Author: azeeadmin

Axa Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of insurance company Axa, is raising an early-stage fund. Today’s new $150 million fund (€130 million) is called AVP Early Stage II.

Previously, Axa Venture Partners had raised a $110 million early-stage fund back in 2015. So far, it has invested in 40 companies, such as Hackajob, K4Connect, Futurae or Zenjob and Happytal.

When it comes to investment strategy, Axa Venture Partners plans to invest in early startups based in Europe, North America and Israel with this new fund. The firm will invest as much as $6 million per company.

Axa Venture Partners also operates a growth fund and invests in other funds through a fund of funds. And the firm has offices in Paris, London, San Francisco and New York.

The global crypto market may have tanked last year, but notable names have joined forces to develop Bitcoin and blockchain financial services in Japan, which has emerged as one of the world’s most crypto-friendly markets.

Blockstream, a blockchain startup founded by Bitcoin contributors, announced this week that it has launched a joint venture in Japan alongside Digital Garage, an early-stage investor/incubator that’s backed local launches from Twitter, Square and others, and financial services firm Tokyo Tanshi.

Crypto Garage — as the new venture is called — is “is dedicated to building Bitcoin and blockchain solutions for the Japanese institutional market.” The venture was first unveiled last year, and it looks like Blockstream recently came onboard through an undisclosed investment. The startup said it is providing “technical expertise” for the effort.

That’s about all the color on the venture for now, although it has released its first product, “SETTLENET.” That is described as a platform that uses Liquid Network, Blockstream’s blockchain that is designed for exchanges and brokers with a focus on speed and security.

Settlenet — because nobody likes all-caps product names — is said to have already gotten clearance from the Japanese Financial Services Agency (FSA), which regulates exchanges and crypto projects, and its first launch will be a stablecoin for the Japanese Yen. The goal is very much to arm exchanges with liquidity and, as such, the stablecoin will be tradable for Bitcoin pegged to the Liquid sidechain using atomic swaps.

The companies have collaborated for some time already. An existing investor in Blockstream, Digital Garage has plowed a further $10 million into the business in what is its third investment since 2016. That deal takes Blockstream to around $110 million raised to date.

Tokyo Tanshi, meanwhile, is a brokerage firm that was founded over 100 years ago. It has worked with Digital Garage on crypto projects since last year, when the two companies first announced Crypto Garage and a broader goal to operate blockchain financial services in Japan.

On-demand food delivery startup Munchery is ceasing operations effective immediately, the startup announced in an e-mail to customers on Monday.

Founded in 2010, the San Francisco-based business had raised a total of $125 million in venture capital funding, reaching a valuation of $300 million with an $87 million round in 2015, according to PitchBook. Munchery was backed by Greycroft, ACME Ventures (formerly known as Sherpa Capital), Menlo Ventures, e.Ventures, Cota Capital, M13 and more.

“Since 2010, we have been committed to bringing fresh, local, and delicious meals into your homes along with all our customers across the country,” the company wrote in today’s e-mail announcement. “We’ve been delighted to work with world-renowned chefs, experiment with diverse and unique ingredients and recipes, and be a part of your holiday feasts and traditions. We have also enjoyed giving back to our community through meal donations, volunteer service, and so much more.”

The news comes as little surprise considering Munchery laid off 257 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce, in May after shutting down its Seattle, Los Angeles and New York operations. At the time, the company said it planned to double down on its biggest market, San Francisco, which would help it “achieve profitability on the near term, and build a long-term, sustainable business.”

Munchery, however, failed to deliver on those promises. On top of the 2018 layoffs, Munchery for years struggled to navigate the challenging plains of on-demand food delivery. To stay afloat, the startup shape-shifted quite a bit from originally launching as a ready-to-eat meal delivery service to delivering meal-kits to creating an $8.95 a month subscription plan for repeat customers and finally, opening up a shop inside a San Francisco BART station in a bid to win over the commuter crowd.

Munchery is just the latest in a line of food delivery startups to shutter. Doughbies, an on-demand cookie delivery business, closed its doors in 2018. Sprig, Maple and Josephine are amongst the others to falter under the pressure of a crowded market.

Munchery didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

On the surface, “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo” sounds like a simple show: Over the course of eight episodes, organizing guru Marie Kondo helps a variety Los Angeles residents sort through their belongings and clean up their homes.

