Author: azeeadmin

Fortnite-maker Epic Games is capping off their insanely successful 2018 with an even more ambitious product launch, a desktop games store built to take on Valve’s Steam Store.

The store which is “launching soon” on PC and Mac is going to be an attractive proposition to game developers with a revenue split that leaves them taking 88 percent of revenues on the store.

“As a developer ourselves, we have always wanted a platform with great economics that connects us directly with our players,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in an emailed statement. “Thanks to the success of Fortnite, we now have this and are ready to share it with other developers.”

Valve’s Steam Store is by far the most dominant presence in online PC game sales, they’ve enjoyed years of prosperity with rather light rivalry from competing stores that haven’t been able to match the scale of Steam. Valve, in a very… conveniently timed announcement yesterday, announced that it was rehashing its revenue split with developers in a bid that they hope will keep higher-earning developers on the platform. While Valve will continue to take an App Store-like 30 percent from sales of game makers with under 10 million in revenue, that figure drops to 25 percent until they hit 50 million revenue, from which point the slice drops to 20 percent.

It’s a more complicated revenue split that obviously benefits successful game makers more so than indies. For Valve, holding onto big game publishers is mission critical. Epic Games already has the benefit of a close working-relationship with many major PC game developers that are using the company’s Unreal Engine to build their titles.

Epic Games earns money with their Unreal Engine by taking a slice of revenues from game makers. Generally that share is 5 percent after the title is released, though Epic also does deals with developers for higher upfront costs with a lower royalty rate. Publishers like EA, Sony Interactive, Microsoft Studios, Activision and Nintendo have titles out that are built on the Unreal Engine.

A big sell for developers using Epic’s game engine, is that the company says it will forego that Unreal revenue cut for any sales of the titles in the Epic Games Store. Depending on the early success of the game store, this could be a big threat to other game engines like Unity.

A 12 percent overall revenue slice for Epic Games is incredibly competitive and could have left a lot of big developers grumbling about the 30 percent cut they were missing out on because of Steam’s take.

Epic Games has notably eschewed storefront revenue splits on Fortnite wherever they can. The app isn’t on Steam for starters, but even on Android, users are forced to download it directly from the Epic Games site as well. This kind of highlights the sway that big studios hold in the market. This year that studio happens to be Epic Games, but in the future that will be some other studio and Valve likely doesn’t want the next blockbuster side-stepping their storefront.

Valve still has a lot going for them. Their store is a massive presence and diehard users already have a library of titles built up with little incentive to switch unless their favorite game makers are the ones to decide to shift their allegiances.

Back in March we first caught wind that Bose is dabbling in augmented reality, with the launch of a new wearable SDK. Seems the headphone maker is ready to bring that technology to market, launching its first headset next month.

Don’t let the AR name fool you. Frames are actually “audio augmented reality,” as one would expect from Bose. That means, in spite of offering the sunglasses form factor, there’s no head’s up display on board here. The aim instead is to offer a more immersive audio experience.

The hardware detects where you are and which direction you’re facing via a nine-axis head motion sensor and the GPS on a tethered Android or iOS devices. The audio pumped through the on-board headphones changes accordingly.

The glasses feature small speaker grilles, rather than earbuds or bone conduction, meaning you’ll still pick up ambient sound. That’s both a positive and a negative. You won’t be getting the same full audio you’d get on a pair of devoted headphones, but you’re also likely to be more aware of your surroundings.

No actual content has been announced here — that’s going to start arriving at some point next year — though the company mentions applications like gaming, learning and travel (think audio-based tour guides for starters) as possibilities. Assuming, of course, you’re in a spot where wearing a pair of sunglasses makes sense.

The headset will run $199. Not cheap for an unproven technology, but giving the price of many Bose products, you’re actually getting off pretty easy here. The on-board battery should last around 3.5 hours on a charge, with 12 hours of standby time.

The Frames will be available in two styles when they hit U.S. stores in January. They’ll arrive in other markets in the spring.

eBay this morning announced it’s expanding the capabilities of its eBay Authenticate service – its luxury goods verification program – to now include luxury jewelry. Timed to coincide with the launch, eBay is also listing over 45,000 luxury jewelry items for sale, including both diamonds and other gemstones which have been verified by professional jewelers.

The eBay Authenticate service first launched just over a year ago, as a means for eBay to better compete with the growing number of luxury goods resale sites like The RealReal and others, which verify sellers’ goods as authentic, so shoppers can feel comfortable buying.

