Author: azeeadmin

Earlier this month, Roku announced it would soon begin selling subscriptions to premium video services directly from its own TV and movies hub, The Roku Channel. Today, those subscriptions are going live, allowing Roku users to sign up for channels like EPIX, Showtime, STARZ, and others, then stream them without needing to install the channel’s own app on their Roku device.

Instead, all the content from the add-ons will be found in The Roku Channel section itself, alongside the other free and ad-supported TV shows, movies, news, sports, and entertainment programming already offered. However, the premium channels will have their own area inside The Roku Channel, including a spot on the homepage, as well as their own dedicated tabs, the company earlier said.

In time, Roku hopes to leverage the data from users’ unique blend of subscriptions to better personalize its recommendations.

A number of companies today offer the ability to watch premium programming through add-ons subscriptions, but fewer allow you to do so à la carte – that is, most require you to subscribe to a core TV package first before adding on extras. Amazon’s Prime Video Channels is probably the best known of the à la carte providers, though Sling TV rolled out a selection of premium a la carte channels last year.

Roku doesn’t plan to offer its own “skinny bundle” base package of streaming TV content at this time, the company recently told TechCrunch.

“I think where we are today is really focused on these à la carte subscriptions,” said Roku’s vice president of Programming, Rob Holmes. “Ultimately, from a user standpoint, there’s a lot of value in being able to pick and choose exactly what you want to sign up for — without having to sign up for one of these base packages to start with. That’s how we think about it today.”

Once subscribed to one of Roku’s premium selections, customers will only be able to watch the content through The Roku Channel itself. In addition to the revenue split on these add-ons, this benefits Roku because it puts attractive premium content right next to Roku’s ad-supported fare of some 10,000+ free movies and TV episodes. When customers are in search of something to watch next, it will be easy for them to just browse within the section they’re already in.

Plus, Roku says add-ons subscribers won’t even be able to use the premium networks’ own apps at launch, which keeps them further isolated in Roku’s own universe.

In order for customers to watch the premium content outside of Roku devices, like Roku TVs or media players, they’ll need to install the free Roku mobile app or watch on the web. The updated version of the iOS app is arriving today, and the Android update will be available in mid-February, the company says.

The selection of premium networks at launch includes: STARZ, Showtime, EPIX, plus Baeble Music; CollegeHumor’s DROPOUT; CuriosityStream; Fandor Spotlight; FitFusion; The Great Courses Signature Collection; Grokker; Hi-YAH!; Hopster; Lifetime Movie Club; DOX, LOLFlicks, Monsters and Nightmares, Magnolia Selects, and Warriors & Gangsters presented by Magnolia Pictures; MHz Choice; NOGGIN; Shout! Factory TV, Smithsonian Channel Plus; Stingray Karaoke; Tastemade; Viewster Anime; and ZooMoo.

Notably missing from the lineup is HBO, which offers its own over-the-top streaming service, HBO NOW, and has deals with a number of à la carte and streaming TV providers.

Roku says the Premium Subscriptions feature will become available on select Roku devices in the U.S. today. They offer a 30-day trial period if you sign up before March 31, 2019, and are paid for using the payment info you have on file with Roku’s own billing system.

All supported devices should receive the update in the coming weeks, starting with Roku players and then Roku TVs. To see if your device has been updated, look for a new row called “Browse Premium Subscriptions” below the Featured row in The Roku Channel.

 

 

Facebook continues to feel the heat over its role in how people communicate — and more importantly, miscommunicate — globally, so today in Europe it redoubled its efforts to counter critics by rolling out new controls specifically around election misinformation ahead of European Parliament elections this spring.

It unveiled its latest efforts to fight “fake news”, with a new system of controls around the placement of political ads, as well as a new set of human-staffed operations centers in Dublin and Singapore to monitor how localised political news is distributed on the social network — both coming in March. Then, to coincide with the new efforts, it presented its new head of global communications — Nick Clegg, a former politician — in his first public speech since taking office.

The bigger hope for Facebook is that today’s two developments will be viewed as evidence that it is making active efforts to set things aright after a series of moves that have soured people’s opinions of the social network. Facebook continues to see a lot of scrutiny in the region over how it has handled its WhatsApp acquisition, its role in the Brexit referendum, larger privacy violations and more, and as it continues to grow, the concern for Facebook is that it could start to see regulatory actions that could curtail growth longer term.

