Author: azeeadmin

Sarahah, the anonymous messaging app founded in Saudi Arabia that became an unexpected viral sensation with teens, clocking up over 300 million registered users before getting banned by Apple and Google over bullying, is making a return to the App Store — but not as you might think.

The startup has launched a new, free iOS app called Enoff (pronounced “enough”) aimed at organizations, tapping into the wave of employee activism and speaking out about unfair practices to provide a way for people in a team to give anonymous, one-way feedback to bosses and human resources reps.

Available also on the web, the aim is to provide a way to give feedback in cases of harassment, corruption and other tricky workplace situations where employees might fear repercussions for speaking out.

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Enoff is going head to head with a number of alternatives already in the market for giving “anonymous” feedback in the workplace, including other apps like Blind as well as incumbent solutions that business might already have in place for getting feedback. But it’s also a return to the startup’s roots: the original Sarahah was originally built to let employees provide honest feedback anonymously to bosses, before it inadvertently got hijacked and turned into a hit with consumers.

This does not signal an end to Sarahah itself. Despite its origins in Saudi Arabia and all the potential controversy that might come along with that, the eponymous app now has 320 million registered users with concentrations especially in the US, UK, India, Egypt and Japan, according to CEO and founder Zain al-Alabdin Tawfiq. With enforced downtime from Google and Apple, the mobile app has been getting rebuilt to provide better safeguards and blocks against bullying, harassment and other negative uses that raised the ire of parents and many others.

Specifically, Sarahah is now tapping into APIs from bigger tech companies like Google to develop better filters that go beyond keywords to flag content based on sentiment and inference. (Tawfiq said that the company is also building its own technology, although with only 10 employees currently working for the startup, it’s slow work to create anything new in-house on top of running the app that already exists.)

The plan is to launch Enoff while resubmitting Sarahah to Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Android store in coming months to hopefully get it listed again. Meanwhile, people are using the app primarily via the web, where they can get to a user’s profile by following links on other platforms, Tawfiq said. Sarahah currenly sees “millions” of active users each month.

“We are working on improving the platform and protection measures,” Tawfiq said, of the bullying that eventually brought the original app down, he described it as “a very limited use case, but we’re working on fixing it.”

To coincide with the launch of Enoff and the work on rebuilding Sarahah, Tawfiq said the startup is working on raising a Series A round of funding to hire more staff, as well as pay for the infrastructure to provide the bigger app and build more of a business around it. He would not comment on how much Sarahah is raising, nor how much it has raised from private backers to date.

Enoff works like this: a company or organization initially registers its domain, which includes on-boarding where a person has to upload identification to get verified to become the company representative on the site. Once an organization has been added, a code to communicate with the representative can be shared with employees, clients, or partners. These individuals then register and can start to provide feedback.

That feedback, in turn, never gets shared with anyone except for whoever is the administrator of that organization, essentially running it like an open-ended tips line going to a single mailbox.

Tawfiq confirmed that Enoff will be free to use with no plans to add any paid tiers to the app, but Sarahah itself is quietly building other kinds of monetization into the wider platform.

He notes that select advertising is now running in Sarahah and over time the plan will be to introduce wider data analytics services tapping into the platform’s wider trove of anonymous information, an area he refers to as “corporate solutions” that will draw on the fact that many organizations — Netflix is one — are already using Sarahah to run feedback campaigns, by providing more targeted analytics and sentiment analysis.

“The service we provide right now is generic, so individuals and companies get the same experience, but we have a great opportunity to provide added value services for companies to give them more benefits from the feedback they receive,” Tawfiq said. “We believe that the billions of messages that are available in Sarahah can be extracted, to find a lot of useful information to help companies improve their processes.”

In all, Sarahah’s continuing popularity points not only to how — despite its issues — we still seem to be craving, as an internet culture, more forums for revealing our thoughts; but that sometimes the simplest solutions, even if flawed, continue to have sticky attraction.

“I think that Sarahah was born with a clear objective. It’s different from other platforms because it was created to break down barriers around giving candid feedback,” Tawfiq said. “Focusing on this objective will help us grow our business even when other services like us have failed.”

