Author: azeeadmin

Knotch announced yesterday that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with NEA’s Hilarie Koplow-McAdams joining the Knotch board of directors. Rob Norman, the former chief digital officer of ad giant GroupM is also joining the board.

“Brands have a desire to understand the effectiveness of their digital content across all channels, a gap that hadn’t been filled before Knotch,” Koplow-McAdams said in a statement. “Our conviction around the Knotch platform and team is driven by their impressive traction and comprehensive product offerings. We’re thrilled to partner with Knotch as they continue their growth trajectory, providing transformative marketing intelligence at scale.”

When we first wrote about Knotch back in 2012, it was a consumer product where people could share their opinions using a color scale. It might seem like a stretch go from that to a marketing and data company, but in fact Knotch still collects data using its color-based feedback system — now, it’s using that system to ask consumers about their response to sponsored content.

In addition, Knotch offers a competitive intelligence product, as well as Blueprint, which helps marketers find the best publishers for their sponsored content.

“As [brands are building] their own content hubs and recognizing content as a really key piece of their marketing stack, as they’re turning to this space, there’s not a lot of great options for them to turn to and say, ‘Here’s a way to know in advance which creative themes and topics and formats [are going to resonate].’ Here’s how we optimize this content, here’s a way to benchmark what you’re doing,” founder and CEO Anda Gansca told me.

And it sounds like Gansca’s vision goes beyond sponsored content.

“In this convoluted landscape, you need a partner that is going to be your Switzerland of data, who’s aligned with you, collecting transparent digital performance data across paid and own channels,” she said.

Knotch has now raised a total of $34 million. Customers include JP Morgan Chase, AT&T, Ally Bank, Ford, Calvin Klein and Salesforce.

Argo AI, the self-driving car startup that burst onto the scene in 2017 with $1 billion in backing from Ford, has obtained a permit to test its autonomous vehicles in California.

The permit, issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, is for one vehicle and two drivers.

Unlike other self-driving car companies, California isn’t the first, or even third, market where Argo AI is testing its tech.

The company, founded by former Google self-driving project veteran Bryan Salesky and Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s former engineering lead Peter Rander, has been busy in its short life, including acquiring LiDAR company Princeton Lightwave.

Argo AI does much of its testing in Pittsburgh, where it’s based. The company is also testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Miami, Detroit and soon Washington, D.C. as part of its relationship with Ford. Argo AI has had vehicles on DC’s streets for months now, mapping roads in the first step toward testing in autonomous mode. Ford said last year that the self-driving vehicles would begin testing on public roads in the first quarter of 2019.

Argo AI is an independent company, although Ford is a major backer and has seats on its board. Ford is also Argo AI’s only customer — at least for the moment. Argo AI is developing the virtual driver system and high-definition maps designed for Ford’s self-driving vehicles. Ford has said it plans to launch a self-driving taxi and delivery service in 2021.

It’s not clear if Argo AI’s plans to test in California are part of its relationship with Ford, are related to a new customer or are part of its testing program. TechCrunch will update the story when it learns more.

It’s not surprising that Apple has a massive active install base of iPhones across the globe, but we now finally have an exact number to put behind it. During its Q1 earnings call, CFO Luca Maestri shared the install base for the first time.

“Our global active install base of iPhone continues to grow and has reached an all-time-high at the end of December,” Maestri said. “We are disclosing that number now for the first time, it has surpassed 900 million devices.”

Apple has previously detailed the total active install base of its products. They updated the number today to 1.4 billion devices worldwide at the end of December 2018, up from 1.3 billion at the end of January 2018. It’s interesting that Apple has decided to break out iPhone device numbers even as it shies away from releasing unit sales in its earning calls from this point moving forward.

Maestri detailed that Apple would continue to offer updated on the iPhone install base and total install base on a “periodic basis.”

Apple seems to be seeking out bright spots wherever they can find them, the Q1 2019 earning didn’t deliver great news for the company despite beating already-reduced market expectations. iPhone revenues were down 15 percent.

A first batch of monthly progress reports from tech giants and advertising companies on what they’re doing to help fight online disinformation have been published by the European Commission.

Platforms including Facebook, Google and Twitter signed up to a voluntary EU code of practice on the issue last year.

The first reports cover measures taken by platforms up to December 31, 2018.

The implementation reports are intended to detail progress towards the goal of putting the squeeze on disinformation — such as by proactively identifying and removing fake accounts — but the European Commission has today called for tech firms to intensify their efforts, warning that more needs to be done in the run up to the 2019 European Parliament elections, which take place in May.

