Author: azeeadmin

With an inaugural investment into the Los Angeles-based entertainment startup Culture Genesis, Clifford Harris Jr., who’s better known as “T.I.”, has launched a new syndicated investment vehicle called Tech Cypha.

Launched by the music and cultural impresario with more hustle than hustle and his business partner Jason Geter, the new collaborative investment strategy focused on tech startups will allow high net worth individuals to participate in deals.

The strategy has evolved since Geter and Harris made their first investment twelve years ago into a company called Streetcred.com, a site that allowed fans to go online and share opinions about street culture. While that first deal didn’t work out, Geter and Harris both remained interested in the technology and startup scene and saw a new opportunity to leverage their networks and promote new businesses.

“We learned a lot,” says Harris. “Now we know where our demographic is.”

For Geter, that demographic is taking advantage of Atlanta’s surging position as a cultural and tecnological mecca in the United States. Indeed, Atlanta-area startups raised roughly $1.15 billion in 2018, a record for the region, according to data from Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association.

“Being in the city of Atlanta and with Georgia Tech producing so much talent, and coming from us being within the hip-hop culture which is always influencing and promoting things, we saw an opportunity,” says Geter. “In the past, we were always looking through the glass window and looking at ways we can participate earlier. And that’s by coming together to pool our resources so we can invest more.”

Harris and Geter aren’t the first hip-hop entrepreneurs to branch out into tech investment.

Calvin Broadus Jr. (better known as Snoop Dogg) closed a $45 million investment fund last year; Sean Carter, or “Jay Z” launched Marcy Venture Partners; the Chamillionaire, Hakeem Seriki, is an entrepreneur in residence at the LA-based firm Upfront Ventures and has his own app; and Nas, who founded Queensbridge Venture Partners, recently saw an exit when one of his companies, PillPack, was sold to Amazon for around $750 million.

“We are a group of guys and girls who’ve been doing business together over time. While we’ve been doing just fine on our own we thought that if we surround ourselves with like-minded individuals and pool our resources together we could do much more together than on our own,” says Harris.

Investors and entrepreneurs should think of Tech Cypha as an open-ended investment syndicate — like a rap version of SV Angels out of Silicon Valley.

“It’s people around our constituency who wake up knowing that there is dealing to be done,” says Geter.

While the Culture Genesis crew out of Los Angeles may seem slightly out of the Atlanta-based wheelhouse for Tech Cypha, the company’s co-founder Cedric Rogers spent a lot of time in Atlanta.

“I lived in Atlanta for many years and [Geter] and I have grown a relationship over seven years,” says Rogers. “I’m excited to work with these guys.”

For Harris, the opposite of moderate, immaculately polished with the spirit of a hustler and the swagger of a college kid, the investment into Culture Genesis is indicative of the type of deal that the syndicate will make. It’s got a media component, it’s leveraging new technology and it taps into the incredibly tech-forward community that comprises the rising middle class audience of urban (for lack of a better word) consumers.

Now the only question is whether Harris and Geder can find out what’s up and what’s happening next.

Google is removing apps from Google Play that request permission to access call logs and SMS text message data but haven’t been manually vetted by Google staff.

The search and mobile giant said it is part of a move to cut down on apps that have access to sensitive calling and texting data.

Google said in October that Android apps will no longer be allowed to use the legacy permissions as part of a wider push for developers to use newer, more secure and privacy minded APIs. Many apps request access to call logs and texting data to verify two-factor authentication codes, for social sharing, or to replace the phone dialer. But Google acknowledged that this level of access can and has been abused by developers who misuse the permissions to gather sensitive data — or mishandle it altogether.

“Our new policy is designed to ensure that apps asking for these permissions need full and ongoing access to the sensitive data in order to accomplish the app’s primary use case, and that users will understand why this data would be required for the app to function,” wrote Paul Bankhead, Google’s director of product management for Google Play.

Any developer wanting to retain the ability to ask a user’s permission for calling and texting data has to fill out a permissions declaration.

Google will review the app and why it needs to retain access, and will weigh in several considerations, including why the developer is requesting access, the user benefit of the feature that’s requesting access, and the risks associated with having access to call and texting data.

Bankhead conceded that under the new policy, some use cases will “no longer be allowed,” rendering some apps obsolete.