The political ad checks that Facebook announced today will see the company launch tools to improve transparency around political ads. Those buying ads will see more scrutiny about their backgrounds, to make sure they are authorized to purchase ads.

Then for every ad that does get placed, users can click on them to find out more about the company or organization making the posting, including about the budget and demographics about the reach of the ad. All of this will be kept in a library that will also be searchable by the public for up to seven years after an ad runs.

These tools will also be rolled out in other markets like Ukraine, Israel and India ahead of their national elections, and it comes alongside other policies that Facebook has put in place over recent weeks: for example, in Nigeria it’s forbidding election advertising to be purchased by foreign entities.

While these are important moves, they are also coming at the same time that Facebook is become more oblique to other kinds of scrutiny. The company has been reportedly cutting off some of the tools that have been built to monitor how advertising works on the platform. These tools have seen their functionality reduced as part of Facebook’s bigger effort to cut off data access to third-parties — a consequence of Facebook’s reaction to Cambridge Analytica and how it and others exploited third-party access to suck up user information — but groups that have been affected claim that their advertising analytics provided more information than Facebook’s new political ad monitoring tools provide.

In addition to this, Facebook is expanding its approach to localising its response in the form of election security operations centers, or war rooms as they’re being called by some (including us). The first of these was established around the time of elections in Brazil last year, based out of Facebook’s HQ in Menlo Park, and it carried on work in the US Midterm elections.

Now Facebook is localising the concept and establishing two new centers in Dublin and Singapore, to “allow our global teams to better work across regions in the run-up to elections.” The aim of these is to track fake news, hate speech and voter suppression, and the idea will be to assemble teams that will work with other groups at the company in areas like threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations and legal.

Potentially meant to bolster the release of the news about the new election measures, Clegg’s appearance in Brussels — at a Facebook-sponsored event — unfortunately wasn’t very strong, underpinned as it was by fairly predictable pronouncements.

Clegg defended Facebook against criticism that it should be subject to the same scrutiny and responsibility as the media: “It’s raucous and unpredictable,” he said of Facebook. He did acknowledge Facebook’s shortcomings and said it’s now in a period of change. (Clegg’s known far and wide for his earnest apologies.)

He also defended the company against any negative readings of its intention to unify the back ends of its various messaging apps — while essentially confirming the the company’s desire to do so in the process.

“It’s much more simple than the heated language suggests,” he said. “What Zuckerberg says that is people are increasingly using different apps and it’s a simple view that over time, people will want to send messages from one to the other. That’s it!” See, nothing to worry about, right?

There may be some positive benefits, such as all apps taking on the encryption that is currently only a part of WhatsApp. However, it remains to be seen how linking up apps that have been built differently would work, and what other tradeoffs we will see in exchange for being able to send an Instagram snap to our WhatsApp contact a little quicker.

Asked if he was worried about being a “Brexit enabler”, Clegg curtly answered no and moved along.

Asked which technology was most worrisome for him in the future, and he named deep fakes. “We’re doing work to figure out what our defenses are against this, but that is a very worrying fact where reality and fiction bleed into each other,” he said. That could also be said about Facebook and its approach overall.

Are more Theranos -style scandals looming for investors in healthcare startups?

A team of researchers associated with the Meta Research Innovation Center at Stanford thinks so. They’ve  published a paper warning investors in life sciences startups that a systemic lack of transparency exists in their portfolio companies — creating the possibility for more multi-billion dollar implosions and scandals like the one that toppled Theranos and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes.

Indeed, one of the study’s authors, Dr. John Ioannidis, the co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and director of the University’s PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, was  among the first people to identify the risks associated with Theranos and its “stealth research”.

Now Dr. Ioannidis and his co-authors, Ioana A. Cristea and Eli M. Cahan have published a study surveying the publicly available research from the largest privately held companies in the healthcare space, and found them lacking. 

Most of the highest valued startups in healthcare have not published any significant scientific literature, the study found. Nearly half of the publications from companies worth over $1 billion came from only two startups — 23andMe and Adaptive Biotechnologies, according to the paper.

