Author: azeeadmin

Movinga, the European house removals and relocation platform, has closed €15 million in further funding. The round was led by London-based growth investor ETF Partners, with participation from existing backers Santo Venture Capital, Earlybird, and Rocket Internet.

The company says the new capital will support “further process automation”, the launch of new services, and international expansion. I understand this will include acquiring its largest online removals competitor in France but Movinga isn’t saying who just yet. Earlier this year Movinga acquired various assets of its biggest German competitor Move24 after the company filed for bankruptcy.

Founded in Berlin in 2015 and now with almost 220 employees across the German, French and Swedish markets, Movinga set out to make it easier to book a city-to-city house move online, noting that the B2C relocation industry is notoriously fragmented and inefficient.

Traditionally, removal firms in Europe are small with processes that are driven manually, which creates additional costs and, says Movinga, results in a frustrating customer experience. It also means traditional relocation companies often struggle with under-utilised capacity — up to 80 percent, apparently resulting in unnecessary CO₂ pollution and traffic in inner cities.

By combining logistics and consumer app technology with a two-sided marketplace that sees Movinga work with relocation partners, the startup is attempting to solve this.

“We currently operate in France, Germany and Sweden, and will soon enter the international overseas moves sector as well as additional countries in Europe,” Movinga CEO Finn Age Hänsel tells me. I understand this will include Austria, and the Benelux region. Currently, the main Movinga model is city-to-city moves, but the company recently added MovingaNow, in a bid to enter the inner-city local segment.

“MovingaNow is extending our model to a smart inner-city model similar to GoGoVan or LUGG.com,” says Hänsel. “In the mid-term, we will also offer real-time on-demand logistics services under that brand, offering an algorithm-driven “Pool Service” for bulky logistics. While we only work with professional moving companies in the traditional Movinga full-service city-to-city, we plan a mix for MovingaNow using traditional companies in the beginning but opening it up for students as helpers as well. We also just leased the first Streetscooters [Electric Minivans]” to conduct transports and see already a great market for it”.

Meanwhile, regarding the acquisition of parts of Move24, the Movinga CEO says it acquired all of the company’s brands, IP rights, domains, and technology. “Basically everything thats valuable,” he says. “On top, we took over a significant amount of employees in management and other departments e.g. kickstarting the Swedish market but also strengthening all other markets and departments”.

Instarem, a Singapore-based startup that helps banks transfer money overseas cheaply, has raised a Series C round of over $20 million for global expansion.

The round is led by MDI Ventures — the VC arm of Indonesian telecom operator Telkom — and Beacon — the fund belonging to Thai bank Kasikorn — as well as existing investors Vertex Ventures, GSR Ventures Rocket Internet and the SBI-FMO Fund.

The money takes four-year-old Instarem to nearly $40 million raised to date, although Instarem co-founder and CEO Prajit Nanu told TechCrunch that the startup plans to expand the Series C to $45 million. The extra capital is expected to be closed by January, with Nanu particularly keen to bring on strategic investors that can help the business grow in new emerging markets in Latin America as well as Europe.

“We are a the stage where the color of the money is very important,” he said in an interview. “It is very key to us that we bring people into the round who can add value to our business.”

Nanu added that the company is speaking to large U.S. funds among other potential investors.

Instarem works with banks to reduce their overseas transfer costs, offering a kind of ‘Transferwise for enterprise’ service. Although, unlike Transferwise which uses a global network of banks to send money across the world, Instarem uses mid-size banks that already trade in overseas currencies. As I previously explained, the process is the financial equivalent of putting a few boxes on a UPS freighter that’s about to head out, thus paying just a sliver of the costs you’d incur if you had to find a boat and ship it yourself.

Focused on Southeast Asia primarily, it services over 50 markets with transfers. The company does offer a service for consumers, but financial institutions — which have ongoing demand and higher average spend — are its primary target.

