Author: azeeadmin

Winter is coming. It’s time for scooter startups to find a cozy, protective blanket to get them through the chilly months.

For Lime and Bird, that could be Uber . The pair of venture capital darlings, which both operate fleets of electric scooters around the world, are said to be in talks with the SoftBank-backed ride-hailing behemoth about a possible acquisition, as first reported by The Information.

The news follows Lyft’s acquisition of bike-rental service Motivate, Ford’s acquisition of dockless bike and e-scooter startup Spin and Uber’s acquisition of JUMP Bikes. The trio of transactions are likely the first of many deals, as M&A activity in the scooter sector will inevitably heat up in the coming months.

Uber, which has scooters available to rent within its mobile app in Los Angeles and Austin courtesy of JUMP, is looking to one of the two startups to beef up its scooter supply, though both companies are denying reports of an impending deal. Bird’s chief executive officer Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch simply that “Bird is not for sale.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Lime told us they are “focused on building an independent company,” or, in other words, “Lime is not interested in Uber’s courtship.”

Uber declined to comment.

Scooter startups don’t come cheap

An acquisition of either Lime or Bird would be quite expensive. Both companies are worth more than $1 billion and would surely hike up their valuations amid M&A talks, especially considering reports that both are currently fundraising at even higher valuations. Bird, for its part, was valued at $2 billion this summer and Lime boasts at least a $1.1 billion price tag. Uber already holds a minority stake in Lime, though, which would cheapen that deal a bit.

An Uber acquisition would surely satisfy their investors, but I’d wager neither Lime nor Bird’s founders are ready to relinquish their independence. Both startups have been working tirelessly to build sustainable businesses and expand beyond bikes and scooters. Bird recently launched Bird Platform, an interesting new service that allows entrepreneurs to buy Bird’s scooters at-cost and rent them out themselves as a side business.

Lime, a couple of weeks prior, released its first fleet of “LimePods,” shareable vehicles that are now available to rent via the Lime app in Seattle, and it’s working on the launch of a line of brick and mortar storefronts in major U.S. and international cities. On top of that, both companies have been racing to tackle new markets around the globe, from Sydney to London, in 2018.

Together, the two companies have raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding in about a year’s time. As the two leading brands, they are quickly turning e-scootering into an acceptable mode of last-mile transportation in the U.S. Their recent behavior suggests the companies are eyeing a future where they are a go-to multimodal transportation platform, like Uber, rather than the subsidiary of one.

Investors, however, have a different perspective. Sources tell TechCrunch some of Lime and Bird’s backers are encouraging the companies to continue discussions with Uber. Despite being extremely young companies — some of the youngest to rack up valuations that high ever, actually — Lime and Bird are costly, which seriously limits their exit options. Lime is backed by GV, IVP, Coatue Management, GGV Capital and others. Bird is backed by investors including Accel, CRV, Greycroft, Sound Ventures and Upfront Ventures.

What does Uber want?

When Uber shelled out $200 million to acquire JUMP Bikes earlier this year and made dockless bikes and scooters rentable in select cities, it became clear the ride-hailing giant was doubling down on micro-mobility.

“We see the Uber app as moving from just being about car sharing and car-hailing to really helping the consumer get from A to B in the most affordable, most dependable, most convenient way,” Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi told TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey at the time of the deal. “We think e-bikes are just a spectacularly great product.”

He added that he’d been staring at e-scooters “quizzically on the streets” and thought they were in an “odd spot” due to regulatory issues. Well, the latter is still true in many cities, but scooters have certainly become more widely accepted as they’ve invaded neighborhoods in Seattle, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Paris and beyond.

Now that Uber is serious about scooters, it needs to increase its supply. Lime, given Uber’s existing stake in the company and its lower valuation, is a natural target.