“Many years ago I was the first person to say that Theranos had a problem,” says Ioannidis. “The problem that I had then was that Theranos did not have any peer-reviewed evidence to show.”

In an interview and in their paper, Ioannidis and Cahan warn that investors have overlooked systemic problems created by the lack of transparency among healthcare startups by

They write:

“It would be tempting to dismiss the Theranos case as just one rotten apple. However, we worry that the focus on fraud puts aside a more fundamental concern. Fraud is making waves in the news, but stealth research may have a more detrimental impact.”

According to the study’s findings, more than half of the healthcare startups that are worth more than $1 billion have published no highly cited papers at all. For companies that were acquired or are publicly traded that number is around 40%.

In all, healthcare startups that are currently valued at over $1 billion published 425 Pubmed papers. And of those papers only 34 (8%, including 2 reviews) were highly cited. For companies with valuations of over $1 billion who had been acquired or are publicly traded on stock exchanges, the researchers counted 413 papers, of which 47 (11%, including 9 reviews) were highly-cited.

Digging deeper into some of the companies which had high valuations but little or no published research revealed scores of operational and technological issues for the researchers.

For instance, StemCentrx, which was bought for $10.2 billion in 2016 by AbbVie, had published 16 papers — and only one highly-cited paper. Since the acquisition, the Food and Drug Administration had imposed a delay on the readout of the company’s phase II trial for its Rova T targeted antibody drug for cancer treatment. In December a Phase III trial for Rova T as a second-line treatment for patients with advanced small cell lung cancer was halted, because the treatment wasn’t working, according to a report in Targeted Oncology. 

Acerta Pharma, another healthcare focused startup focused on cancer treatments was bought by AstraZeneca for $7.3 billion. That company published nine articles and had one highly-cited paper for a very early study of a potential treatment for relapsed chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Acerta received accelerated approval for a drug called acalabrutinib, which treats a rare form of lymphoma called mantle cell lymphoma. Two years ago, AstraZeneca had to retract data and admit that Acerta falsified preclinical data for its drug.

Then there’s Intarcia, the developer of a device for diabetes treatment that’s worth $5.5 billion. That company had its device rejected by the FDA and was forced to lay off staff and halt a couple of later stage trials. It had only published six papers — none of them very highly cited.

Ultimately, the researchers concluded that highly valued healthcare startups don’t contribute to published research and that the valuation of these companies by investors is divorced from any externally validated data.

For the researchers (and for investors) this should presents a problem.

“Many unicorns may be overvalued [21] and subject to unrealistic scientific expectations,” the study’s authors write. And they reject the argument that simply applying for — and receiving — patents is enough to prove that a technology in the healthcare space has been thoroughly vetted. “[Patents] do not offer the same level of documentation as peer-reviewed articles. For example, Theranos had over 100 patents [1], but these were unable to supplant the vacuum in their evidence,” the researchers wrote. 

Even if companies want to protect their technology, there are still ways for them to be more transparent about the results or benefits of their technology. The authors acknowledge that publishing isn’t the primary mission of startups. They can, however publish a few high-value articles, secure their technology through patents and then work with researchers, universities or hospitals to validate the technology and have those organizations publish results of the tests, the authors argue.

As the authors conclude:

Start-ups are key purveyors of innovation and disruption. Consequently, holding them to a minimal standard of evaluation from the scientific community is crucial. Participation in peer review, with all its limitations, is the best way we have to uphold this standard. We are not arguing that start-ups should divert excessive resources to having peer-reviewed papers. However, when their products are destined to affect patient health, they should neither be solely doing marketing. Confidential data sharing with potential investors or regulators cannot replace more open scrutiny by the scientific community.

 

Subscription ebook and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.

It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.

The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Scribd started out as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription ebook business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.

Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”

“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”

The adjustments that Restivo-Alessi is alluding to include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three ebooks and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)

Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”

Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year.  Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attracts between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.

“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”

Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”

And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.

“We started out by offering documents, then ebooks, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”

Dropbox announced today that it has purchased HelloSign, a company that provides lightweight document workflow and eSignature services. The company paid a hefty $230 million for the privilege.