Prajit Nanu founded Instarem in 2014 alongside Michael Bermingham

The company has offices in Singapore, Mumbai and Lithuania and it is opening a presence in Seattle as it begins to look to broaden its business, which already includes three of Southeast Asia’s top ten banks. Nanu said that the company will try to work with banks and financial services such as cross-border services which target users with links to Latin America and Mexico initially. In Asia, it is awaiting payment licenses in Japan and Indonesia which will allow it to offer more services in both countries.

TechCrunch understands that the company is on the cusp of a deal with Visa that will allow its customers to roll out branded prepaid cards, adding another financial service to its offerings. Nanu declined to comment when we asked about a deal with Visa.

TechCrunch has also come to learn that Instarem was subject to an acquisition approach earlier this year from one of Southeast Asia’s unicorns. Nanu declined to name the bidder, but he did tell TechCrunch that the offer “wasn’t the right timing for us.” He is, however, giving increased thought to an exit via IPO.

Last year, when Instarem raised its $13 million Series B, he suggested that it could go public by 2020. Now that target date has shifted back to 2021, with the Instarem CEO telling TechCrunch that the U.S. remained the preferred option for a public listing when the time is right.

Instarem, a Singapore-based startup that helps banks transfer money overseas cheaply, has raised a Series C round of over $20 million for global expansion.

The round is led by MDI Ventures — the VC arm of Indonesian telecom operator Telkom — and Beacon — the fund belonging to Thai bank Kasikorn — as well as existing investors Vertex Ventures, GSR Ventures Rocket Internet and the SBI-FMO Fund.

The money takes four-year-old Instarem to nearly $40 million raised to date, although Instarem co-founder and CEO Prajit Nanu told TechCrunch that the startup plans to expand the Series C to $45 million. The extra capital is expected to be closed by January, with Nanu particularly keen to bring on strategic investors that can help the business grow in new emerging markets in Latin America as well as Europe.

“We are a the stage where the color of the money is very important,” he said in an interview. “It is very key to us that we bring people into the round who can add value to our business.”

Nanu added that the company is speaking to large U.S. funds among other potential investors.

Instarem works with banks to reduce their overseas transfer costs, offering a kind of ‘Transferwise for enterprise’ service. Although, unlike Transferwise which uses a global network of banks to send money across the world, Instarem uses mid-size banks that already trade in overseas currencies. As I previously explained, the process is the financial equivalent of putting a few boxes on a UPS freighter that’s about to head out, thus paying just a sliver of the costs you’d incur if you had to find a boat and ship it yourself.

Focused on Southeast Asia primarily, it services over 50 markets with transfers. The company does offer a service for consumers, but financial institutions — which have ongoing demand and higher average spend — are its primary target.

Prajit Nanu founded Instarem in 2014 alongside Michael Bermingham

The company has offices in Singapore, Mumbai and Lithuania and it is opening a presence in Seattle as it begins to look to broaden its business, which already includes three of Southeast Asia’s top ten banks. Nanu said that the company will try to work with banks and financial services such as cross-border services which target users with links to Latin America and Mexico initially. In Asia, it is awaiting payment licenses in Japan and Indonesia which will allow it to offer more services in both countries.

TechCrunch understands that the company is on the cusp of a deal with Visa that will allow its customers to roll out branded prepaid cards, adding another financial service to its offerings. Nanu declined to comment when we asked about a deal with Visa.

TechCrunch has also come to learn that Instarem was subject to an acquisition approach earlier this year from one of Southeast Asia’s unicorns. Nanu declined to name the bidder, but he did tell TechCrunch that the offer “wasn’t the right timing for us.” He is, however, giving increased thought to an exit via IPO.

Last year, when Instarem raised its $13 million Series B, he suggested that it could go public by 2020. Now that target date has shifted back to 2021, with the Instarem CEO telling TechCrunch that the U.S. remained the preferred option for a public listing when the time is right.

China’s payments giants have taken their battle to Hong Kong. Less than a week after Ant Financial announced adding QR codes to the city’s MTR public transport network of rail, Tencent’s WeChat Pay unveiled a similar scheme on Wednesday.

Starting mid-2021, commuters in Hong Kong can scan a barcode to enter the subway turnstile through WeChat Pay, the digital wallet linked to Tencent’s popular messaging app. That’s a year behind Alibaba’s payments affiliate Alipay, which claims to enable QR codes for MTR in mid-2020.