So far, tens of thousands of developers have already submitted new versions of their apps either removing the need to access call and texting permissions, Google said, or have submitted a permissions declaration.

Developers with a submitted declaration have until March 9 to receive approval or remove the permissions. In the meantime, Google has a full list of permitted use cases for the call log and text message permissions, as well as alternatives.

The last two years alone has seen several high profile cases of Android apps or other services leaking or exposing call and text data. In late 2017, popular Android keyboard ai.type exposed a massive database of 31 million users, including 374 million phone numbers.

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1. Tesla to cut workforce by 7 percent and focus on Model 3 production

In an email to employees, CEO Elon Musk says the focus must be on delivering “at least the mid-range Model 3 variant in all markets.” He also warns the employees who are not set to be axed that there are “many companies that can offer a better work-life balance, because they are larger and more mature or in industries that are not so voraciously competitive.”

“We unfortunately have no choice but to reduce full-time employee headcount by approximately 7% (we grew by 30% last year, which is more than we can support) and retain only the most critical temps and contractors,” he writes.

2. Nike’s auto-laced future

Matthew Panzarino makes the case for the new Adapt BB, a Nike shoe with powered laces that tighten to a wearer’s foot automatically.

3. Microsoft is calling an audible on smart speakers

Microsoft’s smart assistant has its strong suits, but thus far statement of purpose hasn’t been among them. CEO Satya Nadella appears to acknowledge as much this week during a media event at the company’s Redmond campus.

4. Netflix adds 8.8M paid subscribers globally, says it now accounts for 10 percent of US TV screen time

In its most recent quarter, the company added 8.8 million subscribers, well above the 7.6 million that it had predicted at the beginning of the quarter. However, revenue was a bit lower than expected — $4.19 billion, compared to predictions of $4.21 billion.

5. These are all the federal HTTPS websites that’ll expire soon because of the US government shutdown

We looked at domains of federal agencies and the executive branch, then poked every certificate to see if it had expired — and, if not, when it would stop working.

6. Twitter bug revealed some Android users’ private tweets

Twitter accidentally revealed some users’ “protected” (aka, private) tweets, the company disclosed yesterday. For some Android users over a period of several years, tweets were actually made public as a result of this bug.

7. Facebook says it will ask employees to take down glowing Portal reviews on Amazon

New York Times columnist Kevin Roose noticed something fishy in the Amazon reviews for Facebook’s new device, noting on Twitter that many of the verified reviewers bore the same names as Facebook employees.

Sling TV, Dish’s live TV streaming service, will now make personalized suggestions of what to watch. The company this week introduced a new recommendations feature that will highlight the shows, movies, sports and news content it believes you’ll like, based on your viewing history.

The feature is initially available on Apple TV, but will roll out to other platforms in the future, the company says.

To access recommendations, Apple TV users can visit a new “Recommended for You” ribbon in the “My TV” section which will feature its suggestions of both live and on-demand content. The recommendations will also respect any parental control settings you’ve set up, so younger users won’t be able to watch the adult-themed content you’ve restricted.

Unfortunately, Sling TV doesn’t support user profiles, which means recommendations may be hit or miss.

It’s a little surprising that Sling TV hasn’t included recommended content like this, until now. Recommendations, and more broadly, personalization technology, have become table stakes in the streaming business – and beyond. Music services, podcast apps, news aggregators, and even our voice assistants are becoming services we customize to our own liking. Or they leverage A.I. to put together unique suggestions for their individual users. Or both.

Sling TV, launched four years ago, was one of the first services to offer live TV over the internet. That means it’s had more time than newer rivals – like DirecTV Now, Hulu with Live TV or YouTube TV, for example – to develop its own recommendation system.

The company says that recommendations are the first of more personalization updates still to come.

In the months ahead, it also notes it will improve the content recommendations and will make the browsing experience easier.

That’s much needed because way Sling TV has implemented recommendations – a ribbon of content – is fairly basic in comparison with others. Netflix, for instance, finds numerous ways to suggest content – “top picks” based on viewing history along with other suggestions based specific shows you’ve been watching, for starters. And this is mixed in with editorial and categorized suggestions (e.g. “binge-worthy shows), new releases, popular and trending content, among other things.

Meanwhile, Hulu recently rolled out features that let users explicitly inform the service’s recommendation engine – like a “stop suggesting” button that tells Hulu you dislike a show. YouTube TV is capitalizing on its larger video network’s recommendation technology to make its own “top picks” suggestions, and it points users to suggested content on YouTube for whatever show or movie they’re viewing.

