Author: azeeadmin

More problems for Samsung executives this week, as chairman Lee Sang-hoon is indicted on union sabotage charges. Lee’s not alone — twenty-seven other Samsung employees and partners are also being hit with similar charges.

The charges are considered a kind of validation after years of concern over the electronics giant’s approach to organized labor. Lee has been in his current role since March, but previously served as Samsung’s CFO. During that time, the top-level executive was reportedly involved in threatening to cut wages and end business dealings with union-friendly contractors.

Lee is, of course, not the only high-level Samsung executive to be hit with legal charges of late. Last year, Vice Chairman and heir apparent Jay Y. Lee was given a five-year prison sentence over charges of bribery, embezzlement and perjury, though that sentence was later suspend and the decision reversed.

Regardless of what happens to these new charges, it seems pretty fair to say that the consumer electronics and chipmaking giant is long overdue for a overhaul among its executive ranks.

Amazon is taking full advantage of its deal to live stream Thursday Night Football games, which it snagged the rights to earlier this year. The company will this year launch a TNF pre-game show, co-stream the games on its video game streaming site Twitch, and will leverage Prime Video’s “X-Ray” technology to give viewers access to real-time stats, team info, and the ability to shop for team merchandise on Amazon.com.

X-Ray for Prime Video typically offers viewers information about cast and characters in a TV program or movie, as well as info about the music and, sometimes, additional trivia.

In the case of TNF, however, the focus will be on the players and teams.

With the start of the games today, September 27, at 8:20 PM ET, X-Ray on Prime Video will debut a new experience across Fire TV devices, including Fire TV Cube, 4K, Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick, which will give fans live stats and player information, without taking them away from the action.

Instead, viewers will be able to push the “up” button the Fire TV remote to see information like Game Leaders and Team Stats to track top players rushing, passing, receiving, and more. They can deep dive into a favorite team through the new “Teams” tab to learn facts like who owns the team, or how many Super Bowls they’ve won, among other things.

The X-Ray feature will also display real-time play stats and history, available through a “Play History” tab.

While these options are largely repurposing Amazon’s X-Ray feature and putting it to use for sports, the “Shop” option takes things a step further.

Amazon will now allow U.S. viewers to shop its site via X-Ray for things like team hats, t-shirts and other gear – all right from the TV screen.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has tried to blend TV viewing with shopping. It also launched a TV app in the past and even tried a watch-while-you-shop show, Style Code Live, which it later canned. During this year’s Prime Day, it ran QVC-style videos for selected products. But X-Ray isn’t typically used for shopping.

Also new this year to the stream is the option for all-female audio commentary from sports journalists Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm. Amazon said this is the first time two women commentators have covered an NFL game in its entirety.

The option will be joined by others, including a Fox Sports commentary from Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, plus a Spanish-language feed, and a U.K. English feed.

Meanwhile, over on Twitch (which Amazon owns), the game will be live-streamed on the Prime Video channel, where it will include interactive extensions.

Instead of X-Ray, there will be an overlay featuring similar real-time stats, including NFL standings and team stat pages.

Viewers will aso be able to chat using NFL emojis (Twitch’s emotes), that include team logos and other Twitch originals, like those for touchdowns, flags, catching and running with the ball, and more.

The popular Twitch streamer GoldGlove will also co-stream the game with his own commentary on September 27.

Amazon and Twitch will stream 11 TNF games this season across over 200 countries, starting tonight with Vikings vs. Rams at 8:20 PM ET, following the pre-show at 7:15 PM ET.

 

Founded in 2015, Amazon’s Alexa Fund is devoted to helping kickstart early-stage voice startups. This week, it’s announced support for a trio of new companies. 

There’s Bamboo Learning, which was an early partner for Amazon’s Alexa Presentation Language (APL). The startup develops music educational skills, teaching users about notes, instruments, chords and tempo, along with other bits of music vocabulary.

Endel, meanwhile, is designed to use soundscapes to help users relax. According to the company, “Our core algorithm is based on circadian rhythms, pentatonic scale and sound masking. The sounds adapt to different inputs – like time of day, weather, heart rate, and location.”

There’s also healthcare startup Aiva, which uses voice assistants to help route users to healthcare professions. Both Aiva and Endel are Techstars alumni.The three companies will get funding from Amazon and will take part in Amazon’s Demo Night.

In the two years since Indian social media app ShareChat raised $4 million in funding from Lightspeed Ventures the converging trends of increasing smartphone use, wireless internet connectivity, and cashless banking have combined to create a new social media juggernaut.