Of course, there are many, many, many other small e-scooter operators Uber could target, like Skip, Scoot and Grin, to name a few. Spin, one of the early entrants to the e-scooter market, however, is no longer an option. The startup had raised about $8 million in venture funding and sold to Ford for around $100 million in a deal confirmed just a few weeks ago.

Uber is expected to go public in early 2019. The company released its third-quarter financial results last month, reporting an increase in revenue of five percent quarter-over-quarter at $2.95 billion — up 38 percent year-over-year. Gross bookings were up six percent QoQ and 34 percent YoY at $12.7 billion. Net losses, however, were up 32 percent QoQ to $939 million on a pro forma basis.

The company says it’s investing heavily in Uber Eats, its bikes and scooters, and Uber Freight as it expects each of those efforts to become even larger contributors to its overall business.

I expect Uber to make a move on Lime in Q1 2019, before the company closes yet another fundraising round and prices itself higher than even Uber would be willing to pay.

If you’re the proud owner of a Pixel handset you, like 9to5Google, may have spotted this already. The call screening transcripts feature, first noted back in November, are starting to arrive for Pixel users, Google confirmed with TechCrunch.

Making good on the “end of year” promise, the offering has been rolling out for a few days now, bringing with it the ability to read voice transcriptions of voice mails. An addition to the Pixel’s existing call screening feature, the feature answers calls from unknown numbers via Google Assistant and utilizes the company’s solid voice-to-text to offer a transcription of the call.

In spite of the wide rollout, there are still some limitations here. For starters, this particular feature is only available for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. And it’s only rolling out to users in the States at the moment, though Google’s promised to bring it to additional countries in additional languages “in the future.”

Thousands of internet users were understandably upset this morning when a terrible rumor surfaced that “Friends” would be removed from Netflix on January 1, 2019.

Despite numerous reports confirming the news, Netflix took to Twitter to confirm the beloved slapstick sitcom wouldn’t be going anywhere, at least not in 2019, and fans everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

But I’d advise any “Friends” virgins to start binge-watching now because the series is expected to transition to Warner Bros.’ own streaming platform in 2020, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That service is said to be launching at the end of 2019.

We’ve reached out to Netflix to confirm.

As we work to get to the bottom of this, please enjoy this 100-tweet thread on why Rachel Green and Ross Geller were an absolutely awful match.

It’s going to take more than a bunch of posies to make up for this one.

The Canadian branch of 1-800-FLOWERS revealed in a filing with the California attorney general’s office that malware injected on its website had siphoned off customers’ credit cards over a four-year period.

Four years. Let that sink in.

The company said it believes the malware was scraping credit cards between August 15, 2014 to September 15, 2018.

“Findings from the investigation suggest that the information collected included your first and last name, payment card number, expiration date, and card security code,” the filing said.

So, that’s everything that a scammer would need to rinse your credit card dry.

The notification didn’t say how many customers had their data stolen, but California state law says that any hacked company has to inform customers if more than 500 California residents are affected.

As bad as a four-year breach is at the best of times, bizarrely it’s only the second company to admit a security issue dating back to 2014. Marriott on Thursday revealed that 500 million guest reservation records were stolen by unnamed hackers over the four-year period.

You know what they say: Bad news comes in threes. Bets on who’s next?

Bringing Apple Music to Android tablets probably wasn’t Apple’s biggest priority, but three years after launching support for Android phones, the bigger screens are getting some love.

The update, first spotted by 9to5mac, is only available to Google Group beta testers for now, but should soon be rolling out widely when the 2.7 update goes out. The tablet-friendly design switches up the navigation to make use of the added screen real estate.

Apple added support for Android Auto in the last big update in September. As the company expands its native support for Google products, it does make one wonder where support is for Google Home products. The company announced just last week that Apple Music was coming to Amazon Echo devices so it seems that Apple is growing more open-minded in terms of what platforms it’s interested in bringing Music support to.

Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t mince words when he took to the stage to accept the Anti-Defamation League’s first Courage Against Hate Award at an event in New York City today. The executive used the keynote to address a wide range of issues, from anti-Semitism to LGBTQ rights — in many cases framing them in the context of corporate responsibility.