Sling TV will need to ramp up in terms of personalization quickly to better compete as these others become more advanced.

“The ‘Recommended for You’ ribbon is just the beginning of more personalization updates to come,” wrote  Sling TV’s Vice president of product management, Jimshade Chaudhari, in the announcement. “We’re working to improve personalization in the app and create a more engaging and interesting viewing experience, so you can expect Sling to debut more helpful features,” he said.

 

Nasdaq’s BVP Emerging Cloud Index measures the performance of a portfolio of 45 SaaS stocks. Like much of the tech world, and the stock market in general, the final quarter of 2018 was not terribly kind. The good news is that there are signs of life lately.

On November 19th, SaaS stocks had a noteworthy bad day. Everything was down, way down. As we reported, some examples included:

• Salesforce was down 8.7 percent to $121.01.
• Box was down 6.93 percent to $16.66
• Workday was down 7.57 percent to $124.07
• Twilio was down 13.76 percent to $76.90

All of these stocks are part of that Emerging Cloud Index. That day, the index hit $792.95. It would not be the lowest point of 2018. That came about a month later on December 21st when it plunged to $778.39.

Jason Lemkin, managing director at SaaStr Fund, a firm that works with SaaS founders, says in spite of the last quarter, it wasn’t a terrible year for SaaS stocks. “Cloud stocks still way outperformed the broad market in 2018 — way outperformed. But they are not immune to the broader economy. It just has some insulation to it, due to recurring revenue and also the mission criticality on many B2B apps,” he told TechCrunch.

The day after I wrote the story on this cloud stock debacle, my colleague Jon Shieber looked at the overall tech stock losses, which totaled a staggering $1 trillion in the year-end slide. That’s a ton of lost value, but cloud stocks were taking a hit right along with the rest of tech, even when the future appeared very bright indeed.

Today, the Emerging Cloud Index is showing signs of recovering nicely, and all of that gloom and doom seems to be yesterday’s news. The index has been climbing steadily since that pre-Christmas low to $956.46 as we went to press. There is no guarantee that will continue, but it certainly makes more sense given that earnings reports have been mostly positive and the market potential is still growing.

As Synergy Research’s John Dinsdale told me in November, “In terms of ongoing market growth and future prospects, absolutely nothing has changed. The market forecasts remain extremely healthy. Indeed, if anything our next forecast update will likely result in us nudging up our forecast growth rates a little.”

Perhaps, the SaaS market did not deserve to be Wall Street’s whipping boy in December, and the recovering index shows that investors have come to their senses where SaaS stocks are concerned.

The Harman Kardon Invoke was fine. But let’s be real — the first Cortana smart speaker was dead on arrival. Microsoft’s smart assistant has its strong suits, but thus far statement of purpose hasn’t been among them. CEO Satya Nadella appears to have acknowledge as much this week during a media event at the company’s Redmond Campus.

“Defeat” might be a strong word at this stage, but the executive is publicly acknowledging that the company needs to go back to the drawing board. In its current configuration, the best Microsoft can seemingly hope for with Cortana is a slow ramp up after a greatly delayed start. For all of the company’s recent successes, the gulf between its offering and Alexa, Assistant (and to a lesser degree) Siri must seem utterly insurmountable.

The new vision for Cortana is an AI offering that works in tandem with products that have previously been considered its chief competitors. That’s in line with recent moves. Over the summer, Microsoft and Amazon unveiled integration between the two assistants. Nadella used this week’s event to both reaffirm plans to work with Alexa and Google Assistant and note that past categories probably don’t make sense, going forward.

“We are very mindful of the categories we enter where we can do something unique,” he told the crowd. “A good one is speakers. To me the challenge is, exactly what would we be able to do in that category that is going to be unique?”

It’s a fair question. And the answer, thus far, is nothing. Like Samsung’s Bixby offerings, the primary distinguisher has been the devices its chosen to roll out on — appliances for Bixby and PCs for Microsoft. And while moves by Apple, Amazon and Google have all been acknowledgements that desktops and laptops may play an important role in the growth of smart assistants moving forward, but they were hardly a major driver early on.