Dropbox’s SVP of engineering, Quentin Clark, sees this as more than simply bolting on electronic signature functionality to the Dropbox solution. For him, the workflow capabilities that HelloSign added in 2017 were really key to the purchase.

“What is unique about HelloSign is that the investment they’ve made in APIs and the workflow products is really so aligned with our long term direction,” Clark told TechCrunch. “It’s not just a thing to do one more activity with Dropbox, it’s really going to help us pursue that broader vision,” he added. That vision involves extending the storage capabilities that is as the core of the Dropbox solution

This can also been seen in the context of the Extension capability that Dropbox added last year. HelloSign was actually one of the companies involved at launch. While Clark say the company will continue to encourage companies to extend the Dropbox solution, today’s acquisition gives it a capability of its own that doesn’t require a partnership.

HelloSign CEO Joseph Walla says being part of Dropbox gives HelloSign access to resources of a much larger public company, which should allow it to reach a broader market than it could on its own. “We share a design philosophy based on building the best experience for end-users, fueling our efficient business models and sales strategies. Together with Dropbox, we can bring more seamless document workflows to even more customers and dramatically accelerate our impact,”  Walla said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign, who previous held stints at Box and EMC Documentum, said the company will remain an independent entity. That means it will continue to operate with its current management structure and Clark indicated that all of the employees will be offered employment at Dropbox as part of the deal.

When you consider that HelloSign, a Bay area startup that launched in 2011, raised just $16 million, it appears to be a impressive return for investors.

This is a developing story. More to come.

Contentsquare, the cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites, has raised $60 million in further funding.

Leading the Series C round is global investment company Eurazeo. It adds to $42 million in Series B funding raised around a year ago, and includes participation from existing investors Canaan, Highland Europe, and H14.

Described as a “fully automated digital experience insights platform,” ContentSquare’s SaaS analyses customer behavior through the tracking of “billions of digital touch and mouse movements” to provide brands with insights into how to increase engagement, reduce operational costs and maximise conversion rates.

In other words, Contentsquare claims it can tell a company why conversion rates are low and, most importantly, what can be done to improve them. This can include making changes to specific page or content elements, or a combination of the two.

Related to this, Contentsquare has developed an AI engine to analyse behavioural data and offer automatic insights. In addition, the “ AutoZone” feature replaces content tagging and tag configuration with automatic element identification. This means that Contentsquare automatically recognises different page or app elements and can therefore track changes more easily to feed into the aforementioned AI engine.

More recently, the company has released two new solutions for customers: CS Live and AI Alerts, which deliver customer experience information in real-time. CS Live provides Contentsquare’s clients with a way to immediately identify consumer metrics on their websites without the need for a dashboard. AI Alerts, Contentsquare’s newest monitoring system, enables businesses to “detect and react to improve customer engagement without manual effort”.

To that end, Contentsquare is used by digital, content, product, analytics, acquisition, IT and UX teams inside numerous companies. Its customers include Walmart, Samsung, Sephora, Tiffany, LVMH, AccorHotels, Goldman Sachs, Avis, GoPro, Ikea, Nissan, and others.

Meanwhile, Contentsquare says the new capital will help Contentsquare increase research and development focused on AI and predictive analytics. It will also be deployed for further expansion across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Middle-East.

For the second time inside a year, private health information belonging to people in Singapore has been compromised.

Following a hack disclosed last summer that affected the patient records of up to 1.5 million citizens, Singapore’s Ministry of Health revealed today that personal details and the HIV-positive status of 14,200 people were posted online by a convinced fraudster.

Unlike last year’s data breach — which was caused by what appears to be a targeted cyber attack — the details this time around where exposed by unauthorized access to the ministry’s HIV Registry, which occurred in person.

Mikhy K Farrera Brochez, a U.S. citizen who spent over eight years in Singapore before being deported last year over fraud and drug-related offences, is said to have posted the information on the internet after he gained access to it via his partner Ler Teck Siang, a doctor who once led the Ministry of Health’s National Public Health Unit.