Initially, eBay was only focused on handbags from high-end brands like those from Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Dior, Fendi, Balenciaga, Goyard, Celine and Valentino. In September 2018, however, it expanded the program to authenticate luxury watches as well, like those from Rolex, Patek Philippe, Omega, Audemars Piguet, Breitling and Panerai.

The company says the decision to move into jewelry was the logical next step, given the velocity of jewelry sales it sees. Every day, eBay sells 50,000 jewelry items on its site – or more than 2,000 per hour – and it sells one diamond ring per minute.

The first luxury jewelry authenticated through the expanded service include engagement and wedding bands, loose diamonds and gemstones, and fine, vintage and fashion jewelry. The items range in price from $250 to over $20,000 and are sourced by more than two dozen eBay top sellers.

Like its other verification programs, the jewelry is vetted by third-party authentication experts before being listed.

eBay touts its competitive fee structure as a reason to turn to eBay Authenticate instead of rival sites like The RealReal or Poshmark, with either matching or reduced fees in addition to handling the professional listing and photos.

Fivetran, a startup that builds automated data pipelines between data repositories and cloud data warehouses and analytics tools, announced a $15 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners.

Fivetran helps move data from source repositories like Salesforce and NetSuite to data warehouses like Snowflake or analytics tools like Looker. Company CEO and co-founder George Frasier says that the automation is the key differentiator here between his company and competitors like Informatica and SnapLogic.

“What makes Fivetran different is that it’s an automated data pipeline to basically connect all your sources. You can access your data warehouse, and all of the data just appears and gets kept updated automatically,” Frasier explained. While he acknowledges that there is a great deal of complexity behind the scenes to drive that automation, he stresses that his company is hiding that complexity from the customer.

The company launched out Y Combinator in 2012, and other than $4 million in seed funding along the way, it has relied solely on revenue up until now. That’s a rather refreshing approach to running an enterprise startup, which typically requires piles of cash to build out sales and marketing organizations to compete with the big guys they are trying to unseat.

One of the key reasons that they’ve been able to take this approach has been the company’s partner strategy. Having the ability to get data into another company’s solution with a minimum of fuss and expense has attracted data-hungry applications. In addition to the previously mentioned Snowflake and Looker, the company counts Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Redshift, Tableau, Periscope Data, Salesforce, NetSuite and PostgreSQL as partners.

Ilya Sukhar, general partner at Matrix Partners, who will be joining the Fivetran board under the terms of deal sees a lot of potential here. “We’ve gone from companies talking about the move to the cloud to preparing to execute their plans, and the most sophisticated are making Fivetran, along with cloud data warehouses and modern analysis tools, the backbone of their analytical infrastructure,” Sukhar said in a statement.

They currently have 100 employees spread out across four offices in Oakland, Denver, Bangalore and Dublin. They boast 500 customers using their product including Square, WeWork, Vice Media and Lime Scooters, among others.

2018 was a big year for Reddit . The company executed an almost comically overdue redesign, continued to clean up toxic communities and promoted new features that are pushing the company towards new areas of growth.

The company’s engagement has climbed as well, with a 22 percent YoY increase in gross interactions be that a comment, post or vote. Just as importantly, more eyes were seeing these interactions with a 30 percent increase in page views, now clocking in at 14 billion views per month, the company says. Reddit shared some of these stats in a year-end blog post, and while they didn’t update stale statistics on active users, the company did offer some more high-level details on certain verticals on their site have seen engagement increase.

Reddit has long been a hub for photos and video content but until the past couple years, most of this content was hosted off-server, with most videos being drawn in from YouTube and images being largely embedded via Imgur. The company started hosting images in mid-2016, but it wasn’t until last year that serious efforts were put into making sure that videos lived on the site.

Last month, the company says that native videos on the site earned 1.4 billion video views, a 40 percent increase over the previous month. Furthermore, the company says about 400 thousand hours worth of video is being watched on a daily basis.

Video was a big priority this past year, but the company also made some interesting strides with their efforts surrounding news curation. The company began testing a beta of a news tab on its iOS tab, bringing stories sorted by category into a central location. Other features like updated live threads saw increased engagement, in their blog post, the company highlighted that a live thread on news regarding Hurricane Harvey had more than 50 thousand concurrent users scanning for information.

Perhaps the biggest news in 2018 was that there just wasn’t that much awful Reddit company news this year. There were some issues with foreign influence campaigns, a relatively light security breach and some more issues that are pretty much guaranteed on a site with the user base Reddit has, but for the most part, Reddit leadership didn’t have any massive screw-ups this year, which is a pretty major sign of maturity for a company that doesn’t often enjoy much peace and quiet.

