm last week.

Earlier the same week the company responded to the public outcry over the story by saying it would no longer allow suicide related content to be promoted via its recommendation algorithms or surfaced via hashtags.

Also last week, the government’s chief medical advisors called for a code of conduct for social media platforms to protect vulnerable users.

The medical experts also called for greater transparency from platform giants to support public interest-based research into the potential mental health impacts of their platforms.

Facebook co-founder Sean Parker bankrolled Brigade to get out the vote and stimulate civic debate, but after five years and little progress the startup is splitting up, multiple sources confirm to TechCrunch. We’ve learned that Pinterest has acqhired roughly 20 members of the Brigade engineering team. The rest of Brigade is looking for a potential buyer or partner in the political space to take on the rest of the team plus its tech and product. Brigade CEO Matt Mahan confirmed the fate of the startup to TechCrunch.

While Brigade only formally raised $9.3 million in one round back in 2014, the company had quietly expanded that Series A round with more funding. A former employee said it had burned tens of millions of additional dollars over the years. Brigade had also acquired Causes, Sean Parker’s previous community action and charity organization tool.

After Brigade launched as an app for debating positions on heated political issues but failed to gain traction, it pivoted into what Causes had tried to be — a place for showing support for social movements. More recently, it’s focused on a Rep Tracker for following the stances and votes of elected officials. Yet the 2016 campaign and 2018 midterms seem to fly over Brigade’s head. It never managed to become a hub of activism, significantly impact voter turnout, or really even be part of the conversation.

After several election cycles, I hear the Brigade team felt like there had to be better ways to influence democracy or at least create a sustainable business. One former employee quipped that Brigade could have made a greater impact by just funneling its funding into voter turnout billboards instead of expensive San Francisco office space and talent.

The company’s mission to spark civic engagement was inadvertently accomplished by Donald Trump’s election polarizing the country and making many on both sides suddenly get involved. It did succeed in predicting Trump’s victory, after its polls of users found many democrats planned to vote against their party. But while Facebook and Twitter weren’t necessarily the most organized or rational places for discourse, it started to seem unnecessary to try to build a new hub for it from scratch.

Brigade accepted that its best bet was to refocus on govtech infrastructure like its voter identification and elected official accountability tools, rather than a being a consumer destination. Its expensive, high-class engineering team was too big to fit into a potential govtech acquirer or partner, and many of those staffers had joined to build consumer-facing products, not govtech scaffolding.

Mahan, Brigade’s co-founder and CEO as well as the former Causes CEO, confirms the breakup and Pinterest deal, telling us “We ended up organizing the acqhire with Pinterest first because we wanted to make sure we took care of as many people on the team as possible. We were incredibly happy to find that through the process, 19 members of our engineering team earned offers and ended up going over to Pinterest. That’s about two-thirds of our engineering team. They were really excited about staying in consumer product and saw career opportunities at Pinterest.” We’re still waiting on a comment from Pinterest.

Brigade had interest from multiple potential acqhirers and allowed the engineering team’s leadership to decide to go with Pinterest. Several of Brigade’s engineers and its former VP of Engineering Trish Gray already list on LinkedIn that they’ve moved to Pinterest in the past few months. “We had a bunch of employees that took a risk on a very ambitious plan to improve our democracy and we didn’t want to leave them out to dry” Mahan stresses. “We spent more time and more money and more effort in taking care of employees over the last few months than most companies do and I think that’s a testament to Sean and his values.”

Mahan is currently in talks with several potential hosts for the next phase of Brigade, and hopes to have a transition plan in place in the next month. “We’ve in parallel been exploring where we take the technology and the user base next. We want to be sure that it lives on and can further the mission the we set out to achieve even if it doesn’t look like the way it does today.” Though the company’s output is tough to measure, Mahan tells me that “Brigade built a lot of foundational technology such as high quality voter matching algorithms and an entire model for districting people to their elected represatives. My hope for our legacy is that we were able to solve some of these problems that other people can build on.” Given Parker’s previous work with Marijuana legalization campaign Prop 64 in California and his new Opportunity Zones tax break effort, Brigade’s end won’t be Parker’s exit from politics.

Brigade’s breakup could still cast an ominous shadow over the govtech ecosystem, though. Alongside recent layoffs at grassroots campaign text message tool Hustle, it’s proven difficult for some startups in politics to become sustainable businesses. Exceptions like Palantir succeed by arming governments with data science that can be weaponized against citizens. Yet with the 2020 elections around the corner, fake news and election propaganda still a threat, and technology being applied for new nefarious political purposes, society could benefit from more tools built to amplify social justice and a fair democratic process.