A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even though they, too, want to spend their money on things that require a payment card, like Amazon.com purchases or mobile gaming, for example.

That’s where Step comes in.

The company aims to address the needs of what it believes is an underserved market in mobile banking — the 75 million children and young adults under the age of 21 in the U.S., who are still being forced to use cash.

This market isn’t the “unbanked,” it’s the “pre-banked,” explains Step CEO CJ MacDonald, whose previous startup, mobile gift card platform Gyft, sold to First Data several years ago.

Above: Step CEO, CJ MacDonald

“We’re building an all-in-one banking solution that primarily focuses on teens and parents,” he says. “We want it to be a teen’s first bank account. We want to be a teen’s first spending card. And we want to teach financial literacy and responsibility firsthand.”

MacDonald, along with CTO Alexey Kalinichenko, previously of Square and financial services startup Token, founded Step in May 2018. The 10-person team also includes several prior Gyft employees.

Last summer, Step closed on $3.8 million in seed funding from Sesame Ventures, Crosslink Capital and Collaborative Fund. Crosslink general partner Eric Chin sits on the board.

While there are a number of mobile banking apps out there today — like Chime, Monzo, Simple, Revolut and others — Step will specifically target teens, 13 and up, and other young adults with its marketing. Teens under 18 still need parents’ approval to sign up, of course. But the goal is to encourage the teens to bring the idea to their parents — not the other way around.

Step’s focus on this younger demographic puts it in a different space, where there are fewer competitors. Its more direct rivals are not the bigger mobile banks, but rather startups like teen debit card and bank app Current, or the parent-managed debit card for kids from Greenlight.

The mobile banking service Step provides will also aim to be more comprehensive than just a debit card. It will offer a combination of checking, savings and a Visa card that works as both credit and debit.

The card includes Visa’s Zero Liability Protection on all purchases from unauthorized use, and allows parents to set spending limits.

Parents will also be able to connect their own bank accounts to Step to instantly transfer in funds, which can then be distributed to kids’ accounts for things like allowances and chores, or other everyday spending needs. Step’s bank account itself is backed by Evolve Bank, so it’s FDIC-insured up to $250,000.

Unlike Current, which charges a subscription to use its service, Step aims to be a fee-free bank for consumers. Users don’t have to pay for their account, and there are no fees for things like overdrafts. Instead, Step’s plan is to generate revenue through traditional means — like interchange fees and by way of lending practices, once it has established a deposit base.

The company pays a 2.5 percent interest rate on deposits, offers a round-up savings feature and a range of budgeting tools and supports free instant transfers between Step accounts. It also provides access to a network of 35,000 ATMs with no fees.

Beyond simply facilitating mobile banking, Step’s bigger goal is to teach teens to become financially responsible.

“Schools do not teach kids about money. A lot of families don’t talk about money. And it’s a crucial life skill that’s not really addressed properly when people are growing up,” says MacDonald, who says he was lacking in life skills in this area, even as a young college grad.

“There were ‘Money 101’ skills that I had not learned — that no one had talked to me about. Things like building credit, how many credit cards you should have, debt to income ratio,” he continues. “A lot of people get released into the real world without experience [in those areas],” he says.

Long-term, after solving the needs associated with everyday banking transactions, Step wants to layer on other products and services — like tools that allow a family to save together for college, for example.

The company is launching the banking service under an invite-only system to scale up.

Today, it’s opening a waitlist and referral program. When you invite a friend, you each receive one dollar. Access will then be rolled out on a first-come, first-serve basis this spring. Users can join Step through the website, iOS or Android application.

Once upon a time, people had to wait for the Super Bowl to watch the ads. Those dark days are over. Now you can have companies sell you products on-demand, any time, day or night. Amazon has already debuted its latest Alexa ad, and now Microsoft’s getting in on the action — and this one’s a bit of a tear-jerker.

The software giant’s Super Bowl spot highlights some of the work it’s done to increase the accessibility of its products. Front and center is the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a $100 ad-on that makes the console more accessible to gamers with a range of different needs. The spot features a number of different children (and their parents) who are better able to enjoy gaming using the device. 