I suspect this will also means the company will invest less in pushing Cortana as a consumer-facing product for the time being, instead focusing on the ways it can help other more popular assistants play nicely with the Microsoft ecosystem.

European privacy campaigner Max Schrems has filed a fresh batch of strategic complaints at tech giants, including Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube.

The complaints, filed via his non-profit privacy and digital rights organization, noyb, relate to how the services respond to data access requests, per regional data protection rules.

Article 15 of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides for a right of access by the data subject to information held on them.

The complaints contend tech firms are structurally violating this right — having built automated systems to respond to data access requests which, after being tested by noyb, failed to provide the user with all the relevant information they are legally entitled to.

noyb tested eight companies in all, in eight different countries in Europe, and says it found none of the services provided a satisfactory response. It’s filed formal complaints with the Austrian Data Protection Authority against the eight, which also include music and podcast platform SoundCloud; sports streaming service DAZN; and video on-demand platform Flimmit .

The complaints have been filed on behalf of ten users, per Article 80 of the GDPR which enables data subjects to be represented by a non-profit association such as noyb.

Here’s its breakdown of the responses its tests received — including the maximum potential penalty each could be on the hook for if the complaints are stood up:

Two of the companies, DAZN and SoundCloud, failed to respond at all, according to noyb. While the rest responded with only partial data.

noyb points out that in addition to getting raw data users have the right to know the sources, recipients and purposes for which their information is being processed. But only Flimmit and Netflix provided any background information (though again still not full data) in response to the test requests.

“Many services set up automated systems to respond to access requests, but they often don’t even remotely provide the data that every user has a right to,” said Schrems in a statement. “In most cases, users only got the raw data, but, for example, no information about who this data was shared with. This leads to structural violations of users’ rights, as these systems are built to withhold the relevant information.”

We’ve reached out to the companies for comment on the complaints.

Last May, immediately after Europe’s new privacy regulation came into force, noyb lodged its first series of strategic complaints — targeted at what it dubbed “forced consent”, arguing that Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google’s Android OS do not give users a free choice to consent to processing their data for ad targeting, as consenting is required to use the service.

Investigations by a number of data protection authorities into those complaints remain ongoing.

Most of us believe our time is extremely valuable, certainly worth more than thirty cents. But then you read about human decision-making, and you have to wonder what goes through people’s heads.

This time, it is Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a review of Amazon Publishing, the printing house (if you will) of the ecommerce giant. Amazon published more than one thousand titles in 2017, and now commands roughly a majority of all book purchases made in the U.S., online or offline.

But what really surprised me about the article was this paragraph:

Under the arrangement, these titles are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors based on how many pages of an e-book are read. The payouts are usually around $0.004 to $0.005 a page. Authors would receive $1.20 to $1.50 on 300-page e-book priced at $10, less if readers don’t finish.

If you read an average of say sixty pages an hour, that equates to about thirty cents of royalties per hour of entertainment. Amazon’s revenues are higher given that Kindle Unlimited is a subscription, but still. We can argue that the titles on Kindle Unlimited are pulp fiction, or that the users of Kindle Unlimited lack taste, or whatever.

The reality though is that people (i.e. the reading public) are remarkably parsimonious when it comes to filling up their heads with words. Wired writer Antonio García Martínez tweeted out a question last week:

The obvious answer is that there is literally no market for people to pay $10-20 for 30 pages of content, outside of case studies at Harvard Business School. I chatted with some authors and publishing execs about this, and the answer was two-fold. One is that consumers really have a knack for only paying for thicker books rather than shorter ones. And two, books have enormous fixed costs that make short works infeasible given that consumer market (for instance, the cost of a cover design is the same regardless of length of a book).

And so publishers junk up their books with extras to make them seem thicker than they really are.

Take The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, which I just finished reading this morning (it’s a fine book). The paperback version is listed on Amazon as “368 pages.” That’s a substantial book! But it isn’t that long at all. The actual core text of the book including the epilogue is 217 pages, with 26 photos strewn about along with fairly heavy amounts of page gaps between chapters. So the core text is maybe around 190 pages. The book then adds a frequently asked questions section (22 pages), an acknowledgements section (12 pages!), notes (40 pages), bibliography (28 pages), an index (18 pages), and a reading group guide (3 pages). 190 pages of 368 is 51.6%.

