Author: azeeadmin

It’s been a rough few months for MoviePass. But every time the movie subscription service has faltered, one company has been there to pick up the pieces. Sinemia has done a solid job benefiting from MoviePass’s woes, even seeming to taunt its chief competitor with a handful of promotions.

Now that Sinemia is launching an unlimited plan in the U.S., U.K, Canada and Australia, the service is getting a few more digs in. In a press release tied to today’s announcement, Sinemia called the $30 a month plan “a sustainable, reasonable model for seeing movies on an unlimited basis.”

“While most of our plans are focused on the modern moviegoer who sees one, two, or three movies each month, we want to serve every type of movie lover and that includes frequent moviegoers looking for an unlimited tickets option,” CEO and founder Rifat Oguz notes in the release. “We’ve spent four years testing and fine-tuning our unlimited tickets model and are confident this is the right price to sustainably offer such a plan.”

The references to sustainability and the like are clearly digs at the fact that MoviePass has burned through cash and repeatedly tweaked its own offerings in an attempt achieve profitability.  Last month, the service announced that, among other limitations, it’s going to limit selection to up to six films a day.

Along with the all-in unlimited model, Sinemia offers up a number of other plans for…less enthusiastic moviegoers.

Pandora is taking on Spotify with the launch of a new personalized playlist, The Drop, announced this morning. Similar to Spotify’s Release Radar, The Drop will also focus on new releases from artists its listeners care about. New tracks are added to the playlist on the day they’re released, the company says  – that means Fridays, as with Release Radar.

Pandora’s playlist will also be longer than Spotify’s 30-track Release Radar as it doesn’t immediately ditch older tracks when new ones arrive. The Drop will instead grow to feature 100 of the latest tracks listed in order, with the newest at the top.

The selections on your version of The Drop will be based on your prior listening behavior on Pandora, the company says. And they’ll be algorithmically programmed, not hand-curated.

As you listen, if you find something you like, you’ll be able to add it to “My Music” or share it directly with friends and family.

The launch arrives at a time when the company has been more recently focused on personalized playlists as a means of upselling free users to its paid tiers.

In May, the streaming service rolled out dozens of personalized playlists to its Premium subscribers, based on their listening behavior and Pandora’s Music Genome. These “soundtracks,” as Pandora calls them, are categorized by genre (R&B, Hip Hop, Pop, Alternative, etc.) as well as by mood or activity (Focus, Chill, Happy, Rainy Day, etc.).

Since their debut, more than 790,000 users have listened to at least one of these personalized soundtracks, Pandora told TechCrunch. In addition, users have collectively listened for nearly 1 million hours, and have played a total of 21.4 million songs from their soundtracks to date.

Energy is the top soundtrack with 2.8 million spins, followed by Hip Hop (2.5m), Country (1.8m), R&B (1.43m), Party (1.41m), Pop (1.4m) and Happy (1.2m).

Like these playlists, The Drop will also only be available to Premium subscribers or those testing Pandora on a free trial before committing to a subscription.

The Premium tier is Pandora’s answer to Spotify’s on-demand service, offering playlist creation, downloads for offline listening, unlimited skips and replays, higher-quality audio, and no ads, as well as the ability to play any song at will.

The strategy of enticing paying customers with personalization features may be working.

The streaming service in July reported its two paid tiers – Plus and Premium – had reached 6 million subscribers – a number that’s up 23% year-over-year. But its user base overall is declining slightly, as Spotify and Apple Music charge ahead. Its 71.4 million active users represented a 6% drop from its 76 million users in the year-ago period.

While I was able to test The Drop pre-launch, it’s harder to speak precisely to its quality because my child uses my Pandora account more often than I do. So my playlist was an eclectic mix of David Bowie, Blood on the Dance Floor, Interpol, Ariana Grande, Twenty One Pilots, Echo & The Bunnymen, among others. That said, it didn’t have anything on it that was way off base for at least one of us.

It was also not 100 songs at launch – just 14 – as the playlist will grow over time.

The Drop is launching today, but will roll out to Pandora’s Premium user base over the course of the next two weeks, says Pandora.