“I sometimes say that I worry less about computers that think like people and more about people that think like computers—without values or compassion, without concern for consequences,” Cook said, in a copy of the remarks provided to TechCrunch.

He also used the platform to address the company’s longstanding stance against providing a platform for hate — a hot-button issue as social networks have attempted to address the online proliferation of hate speech and conspiracy theories.

From the speech:

From the earliest days of iTunes, to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy. Why… Because it’s the right thing to do. And as we showed this year, we won’t give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the App Store. Why… Because it’s the right thing to do. My friends, if we can’t be clear on moral questions like these, then we’ve got big problems. At Apple, we are not afraid to say that our values drive our curation decisions. And why should we be? Doing what’s right — creating experiences free from violence and hate, experiences that empower creativity and new ideas — is what our customers want us to do. Technology should be about human potential. It should be about optimism. And we believe the future should belong to those who use technology to build a better, more inclusive and more hopeful world.

There are no easy answers, as the last several years have proven. But Apple’s certainly taken a much stronger approach around issues of hate speech than many fellow tech giants.

Last Thursday, Marriott sent out millions of emails warning of a massive data breach — some 500 million guest reservations had been stolen from its Starwood database.

One problem: the email sender’s domain didn’t look like it came from Marriott at all.

Marriott sent its notification email from “email-marriott.com,” which is registered to a third party firm, CSC, on behalf of the hotel chain giant. But there was little else to suggest the email was at all legitimate — the domain doesn’t load or have an identifying HTTPS certificate. In fact, there’s no easy way to check that the domain is real, except a buried note on Marriott’s data breach notification site that confirms the domain as legitimate.

But what makes matters worse is that the email is easily spoofable.

Often what happens after a data breach, scammers will capitalize on the news cycle by tricking users into turning over their private information with their own stream of fake messages and websites. It’s more common than you think. People who think they’re at risk after a breach are more susceptible to being duped.

Companies should any information on their own websites and verified social media pages to stop bad actors from hijacking victims for their own gain. But once you start setting up your own dedicated, off-site page with its unique domain, you have to consider the cybersquatters — those who register similar-looking domains that look almost the same.

Take “email-marriot.com.” To the untrained eye, it looks like the legitimate domain — but many wouldn’t notice the misspelling. Actually, it belongs to Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, to warn users not to trust the domain.

“I registered the domains to make sure that scammers didn’t register the domains themselves,” Williams told TechCrunch. “After the Equifax breach, it was obvious this would be an issue, so registering the domains was just a responsible move to keep them out of the hands of criminals.”

Equifax, the biggest breach of last year, made headlines not only for its eye-watering hack, but its shockingly bad response. It, too, set up a dedicated site for victims — “equifaxsecurity2017.com” — but even the company’s own Twitter staff were confused, and inadvertently sent concerned victims to “securityequifax2017.com” — a fake site set up by developer Nick Sweeting to expose the company’s vulnerable incident response.

With the Equifax breach not even a distant memory, Marriott has clearly learned nothing from the response.

Many others have sounded the alarm on Marriott’s lackluster data breach response. Security expert Troy Hunt, who founded data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, posted a long tweet thread on the hotel chain giant’s use of the problematic domain. As it happens, the domain dates back at least to the start of this year when Marriott used the domain to ask its users to update their passwords.

Williams isn’t the only one who’s resorted to defending Marriott customers from cybercriminals. Nick Carr, who works at security giant FireEye, registered the similarly named “email-mariott.com” on the day of the Marriott breach.

“Please watch where you click,” he wrote on the site. “Hopefully this is one less site used to confuse victims.” Had Marriott just sent the email from its own domain, it wouldn’t be an issue.

A spokesperson for Marriott did not respond to a request for comment.

Google wants to help you take a closer look at the art world.