Both Alipay and WeChat Pay are making this scan-to-ride option available to visitors from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong residents.

Hong Kong has become a testing ground for the Chinese e-wallet titans going global due to the city’s geographic adjacency and cosmopolitan population. Its market of 740 million people also offers growth potential as mobile payments adoption is still nascent. In a survey conducted by the Hong Kong Productivity Council, only 30 percent of the respondents said they had paid with mobile devices, while most locals are accustomed to credit cards and cash.

By contrast, 92 percent of China’s 970 million mobile users have paid on smartphones, according to a July report from consulting firm Ipsos.

Cracking the Hong Kong market isn’t easy. For years, locals have used the stored-value Octopus card to pay for everything from MTR rides to convenient store purchases. The card system, which is 57.4 percent owned by MTR, claims to cover 99 percent of the city’s population.

Time will tell whether the payments newcomers could replicate their success in their neighboring city. On the Mainland side, WeChat Pay took off after a series of marketing campaigns that involved users fighting for cash-filled digital packets on WeChat. Alipay, on the other hand, traced much of its success to its ties with Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms, which don’t accept WeChat Pay.

In Hong Kong, the rivals have introduced redeem programs and shelled out generous subsidies to vie for shoppers. AlipayHK said in June that it crossed 1.5 million users, up from one million in March. WeChat Pay Hong Kong is keeping mum about its user base but a company executive said in November that the wallet scored more than ten times growth in transactions over the past year.

China’s payments giants have taken their battle to Hong Kong. Less than a week after Ant Financial announced adding QR codes to the city’s MTR public transport network of rail, Tencent’s WeChat Pay unveiled a similar scheme on Wednesday.

Starting mid-2021, commuters in Hong Kong can scan a barcode to enter the subway turnstile through WeChat Pay, the digital wallet linked to Tencent’s popular messaging app. That’s a year behind Alibaba’s payments affiliate Alipay, which claims to enable QR codes for MTR in mid-2020.

Both Alipay and WeChat Pay are making this scan-to-ride option available to visitors from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong residents.

Hong Kong has become a testing ground for the Chinese e-wallet titans going global due to the city’s geographic adjacency and cosmopolitan population. Its market of 740 million people also offers growth potential as mobile payments adoption is still nascent. In a survey conducted by the Hong Kong Productivity Council, only 30 percent of the respondents said they had paid with mobile devices, while most locals are accustomed to credit cards and cash.

By contrast, 92 percent of China’s 970 million mobile users have paid on smartphones, according to a July report from consulting firm Ipsos.

Cracking the Hong Kong market isn’t easy. For years, locals have used the stored-value Octopus card to pay for everything from MTR rides to convenient store purchases. The card system, which is 57.4 percent owned by MTR, claims to cover 99 percent of the city’s population.

Time will tell whether the payments newcomers could replicate their success in their neighboring city. On the Mainland side, WeChat Pay took off after a series of marketing campaigns that involved users fighting for cash-filled digital packets on WeChat. Alipay, on the other hand, traced much of its success to its ties with Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms, which don’t accept WeChat Pay.

In Hong Kong, the rivals have introduced redeem programs and shelled out generous subsidies to vie for shoppers. AlipayHK said in June that it crossed 1.5 million users, up from one million in March. WeChat Pay Hong Kong is keeping mum about its user base but a company executive said in November that the wallet scored more than ten times growth in transactions over the past year.

There’s hardly enough room to turn around in Livin Farms’ office. Pretty standard, really, in Central, Hong Kong, where space is at a perpetual premium. It’s a small operation for the HAX-backed startup — there’s space for a few desks and not much more. The startup’s last product, the Hive, stands next to the door. It’s a series of innocuous trays stacked atop one another.

But it’s the Hive Explorer I’m here to see. The small tray sits in the middle of the room. Its top is open, the brightly colored bits of plastic drawing the eye from the moment you step through the door. Its contents pulsate with strange, random rhythms. Upon closer inspection, the browns are whites and blacks are alive, a small bed of mealworms wriggle atop one other, chowing down of the remnants of oats left behind by the team.