It isn’t clear where the details were posted, but the ministry said access to the leak has been “disabled.” However, since Brochez is believed to have retained details in person, it is entirely possible that they may appear again. In a bid to mitigate that threat, the Singapore government is “working with relevant parties to scan the Internet for signs of further disclosure of the information” and ” “seeking assistance from… foreign counterparts.”

“We are sorry for the anxiety and distress caused by this incident. Our priority is the wellbeing of the affected individuals. Since 26 January, we have been progressively contacting the individuals to notify them and render assistance,” the ministry wrote in an announcement.

It urged anyone who comes into contact with the information to turn it in and “not further share it.”

The registry lists the name, ID number, phone number, email address, HIV test results and related medical information for 5,400 Singapore nations who were diagnosed with HIV up to January 2013. It includes the same details for 8,800 foreigners as of December 2011, and the details of 2,400 related contacts up to May 2007.

The government introduced system safeguards in September 2016 to limit the potential for rogue access to the data. That included a two-person approval process for data downloads, a dedicated workstation to prevent unauthorized access, and the disabling on portable storage devices that could be used to transport information.

Police were first alerted that Brochez was in possession of the data in May 2016. It wasn’t until two years later that they were told that he had retained the information. Despite an investigation, they learned Brochez had disclosed the details online just over one week ago.

Brochez is currently located outside of Singapore. He worked in the country between 2008 and 2016, but was charged for faking his HIV test result using Ler’s blood and using fake qualifications to earn a work permit. After completing a two-year sentence, he was deported in May 2018

Ler is waiting on an appeal after he was handed a two-year jail term for abetting Brochez, providing false information to authorities and failing to take care of confidential information.

Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending, has added support for Amex cards.

In effect the feature is being re-instated, having existing fleetingly when Curve was in testing back in 2016 before being unceremoniously blocked by American Express. The two companies appear to have finally settled their differences, which is undoubtedly good news for Curve customers who also have a U.K. Amex card.

Technically in Beta, the new Amex feature lets Curve customers add their Amex cards to Curve and spend with Amex anywhere the Curve Mastercard is accepted. This, says the fintech startup, solves the annoyance Amex card members face with some retailers not accepting Amex cards due to the card’s higher fees.

Presumably, Curve is happy to swallow these fees to better serve its customers, although we don’t know the specific commercial terms of any commercial agreement, if indeed there is one.

In further good news, Curve says that Amex card members will continue to earn American Express Membership Rewards points when they spend with their Curve card linked to Amex and will simultaneously earn Curve Rewards points, too. Curve itself offers rewards at 50 major brands, including Amazon, Uber, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Ocado, Selfridges, BP and more.

This should mean that Curve customers who switch the Curve app to charge their Amex card under the hood will receive twice the rewards. Once from Curve and once from Amex per qualifying transaction.

Curve says it has been trialling Amex compatibility with its platform in closed Beta since November. During Beta testing, at least 500 Curve users spent more than £1 million on their Amex cards by paying with Curve, apparently.

Adds Curve founder and CEO, Shachar Bialick, in a telling statement: “Ensuring Amex compatibility with Curve was one of our priorities and most asked for features by our customers. However, bringing Amex back to Curve was not an easy feat. There were challenges around brand and commercials, some of which still exists”.

In a brief call, Bialick paid tribute to his team for getting Amex support across the line and to the “progressive regulatory and competitive landscape” in Europe and the U.K., which he says is fostering competition in the payments and financial space and enabled Curve to bring Amex into its platform. “We hope Amex will continue to support the interest of their customers,” adds the Curve founder.

In other words, this is likely evidence of a startup pushing up against the boundaries of Open Banking and PSD2 to innovate on behalf of customers and finding that the regulation holds water. Hopefully we’ll see more innovation to come in the months and years ahead as other fintech startups do the same.

South African internet conglomerate Naspers is best known for backing Chinese tech giant Tencent, but it also operates a vast network on of online classifieds businesses. That network just got a little larger after Naspers took full control of Russia-based Avito through a new $1.16 billion all-cash investment to top up its ownership to over 99 percent.

Avito is Russia’s top classifieds site, claiming 10.3 million unique daily visitors. It currently has close to 47 million listings covering categories that include goods, auto, real estate, jobs and services.