Changes are afoot at Techstars NYC. Over the summer, Alex Iskold announced that he would be leaving his role as the program’s managing director, and other staff members are departing as well. Now Techstars says Jenny Fielding is taking charge of the program.

Fielding is already a Techstars veteran, having run a number of its industry-focused corporate accelerators, such as Techstars IoT, the Barclays Accelerator and the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. She’s also one of the cofounders at The Fund, a new early-stage fund that backs New York City founders.

Techstars, meanwhile, has become increasingly focused on corporate partnerships, but it still operates a handful of independent, industry-agnostic programs based in cities like Boulder, Boston and New York.

In a blog post, Fielding said that by taking on her new role, she’s “doubling down on my commitment to the NYC tech community.” She continued:

My goal is to build even deeper ties with local organizations that foster community and promote inclusivity … New York is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and Techstars is committed to having founders, mentors, partners, and program staff who reflect this mix of people and cultures. Further supporting this mission of inclusion, Techstars continues to deepen relationships with the many universities and civic initiatives that foster innovation.

The next Techstars NYC class will begin in July of 2019. Applications open on January 7.

It’s been a whirlwind few months for Forethought, a startup with a new way of looking at enterprise search that relies on artificial intelligence. In September, the company took home the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield trophy in San Francisco, and today it announced a $9 million Series A investment.

It’s pretty easy to connect to the dots between the two events. CEO and co-founder Deon Nicholas said they’ve seen a strong uptick in interest since the win. “Thanks to TechCrunch Disrupt, we have had a lot of things going on including a bunch of new customer interest, but the biggest news is that we’ve raised our $9 million Series A round,” he told TechCrunch.

The investment was led by NEA with K9 Ventures, Village Global and several Angel investors also participating. The Angel crew includes Front CEO Mathilde Collin, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and Learnvest CEO Alexa von Tobel.

Forethought aims to change conventional enterprise search by shifting from the old keyword kind of approach to using artificial intelligence underpinnings to retrieve the correct information from a corpus of documents.

“We don’t work on keywords. You can ask questions without keywords and using synonyms to help understand what you actually mean, we can actually pull out the correct answer [from the content] and deliver it to you,” Nicholas told TechCrunch in September.

He points out that it’s still early days for the company. It had been in stealth for a year before launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. Since the event, the three co-founders have brought on six additional employees and they will be looking to hire more in the next year, especially around machine learning and product and UX design.

At launch, they could be embedded in Salesforce and Zendesk, but are looking to expand beyond that.

The company is concentrating on customer service for starters, but with the new money in hand, it intends to begin looking at other areas in the enterprise that could benefit from a smart information retrieval system. “We believe that this can expand beyond customer support to general information retrieval in the enterprise,” Nicholas said.

Two and a half years after launch, Pokémon GO is at last getting player-versus-player battling.

If you’ve already had your fun with GO and moved on, that headline is probably all you need to know — it’s either enough to re-spark your interest, or not.

But if you’re still polishing up that Pokédex, hatchin’ eggs, and raiding every weekend, you’re probably itching for a few more details. Good news! I got to run through a few battles late last week, and I noted damned near everything that was mentioned.

Here’s what I learned:

• Each player brings three Pokémon into a battle (rather than 6, as with the main series). The first trainer to knock out all three of their opponent’s Pokémon wins. Niantic says that 6-on-6 just took too long for a game meant to be played, as the name implies, on the go.



• If you’re not already friends with a potential opponent, you’ll need to scan a QR code from the other player’s screen to initiate a battle. If you’re ultra friends or best friends, you can battle remotely
• Don’t have anyone to battle with? You can also face off against the leaders of the three teams: Blanche (Mystic), Candela (Valor), and Spark (Instinct). The best part of that: training against the gym leaders will earn you points toward the long-frozen Ace Trainer medal (which has been impossible to make progress on since the gym overhaul back in 2017 got rid of training.)



• Once a battle is initiated, you choose to battle in one of three leagues, with each league having a different cap on your Pokemon’s Combat Power (or CP): Great League (with a cap of 1,500 CP), Ultra League (2,500 CP), or Master League (No cap.)
• The thinking there: different Pokémon might shine at different strength tiers, which increases the number of “worthwhile” Pokémon. It also lets newer players jump into battling at lower levels, where higher CP Pokémon aren’t on the table.
• To fast attack, you tap the screen. Unlike gym battles/raids, there is no swiping to dodge.
• Tapping to fast attack juices up your charge attack.



