Author: azeeadmin

When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card.

Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with 0 percent APR financing. It’s also launching Android compatibility in beta testing (the carrier was iOS-only until now), and is selling Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices.

Visible is one of several attempts by companies large and small to rethink the wireless carrier model. In this case, the service is backed by Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) and uses Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but it says it operates as an independent startup.

As for what Visible is actually offering, you pay $40 a month for unlimited text, voice, data and hotspot usage at speeds of up to 5 Mbps. There’s no contract, no extra fees and you manage everything through an app on your phone.

Now, on top of that, Visible is selling 11 different iPhone models, along with two different Samsung Galaxy models. You can either pay the full price upfront or sign up for financing from Affirm — which, again, has a 0 percent APR and, for some consumers, won’t require a downpayment.

The company says there are no hidden fees (like an activation, SIM card kit or restocking fee) either. When asked how Visible is able to offer this kind of pricing, a spokesperson pointed to the company’s “all digital business model” — it has lower costs because it’s not paying for physical infrastructure like stores.

In addition, Visible is introducing a new program called Visible Protect, which covers you (and provides access to Apple Care) in cases of loss, theft or hardware damage after the manufacturer’s warranty expires. To do this, it’s partnering with Assurant. Pricing starts at $10 per month.

“Above anything else, service, quality of product, and simplicity are what matter most,” said Visible CEO Miguel Quiroga in a statement. “From the start of our business, we wanted to set a new bar for the way things are done by re-defining and evolving wireless and the overall retail experience. With every new offering, including our 0% [APR] financing, no fees for device purchase, and Visible Protect, we will advance our mission of removing complicated barriers for all consumers.”

Humio, a startup that provides a real-time log analysis service for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Accel. It previously raised its seed round from WestHill and Trifork.

The company, which has offices in San Francisco, the U.K. and Denmark, tells me that it saw a 13x increase in its annual revenue in 2018. Current customers include Bloomberg, Microsoft and Netlify .

“We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how companies build, manage and run their systems,” said Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt. “This shift is driven by the urgency to adopt cloud-based and microservice-driven application architectures for faster development cycles, and dealing with sophisticated security threats. These customer requirements demand a next-generation logging solution that can provide live system observability and efficiently store the massive amounts of log data they are generating.”

To offer them this solution, Humio raised this round with an eye toward fulfilling the demand for its service, expanding its research and development teams and moving into more markets across the globe.

As Schmidt also noted, many organizations are rather frustrated by the log management and analytics solutions they currently have in place. “Common frustrations we hear are that legacy tools are too slow — on ingestion, searches and visualizations — with complex and costly licensing models,” she said. “Ops teams want to focus on operations — not building, running and maintaining their log management platform.”

To build this next-generation analysis tool, Humio built its own time series database engine to ingest the data, with open-source tools like Scala, Elm and Kafka in the backend. As data enters the pipeline, it’s pushed through live searches and then stored for later queries. As Humio VP of Engineering Christian Hvitved tells me, though, running ad-hoc queries is the exception, and most users only do so when they encounter bugs or a DDoS attack.

The query language used for the live filters is also pretty straightforward. That was a conscious decision, Hvitved said. “If it’s too hard, then users don’t ask the question,” he said. “We’re inspired by the Unix philosophy of using pipes, so in Humio, larger searches are built by combining smaller searches with pipes. This is very familiar to developers and operations people since it is how they are used to using their terminal.”

Humio charges its customers based on how much data they want to ingest and for how long they want to store it. Pricing starts at $200 per month for 30 days of data retention and 2 GB of ingested data.

Blue Prism helped coin the term robotic process automation (RPA) when the company was founded back in 2001 to help companies understand the notion of automating mundane business processes. Today, it’s releasing updates to that platform including an updated marketplace for exchanging connectors to extend the main product, and in some cases, adding a layer of intelligence.

The product at its core has allowed non-technical users to automate a business process by simply dragging components into an interface. All of the process coding has been automated on the back end. You could have a process that scans a check, enters a figure in a spreadsheet and sends an automated message to another employee (or digital process) when it’s done.

Moss sees a world in which companies are looking to digitization to stave off growing competition. Big insurance companies, financial services and other workflow-intensive organizations need to look beyond the automation capabilities his company has given them and that is going to require an intelligence layer.

Today, the company wants to extend its core capability by offering more advanced tools in the Blue Prism Digital Exchange marketplace. The Exchange gives partners and customers the ability to create and share tools to enhance Blue Prism. To encourage those entities to add AI capabilities, the company also announced a new AI engine for building connectors to advanced AI tools from Amazon, Google, IBM and other AI platforms.