The Adaptive Controller was created with input from a number of different groups, including The AbleGamers Charity, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, SpecialEffect, Warfighter Engaged and tested with help from various users. On top of its base functionality with two large pads, it also works with a number of different control inputs, which can be plugged into the rear of the product.e

An advertising pitch deck used by fast-growing short form video sharing app TikTok has leaked, providing a snapshot of usage in its biggest markets in Europe.

The pitch deck was obtained by Digiday which says it was sent to a large (unnamed) European ad agency.

Metrics and gender breakdowns for the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are included in the deck. The slides are dated November 2018.

Germany and France come out as the top European markets for the video sharing app, according to the deck, with 4.1M+ and 4M+ monthly active users respectively, and an average of 6.5BN and 5BN video views.

Next is the UK, with 3.7M+ users (and 5BN video views); followed by Spain with 2.7M+ users (and 3BN video views); and Italy with 2.4M+ users (and 3BN views).

Last summer Beijing’s ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, said the app had passed 500 million monthly active users worldwide.

Analyst estimates suggest it’s had around 800M total downloads in total since launch in fall 2016.

Although usage stepped up in 2017, after Bytedance shelled out to acquire rival lip-sync video app, Musical.ly — paying between $800M and $1BN to bag and merge its 60M (mostly US) users.

In the UK, France and Germany TikTok users open the app an average of 8 times per day, according to the leaked deck, vs 6 times in Italy and Spain.

While UK users clock up the most time spent in the app, with an average of 41 minutes per day; followed by France (40 minutes); Germany (39 minutes); Italy (34 minutes); and Spain (31 minutes).

Users of the app skew female across all five markets but the skew is greatest in Italy and Spain, which both have a 65:35 female to male ratio.

The smallest skew is in Germany where the female to male ratio of users is 54:46.

The pitch deck also details ad formats TikTok is selling in the region, covering four ad products and how they are measured.

The listed ad products are: Brand takeover; in-feed native video; hashtag challenge; and Snapchat-style 2D lens filters for photos — with 3D and AR lenses listed as “coming soon” (2019, per another slide).

The slides do not include prices for the ad formats but Digiday cites one media buyer who told it the company is charging $10 CPMs for fixed buys. Though it says another media exec told it agencies are being given different rates, noting the person had heard higher prices for the brand takeover ad unit for example.

We’ve reached out to TikTok for comment.

South Park famously annoyed the world by triggering Echo and Google Home devices with familiar wake words. When Amazon’s at the wheel, however, the company is able to ensure that Alexa stays quiet using a method called acoustic fingerprinting.

In the lead-up to the Super Bowl, the company’s offered a (relatively) easy-to-understand breakdown of why its celebrity-laden ads won’t wake up Alexa during the big game. With its own ads, the company adds a fingerprint of the audio, which is stored on-device.

Given the Echo’s storage limitations, additional fingerprints are stored in the cloud, where the assistant can cross-check things before waking. The system generally works pretty well, though complications can occur in, say, a noisy environment (what Super Bowl party has ever been noisy, though?) in which case a longer clip is required to do its job.

Things, naturally, get a bit trickier when Amazon isn’t producing the ad (as South Park fans can attest). In that case, the system cross-checks audio with different users.

“If the audio of a request matches that of requests from at least two other customers, we identify it as a media event,” the company explains. “We also check incoming audio against a small cache of fingerprints discovered on the fly (the cached fingerprints are averages of the fingerprints that were declared matches). The cache allows Alexa to continue to ignore spurious wake words even when they no longer occur simultaneously.”

Foxconn is even more aggressively cutting back its growth ambitions around the world than we previously thought. In addition to the news yesterday that Foxconn intends to scale back its plans for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, leaving that state in something of a lurch, we have now learned that the Taiwanese company intends to scale back a $9 billion factory in Guangzhou, according to the Nikkei Asian Review citing internal documents. It lists trade war fears and a macro slowdown as the cause.

We talked about the lessons for economic development yesterday, but there is another angle around manufacturing flexibility that is critical to understanding this news.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dave Evans, who is building a startup called Fictiv, which is a “a contract manufacturer that doesn’t own any machines.” He thinks about manufacturing “more like cloud computing” where you can “scale up and down production as you would with AWS or a load-balancing server.”