Above them, a neon yellow tray houses a trio of fully grown beetles and a couple dozen pupae. The former are constant on the move, butting up against one another and sometimes doing more with aims of continuing the life cycle. The pupae lie around, seemingly lifeless, occasionally twitching out a reminder that there’s still life inside.

The Explorer finds Livin Farms broadening its horizons into the world of STEM education. Where past products were focused on scalable sustainability, the new Kickstarter project is firmly targeted at youngsters. And there’s a fair amount to be learned in the bucket full of beetles. Mortality, for one. Founder Katharina Unger grabs a nearby jar and twists off the cap.

It’s filled to the top with dried mealworms. She pulls one out and pops it in her mouth, handing it to me, hopefully. I follow suit. It’s crispy. Not flavorless, exactly, but not particularly distinct. Maybe a bit salty. Mostly it just feels overwhelmingly morbid, showing down on on a little larva as its brothers continue to feast a few inches away.

Protein source of the future, now, to quote The Mountain Goats. Livin Farms also produces a unflavored larva-based powder and a surprising tasty granola as a kind of proof concept for its sustainable high-protein foodstuffs. The mission hits home here in one of the world’s most densely packed places.

[She gave me some to take home, if anyone’s hungry.]

The Explorer also offers youngsters a peak at what many consider the future of sustainable farming — assuming food manufacturers are ever able to break through the stigma of eating insects. Kids are encourage to harvest the larva to avoid overpopulation with a bit of dry roasting. The box serves as a relatively odor-free form of composting. Feeding the bugs simply entails tossing excess foodstuffs into the bin. The little buggers will tear through it, leaving a thin powder of waste in a tray below.

The setup also features a heat plate to keep the worms warm and a fan to regulate humidity, assuring that settings are ideal for the beetles to do their thing. Livin Farms is also opening up the controls to the system via Swift, in an attempt to bring a coding component to the system.

The Explorer went live on Kickstarter this week. Early bird pledges can pick up a the box of worms for ~$113.

Since planes were invented, they’ve flown using moving parts to push air around. Sure, there are gliders and dirigibles, which float more than fly, but powered flight is all about propellers (that’s why they call them that). Today that changes, with the first-ever “solid state” aircraft, flying with no moving parts at all by generating “ionic wind.”

If it sounds like science fiction… well, that’s about right. MIT’s Stephen Barrett explains that he took his inspiration directly from Star Trek.

“In the long-term future, planes shouldn’t have propellers and turbines,” Barrett said in an MIT news release. “They should be more like the shuttles in ‘Star Trek,’ that have just a blue glow and silently glide.”

“When I got an appointment at university,” he explained, “I thought, well, now I’ve got the opportunity to explore this, and started looking for physics that enabled that to happen.”

He didn’t discover the principle that ended up making his team’s craft fly — it’s been known about for nearly a century, but has never been able to be applied successfully to flight.

The basic idea is simply that when you have a powerful source of negatively charged electrons, they pass that charge on to the air around them, “ionizing” it, at which point it flows away from that source and toward — if you set it up right — a “collector” surface nearby. (Nature has a much more detailed explanation. The team’s paper was published in the journal today.)

Essentially what you’re doing is making negatively charged air flow in a direction you choose. This phenomenon was recognized in the ’20s, and in the ’60s they even attempted some thrust tests using it. But they were only able to get about 1 percent of the input electricity to work as thrust. That’s inefficient, to say the least.

To tell the truth, Barrett et al.’s system doesn’t do a lot better, only getting 2.6 percent of the input energy back as thrust, but they have the benefit of computer-aided design and super-lightweight materials. The team determined that at a certain weight and wingspan, and with the thrust that can be generated at that scale, flight should theoretically be possible. They’ve spent years pursuing it.

After many, many revisions (and as many crashes) they arrived at this 5-meter-wide, 2.5-kilogram, multi-decker craft, and after a few false starts it flew… for about 10 seconds. They were limited by the length of the room they tested in, and figure it could go farther, but the very fact that it was able to sustain flight significantly beyond the bounds of gliding is proof enough of the concept.