But the company doesn’t want to simply leave it to partners to provide the innovation. It wants that happening in-house as well, and to that end it has created Blue Prism Labs, where it will work with these same technologies looking for ways to inject its RPA products with artificial intelligence. This could lead to more sophisticated automated workflows down the road such as using image recognition technology to add metadata about a photo automatically.

While Blue Prism has been a public company since 2016, the market has attracted a slew of startups, which have in turn been attracting big bucks from investors on gaudy valuations. UIPath, a NYC RPA company has raised almost $450 million. Its most recent round in September was for $225 million on a $3 billion valuation. Automation Anywhere, a San Jose RPA startup, has raised $550 million including an enormous $300 million investment from SoftBank in November on a valuation of $2.6 billion.

A year ago, Facebook-owned WhatsApp officially introduced its standalone app aimed at small business customers. Today, the WhatsApp Business app has grown to reach 5 million business customers, the company says. And now it’s making the app easier to use on the desktop and the web by porting over several of the most popular features that were previously available only on mobile.

These include tools to organize and filter chats, as well as to quickly reply to customer inquiries.

Quick Replies, as the latter feature is called, lets businesses respond to common questions from customers with pre-written replies. It’s similar to a feature Facebook introduced several years ago, then called “Saved Replies,” that allowed business owners with Facebook Pages to respond to customers with canned messages.

On WhatsApp Business, you can trigger the quick replies by press the “/” button on your keyboard.

The feature joins several other customer service features, like automated greeting messages that are triggered when the customer pings the business account, or away messages that can be scheduled for those times when you’re not able to immediately answer new inquiries.

The other two features now rolling out to web and desktop users are labels and chat list filters.

The former lets you organize contacts using labels, and the latter lets you filter chat list by categories like unread messages, groups, or broadcast lists. Like Quick Replies, these were previously available on mobile.

The idea, the company explains, is to make it easier on business owners who are working from their computer – sending invoices, scheduling appointments, and responding to customer inquiries. They shouldn’t have to turn to their phone to use these sorts of basic customer service features.

The new web and desktop features are rolling out today, says WhatsApp.

Leveraging years of building out white-labeled fitness applications for the health and wellness spokesmodels made Instagram famous, wellness startup, Plankk,  is now launching a digital app called The Plankk Studio where fans can take lessons from their favorite Instagram stars. 

The company spent years building apps for the Instagram set, putting up 37 white-labeled applications which contained the diet plans and exercise regimes of popular influencers like Whitney Johns, Christina Vargas, Kino MacGregor, James Ellis, and Ashley Kaltwasser.

The concept isn’t new. The Nike Training Club App is a free mobile app that offers workouts from Nike trainers, Freeletics, Pear or literally hundreds of other fitness apps that combine coaching and an exercise regime.

Indeed, many of these trainers on Plankk also have classes available on YouTube or on Instagram. What’s different according to chief executive Colin Szopa is the roster of fitness gurus that Plankk can offer, and the incentive to go live on the platform so users can be sure they’re getting time with their favorite Instagram influencer.

Plankk is launching with over 1,000 videos and is available online and on iOS and Android. the company said it will launch on Roku, Apple TV, and other OTT options in the next few weeks. 

The on-demand workouts are available through a $14.99 monthly subscription and the company is creating a token-based payment system for live classes — ideally incentivizing the trainers with a better cut in the token-based economy.

Founded in 2016, the company claims that through its network of white-labeled apps and partnerships with influencers it reaches over 110 million people.

Plankk is also offering more than just fitness classes through its studio. The company is working with MacGregor, a yoga instructor to provide Ashtanga yoga lessions through its link to MacGregor’s Omstars channel.

Plankk Studio provides its influencer creators with an additional revenue stream in which they are paid on a per-user basis for on-demand workouts and live classes. In addition to familiarizing members with trainers’ personalities and content, the platform offers influencers additional monetization options by promoting their personal apps to users who stream their classes.

Apple’s secretive efforts to develop a self-driving car — its so-called ‘Project Titan’ — have taken a hard turn in 2019 after it emerged that the iPhone-maker has reassigned 200 employees previously involved in its development.

That’s according to CNBC which, citing sources, reported that a portion of the 200 staff were moved to other projects inside Apple, while others — and it isn’t clear how many — were let go altogether. The news was enough to prompt Apple to respond with a confirmation that included a rare mention of its automotive ambitions.

“We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple. As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple. We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever,” a spokesperson said.

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for additional comment but, at the time of writing, the company had not responded.

CNBC reported that the layoffs had been expected and were seen as an imminent restructuring under Project Titan’s new leadership, long-time Apple veteran Bobs Mansfield and Doug Field, Apple’s former VP of Mac hardware engineering who rejoined from the company in October after a spell with Tesla.