The company’s Arts & Culture app has long been one of the company’s cooler niche apps and one that I often feel guilty about overlooking every time I rediscover it. Today, the company has added another experience into the mix focused on collecting the known works of Dutch master artist Johannes Vermeer and curating them in a single place.

The feature looks a lot like many of the company’s other deep dives, including listicles of factoids, interviews with experts and editorials. What makes this presentation unique is that the company actually constructed a miniature 3D art gallery that can utilize your phone’s AR functionality to plop into physical space in front of you.

With ARCore or ARKit, you can move through the “Pocket Gallery” and get close to the high-resolution captures of the paintings while also bringing up information about the works.

Having just tried it, this is one of those things that honestly doesn’t make a ton of sense to do with phone AR. Having a fully rendered gallery pop on your coffee table is an interesting gimmick, but they probably could have ditched the AR for a fully rendered 3D environment that’s more of a traversable object or just left the immersive views for VR and stuck with 2D exploration on your phone.

Nevertheless, it all makes for some interesting experimentation, and it’s just cool to see Google trying out new things with experiencing digital art in a more immersive way. Google’s Arts & Culture app is available on iOS and Android.

Just in time for holiday shopping, Apple announced the launch of an online store offering a 10 percent discount of all products for active military and veterans.

“At Apple we are deeply grateful to the men and women of our armed forces,” the company said in statement offered to TechCrunch. “We’re proud to offer active military and veterans a new dedicated online store with special pricing as an expression of our gratitude for their brave service.”

Apple has long offered education and student pricing discounts on various hardware offerings, along with select pricing through its federal employee and military personnel government purchase program. A number of other companies, including Microsoft, Lenovo and Samsung also offer some version of military personnel discounts.

Tumblr, a microblogging service that’s impact on internet culture has been massive and unique, is preparing for a massive change that’s sure to upset many of its millions of users.

On December 17, Tumblr will be banning porn, errr “adult content,” from its site and encouraging users to flag that content for removal. Existing adult content will be set to a “private mode” viewable only to the original poster.

What does “adult content” even mean? Well, according to Tumblr, the ban means the removal of any media that depicts “real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.”

This is a lot more complicated than just deleting some hardcore porn from the site, over the past several years Tumblr has become a hub for communities and artists with more adult themes. This has largely been born out of the fact that adult content has been disallowed from other multimedia-focused social platforms. There are bans on nudity and sexual content on Instagram and Facebook, though Twitter has more relaxed standards.

Why now? The Tumblr app was removed from the iOS app store several weeks ago due to an issue with its content filtering that led the company to issue a statement. “We’re committed to helping build a safe online environment for all users, and we have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to media featuring child sexual exploitation and abuse,” the company had detailed. “We’re continuously assessing further steps we can take to improve and there is no higher priority for our team.”

We’ve reached out to Tumblr for further comment.

Update:  In a blog post titled “A better, more positive Tumblr”, the company’s CEO Jeff D’Onofrio minimized claims that the content ban was related to recent issues surrounding child porn, and is instead intended to make the platform one “where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.”

“As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets,” the post reads. “Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.”

The imminent “adult content” ban will not apply to media connected with breastfeeding, birth, or more general “health-related situations” like surgery, according to the company.

Tumblr is attempting to make aims to minimize the impact on the site’s artistic community as well, but this level of nuance is going to be incredibly difficult for them to enforce uniformly and will more than likely lead to a lot of frustrated users being told that their content does not qualify as “art.”

Tumblr is also looking to minimize impact on the more artistic storytelling “such as erotica, nudity related to political or newsworthy speech, and nudity found in art, such as sculptures and illustrations, are also stuff that can be freely posted on Tumblr.”

I don’t know how much it needs to be reiterated that child porn is a major issue plaguing the web, but a blanket ban on adult content on a platform that has gathered so many creatives working with NSFW themes is undoubtedly going to be a pretty controversial decision for the company.