I am not saying that notes or a bibliography are optional in a political argumentative text, but merely that the publisher, who lists the paperback at $17.95, felt compelled to add all these photos and a FAQ to make the book feel substantial for consumers to get them to pay $18.

In “Brainjunk and the killing of the internet mind,” I argued that we need to start paying more for less in the context of media subscriptions:

It is the deep irony of our times that readers, often deeply educated, will shell out $30 for a meal in New York or San Francisco while paying thousands in rent, only to avoid paying a few bucks a month for a publication, let alone ten. The monthly price for the New York Times is the price of a single cocktail these days in Manhattan.

The bulk of my friends don’t pay for subscriptions. The bulk of the internet doesn’t pay for subscriptions. People will gladly spend hours a day reading brainjunk, to avoid even the slightest expense that might improve the quality of what they are reading. And so, even storied publications are going to fall by the wayside so we can read about “7 Tips on How To Improve Media.”

I think it is well past time to extend that thinking to all forms of content that we consume.

That’s why I have started to calculate the price per page of my books, as a way to adjust for quality and also to match how I value my time. Sitting on my desk right now are three slim books:

1. Networks of New York by Ingrid Burrington (112 pages, $15.96)
2. The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant (128 pages, $15.00)
3. The Emissary by Yoko Tawada (128 pages, $14.95)

There is nothing wrong with paying $18 for a 160 page book. Much like fast food is cheap but perhaps not positively filling, an underpriced book is likely to similarly nourish our brains.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

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

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Media investing is still tough

Nieman Lab interviews Corey Ford, who founded Matter.vc, one of the few venture firms that was willing to invest in media. Ford is taking time away from Matter to consider his next steps after seven years at the helm. Ford on opportunities in investing: “However, I wish that we could have figured out a model that was a mix of companies that are on the venture capital journey — I feel like there’s an opportunity in the middle, in between nonprofits and venture capital. I think especially this space is one where I call it, to use a baseball analogy, instead of looking for only grand slams, what are the good doubles?”

U.S. and China seem to be heading toward a deal

Pressure is growing on both governments to try to calm their trade spat. Meanwhile, in Europe, trade ministers and heads of competition policy are openly debating how best to make Europe competitive with Chinese state-run conglomerates, who are gobbling up market share in strategic industries. Meanwhile, in Huawei news, Oxford University has suspended ties to the embattled company, while Germany considers banning it entirely (which is hard to believe given the number of Huawei ads I saw in Berlin two months ago).

What’s next & obsessions

• I have a lot of short books on my desk to read.
• Arman is reading Never Lost Again by Bill Kilday, a history of mapping at Google and beyond.
• Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here <danny@techcrunch.com>

Ride-hailing startup Go-Jek’s expansion into the Philippines ran into problems earlier this month over its ownership structure, but that isn’t deterring the Indonesian company from investing into the market.

Today, Go-Jek announced that it has acquired local fintech company Coins.ph through “substantial investment” which gives it a majority stake in the business. The deal is officially undisclosed, but TechCrunch understands from two industry sources that Go-Jek paid $72 million.

The startup claims five million registered users in the Philippines, where it offers a mobile wallet that covers payments, phone top-up, bill payment, public transport rides and more. Post-deal, the company will continue to run as usual but while tapping into Go-Jek’s resources and experience.

Ron Hose, CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch that Coins.ph was in the process of raising a new round of funding when the Go-Jek opportunity presented itself.

“We had to make a decision on how we want to continue growing our business, and we felt like ultimately together with Go-Jjek we could build something that is overall bigger and better for our customers,” he said in a phone interview.

Coins.ph started out offering crypto exchange services, but it pivoted to a broader focus on fintech including mobile payments and financial services in recent times. The company has raised $10 million from two investments and it counts Naspers, Global Brain, Wavemaker, Beenext and Pantera Capital among its backers.

The acquisition is clearly a strategic one for Go-Jek, which is reportedly valued at around the $9 billion mark.

Last year, it expanded beyond Indonesia — where it claims to be the dominant player — for the first time. Its overseas moves saw it enter Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore, with the Philippines named as another proposed destination, although it has taken longer than planned with no launch yet.

Fintech doesn’t sound like an obvious point of entry for a ride-hailing company, but, in Southeast Asia, ride-hailing and fintech area peas in a pod. Part of Go-Jek’s success in Indonesia was the rise of its GoPay service, which enables money transfers, offline payment and even insurance and micro-loans. The company said half of the transactions on its network in Indonesia are made via the payment service.