Still, not a lot is known about the project. There have been sneak peaks — including a look at the unorthodox tech stack for the vehicle roof, which included a suite of sensors and autonomous hardware — while the company was said to have doubled its fleet as of last January. CEO Tim Cook previously called Apple’s car push “the mother of all AI projects,” indicating that, despite the mystery, it is certainly taking up a huge amount of focus for the company.

This isn’t the first time Apple has restructured the project. Back in 2016, it was said to have abandoned the bold target of developing its own vehicle instead opting to develop vehicle smarts. Exactly what the strategy is now following Field’s appointment and this restructuring is not unclear.

Tencent has finally come out of a prolonged freeze on game approvals as Beijing granted licenses to two of its mobile games this month.

According to a notice published by China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television on January 24, Tencent is one of nearly 200 games assigned licenses in January.

That’s big news for the Shenzhen-based firm which has seen its share price plummet in the past months because the licensing halt crippled its ability to generate gaming revenues. Tencent is best known for its immensely popular WeChat messenger, but gaming makes up a bulk of its earnings.

China resumed its game approval process in December after a nine-month hiatus during which it worked to reshuffle its main regulating bodies for games. However, it left Tencent, the country’s biggest game publisher, and runner-up NetEase off its first batch of approved titles. NetEase also scored its first post-freeze license this month.

Despite the thawing, industry experts warn that approving will come at a much slower rate than before as regulators look to more closely monitor game contents, putting the burden on game developers and publishers to decipher new industry rules.

“The size of the gaming company does not matter. It matters how fast the company can be adapting to the new set of rules and guidelines,” Shenzhen-based game consultant Ilya Gutov told TechCrunch in December.

More to come

Jigsaw, the cybersecurity-focused division owned by Google parent Alphabet, is now allowing political organizations in Europe to sign up for its anti-web-flooding technology for free.

Until now, the free-to-use technology designed to protect political campaigns and websites against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — dubbed Project Shield — was only available to news sites and journalists, human rights sites and elections monitoring sites in the U.S.

Now, Jigsaw is extending those protections to European political operators ahead of contentious parliamentary elections later this year.

The anti-DDoS technology aims to protect websites and services from being pummeled with tons of junk internet traffic from multiple sources at once. It protects against several types of DDoS attacks — and not just the traditional layer 3 or 4 protocol-based attacks but also the more powerful layer 7 attacks that involve large volume, often thanks to DNS amplification.

By caching a website, the technology absorbs a lot of the malicious traffic, and filtering harmful traffic keeps sites running.

Jigsaw’s move comes at a time when highly anticipated elections are expected to adjust political powers across the continent — particularly in what’s left of the European Union, after the controversial British departure from the EU, known as “Brexit.” Anti-political actors and nation-state hackers have long worked hard in Europe to disrupt elections and sow discord in an effort to discredit results.

Some have outright launched flooding attacks to down websites at a time when they’re most needed.

In the last year alone, several flooding attacks left critical websites downed for hours and longer. Election sites from Tennessee to the Czech Republic were downed in an effort to disrupt the voting process.

Project Shield said it’s offering the service for free to all European political organizations and campaigns, said Jigsaw’s Dan Keyserling in an email to TechCrunch. That’s in contrast to existing providers, like Cloudflare, that sell DDoS protection.

“The spread of DDoS attacks is a global issue,” said Keyserling. “Just scanning the news showed us it is a growing problem.”

Singapore’s digital fintech companies are attracting investor attention and dollars in 2019. Fresh from Singapore Life — a digital-only insurer — raising $33 million across two recently closed rounds, so Credit Culture, a digital loan specialist — has banked SG$40 million ($29.5 million) ahead of its imminent launch.

Credit Culture has raised its capital from Malaysia’s RCE Capital Berhad in a deal that allows the investor to potentially take a stake of up 30 percent in the startup. Its investment is via five-year bonds that are secured with the loan receivables from Credit Culture and include granted call options for taking that stake — in other words: this isn’t your regular startup deal.

RCE Capital Berhad said in a filing that Credit Culture has already raised SG$4 million ($2.9 million) via a seed investment, and it appears that it is financially set ahead of its launch.

“We are currently well-positioned with the recent injection of funds. That being said, we are always open to exploring various options to grow especially for regional expansion,” Credit Culture a representative told TechCrunch in an emailed response.

Founded by former bankers, Credit Culture is set to become one of Singapore’s first digital financial service startups after its parent company, DEY, secured approval to operate a moneylending business as part of a pilot to test online fintech services.

Since it hasn’t launched yet, there’s not a huge amount to say about the business, but its goal is to offer personal loans to Singapore-based customers using digital channels, so its website and mobile apps. The company plans to vet applicants using a mixture of existing platforms for data, including government initiative like MyInfo, and its own credit-scoring engine for creditworthiness assessment. It will also require face-to-face verification for loans to be granted, it confirmed.