• Or, I should say, charge attacks. Plural! Each Pokémon can now have a second charge move permanently unlocked (using stardust/candy.) These unlocked charge attacks will also work in raids/gym battles. The new move is picked at random from that Pokémon’s currently available moves at the time of unlock (read: you won’t get a community day exclusive move, or a legacy move, unless Niantic opts to bring them back into the move pool.)
• You can use Charge TMs to change either attack.



• When you fire a charge attack, a circle and timer appear on screen. The faster you tap that circle before the timer counts down, the more damage your charge attack can potentially do.
• When your opponent fires a charge attack, you’ll have the opportunity to use a “Protect Shield” which greatly limits the damage it can do. The catch: you only get two protect shields per battle, so you’ll want to use them at the right time.
• Matches are timed (thought Niantic hadn’t settled on a match length when I did my test battles). If the time expires and Pokémon are left, the win goes to the player with the most remaining Pokémon and/or the most health.



• Both winner and loser are rewarded with items; winning does not guarantee better items.

• Potential rewards include Sinnoh stones, the much coveted items required to evolve a bunch of recently added Pokémon.
• Battling the AI team leader trainers will give you rewards once per day
• Wins are recorded; losses are not. Niantic repeatedly noted that they didn’t want there to be any reason to not battle someone.
• Like sending a gift or participating in a raid together, battling a friend counts toward increasing friendship levels.
• Potions and revives can not be used mid-battle. Meanwhile, damage and knockouts do not impact your Pokémon outside of the battle.
• The real-world weather will show up in battles, but it’s purely visual; while this may change eventually, Niantic tells me that weather does not have an impact on Pokémon stats in PvP battles at first.
• As of last week, the only Pokémon you can’t bring into battles are Ditto and Shedinja.

For anyone hoping that GO’s eventual battle system would be modeled after the battles of the main series, this… isn’t that. Rather than a turn-by-turn back and forth, battling in GO feels closer to what players might’ve grown accustomed to when taking down a gym or participating in a raid. New mechanics, like the aforementioned protect shields, help to make it feel a bit more strategic and less like blindly tapping the screen until something happens — but after 20-something years of Pokémon games, any changes are bound to be a point of heated debate.

With that said (and with the disclaimer that I’ve only had a few battles so far) I’d say I’m… intrigued. It certainly won’t replace the main series battling system in anyone’s heart, but it’s a solid take on a system that works for casual players while still giving them reason to better learn which Pokémon are strong/weak against each other, which move sets are most effective, etc. It’s an intentionally casual battle system for what is an intentionally casual game. Don’t like it enough to take the time to battle a friend? Battle an AI trainer instead, get your rewards, and be done with it. Want to swing the other way and get super into it and become notorious in your neighborhood for being tough to beat? You can do that too, and the gameplay impact is about the same.

I appreciate that they’re allowing friends to battle remotely (once they’ve reached the ultra/best friend tiers.) It’s a bit of a departure for this game, which generally requires you to be on-location and face-to-face for nearly everything else. But with many Pokémon GO players being new to the series, remote battling lets them get in more battling practice against an actual human than an exclusively in-person system might.

As usual, Niantic is being a bit ambiguous about when this’ll roll out, saying only that it’ll roll out “later this month” — which, generally, means as soon as they’re able to flip all the switches, squash the last minute bugs, and get the necessary updates through the App Store. From what I’m hearing, and like many of the recent GO feature releases, I’d expect it go live for higher level players first.

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TechCrunch’s Verizon-owned parent, Oath, an ad tech division made from the merging of AOL and Yahoo, has agreed to pay around $5 million to settle charges that it violated a federal children’s privacy law.

The penalty is said to be the largest ever issued under COPPA.

The New York Times reported the story yesterday, saying the settlement will be announced by the New York attorney general’s office today.

At the time of writing the AG’s office could not be reached for comment.

We reached out to Oath with a number of questions about this privacy failure. But a spokesman did not engage with any of them directly — emailing a short statement instead, in which it writes: “We are pleased to see this matter resolved and remain wholly committed to protecting children’s privacy online.”

The spokesman also did not confirm nor dispute the contents of the NYT report.

According to the newspaper, which cites the as-yet unpublished settlement documents, AOL, via its ad exchange, helped place adverts on hundreds of websites that it knew were targeted at children under 13 — such as Roblox.com and Sweetyhigh.com.

The ads were placed used children’s personal data, including cookies and geolocation, which the attorney general’s office said violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998.

The NYT quotes attorney general, Barbara D. Underwood, describing AOL’s actions as “flagrantly” in violation of COPPA.