The Commission announced a multi-pronged action plan on disinformation two months ago, urging greater co-ordination on the issue between EU Member States and pushing for efforts to raise awareness and encourage critical thinking among the region’s people.

But it also heaped pressure on tech companies, especially, warning it wanted to see rapid action and progress.

A month on and it sounds less than impressed with tech giants’ ‘progress’ on the issue.

Mozilla also signed up to the voluntary Code of Practice, and all the signatories committed to take broad-brush action to try to combat disinformation.

Although, as we reported at the time, the code suffered from a failure to nail down terms and requirements — suggesting not only that measuring progress would be tricky but that progress itself might prove an elusive and slippery animal.

The first response certainly looks to be a mixed bag. Which is perhaps expected given the overarching difficulty of attacking a complex and multi-faceted problem like disinformation quickly.

Though there’s also little doubt that opaque platforms used to getting their own way with data and content are going to be dragged kicking and screaming towards greater transparency. Hence it suits their purpose to be able to produce multi-page chronicles of ‘steps taken’, which allows them to project an aura of action — while continuing to indulge in their preferred foot-drag.

The Guardian reports especially critical comments made by the Commission vis-a-vis Facebook’s response, for example — with Julian King saying at today’s press conference that the company still hasn’t given independent researchers access to its data.

“We need to do something about that,” he added.

Here’s the Commission’s brief rundown of what’s been done by tech firms but with emphasis firmly placed on what’s yet to be done:

• Facebook has taken or is taking measures towards the implementation of all of the commitments but now needs to provide greater clarity on how the social network will deploy its consumer empowerment tools and boost cooperation with fact-checkers and the research community across the whole EU.
• Google has taken steps to implement all its commitments, in particular those designed to improve the scrutiny of ad placements, transparency of political advertisement and providing users with information, tools and support to empower them in their online experience. However some tools are only available in a small number of Member States. The Commission also calls on the online search engine to support research actions on a wider scale.
• Twitter has prioritised actions against malicious actors, closing fake or suspicious accounts and automated systems/bots. Still, more information is needed on how this will restrict persistent purveyors of disinformation from promoting their tweets.
• Mozilla is about to launch an upgraded version of its browser to block cross-site tracking by default but the online browser should be more concrete on how this will limit the information revealed about users’ browsing activities, which could potentially be used for disinformation campaigns.

Commenting in a statement, Mariya Gabriel, commissioner for digital economy and society, said: “Today’s reports rightly focus on urgent actions, such as taking down fake accounts. It is a good start. Now I expect the signatories to intensify their monitoring and reporting and increase their cooperation with fact-checkers and research community. We need to ensure our citizens’ access to quality and objective information allowing them to make informed choices.”

Strip out the diplomatic fillip and the message boils down to: Must do better, fast.

All of which explains why Facebook got out ahead of the Commission’s publication of the reports by putting its fresh-in-post European politician turned head of global comms, Nick Clegg, on a podium in Brussels yesterday — in an attempt to control the PR message about what it’s doing (or rather not doing, as the EC sees it) to boot fake activity into touch.

Clegg (re)announced more controls around the placement of political ads, and said Facebook would set up new human-staffed operations centers — in Dublin and Singapore — to monitor how localised political news is distributed on its network.

Although the centers won’t launch until March. So, again, not something Facebook has done.

The staged press event with Clegg making his maiden public speech for his new employer may have backfired a bit because he managed to be incredibly boring. Although making a hot button political issue as tedious as possible is probably a key Facebook strategy.

Anything to drain public outrage to make the real policymakers go away.

(The Commission’s brandished stick remains that if it doesn’t see enough voluntary progress from platforms, via the Code, is to say it could move towards regulating to tackle disinformation.)

Advertising groups are also signed up to the voluntary code. And the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), European Association of Communication Agencies and Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe have also submitted reports today.

In its report, the WFA writes that the issue of disinformation has been incorporated into its Global Media Charter, which it says identifies “key issues within the digital advertising ecosystem”, as its members see it. It adds that the charter makes the following two obligation statements:

We [advertisers] understand that advertising can fuel and sustain sites which misuse and infringe upon Intellectual Property (IP) laws. Equally advertising revenue may be used to sustain sites responsible for ‘fake news’ content or ‘disinformation’. Advertisers commit to avoiding (and support their partners in the avoidance of) the funding of actors seeking to influence division or seeking to inflict reputational harm on business or society and politics at large through content that appears false and/or misleading.