Like Singapore Life and other digital-only ventures, including Hong Kong’s Bowtie, the objective is to pass on cost savings from being a purely online player — i.e. not operating branches and other physical consumer-facing outlets — and make prices fully transparent to applicants.

As you’d expect, Singapore is the initial focus for the company but it is already eying potential market expansions.

“We do have plans to expand to other Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines and Indonesia,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “There is a large potential given the need for personal financing and the large unbanked population segments.”

After days of intermittent blackouts at the order of the Zimbabwe’s Minister of State for National Security, ISPs have restored connectivity through a judicial order issued Monday.  

The cyber-affair adds Zimbabwe to a growing list of African countries—including Cameroon, Congo, and Ethiopia—whose governments have restricted internet expression in recent years.

The debacle demonstrates how easily internet access—a baseline for all tech ecosystems—can be taken away at the hands of the state.  

It also provides another case study for techies and ISPs regaining their cyber rights. Internet and social media are back up in Zimbabwe — at least for now.   

Protests lead to blackout

Similar to net shutdowns around the continent, politics and protests were the catalyst. Shortly after the government announced a dramatic increase in fuel prices on January 12, Zimbabwe’s Congress of Trade Unions called for a national strike.

Web and app blackouts in the Southern African country followed demonstrations that broke out in several cities. A government crackdown ensued with deaths reported.

“That began Monday [January 14]. A few demonstrations around the country become violent…Then on Tuesday morning there was a block on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp,” TechZim CEO Tinashe Nyahasha told TechCrunch on a call from Harare.

On January 15, Zimbabwe’s largest mobile carrier Econet Wireless confirmed via SMS and a message from founder Strive Masiyiwa that it had complied with a directive from the Minister of State for National Security to shutdown internet.

Net access was restored, taken down again, then restored, but social media sites remained blocked through January 21.

Data provided to TechCrunch from Oracle’s Internet Intelligence research unit confirm the net blackouts on January 16 and 18.

VPNs, government response

Throughout the restrictions, many of Zimbabwe’s citizens and techies resorted to VPNs and workarounds to access net and social media, according to Nyahasha.

Throughout the interruption TechZim ran updated stories on ways to bypass the cyber restrictions.

The Zimbabwean government’s response to the net shutdown started with denial—one minister referred to it as a congestion problem on local TV—to presidential spokesperson George Charamba invoking its necessity for national security reasons.

Then President Dambudzo Mnangawa took to Twitter to announce he would skip Davos meetings and return home to address the country’s unrest—a move panned online given his government’s restrictions on citizens using social media.    

The Embassy of Zimbabwe in Washington, DC and Ministry for ICT did not respond to TechCrunch inquiries on the country’s internet and app restrictions.

Court ruling, takeaways

On Monday this week, Zimbabwe’s high court ordered an end to any net restrictions, ruling only the country’s president, not the National Security Minister, could legally block the internet. Econet’s Zimbabwe Chief of Staff Lovemore Nyatsine and sources on the ground confirmed to TechCrunch that net and app access were back up Tuesday.  

Zimbabwe’s internet debacle created yet another obstacle for the country’s tech scene. The 2018 departure of 37–year President Robert Mugabe—a  hero to some and progress impeding dictator to others—sparked hope for the lifting of long-time economic sanctions on Zimbabwe and optimism for its startup scene.

Some of that has been dashed by subsequent political instability and worsening economic conditions since Mugabe’s departure, but not all of it, according to TechZim CEO Tinashe Nyahasha.   

“There was momentum and talk of people coming home and investing seed money. That’s slowed down…but that momentum is still there. It’s just not as fast as it could have been if the government had lived up to the expectations,” he said.  

Of the current macro-environment for Zimbabwe’s tech sector, “The truth is, it’s bad but it has been much worse,” Tinashe said

With calls for continued protests, Monday’s court ruling is likely not the last word on the internet face-off between the government and Zimbabwe’s ISPs and tech community.

Per the ruling, a decision to restrict net or apps will have to come directly from Zimbabwe’s president, who will weigh the pros and cons.

On a case by case basis, African governments may see the economic and reputational costs of internet shutdowns are exceeding whatever benefits they seek to achieve.

Cameroon’s 2017 shutdown, covered here by TechCrunch, cost businesses millions and spurred international condemnation when local activists created a  #BringBackOurInternet campaign that ultimately succeeded.

In the case of Zimbabwe, global internet rights group Access Now sprung to action, attaching its #KeepItOn hashtag to calls for the country’s government to reopen cyberspace soon after digital interference began.

Further attempts to restrict net and app access in Zimbabwe will likely revive what’s become a somewhat ironic cycle for cyber shutdowns. When governments cut off internet and social media access, citizens still find ways to use internet and social media to stop them.