Now Lightspeed has confirmed that the company has raised an additional $100 million in financing at roughly a half billion dollar valuation alongside investment partners including India Quotient, Jesmond Holdings, Morningside, SAIF Partners, Shunwei Ventures, Venture Highway and Xiaomi. 

In the years since that first Lightspeed investment, ShareChat has gone from a company with 1 million monthly active users to 25 million monthly active users — and while the company lags behind the messaging giant WhatsApp (whose app is used by more than 200 million people in India) its growth in India is remarkable.

“ShareChat is really looking to tap into the next billion users in India,” says Ravi Mhatre, a partner at Lightspeed, whose investment dollars helped architect the ShareChat rise.

What’s giving this startup the ability to connect to those next billion users is one strategy of a 9-year-old plan to develop what’s been called the “India Stack” — an entirely new digital infrastructure for a country with a population of 1.32 billion spread across an area of nearly 1.3 million square miles.

The push began in 2009 with the launch of Aadhaar, India’s (recently amended) national biometric recording scheme. Seven years later it took a huge leap forward with the implementation of the nation’s massive demonetization plan and the near-simultaneous rollout of a 4G high speed mobile network across the country.

While the demonetization strategy ate into growth rates across the country, and likely didn’t reduce the amount of money in circulation, according to Indian financial publication LiveMint, the 4G rollout was a huge success.

Since Jio, the telecommunications arm of the giant industrial conglomerate Reliance Group, launched its 4G service in September 2016, adoption rates across the country have skyrocketed.

According to a report from the telecommunications analysis firm, OpenSignal, Jio’s contribution to networking India has been massive.

During the quarter ending June 2017, total data usage stood at over 4.2 million terabytes, out of which 4G data accounted for 3.9 million TBs, according to TRAI. The growth is most visible when checking the numbers from a year ago, when 4G data usage stood at a mere 8,050 TBs; that’s a 500-fold increase… [And] LTE availability in India is remarkable: users were able to connect to an LTE signal over 84% of the time, a rise of over 10 percentage points from a year earlier. This places India ahead of more established countries in the 4G landscape such as Sweden, Taiwan, Switzerland or the U.K.

For a startup like ShareChat that means tens of millions of daily active users, according to Mhatre.

Those users are drawn to ShareChat’s broadcast chat feature, which allows users on mobile phones to broadcast conversations and commentary about any topic they wish. “It’s a platform where content that is relevant to you is surfaced to you and you engage with it,” Mhatre says.

The company was founded by three Bangalore-based developers. Farid Ahsan, 26, Ankush Sachdeva, 25, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, also 26 — all graduates from India’s famous IIT Kanpur University — had worked up 17 different prototypes for a product before they finally settled on the version that would become ShareChat.

The company’s founders are also taking a page from the popular Chinese app WeChat and hope to turn their broadcast chat service into a platform for micropayments, education, and other types of entertainment.

What started as a niche site for people to communicate in their local dialects could now become the first true domestic social media giant in India.

There are other Chinese corollaries to ShareChat’s business that may be informative. Toutiao, the news aggregation service owned by Bytedance, is perhaps the closest in kind to ShareChat at the moment, but even that is only accurate to a point.

China’s infrastructure is still somewhat based on personal computers and landlines, whereas India’s is wholly mobile-first. For Mhatre, it’s the first country to make the leap to a digital economy based entirely on mobile computing.

At Lightspeed the opportunity that presents is similar to the mid-90s birth of the Internet in the U.S. and the late 2000 technology boom that created billions of dollars in value for companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent.

What makes this feat even more impressive was that until two or three years ago, it looked like India wouldn’t be living up to the expectations that had been set for it and emerging market countries like Russia and Brazil that comprise three-fourths of the BRICs that were supposed to be the foundational building blocks of the 21st century global economy.

“If you look at China — the GDP in China is $12 to $13 trillion… India is about $2.5 trillion [but] infrastructure got developed there earlier than in India,” Mhatre said. India is at the same inflection point now, where the infrastructure boom is contributing to the development of new business models. 

The constraints of that infrastructure have also informed the business ShareChat has built as well. Because while digital penetration rates in the country are high, the download speeds are exceptionally low (due in part to overwhelming demand).

Again, the OpenSignal report is informative.

While LTE availability saw a meteoric rise, the same cannot be said of 4G speeds. In our latest State of LTE report, India occupied the lowest spot among the 77 countries we examined, with average download speeds of 6.1 Mbps, over 10 Mbps lower than the global average.

ShareChat’s focus on messaging and sharing data light images is a platform that’s suited to the current strengths and limitations of India’s infrastructure. “You have half a billion people with a high speed internet terminal in their hand and they want to do things with it,” Mhatre said. And ShareChat isn’t just localized in its tech stack. The company also is localized by language. 