 

 

A multi-month investigation by Sweden’s Medical Products Agency into a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of ‘digital contraception’ app Natural Cycles has been closed after the startup agreed to clarify the risk of the product failing.

But, on the self-reported data front, the agency said it was satisfied the number of unwanted pregnancies is in line with Natural Cycles’ own clinical evaluations which are included in the certification documentation for the product.

In its marketing and on its website Natural Cycles describes the app-based system as “93% effective under typical use” — a finding that’s based on a clinical study it conducted of more than 22,000 of its users.

The investigation by Sweden’s MPA began around eight months ago, after a number of users in Natural Cycle’s home market had reported unwanted pregnancies to a local hospital — which then reported the app to the regulator.

The Natural Cycles app uses an algorithm to track fertility by monitoring the user’s menstrual cycle. The process requires women take their body temperature at least several times a week, and do so first thing in the morning, inputting the data into the app which is designed to adapts its ‘fertile’ or ‘not fertile’ predictions to each user’s cycle.

Several users have reported falling pregnant while using the app. But the proportion of women who have done so (at least in Sweden) is in line with efficacy rates reported by Natural Cycles, according to the regulator’s assessment.

Earlier this year the MPA said it had received “approximately 50 complaints” related to unwanted pregnancies in users of the app. But late last week it announced it had concluded its assessment of the app — which it said focused on “product safety, instructions for use and post market surveillance documentation in order to confirm if the product is in compliance with regulations”.

As well as looking at parts of the certification documentation for Natural Cycles, the agency says it assessed monthly reports of unwanted pregnancies among active app users in Sweden, covering a six-month period — with pregnancy data supplied by the company itself on a month by month basis during the first half of 2018.

The agency found the number of reported unwanted pregnancies reported by users to be in line with Natural Cycles’ certification documents for the product, finding a failure rate in typical use of 6.9%.

But it also asked the company to clarify the risk of unwanted pregnancies in instructions for the app.

“Our conclusion is that the number of unwanted pregnancies during the assessed time period is consistent with data shown in the clinical evaluation included in the certification documentation. Since it is important that a contraception app is correctly used, we requested the manufacturer to clarify the risk of unwanted pregnancies in the instructions for use and in the app. These issues have been addressed by Natural Cycles and thereby our review is completed,” said Mats Artursson, investigator at the agency in a statement.

As we reported earlier this year, the startup has lent heavily on aggressive social media marketing of its novel ‘digital contraception’ method — which has sometimes appeared to downplay the risk of failure for what is undoubtedly a relatively complex contraception option, given it requires users to consistently self-monitor (and accurately measure their body temperature) as well as use alternative contraception on days when the app informs them they are fertile.

Natural Cycles admits that factors such as illness, disrupted sleep, drinking alcohol and having an irregular menstrual cycle can have a negative impact on the accuracy of its algorithmic fertility predictions. And says itself that the method is not a suitable contraception choice for every individual.

Nor does the app offer any protection against STDs — unless users combine it with additional barrier methods of contraception.

But despite that, until very recently on its website (and in some of its marketing) Natural Cycles has been making the misleading claim that its contraception app is “99% effective” if used “perfectly”. (Perfect use implying, well, superhuman use.)

And just last month the company was wrapped on the knuckles by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority — which banned one of its social media ads for being misleading, also warning the company against exaggerating the efficacy of the app in preventing pregnancies.

The assessment by the Swedish MPA looks to have reached similar conclusions about certain aspects of the claims Natural Cycles’ has been making for the app.

When we covered the ASA’s ruling last month Natural Cycle’s website still included the misleading 99% ‘perfect use’ claim — within this confusingly worded paragraph: “With using the app perfectly, i.e. if you never have unprotected intercourse on red days, Natural Cycles is 99% effective, which means 1 woman out of 100 get pregnant during one year of use.”