The deal, which was made via Naspers’ OLX Group, takes its ownership to 99.6 percent on a fully diluted basis and values the full company at $3.85 billion.

While classifieds may sound like a very retro corner of e-commerce, it remains a growing business (just ask Facebook, which has been growing its own marketplace and giving it increasing exposure across its own network).

Particularly in emerging and developing markets, leading local players continue to find traction. In the last six months ending September 30, Avito generated sales of 10.3 million rubles ($157.50 million), up 30 percent on the year before; and it operates with a 65.4 percent ebitda margin, with listings growing 7.4 percent to 17.46 million — according to Vostok New Ventures, one of the backers who sold up in this deal.

“Avito’s talented management team, led by CEO Vladimir Pravdivy, has demonstrated the capacity to achieve remarkable growth consistently over time,” said Martin Scheepbouwer, CEO of the OLX Group, in a statement. “Business performance is excellent and we look forward to continuing this trend by further leveraging the technology, knowledge and experience from Avito within OLX Group and vice versa.”

Naspers-OLX originally took a majority stake in 2015 through a $1.2 billion investment. Before that, it had been involved in Avito as early as 2013, when the company was formed by a merger between Slando.ru and OLX.ru, two rivals that were both backed by Naspers.

Consolidating its position in companies where it’s already strong helps Naspers also use the cash from those operations to invest in newer areas of business like tapping into more on-demand services and innovations in financial services to complement the legacy areas.

“Avito is the leading online classifieds player in Russia and our decision to increase our stake reflects our belief in the long-term prospects of this great business and the Russian internet market,” said Bob van Dijk, Naspers CEO, in a statement. “This investment further strengthens our global position in online classifieds, a core focus for Naspers alongside online food delivery and fintech.”

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now boasts 1.5 million current account customers, has partnered with fintech startup Flux to bring itemised receipts and loyalty points to its banking app.

Due to be officially unveiled at a joint event in London on Wednesday, the new functionality means that if you’re a customer of Monzo — and once you’ve opted in — Flux will deliver digital receipts, rewards and loyalty to the Monzo app in real-time, whenever you spend at a Flux partner merchant. Currently this includes EAT, Costa Coffee, itsu, pod, and pure, while I understand a number of other major merchants are in the pipeline and could be announced quite soon.

In the long-term, Flux wants to become the proprietary technology platform for the interchange of item-level digital receipt data, but has always faced a chicken and egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. As I wrote when the company raised its Series A in December, cracking this problem has clearly started to gather momentum.

Noteworthy is that Monzo had actually been trialing Flux in a very small closed beta since 2017, but progress had stalled while the challenger bank built out its current account offering and figured out its “marketplace banking” strategy. Related to this is the question of how deep third-party integration should go and how wide the Monzo marketplace should cast its net in terms of the number of competing third-party products vying for attention.

To that end, the Flux integration feels pretty wholehearted. This includes a call-to-action within the Monzo app to link your account to Flux when you spend in a Flux partner merchant. On-boarding users to Flux in context — ie right after the point of purchase — and therefore unlocking itemised digital receipts immediately and retroactively, will very likely make opting into the feature a no-brainer.

Flux’s integration with the Barclays Launchpad app works in a similar fashion. However, within challenger bank Starling, the other Flux bank partner, no such call-to-action exists. Instead, it can only be enabled within the Starling Marketplace, which at two taps deep feels slightly buried for now.

Meanwhile, although the current focus is building receipt infrastructure, the Flux vision is much broader. By bridging the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app, the startup can not only power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics, it could also offer new types of enriched experiences for consumers.

This could in the future include letting you easily track your eating out habits, right down to item-level rather than just merchant category, as part of your general health goals. Or providing much deeper spending analytics to help you improve financial wellbeing. In other words, there’s a great deal more latent value in item-level receipt data to be unlocked yet.

Cue Matty Cusden-Ross, CEO and Founder at Flux: “Flux’s mission is to liberate the worlds’ receipt data in order to enrich trillions of experiences globally. Today we’re excited to be expanding our partnership with Monzo to bring automated receipts and rewards to even more people. Monzo share our vision of the future and as Flux continues to scale across bigger and bigger merchants we can’t wait to make Flux available everywhere”.