While the Code of Practice doesn’t contain a great deal of quantifiable substance, some have read its tea-leaves as a sign that signatories are committing to bot detection and identification — by promising to “establish clear marking systems and rules for bots to ensure their activities cannot be confused with human interactions”.

But while Twitter has previously suggested it’s working on a system for badging bots on its platform (i.e. to help distinguish them from human users) nothing of the kind has yet seen the light of day as an actual Twitter feature. (The company is busy experimenting with other kinds of stuff.) So it looks like it also needs to provide more info on that front.

We reached out to the tech companies for comment on the Commission’s response to their implementation reports.

Google emailed us the following statement, attributed to Lie Junius, its director of public policy: 

Supporting elections in Europe and around the world is hugely important to us. We’ll continue to work in partnership with the EU through its Code of Practice on Disinformation, including by publishing regular reports about our work to prevent abuse, as well as with governments, law enforcement, others in our industry and the NGO community to strengthen protections around elections, protect users, and help combat disinformation.

A Twitter spokesperson also told us:

Disinformation is a societal problem and therefore requires a societal response. We continue to work closely with the European Commission to play our part in tackling it. We’ve formed a global partnership with UNESCO on media literacy, updated our fake accounts policy, and invested in better tools to proactively detect malicious activity. We’ve also provided users with more granular choices when reporting platform manipulation, including flagging a potentially fake account.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment.

When Apple lowered guidance on earnings earlier this month, it cited markets like China as a major factor in its disappointing numbers. Sure enough, when earnings hit today, things didn’t look great, as iPhone revenues dipped 15 percent year over year for the quarter.

In an interview with Reuters earlier today, Tim Cook noted that the company is reassessing how it sells handsets outside of the U.S. Apple has traditionally relied on the U.S. dollar to set the price, which has led to steeper costs internationally.

“When you look at foreign currencies and then particularly those markets that weakened over the last year those (iPhone price) increases were obviously more,” the CEO said. “And so as we’ve gotten into January and assessed the macroeconomic condition in some of those markets we’ve decided to go back to more commensurate with what our local prices were a year ago in hopes of helping the sales in those areas.”

There are, of course, a lot of factors at play here. For one thing, global smartphone numbers have been on the decline for the first time since analysts began recording such figures. Handsets have gotten pretty good across the board and afforded fewer killer reasons to upgrade every two or so years.

Economic factors are also at play in a major way. That certainly goes for China, where the country’s slowed growth has led to fewer large purchases. A looming trade war between the U.S.  and China has had an impact as well, with tariffs and other factors, as companies like Huawei have managed to buck the trend in their home country.

Apple’s Q1 earnings are in, and things don’t look too rosy for the iPhone. Revenue for the handset has declined 15 percent year over year for the quarter. It’s a pretty hefty drop for a device that’s been flying high for so long, but you can’t say Apple didn’t warn us. Earlier this month, Tim Cook noted that the company was lowering its guidance, thanks in no small part to smartphone figures.

In its earlier report, the company put much of the blame at the feet of the Chinese market. There are a lot of factors on that front, including slowing economic growth in the world’s largest smartphone market, and a general trend toward prolonged upgrade cycles, as users are holding onto devices for longer. That’s been a large part of the reason that smartphone sales are down nearly across the board, marking the first contraction of the category since analysts began tracking it. 

Last year’s arrival of the XS marked a less dramatic refresh than the iPhone X, but Apple also introduced a new budget handset with the XR. That device has reportedly been a disappointment, though Apple has repeatedly noted that the device has been the best selling iPhone since its October launch.

Notably, those numbers are off-set somewhat by growth in other categories. The iPad grew 17 percent on the strength of new models, while Mac/Wearables and Home/Accessories each grew, at 9 and 33 percent, respectively. Services, meanwhile, saw the biggest uptick at 19 percent to $10.9 — an all-time high for the category.

“While it was disappointing to miss our revenue guidance, we manage Apple for the long term, and this quarter’s results demonstrate that the underlying strength of our business runs deep and wide,” Cook said in a statement. “Our active installed base of devices reached an all-time high of 1.4 billion in the first quarter, growing in each of our geographic segments. That’s a great testament to the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers, and it’s driving our Services business to new records thanks to our large and fast-growing ecosystem.”

Apple met its already-lowered expectations for its first earnings report of 2019, but the outlook isn’t too rosy as the gadget maker sees a major year-over-year decline in its cash cow iPhone business.

Apple reported revenue of $84.3 billion with $4.22 in basic earnings per share, falling largely in line with Wall Street expectations of $84 billion with an EPS of $4.17. The company’s revenue shrank 5 percent year-over-year from $88.3 billion one year ago. Apple shares popped 2 percent after-hours.