In a world filled with fast-moving political eddies and fickle consumer demand, Evans ardently advocates for manufacturing flexibility. “No one is talking about how to build a supply chain that is agile enough to deal with different geopolitical climates,” he said. In today’s world, “supply chain planning is years or sometimes decades out” and yet, “if I look at policy or governments, or nascent trade agreements, that tends to be on quarters.”

Flexibility is ultimately about resilience. Faster adaptation allows companies to increase profits and reliability. “If you are going to build a robust business that lasts, then you need to have robust supply chains,” Evans said. You “don’t want to be a company that is a ping-pong based on the mood of Trump’s tweets.”

A huge part of what Fictiv is attempting to do as a startup is to offer that flexibility as a service. According to its website, the company has produced more than 3 million parts and can have turnaround times in some cases as short as a day. As I pointed out yesterday, it is these part ecosystems that often prove the biggest barrier to (re)launching manufacturing back in the United States.

Manufacturing flexibility is something that Chinese factories have prioritized for years. As an email correspondent with knowledge of these supply chains for large consumer companies discussed with me, China’s biggest strength may not be the ecosystem that has developed around Shenzhen and in Guangzhou, but actually the ability to scale up and down manufacturing by tens of thousands of workers in a week.

Foxconn, perhaps more than any manufacturer, has learned the importance of that skill. Its very survival is predicated on its ability to quickly adjust — at a scale of hundreds of millions of units — to the changing needs of its partners. When the economics of its plants don’t make sense, they shut them down, immediately. That may not be a positive for Wisconsin, but it is the competitive edge that America has lost over the years against much more flexible international competitors.

How can you compete and also invest long-term?

Competition is a key value of capitalism. The more competitors there are, the more that prices can drop and the more surplus value that consumers can pick up. That’s why why we try to avoid giving any one company too much sway over its market.

The challenge though is that competition also forces companies to fight each other for small wins, rather than carefully placing investments for the long term. If survival or even just profitability depends on precise revenues this quarter, then dollars will flow to marketing to juice sales rather than to R&D to invest in the future.

This is the great irony of competition. Too much of it and you get stagnation, while monopolies can counter-intuitively offer huge incentives for innovation. There is a reason that Google and Microsoft today, Xerox a generation ago, and Bell Labs even further back produced some of the most fundamental research in technology in the past century — durable, monopolistic revenue and a long-term view all cascade together.

So it was interesting reading through this Financial Times long read about the success and failures of privatizing different train systems around the world. The basic line is that Japan has managed to privatize its rail while maintaining great customer satisfaction, while the UK has stagnated with ever higher fares and diminished service since it sold off public rail. Switzerland in contrast has robust service and a completely nationalized rail.

Why the difference?

There are a couple of keys to Switzerland’s and Japan’s success. First, they think in systems, which means they understand that even as rail companies, they are not just limited to “rail.” For instance, Japan’s rail companies are also major real estate developers and landlords. The more people who choose rail, the more consumers who might shop at the malls erected around large train stations. There is a unity here that comes from ownership.

But monopolies are still monopolies — why not just cut service and bleed profits out of the system? The answer is that Japan’s rail companies own the underlying tracks themselves, and thus are ultimately dependent on the long-term vitality of specific routes. From the article:

“Our railway has relatively attractive residential areas along it. We want to make sure it’s a good place for young people to keep choosing it as a place to live,” says Fumiaki Shiroishi, director of the railway division at Tokyu, which serves some of Tokyo’s most popular western suburbs. “Even if we can’t expect an increase in overall population there will be winners and losers among the railways. People gather where it’s convenient. There are places where the population will increase 30 per cent and places where it will decline 70 per cent.”

There is indeed competition, but of a more long-term variety. These companies understand that their ultimate worth isn’t just having a reliable timetable, but having such quality service over many years that people make permanent life decisions based on that performance. It’s also key that the rail companies will eventually recoup their investments due to the stability of their business environment.