That approach has been copied by Grab, Go-Jek’s arch-rival, which is rolling out its Grab Pay service across Southeast Asia’s biggest six countries with plans to enter areas like loans, remittance and insurance with partners such as Chinese digital insurer ZhongAn.

In that spirit, Go-Jek said today that Coins.ph will work closely with GoPay to “to encourage a cashless
society and enhance access to financial services in the Philippines.”

Coins.th, the company less developed business in Thailand, is likely to continue to operate as it currently is now, Hose said. That Thai entity has fewer locations than the Philippines business so it is likely less appealing to Go-Jek, despite its expansion to Thailand.

The GoPay collaboration is likely to mean the rollout of services such as insurance, loans and other financial services as well as, of course, deepening Coin.ph’s userbase in the Philippines, a country with a population of over 105 million people.

“With the second largest population and a strong domestic economy, the Philippines is one of the most exciting markets in Southeast Asia and through this partnership with Coins.ph, we are humbled to take part in the country’s digital payments transformation,” Go-Jek CEO Nadiem Makarim said in a statement

“Today’s announcement marks the start of our long-term commitment to the Philippines and a continuation of our mission to use technology to improve everyday lives and create a positive social impact,” he added.

There’s plenty of competition on that front, though.

Grab is readying its GrabPay entry and well-funded Oriente is present, but already Alibaba has invested in payment and fintech company Mynt while Tencent, China’s other internet superpower and a Go-Jek investor, backed rival service Voyager through a $215 million deal. Now Go-Jek, which is readying a $2 billion investment round of its own, is entering the fray. This year promises to be an interesting one for fintech in the Philippines.

Past Go-Jek acquisitions have included offline payment firm Kartuku, payment gateway Midtrans, payment and lending network Mapan — announced all in one go. India, it has gone after engineering talent with acquihire deals for startups C42, CodeIgnition and Piant, which have helped create its Bangalore-based tech hub.

Netflix thinks “Fortnite” is a bigger threat to its business than HBO. The company in its latest quarterly earnings report released on Thursday said that while its streaming service now accounts for around 10 percent of TV screen time in the U.S., it no longer views its competition only as those services also providing TV content and streaming video.

“We compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite more than HBO,” the company’s shareholder letter stated. “When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time…There are thousands of competitors in this highly-fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those with great experiences.”

In other words, Netflix today sees its competition as anyone in the business of entertaining their customers, and eating up their hours of free time in the process. That includes breakout gaming hits like “Fortnite.”

Netflix’s statement comes at a time when the internet, mobile and gaming have been shifting consumer’s focus and attention away from watching TV.

In fact, all the way back in 2012, mobile industry experts were warning that time spent in mobile apps was beginning to challenge television. And a few years ago, apps finally came out on top. For the first time ever, time spent inside apps exceeded that of TV.

Fortnite, in particular, has capitalized on this change in consumer behavior and has now grown to over 200 million players. (Netflix just reached 139 million, for comparison’s sake.)

In 2018, Fortnite – along with other multiplayer games like PUBG – pushed forward a trend toward cross-platform gaming that’s capable of reaching consumers wherever they are, similar to streaming apps like Netflix. According to a recent report from App Annie, this is just the tip of the iceberg, too. Cross-platform gaming, including not only Fortnite and PUBG, but also whatever comes next – is poised to grow even further in 2019.

Notably, Fortnite, too, has become a place where you don’t just go to play – but rather “hang out.” For kids and young adults, the game has replaced the mall or other parts of the city where kids and teens just go to be around friends and socialize, wrote tech writer Owen Williams, recently, on his blog Charged.

“Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it’s become the coveted ‘third place’ for millions of people around the world,” he said.

Roblox, with it over 70 million players, serves a similar purpose.

That means it’s also a real threat to Netflix’s time. If gamers are hanging around a virtual space with friends, they have less time to stream TV. (And perhaps – given that many of the youngest Netflix never got cable to begin with – less desire to watch TV to begin with.)

“I think about it really is as winning time away, entertainment time from other activities,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Thursday, discussing the threat from those competing for users’ time. “So, instead of doing Xbox or Fortnite or youTube or HBO or a long list, we want to win and provide a better experience. No advertising on demand. Incredible content,” he said.