As the investors at Lightspeed noted in their thoughts on the deal.

The “next billion” users in India speak 22 different languages and are spread out over an area the size of Europe. ShareChat’s founders Ankush, Bhanu and Farid blew us away with their insight into this new user base. Their first brush with this user base came in 2015 when they noticed that sharing of photos, videos, poetry, jokes and even good morning messages was at epidemic levels on WhatsApp. Yet there was no easy one-stop shop for finding this content.  ShareChat was born to solve this problem. As they developed the idea, they also saw that this audience hungered for connection and content about their cities and villages of origin. They noticed emergent behavior around users wanting to “look cool” to their friends by finding the best content, solving for loneliness by finding friends in their own language, and even wanting to drive fame and celebrity in their own geographies.  

A new messaging app is looking to give folks a way to communicate in situations with poor or no cellular connectivity.

Berkanan, founded by Zsombor Szabó, is a group messaging app that uses Bluetooth to send and receive messages. This means that Berkanan works in a plane, at a festival, camping, or anywhere else where cellular coverage is disappointing.

Imagine people on a plane asking each other for top movie recommendations from the in-flight entertainment system, or folks at a festival figuring out a rally point to meet up between sets. Public messages auto-delete after 24 hours.

Alongside group messaging, Berkanan also allows private one-to-one messaging, as well as audio calls placed over Bluetooth. The range for these calls and messages is about 50 meters, but if there are people between you and your intended recipient with the app installed, Berkanan can send messages further by going through other users devices.

Berkanan will also show users if they are getting closer or further away from the user they’re messaging with, without ever showing either person’s exact location.

Group chatting with strangers in your location might seem a bit icky at first glance, but group chatting with strangers is essentially the basis of Twitter. With Berkanan, however, a common location replaces the #topic.

Berkanan is entirely bootstrapped, but Szabo has implemented a somewhat unconventional method of generating revenue.

Inspired by games like Fortnite, which make money off of custom skins, dances, and other virtual items, Berkanan will charge users to edit their profile. When a user logs on, their profile will consist of the name they assigned to their iPhone and their profile picture will be their initials, similar to the iOS Contacts interface.

Users can pay to add their own profile picture and add a short bio to their profile.

To be clear, it’s already possible to send SMS via Bluetooth. But Berkanan offers a way to broadcast that message to everyone (with the app) in your location. Of course, user acquisition is critical for the app, which is why Szabó is considering ways for the enterprise to take advantage of the app.

What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars.

Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models for as little as $50 per share. The company says it has 50,000 members that have invested millions. Currently, there are just 10 cars available to purchase stakes in, though Rally Rd. expects to have 100 available on the app by the end of 2019.

The New York-based startup has just closed its second round of funding, a $7 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Anthemis Group, Social Leverage, WndrCo, Nas, Betterment co-founder Eli Broverman and Acorns co-founder Jeff Cruttenden. Earlier this year, it announced a $3 million seed round led by Columbus Nova.

Rally Rd.’s co-founders Chris Bruno and Rob Petrozzo told TechCrunch the crypto boom and bust really put digital asset investing in the mainstream, helping to bolster business that would have seemed pretty odd just a few years ago.

The pair plan to use the investment to open what they call a “live investing ecosystem,” a vehicle showroom where users can go to participate in initial car offerings in-person. The first will be in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, with other locations to follow in Los Angeles, South Florida and possibly Texas, where they have a strong user base.

“We want to create that Apple Store atmosphere where anyone can come in and learn about equity investing on the spot,” said Petrozzo, Rally Rd.’s chief product officer.

Through a subsidiary company, Rally Rd. purchases collector vehicles and holds the cars’ titles. The startup then hosts SEC-registered offerings, essentially an IPO for a car, where investors can buy one or more of 2,000 equity shares. The vehicles are registered for sale through a registered broker-dealer available in 32 states; the company is still working on obtaining licenses for the remaining 18 states.

Just like the regular stock market, after the initial offering, Rally Rd. holds regular trading windows for each vehicle where users can buy or sell their shares in an app-based secondary marketplace.

“They’ve literally recreated the NASDAQ or NYSE experience for these assets on the Rally Rd. platform,” Upfront partner Greg Bettinelli, who has joined Rally Rd.’s board of directors, told TechCrunch.

Bettinelli added that the reaction he has seen from Rally Rd. customers is similar to what he saw in the early days of the Amazon-acquired smart doorbell company Ring, mobile sneaker marketplace GOAT and ThredUp, an online consignment store that’s raised more than $125 million to date.