But for some, following Kondo’s KonMari method can be a surprisingly difficult or emotional experience — after all, it’s really about looking at what we own and where we live. And the show has led to broader discussions around things like the value of books and how gender still plays a big role in domestic labor.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that our discussion of the new Netflix series ends up being similarly wide ranging.

In a first for the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by two guest hosts — Sarah Perez and Catherine Shu. The conversation quickly moves beyond a straightforward review into a broader conversation about Kondo’s ideas. It seems like a significant portion of the TechCrunch team has been inspired by the show to start going through their stuff and identifying what “sparks joy,” though some of us have been more systematic and successful than others.

We also discuss Hulu’s surprise release of a Fyre Festival documentary just a few days before Netflix launched a similar film — a situation that’s led the filmmakers behind both projects to point out questionable choices made by their competitors.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Last September, two former National Football League players launched an app called Politiscope to track the voting records of members of Congress and the bills that they were introducing — and provide non-partisan information about what those bills and votes would mean to voters.

The pro-football-playing brothers, Walter Powell Jr. and Brandon Williams, launched the app to provide an accurate accounting of what Congressional leadership was doing — something the two felt was necessary given the political climate and the ways in which the traditional sources of education on political issues were being called into question.

“A claim of ‘Fake News’ from the current national leaders in response to unflattering news threatens this nation’s democracy and the concept that this great nation was built upon,” said Powell in a statement when the app first launched in September.

Now the two brothers are expanding Politiscope’s reach by launching the Android version of the service.

While the scope of Politiscope may be expanding, the brothers make clear that the company’s mission is still the same. To provide unbiased information sourced from places like the Congressional Budget Office, the Library of Congress, and the Pew Research Center.

Politiscope has two main features in the app.

The first is its “Today in Congress” section, which provides information on all of the proposed legislation that’s making its way through the House of Representatives and the Senate. The app summarizes the bills and gives statements from Republicans and Democrats on how they view the bill that’s been proposed.

The second feature is its profiles of elected officials. The profiles include voting records, business records and other information culled from Federal records and publicly available information to give voters a clear picture of their representatives in government based solely on data.

“Unless you’re studying the actual legislation, it’s almost impossible to find a good source of political information that isn’t at least somewhat slanted, either to the right or the left,” says Powell. “Today’s media is becoming more and more widely split along liberal and conservative lines, and political rhetoric is growing increasingly devoid of clear and objective information. Politiscope exists to eliminate bias and help people understand what’s actually going on in the world of U.S. politics.”

Most founders don’t walk away from their startup after raising $32 million and reaching 1000 clients. But Roger Dickey’s heart is in consumer tech, and his company Gigster had pivoted to doing outsourced app development for enterprises instead of scrappy entrepreneurs.

So today Dickey announced that he’d left his role as Gigster CEO, with former VMware VP Christopher Keane who’d sold it his startup WaveMaker coming in to lead Gigster in October. Now, Dickey is launching Untitled Labs, a “search lab” designed to test multiple consumer tech ideas in “social and professional networking, mobility, personal finance, premium services, health & wellness, travel, photography, and dating” before building out one

Untitled Labs is starting off with $2.8 million in seed funding from early Gigster investors and other angels including Founders Fund, Felicia Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Nikita Bier of TBH (acquired by Facebook), and Zynga co-founder Justin Waldron.

Investors lined up after seeing the success of Dickey’s last two search labs. In 2007, his Curiosoft lab revamped classic DOS game Drugwars as a Facebook game called Dopewars and sold it to Zynga where it became the wildly popular Mafia Wars. He did it again in 2014, building Gigster out of Liquid Labs and eventually raising $32 million for it in rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Redpoint. Dickey had proven he wasn’t just dicking around and his search labs could experiment their way to an A-grade startup.

“I loved learning about B2B but over the years I realized my true passions were in consumer and I kinda got the itch to try something new” Dickey tells me. “These things happen in the life-cycle of a company. The person who starts it isn’t always the same person to take it to an IPO. Gigster’s doing incredibly well. It was just a really vanilla separation in the best interest of all parties.”

Gigster’s remaining co-founder and CTO Debo Olaosebikan will stay with the startup, but tells me he’ll be “moving away from a lot of the day-to-day management.” He’ll be in a more public facing role, evangelizing the vision of digital transformation to big clients hoping Gigster can equip them with the apps their customers demand. “We’ve gotten to a really good place on the backs of the founders and to get it to the next level inside of enterprise, having people who’ve done this, lived this, worked in enterprise for a long time makes sense for the company.”