Apple set guidance for Q2 revenue between $55 billion and $59 billion at the low-end of analysts expectations of $58.8 billion.

While Apple’s revenue arrived closely in line with expectations, the number is a far cry from the guidance Apple offered in November. Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a letter to investors, slashing Q1 guidance from a range of between $89 billion and $93 billion to $84 billion. Apple’s stock price cratered nearly 10 percent when Cook’s letter was released, a drop that represented the worst single-day plunge for the company in more than five years. Apple’s wild stock fluctuations have been a cause for a lot of uneasiness amongst the broader market.

A big focus in this release was on Apple’s revenues in emerging markets. While shifts among revenues in most regions were moderate, the company’s revenues in Greater China shrank nearly 27 percent to $13.2 billion compared to $18 billion in the quarter one year ago.

This is notably the first quarter that Apple has not included unit sales for its product lines including iPhone, iPad and Mac. iPhone revenues were down 15 percent year-over-year with $52 billion in revenue in Q1 2019 compared to $61.1 billion in Q1 2018. It wasn’t all bad news, the company saw gains across each of its other product divisions with Services up 19 percent, Mac up 9 percent, iPad up 17 percent, and the newly renamed “Wearables, Home and Accessories” vertical up 33 percent.

The company highlighted the gross margins of its Services business, operating at 62.8 percent.

“While it was disappointing to miss our revenue guidance, we manage Apple for the long term, and this quarter’s results demonstrate that the underlying strength of our business runs deep and wide,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

We’ll have more details from the earnings call.

Updating

As eBay gets increasing pressure from activist shareholders like Elliott Management and Starboard to reform its business and turn it into a high-growth tech stock by overhauling its main Marketplace, refreshing management and rethinking its other businesses like StubHub and classifieds, the e-commerce platform delivered a set of Q4 results that were solid if a little lacklustre.

The company today said that for the quarter that ended December 31, it posted revenues of $2.9 billion with non-GAAP net income of $670 million or $0.71 per share. On both counts, it just beat analyst expectations, which were respectively $2.87 billion on EPS of $0.68. But as a sign of the flagging business that activist shareholders have been highlighting, gross merchandise volumes were $24.6 billion, up just one percent on a year ago, even as revenues rose six percent.

In what might be a small concession to those requests for reform, eBay said it repurchased approximately $1.5 billion of its common stock in the quarter, and that it plans to “return approximately $7 billion to shareholders through dividends and repurchases over the next two years, with approximately $5.5 billion to be returned in 2019.”

It also provided some guidance for the full year: net revenues will be between $10.7 billion and $10.9 billion, growing between just 1 percent and 3 percent, with GAAP earnings per diluted share from continuing operations in the range of $1.83 – $1.93 and non-GAAP earnings per diluted share from continuing operations in the range of $2.62 – $2.68.

“We delivered record earnings for the fourth quarter and full year 2018,” said Devin Wenig, President and CEO of eBay Inc., in a statement. “In 2019, our focus will be on further improvements to the eBay user experience, while pursuing significant long-term growth opportunities in advertising and payments. We are confident in the strength of our business and future growth prospects, as demonstrated by our decision to institute eBay’s first-ever dividend and increase our share repurchase program.”

Active buyers are up four percent to 179 million, with the Marketplace, its core platform, accountung for $2.3 billion of its revenues, and $23.2 billion of GMV. StubHub, its ticketing business, accounted for $314 million of sales, while classifieds brought in $263 million of revenues.

The company is often compared against Amazon, which started out of the gate around the same time as eBay, but has gone on to diversify into a vast array of business areas and has truly changed the face of commerce as we know it. eBay hasn’t quite had that impact, and arguably its greatest acquisition, of PayPal, was spun off several years ago into its own business, which is thriving (it will report results later this week).

eBay has been trying to diversify its own business in the meantime, in areas such as promoted listings and other services to expand how merchants and buyers can spend on its platform. It said that revenues from promoted listings are up 150 percent across 200 million listings from 600,000 active sellers.

It’s also trying to move into more services around its sales, for example around installation and authentication services for higher-end items such as jewellery.

It also provided some guidance on Q1, where it expects revenues of between $2.55 billion and $2.60 billion, which will be representative of flat to two percent growth on a year ago — one more sign of the kind of sluggish growth that Elliott is pinpointing in its reform plan. Non-GAAP earnings per diluted share from continuing operations in the range of $0.62 – $0.64.

I’m listening to the earnings call and will update this post with any additional points that are notable.