For now, Rally Rd. isn’t making money. They don’t take any management fees or share of the offering. Bruno says their plan to generate revenue is to adopt the Robinhood model and are building out a subscription service for those interested in premium access.

In early 2019, Rally Rd. expects to announce expansions into other verticals, including art and sports memorabilia. At some point, they plan to make the app available around the globe, beginning with Australia, Europe and Canada.

What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars.

Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models for as little as $50 per share. The company says it has 50,000 members that have invested millions. Currently, there are just 10 cars available to purchase stakes in, though Rally Rd. expects to have 100 available on the app by the end of 2019.

The New York-based startup has just closed its second round of funding, a $7 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Anthemis Group, Social Leverage, WndrCo, Nas, Betterment co-founder Eli Broverman and Acorns co-founder Jeff Cruttenden. Earlier this year, it announced a $3 million seed round led by Columbus Nova.

Rally Rd.’s co-founders Chris Bruno and Rob Petrozzo told TechCrunch the crypto boom and bust really put digital asset investing in the mainstream, helping to bolster business that would have seemed pretty odd just a few years ago.

The pair plan to use the investment to open what they call a “live investing ecosystem,” a vehicle showroom where users can go to participate in initial car offerings in-person. The first will be in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, with other locations to follow in Los Angeles, South Florida and possibly Texas, where they have a strong user base.

“We want to create that Apple Store atmosphere where anyone can come in and learn about equity investing on the spot,” said Petrozzo, Rally Rd.’s chief product officer.

Through a subsidiary company, Rally Rd. purchases collector vehicles and holds the cars’ titles. The startup then hosts SEC-registered offerings, essentially an IPO for a car, where investors can buy one or more of 2,000 equity shares. The vehicles are registered for sale through a registered broker-dealer available in 32 states; the company is still working on obtaining licenses for the remaining 18 states.

Just like the regular stock market, after the initial offering, Rally Rd. holds regular trading windows for each vehicle where users can buy or sell their shares in an app-based secondary marketplace.

“They’ve literally recreated the NASDAQ or NYSE experience for these assets on the Rally Rd. platform,” Upfront partner Greg Bettinelli, who has joined Rally Rd.’s board of directors, told TechCrunch.

Bettinelli added that the reaction he has seen from Rally Rd. customers is similar to what he saw in the early days of the Amazon-acquired smart doorbell company Ring, mobile sneaker marketplace GOAT and ThredUp, an online consignment store that’s raised more than $125 million to date.

For now, Rally Rd. isn’t making money. They don’t take any management fees or share of the offering. Bruno says their plan to generate revenue is to adopt the Robinhood model and are building out a subscription service for those interested in premium access.

In early 2019, Rally Rd. expects to announce expansions into other verticals, including art and sports memorabilia. At some point, they plan to make the app available around the globe, beginning with Australia, Europe and Canada.

Bumble is continuing to go on the offensive against Match Group. Earlier this week, the dating app maker said it was serving Match Group with papers (which Match Group said at the time it hadn’t yet received – but it has now). Bumble is taking Match Group to court for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets during acquisition talks. Today, Bumble is also officially responding to Match Group’s suit against it, which claims patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property.

Bumble this morning put out a statement, indicating that it plans to now take the battle to court:

“Bumble has today formally responded to Match’s lawsuit from March 2018 alleging patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. We believe all of the claims are baseless, and are seeking to have several claims dismissed immediately, given their lack of merit.

As stated previously, this was a thinly veiled attempt by Match to interfere with Bumble’s growth, as Bumble continues to take share from Tinder, and to scare potential suitors so Match could acquire Bumble at below market value. It also demonstrates an attempt by Match to monopolize the very practice of making real, meaningful connections. Match did not invent the world of dating; men and especially women everywhere deserve the opportunity to connect with who they want, on their terms, and Bumble will continue to stand up for our users and our values as we take this battle to court.”

The two companies have a history of bad blood between them.

Bumble was founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe, who was also a co-founder at Tinder and had previously sued Tinder for sexual harassment. She then branded Bumble as a more empowering dating app for women, by allowing women to start the chats first.

Like many dating apps on the market today, Bumble uses the double opt-in mechanism of creating matches, as determined by a right swipe on a profile card.

The app has grown to over 40 million users, Wolfe said recently at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, and the company says its revenue run rate has now climbed to $200 million per year.

Match Group has unsuccessfully tried to acquire Bumble twice – once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble says Match Group filed its original lawsuit against it to make it less attractive to other potential acquirers.