“This is the first-ever sustained flight of a plane with no moving parts in the propulsion system,” Barrett Said. “This has potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion emissions.”

No one, least of all the crew, thinks this is going to replace propellers or jet engines any time soon. But there are lots of applications for a silent and mechanically simple form of propulsion — drones, for instance, could use it for small adjustments or to create soft landings.

There’s lots of work to do. But the goal was to invent a solid-state flying machine, and that’s what they did. The rest is just engineering.

Don’t panic! Life imitates art, to be sure, but hopefully the researchers in charge of the Cognitive Architecture for Space Exploration, or CASE, have taken the right lessons from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and their AI won’t kill us all and/or expose us to alien artifacts so we enter a state of cosmic nirvana. (I think that’s what happened.)

CASE is primarily the work of Pete Bonasso, who has been working in AI and robotics for decades — since well before the current vogue of virtual assistants and natural language processing. It’s easy to forget these days that research in this area goes back to the middle of the century, with a boom in the ’80s and ’90s as computing and robotics began to proliferate.

The question is how to intelligently monitor and administrate a complicated environment like that of a space station, crewed spaceship, or a colony on the surface of the Moon or Mars. A simple question with an answer that has been evolving for decades; the International Space Station (which just turned 20) has complex systems governing it and has grown more complex over time — but it’s far from the HAL 9000 that we all think of, and which inspired Bonasso to begin with.

“When people ask me what I am working on, the easiest thing to say is, ‘I am building HAL 9000,’ ” he wrote in a piece published today in the journal Science Robotics. Currently that work is being done under the auspices of TRAC Lab, a research outfit in Houston.

One of the many challenges of this project is marrying the various layers of awareness and activity together. It may be, for example, that a robot arm needs to move something on the outside the habitat. Meanwhile someone may also want to initiate a video call with another part of the colony. There’s no reason for one single system to encompass command and control methods for robotics and a VOIP stack — yet at some point these responsibilities should be known and understood by some overarching agent.

CASE, therefore, isn’t some kind of mega-intelligent know-it-all AI, but an architecture for organizing systems and agents that is itself an intelligent agent. As Bonasso describes in his piece, and as is documented more thoroughly elsewhere, CASE is composed of several “layers” that govern control, routine activities, and planning. A voice interaction system translates human-language queries or commands into tasks those layers can carry out. But it’s the “ontology” system that’s the most important.

Any AI expected to manage a spaceship or colony has to have an intuitive understanding of the people, objects, and processes that make it up. At a basic level, for instance, that might mean knowing that if there’s no one in a room, the lights can turn off to save power but it can’t be depressurized. Or if someone moves a rover from its bay to park it by a solar panel, the AI has to understand that it’s gone, how to describe where it is, and how to plan around its absence.

This type of common sense logic is deceptively difficult and is one of the major problems being tackled in AI today. We have years to learn cause and effect, to gather and put together visual clues to create a map of the world, and so on — for robots and AI, it has to be created from scratch (and they’re not good at improvising). But CASE is working on fitting the pieces together.

Screen showing another ontology system from TRAC Labs, PRONTOE.

“For example,” Bonasso writes, “the user could say, ‘Send the rover to the vehicle bay,’ and CASE would respond, ‘There are two rovers. Rover1 is charging a battery. Shall I send Rover2?’ Alas, if you say, ‘Open the pod bay doors, CASE’ (assuming there are pod bay doors in the habitat), unlike HAL, it will respond, ‘Certainly, Dave,’ because we have no plans to program paranoia into the system.”

I’m not sure why he had to write “alas” — our love of cinema is exceeded by our will to live, surely.

That won’t be a problem for some time to come, of course — CASE is still very much a work in progress.

“We have demonstrated it to manage a simulated base for about 4 hours, but much needs to be done for it to run an actual base,” Bonasso writes. “We are working with what NASA calls analogs, places where humans get together and pretend they are living on a distant planet or the moon. We hope to slowly, piece by piece, work CASE into one or more analogs to determine its value for future space expeditions.”