Olaosebikan and Dickey both confirm there was no misconduct or other funny business that triggered the CEO’s departure, and he’ll stay on the Gigster board. Dickey tells me that Gigster’s business managing teams of freelance product managers, engineers, and designers to handle product development for big clients has grown revenue every quarter. It now has 1200 clients including almost 10% of Fortune 500 companies. Olaosebikan says “We have a great repeatable sales model. We can grow profitably and then we can figure out financing. We’re not in a hurry to raise money.”

Since leaving Gigster, Dickey has been meeting with investors and entrepreneurs to noodle on what’s in their “idea shelf” — the product and company concepts these techies imagine but are too busy to implement themselves. Meanwhile, he’s seeking a few elite engineers and designers to work through Untitled’s prospects.

Dickey said he came up with the “search labs” definition since he and others had found success with the strategy that no one had formalized. The search labs model contrasts with three other ways people typically form startups:

• Traditional Startup: Founders come up with one idea and raise from venture firms to build it into a company that’s quick to start and lets them keep a lot of equity, but these startups often fail because they lack product market fit. Examples: Facebook, SpaceX.
• Startup Accelerators and Incubators: Founders come up with one idea and enter an accelerator or incubator that provides funding and education for lots of startups in exchange for a small slice of equity. Founders sometimes learn their idea won’t work and pivot during the program, which is why accelerators seek to fund great teams, but otherwise operate traditionally. Examples: Y Combinator, 500 Startups.
• Startup Studio: The studios’ founders work with entrepreneurs to come up with a small number of ideas while keeping a significant of the equity. The entrepreneurs operate semi-autonomously but with the advantage of shared resources. Examples: Expa, Betaworks.
• Search Lab: Founders conceptualize and experiment with a small number of startup ideas, then focus the company around the most promising prototype. Examples: Untitled Labs, Midnight Labs (turned into TBH)

Dickey tells me that after 80 angel investments, going to every recent Y Combinator Demo Day, and talking with key players across the industry, the search lab method was the best way to hone in on his best idea rather than just going on a hunch. Given that approach, he went with “Untitled” so he could save the branding work for when the right product emerges. Dickey concludes “We’re trying to keep it really barebones. We don’t have an office, don’t have a logo, and we’re not going to make swag. We’re just going to find the next business as efficiently as possible.”

AIESEC, a non-profit that bills itself as the “world’s largest youth-run organization,” exposed more than four million intern applications with personal and sensitive information on a server without a password.

Bob Diachenko, an independent security researcher, found an unprotected Elasticsearch database containing the applications on January 11, a little under a month after the database was first exposed.

The database contained “opportunity applications” contained the applicant’s name, gender, date of birth, and the reasons why the person was applying for the internship, according to Diachenko’s blog post on SecurityDiscovery, shared exclusively with TechCrunch. The database also contains the date and time when an application was rejected.

AIESEC, which has more than 100,000 members in 126 countries, said the database was inadvertently exposed 20 days prior to Diachenko’s notification — just before Christmas — as part of an “infrastructure improvement project.”

The database was secured the same day of Diachenko’s private disclosure.

Laurin Stahl, AEISEC’s global vice president of platforms, confirmed the exposure to TechCrunch but claimed that no more than 40 users were affected.

Stahl said that the agency had “informed the users who would most likely be on the top of frequent search results” in the database — some 40 individuals, he said — after the agency found no large requests of data from unfamiliar IP addresses.

“Given the fact that the security researcher found the cluster, we informed the users who would most likely be on the top of frequent search results on all indices of the cluster,” said Stahl. “The investigation we did over the weekend showed that no more than 50 data records affecting 40 users were available in these results.”

Stahl said that the agency informed Dutch data protection authorities of the exposure three days after the exposure.

“Our platform and entire infrastructure is still hosted in the EU,” he said, despite its recently relocation to headquarters in Canadia.

Like companies and organizations, non-profits are not exempt from European rules where EU citizens’ data is collected, and can face a fine of up to €20 million or four percent — whichever is higher — of their global annual revenue for serious GDPR violations.

It’s the latest instance of an Elasticsearch instance going unprotected.