To me, these debates over long-term investment are central to the challenges facing many startups today. Competition is keen. You build a scooter company, and suddenly there are a whole crop of challengers in the blink of an eye. Capturing value is the key to building a startup, but how do you capture value if you don’t even know you will exist in six months?

Particularly as Silicon Valley enters industries such as health care, education, construction and others, where huge investments in product development and research will be critical to success, taming the downsides to competition will be necessary for returns to multiply.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

What’s Next

• More work on societal resilience
• I’m reading a Korean novel called The Human Jungle by Cho Chongnae that places a multi-national cast of characters in China’s economy. It’s been a great read a quarter of the way in.

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

Intel, it seems, didn’t have to look too hard to find its new CEO. Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. Swan, the seventh CEO in Intel’s 50 year history will also be joining the chip maker’s board of directors.

Prior to this gig, Swan was Intel’s CFO, grabbing that gig in late-2016 after holding positions at eBay and Electronic Data Systems Corp. Swan stepped into the interim role as word emerged of then-CEO Brian Krzanich’s “past consensual relationship” with an employee.

“In my role as interim CEO, I’ve developed an even deeper understanding of Intel’s opportunities and challenges, our people and our customers,” Swan in a release tied to the news. “When the board approached me to take on the role permanently, I jumped at the chance to lead this special company. This is an exciting time for Intel: 2018 was an outstanding year and we are in the midst of transforming the company to pursue our biggest market opportunity ever.”

Todd Underwood, the company’s VP of Finance, will become the interim CFO as the chipmaker looks to permanently fill Swan’s previous role. As for why it took so long to name a permanent CEO with Swan around the whole time, the executive reportedly wasn’t always so enthusiastic about the position. Shortly after stepping in as interim chief exec, reports surfaced that he didn’t want the gig. He even reportedly went so far as to remove himself from consideration.

Hading up Intel will be a lofty task. the company has struggled to adapt to a changing environment. The company missed out on much of the mobile revolution, as companies like Qualcomm picked up the mantle. Last year, Samsung overtook the company for the title of the world’s largest chipmaker. Intel has since begun bracing itself as a leading force in the push toward 5G, but a slowing smartphone market has had an impact on the company, along with the rest of the industry.

 

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video.

Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial breaks before and during their viewing experience. However, Vice President and Head of Advertising Platforms Jeremy Helfand said the company realizes that playing a similar ad as soon as you hit pause would be bad for both viewers and advertisers.

For the viewer, “It can be jarring — you think you’ve paused the content, but you’re still seeing sight, sound and motion,” Helfand said. As for the advertiser, they don’t want to create a 30-second ad that the viewer doesn’t see because they’ve left for the kitchen or the bathroom, or because they unpause the show five seconds into the ad.

Conversely, he said that during testing, Hulu found that viewers accepted the format “if the ad is subtle and relevant.”

The Hulu Pause Ad is more like a translucent banner — or, as Helfand put it, “a car billboard on the side of the road” — that appears on the right side of the screen. This makes for a better viewing experience, since it’s less distracting than a video and you can still see your TV show underneath. And Helfand argued that it’s also better for the brand, because it allows them to get their message across in a quick and simple way.

Also, Pause Ads won’t appear until several seconds after you pause. That’s in case you’ve paused so that you can rewind or otherwise adjust the video, which isn’t really an ideal time to show an ad. If you start fiddling with the controls, the Pause Ad either won’t appear at all, or if it’s already on-screen, it will immediately disappear. Similarly, it should disappear as soon as you hit play again.

When asked if this might give advertisers another ad placement issue to worry about — say, if their brand shows up next to a risqué sex scene or a gory death scene — Helfand noted that Pause Ads won’t be appearing on episodes that have been rated TV-MA, and that Hulu allows advertisers to target or “anti-target” (explicitly avoid) based on genre. It also sounds like these capabilities will be further refined.

Hulu plans to launch the first Pause Ads in the second quarter of this year, and it’s already announcing two advertisers — Coca-Cola and Charmin. The ads will appear in select on-demand content in the Hulu library.