The $5M fine for Oath comes at a time when scrutiny is being dialled up on online privacy and ad tech generally, and around kids’ data specifically — with rising concern about how children are being tracked and ‘datafied’ online.

Earlier this year, a coalition of child advocacy, consumer and privacy groups in the US filed a complaint with the FTC asking it to investigate Google-owned YouTube over COPPA violations — arguing that while the site’s terms claim it’s aimed at children older than 13 content on YouTube is clearly targeting younger children, including by hosting cartoon videos, nursery rhymes, and toy ads.

COPPA requires that companies provide direct notice to parents and verifiable consent parents before collecting under 13’s information online.

Consent must also be sought for using or disclosing personal data from children. Or indeed for targeting kids with adverts linked to what they do online.

Personal data under COPPA includes persistent identifiers (such as cookies) and geolocation information, as well as data such as real names or screen names.

In the case of Oath, the NYT reports that even though AOL’s policies technically prohibited the use of its display ad exchange to auction ad space on kids’ websites, the company did so anyway —  citing settlement documents covering the ad tech firm’s practices between October 2015 and February 2017.

According to these documents, an account manager for AOL in New York repeatedly — and erroneously — told a client, Playwire Media (which represents children’s websites such as Roblox.com), that AOL’s ad exchange could be used to sell ad space while complying with Coppa.

Playwire then used the exchange to place more than a billion ads on space that should have been covered by Coppa, the newspaper adds.

The paper also reports that AOL (via Advertising.com) also bought ad space on websites flagged as COPPA-covered from other ad exchanges.

It says Oath has since introduced technology to identify when ad space is deemed to be covered by Coppa and ‘adjust its practices’ accordingly — again citing the settlement documents.

As part of the settlement the ad tech division of Verizon has agreed to create a COPPA compliance program, to be overseen by a dedicated executive or officer; and to provide annual training on COPPA compliance to account managers and other employees who work with ads on kids’ websites.

Oath also agreed to destroy personal information it has collected from children.

It’s not clear whether the censured practices ended in February 2017 or continued until more recently. We asked Oath for clarification but it did not respond to the question.

It’s also not clear whether AOL was also tracking and targeting adverts at children in the EU. If Oath was doing so but stopped before May 25 this year it should avoid the possibility of any penalty under Europe’s tough new privacy framework, GDPR, which came into force in May this year — beefing up protection around children’s data by setting a cap of between 16- and 13-years-old for children being able to consent to their own data being processed.

GDPR also steeply hikes penalties for privacy violations (up to a maximum of 4% of global annual turnover).

Prior to the regulation a European data protection directive was in force across the bloc but it’s GDPR that has strengthened protections in this area with the new provision on children’s data.

One of Europe’s most popular fitness applications is poised to flourish in the U.S. market with the help of several Los Angeles-based investors.

Freeletics, headquartered in Munich, Germany, is today announcing its first round of private capital after bootstrapping since 2013. The $45 million Series A was co-led by FitLab, Causeway Media Partners and JAZZ Venture Partners, with participation from Courtside Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures and ward.ventures. Sports teams including the San Francisco 49ers and the Boston Celtics also invested, though Freeletics founder and chief executive officer Daniel Sobhani declined to comment on any partnerships that may be in the works between the startup and the athletes.

As you might expect from the name, Freeletics operates its mobile fitness coaching app on a freemium model, with tiered pricing beginning at $11.99 for one month or $74.99 for a year-long membership. The app, which offers fitness content and AI-powered training plans tailored to individual users, initially focused on Germany but has since grown in popularity across Europe and in the U.S.

“We want to be there for people who want a long-term athletic lifestyle,” Sobhani told TechCrunch. “There are hundreds of millions of people who would love to make a change to their health and fitness but only a fraction of those actually make it. Helping people at scale to solve such a common problem is a tremendous benefit for the person but also for society.”

Sobhani says Freeletics now has 31 million users in over 160 countries and will use its first bit of VC backing to grow its American user base — where it’s been growing 100 percent month-over-month. The company also plans to add a Netflix-style training platform, where “unlimited relevant training plans” will be available to paying users, as well as nutritional guidance to help people stay fit. The startup, however, has no plans to expand into hardware.

“Most of the people out there that want to become fitter or healthier are reverting to choices that have been there for decades, like going to the gym or running but without broader context or understanding,” Sobhani said. “Or they are turning to books or very restrictive diets. Tech solutions are so much better because they can adjust to you; they can make sure what you’re doing is effective.”