A massive database leaking millions of real-time SMS text message data was found and secured last year, a popular massage service, and phone contact lists on five million users from an exposed emoji app.

AIESEC, a non-profit that bills itself as the “world’s largest youth-run organization,” exposed more than four million intern applications with personal and sensitive information on a server without a password.

Bob Diachenko, an independent security researcher, found an unprotected Elasticsearch database containing the applications on January 11, a little under a month after the database was first exposed.

The database contained “opportunity applications” contained the applicant’s name, gender, date of birth, and the reasons why the person was applying for the internship, according to Diachenko’s blog post on SecurityDiscovery, shared exclusively with TechCrunch. The database also contains the date and time when an application was rejected.

AIESEC, which has more than 100,000 members in 126 countries, said the database was inadvertently exposed 20 days prior to Diachenko’s notification — just before Christmas — as part of an “infrastructure improvement project.”

The database was secured the same day of Diachenko’s private disclosure.

Laurin Stahl, AEISEC’s global vice president of platforms, confirmed the exposure to TechCrunch but claimed that no more than 40 users were affected.

Stahl said that the agency had “informed the users who would most likely be on the top of frequent search results” in the database — some 40 individuals, he said — after the agency found no large requests of data from unfamiliar IP addresses.

“Given the fact that the security researcher found the cluster, we informed the users who would most likely be on the top of frequent search results on all indices of the cluster,” said Stahl. “The investigation we did over the weekend showed that no more than 50 data records affecting 40 users were available in these results.”

Stahl said that the agency informed Dutch data protection authorities of the exposure three days after the exposure.

“Our platform and entire infrastructure is still hosted in the EU,” he said, despite its recently relocation to headquarters in Canadia.

Like companies and organizations, non-profits are not exempt from European rules where EU citizens’ data is collected, and can face a fine of up to €20 million or four percent — whichever is higher — of their global annual revenue for serious GDPR violations.

It’s the latest instance of an Elasticsearch instance going unprotected.

A massive database leaking millions of real-time SMS text message data was found and secured last year, a popular massage service, and phone contact lists on five million users from an exposed emoji app.

If you leave something on the internet long enough, someone will hack it.

The reality is that many device manufacturers make it far too easy by using default passwords that are widely documented, allowing anyone to log in as “admin” and snoop around. Often, there’s no password at all.

Enter “Shodan Safari,” a popular part-game, part-expression of catharsis, where hackers tweet and share their worst finds on Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases popular with security researchers. Almost anything that connects to the internet gets scraped and tagged in Shodan’s vast search engine — including what the device does and internet ports are open, which helps Shodan understand what the device is. If a particular port is open, it could be a webcam. If certain header comes back, it’s backend might be viewable in the browser.

Think of Shodan Safari as internet dumpster diving.

From cameras to routers, hospital CT scanners to airport explosive detector units, you’d be amazed — and depressed — at what you can find exposed on the open internet.

Like a toilet, or prized pot plant, or — as we see below — someone’s actual goat.

The reality is that Shodan scares people — and it should. It’s a window into the world of absolute insecurity. It’s not just exposed devices but databases — storing anything from two-factor codes to your voter records, and where you’re going to the gym tonight. But devices take up the bulk of what’s out there. Exposed CCTV cameras, license plate readers, sex toys, and smart home appliances. If it’s out there and exposed, it’s probably on Shodan.

If there’s ever a lesson to device makers, not everything has to be connected to the internet.

Here’s some of the worst things we’ve found so far. (And here’s where to send your best finds.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to a leaked image from Evan Blass, Samsung’s new flagship device could come in three different versions — the Samsung Galaxy S10, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the Samsung Galaxy S10E.

That new leak lines up with previous leaks. As you can see on the photo, the new devices don’t have a notch. They feature a hole-punch selfie camera instead. If you’re looking for the fingerprint sensor, Samsung could choose to embed it in the screen.

Just like in previous years, in addition to the main S10, there will be a bigger version of the device — the S10+. On this photo, you can see that the bigger version has two selfie cameras instead of one.

But the S10E is a new addition to the lineup. Samsung is launching a more affordable version of the S10 at the same time as the S10. The S10E features two cameras on the back instead of three for instance. I wouldn’t be surprised if the S10E had an LCD display instead of an AMOLED display as well.

Samsung plans to unveil the Galaxy S10 at an event in San Francisco on February 20. We’ll have a team on the ground to tell you more about the device.