Helfand said the exact size and placement of the unit could continue evolving over time. In addition, Hulu is still figuring out the exact pricing model, but it’s envisioned as part of a larger package for advertisers.

And while it’s understandable for viewers to get annoyed when they see ads in new places, Helfand suggested that this is part of a broader push towards “non-disruptive formats,” where the ads don’t stop the video and interrupt your viewing experience. In fact, the goal is for these new formats to account for 50 percent of Hulu’s ad revenue within the next three years.

“The whole conversation that we’ve had in this market, should a commercial break be 10 or 15 seconds — it’s all disruptive,” Helfand said. Instead, he argued that the better question is, “How do you help provide the very best storytelling experience for viewers in an ad-supported service?”

On the back of a strong showing for portfolio company Spotify going public last year and several biggies like Airbnb also slated to list very soon, VC firm TCV has announced its latest fund, the $3 billion TCV X, which has now closed and will start getting invested “soon,” the company tells me.

TCV’s previous fund — the $2.5 billion TCV IX — was closed in 2016 and focused on growth rounds. The firm says that it has made 21 investments out of that fund to date. Recent fundings have included travel platform Sojern, Tour Radar, home-exercise startup Peloton, activity booking platform Klook, ByteDance, LegalZoom and more.

“The amount we raised is about the opportunity in tech investing, it’s large and continues to grow,” Nathan Sanders, TCV GP and COO, said in an interview today about this latest fund. “We are not looking to have explosive growth but we’re increasing our size to meet the opportunity. It’s bigger than what we had before but we will stay focused and disclipined.”

TCV typically invests between $30M and $300M in companies.

The larger size of this fund compared to previous funds for TCV underscores bigger trends affecting the tech industry.

Startups are increasingly raising rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars — Crunchbase estimates that there were some $300 billion collectively invested in equity rounds in 2018, a high-water mark for the industry. Within that, deal volume was up 32 percent and dollar volume was up 55 percent over 2017.

For larger firms like TCV, that essentially spells raising more to spend more order to stay in the game.

Sanders confirmed that he thinks the larger fund sizes and larger rounds in general both were drivers in TCV going for $3 billion this time around. He added that while some are legitimately asking questions about startups that are staying private for too long and racking up sky-high valuations on paper in the process, this isn’t translating to pressure for TCV’s portfolio companies to jump into anything soon themselves.

“The amount of capital we’re seeing getting invested in high-growth companies means there are an increasing number of options for those companies,” he said. “Some will choose to stay private longer and some are using that amount of capital to grow faster. Our number-one priority for our companies is to help them grow and if the company is able to do that in whichever way is best, then the returns will follow.”

China’s internet firms are getting pally with giant state-owned automakers as they look to deploy their artificial intelligence and cloud computing services across traditional industries. Ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, which owns Uber China, announced earlier this week a new joint venture with state-owned BAIC. Hot on the heels came another entity set up between Tencent and the GAC Group.

GAC, which is owned by the Guangzhou municipal government in southern China, announced Thursday in a filing it will jointly establish a mobility company with social media and gaming behemoth Tencent, Guangzhou Public Transport Group alongside other investors.

The announcement followed an agreement between Tencent and GAC in 2017 to team up on internet-connected cars and smart driving, a deal that saw the carmaker tapping into Tencent’s expertise in mobile payments, social networking, big data and cloud services. Tencent, which is most famous for its instant messenger WeChat, went through a major restructuring last October to place more focus on enterprise-facing services, and the GAC tie-up appears to fit nicely into that pivot.

The fresh venture will bank a capital infusion of 1 billion yuan ($149 million) with GAC owning a 35 percent stake. Tencent and Guangzhou Public Transport will take up 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

A flurry of Chinese internet service providers have made forays into the automotive industry, marketing their digital and machine learning capabilities at old-school automakers. Besides Tencent, GAC has also recruited telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and voice assistant startup iFlytec to upgrade its vehicles. Search titan Baidu, on the other hand, operates an open platform for autonomous driving cars and has chosen state-owned Hongqi to test out its autonomous driving solutions. Ecommerce behemoth Alibaba has also set foot in transportation with a smart sedan jointly developed with state-owned SAIC.