I’ve asked Bonasso for some more details and will update this post if I hear back.

Whether a CASE- or HAL-like AI will ever be in charge of a base is almost not a question any more — in a way it’s the only reasonable way to manage what will certainly be an immensely complex system of systems. But for obvious reasons it needs to be developed from scratch with an emphasis on safety, reliability… and sanity.

A win for privacy on LinkedIn could be a big loss for businesses, recruiters, and anyone else expecting to be able to export the email addresses of their connections. LinkedIn just quietly introduced a new privacy setting that defaults to blocking other users from exporting your email address. That could prevent some spam, and protect users who didn’t realize anyone who they’re connected to could download their email address into a giant spreadsheet. But the launch of this new setting without warning or even a formal announcement could piss off users who’d invested tons of time into the professional networking site in hopes of contacting their connections outside of it.

TechCrunch was tipped off by a reader that emails were no longer coming through as part of LinkedIn’s Archive tool for exporting your data. Now LinkedIn confirms to TechCrunch that “This is a new setting that gives our members even more control their email address on LinkedIn. If you take a look at the setting titled “Who can download your email”, you’ll see we’ve added a more detailed setting that defaults to the strongest privacy option. Members can choose to change that setting based on their preference. This gives our members control over who can download their email address via a data export.”

That new option can be found under Settings & Privacy -> Privacy -> Who Can See My Email Address? This “Allow your connections to download your email [address of user] in their data export?” toggle defaults to ‘No’. Most users don’t know it exists since LinkedIn didn’t announce it, there’s merely been a folded up section added to the Help center on email visibility, and few might voluntarily change it to ‘Yes’ since there’s no explanation of why you’d want to. That means nearly no one’s email addresses will appear in LinkedIn Archive exports any more. Your connections will still be able to see your email address if they navigate to your profile, but they can’t grab those from their whole graph.

Facebook came to the same conclusion about restricting email exports back when it was in a data portability fight with Google in 2010. Facebook had been encouraging users to import their Gmail contacts, but refused to let users export their Friends’ email addresses. It argued that users own their own email addresses, but not those of their Friends, so they couldn’t be downloaded — though that stance conveniently prevented any other app from bootstrapping a competing social graph by importing your Facebook friend list in any usable way. I’ve argued that Facebook needs to make friend lists interoperable to give users choice about what apps they use, both because it’s the right thing to do but also because it could deter regulation.

On a social network like Facebook, barring email exports makes more sense. But on LinkedIn’s professional network where people are purposefully connecting with those they don’t know, and where exporting has always been allowed, making the change silently seems surreptitious. Perhaps LinkedIn didn’t want to bring attention to the fact it was allowing your email address to be slurped up by anyone you’re connected with given the current media climate of intense scrutiny regarding privacy in social tech. But trying to hide a change that’s massively impactful to businesses that rely on LinkedIn could erode the trust of its core users.

One day after experiencing a massive outage across its ad network, Facebook, one of the most important online advertising platforms, is still seeing “intermittent” issues for its ad products at one of the most critical times of the year for advertisers.

According to a spokesperson for the company, while most systems are restored there are still intermittent issues that could affect advertisers.

For most of the day yesterday, advertisers were unable to create and edit campaigns through Ads Manager or the Ads API tools.

The company said that existing ads were delivered, but advertisers could not set new campaigns or make any changes to existing campaigns, according to several users of the network.

Reporting has been restored for all interfaces, according to the company, but conversion data may be delayed throughout the day for the Americas and in the evening for other regions.

The company declined to comment on how many campaigns were affected by the outage or on whether it intends to compensate or make up for the outage with advertisers on the platform.

Some advertisers are still experiencing outages and are not happy about it.

This is a bad look for a company that is already fighting fires on any number of other fronts. But unlike the problems with bullying, hate speech, and disinformation that don’t impact the ways Facebook makes money, selling ads is actually how Facebook makes money.

In the busiest shopping season of the year (and therefore one of the busiest advertising seasons of the year) for Facebook to have no response and for some developers to still be facing intermittent outages on the platform is a bad sign.