The two tried to work out their differences since the lawsuits’ filings in March, but were unsuccessful. Now, they’re headed to court – and to the press.

The claims Match Group makes around patent infringement involve Bumble’s use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in, and its swiped-based gestures – things Tinder popularized for dating apps, but have since become something of an industry standard, similar to how Facebook’s News Feed became a model for other social apps. But whether or not Bumble is illegally infringing on those patents will be left to the courts to decide.

Match Group is very aggressive when it comes to maintaining a dominant position in the dating app market.

The company already owns top brands like Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, and others. It also more recently took a majority stake in Hinge. And it often copies the features of rivals it doesn’t own, as it did with Hinge’s media-sharing feed, Coffee Meets Bagel’s top picks, Happn’s location-based features, and, as of this week, Bumble’s “ladies first” feature.

We’ve reached out to Match Group for comment, and will update if the company responds.

Bumble is continuing to go on the offensive against Match Group. Earlier this week, the dating app maker said it was serving Match Group with papers (which Match Group said at the time it hadn’t yet received – but it has now). Bumble is taking Match Group to court for fraudulently obtaining trade secrets during acquisition talks. Today, Bumble is also officially responding to Match Group’s suit against it, which claims patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property.

Bumble this morning put out a statement, indicating that it plans to now take the battle to court:

“Bumble has today formally responded to Match’s lawsuit from March 2018 alleging patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. We believe all of the claims are baseless, and are seeking to have several claims dismissed immediately, given their lack of merit.

As stated previously, this was a thinly veiled attempt by Match to interfere with Bumble’s growth, as Bumble continues to take share from Tinder, and to scare potential suitors so Match could acquire Bumble at below market value. It also demonstrates an attempt by Match to monopolize the very practice of making real, meaningful connections. Match did not invent the world of dating; men and especially women everywhere deserve the opportunity to connect with who they want, on their terms, and Bumble will continue to stand up for our users and our values as we take this battle to court.”

The two companies have a history of bad blood between them.

Bumble was founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe, who was also a co-founder at Tinder and had previously sued Tinder for sexual harassment. She then branded Bumble as a more empowering dating app for women, by allowing women to start the chats first.

Like many dating apps on the market today, Bumble uses the double opt-in mechanism of creating matches, as determined by a right swipe on a profile card.

The app has grown to over 40 million users, Wolfe said recently at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, and the company says its revenue run rate has now climbed to $200 million per year.

Match Group has unsuccessfully tried to acquire Bumble twice – once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble says Match Group filed its original lawsuit against it to make it less attractive to other potential acquirers.

The two tried to work out their differences since the lawsuits’ filings in March, but were unsuccessful. Now, they’re headed to court – and to the press.

The claims Match Group makes around patent infringement involve Bumble’s use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in, and its swiped-based gestures – things Tinder popularized for dating apps, but have since become something of an industry standard, similar to how Facebook’s News Feed became a model for other social apps. But whether or not Bumble is illegally infringing on those patents will be left to the courts to decide.

Match Group is very aggressive when it comes to maintaining a dominant position in the dating app market.

The company already owns top brands like Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, and others. It also more recently took a majority stake in Hinge. And it often copies the features of rivals it doesn’t own, as it did with Hinge’s media-sharing feed, Coffee Meets Bagel’s top picks, Happn’s location-based features, and, as of this week, Bumble’s “ladies first” feature.

We’ve reached out to Match Group for comment, and will update if the company responds.

It’s been a busy week at Cloudflare, which promised a week of news for its birthday (and delivered). After announcing the Bandwidth Alliance yesterday, the company today announced the Cloudflare Registrar. This new domain registration service promises to only charge the wholesale price that the top-level domain registry (think Verisign) charges. Typically, registrars charge their own fees on top of that and try to upsell you to a hosting plan or other services that you likely don’t need.

As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, this new service isn’t meant to be a loss-leader. “We took a look at this and said: every single Cloudflare customer needs to register their domains,” he told me. “And I’ve never heard somebody say: I love my domain registrar. We hope to create the first domain registrar people love.”

The service will start rolling out by order of how long a customer has been with Cloudflare. If you signed up when Cloudflare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt eight years ago, you’ll get yours pretty soon. But Cloudflare also allows you to donate to Girls Who Code to skip the line. “What we’re hoping is that whatever [our customers save], they will donate to Girls Who Code.”

Given Cloudflare’s heritage, it’s no surprise the new service will offer security features like built-in two-factor authentication and automatic domain lock, as well as Whois privacy protection.

If some of this sounds familiar, it’s likely because you’ve heard of the Cloudflare enterprise registrar, the company’s domain registration and protection service for large businesses.