It’s since scrubbed the paragraph from its website, focusing solely on the 93% effective stat — on which it now writes: “Natural Cycles is 93% effective under typical use, which means that 7 women out of 100 get pregnant during 1 year of use. Typical use effectiveness takes into account all possible reasons for becoming pregnant while using the app: from having unprotected sex on a red day, to the app wrongly attributing a green day or the chosen method of contraception on a red day having failed.”

It’s not clear whether Natural Cycles removed the 99% ‘perfect use’ claim as a result of the ASA ruling — or following the Swedish MPA’s assessment. (We’ve asked the company to clarify the exact changes it made related to the MPA’s findings, which the regulator also says relate to software versioning, and will update this story with any response.)

Its app gained certification as a contraception in the EU in February 2017, and went on to gain FDA clearance (via a De Novo classification request) this summer — giving the product a major credibility boost, even as regulatory clearances still come with plenty of caveats. (In the FDA‘s case it warns that: “Users must be aware that even with consistent use of the device, there is still a possibility of unintended pregnancy.”)

It’s also worth noting that it’s still the case that Natural Cycles has not carried out a randomized control trial to more robustly prove out the efficacy of the product, i.e. by using standard scientific methods.

Instead, users must rely on the findings of its self-selecting clinical study of its own users — which may have its own weaknesses, given that, for example, any user who fails to report an unwanted pregnancy to Natural Cycles would not be reflected in the data it’s providing to regulators.

Commenting on the conclusion of the Swedish MPA’s investigation in a statement, Natural Cycles CEO Raoul Scherwitzl said: “We are pleased that the MPA has concluded its investigation, following a review of our real-world effectiveness data. There has been a lot of discussion about this investigation, and we hope that it will provide some reassurance to women to see eminent bodies like the Swedish MPA and the US FDA in alignment based on the strength of our clinical evidence. We never doubted the effectiveness of our product since the number of reported pregnancies is monitored closely on a monthly basis — this is an ongoing responsibility that we commit to as part of operating in a regulated environment.”

Less than three months after it raised $200 million led by SoftBank’s mighty Vision Fund, Indian digital insurance startup PolicyBazaar beefed up its new healthcare business through a $50 million capital injection.

DocPrime, which lets visitors book consultations with doctors or schedule a range of medical tests, launched in August. Already, it claims to host 14,000 doctors and 5,000 diagnostic labs on its platform serving Delhi-NCR — the ‘capital region’ that surrounds the city.

With this investment — which is provided by PolicyBazaar — DocPrime will begin an expansion next month that is expected to take it into major cities such as Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. That’s part of a wider goal to reach 100 cities across India and grow the network to 150,000 doctors and 20,000 labs.

DocPrime is up against established competitors, however.

Practo has raised $230 million from investors including China’s Tencent and it claims to work with 200,000 healthcare providers. Beyond India, Practo has already expanded overseas to four countries to tap the doctor-patient gap in other emerging markets. Lybrate, another doctor-patient matching service, has raised over $14 million although it has quietened down somewhat lately. 1mg and Netmeds are others that are active in the space in India.

To get an edge, DocPrime has pushed to work closely with China-based Ping An Good Doctor, a fellow Vision Fund company that claims over 30 million monthly active users.

Now that Amazon’s proven the efficacy of Go with a trio of Seattle locations, the retail giant is starting to open up its cashier-free Go stores at a steady clip. New York and San Francisco are already on the horizon, and the company just sneakily launched a new store in Chicago. 

An Amazon ChicaGo, as it were.

Opening this week at 113 S Franklin St, the fourth Go store is the first to open outside of Amazon’s hometown. It’s also one of six expected to launch this year. Venture Beat notes that the store is keeping the fairly conventional weekday hours of 7AM to 8PM, though unlike other two of the other locations, it will be closed over the weekend.

As for what’s being offered up, it’s fairly standard convenience store fare, including breakfast, lunch and dinner meal kits and hot food.

For now, the locations largely thrive on the novelty of providing limited human interaction. Instead of the standard cashier model, the store relies on camera tracking and charges shoppers’ accounts as they walk out the door, product in tow. The next step for Amazon is demonstrating how effectively the model can be scaled.

The actual role the company plans to play in the brick and mortar retail model, however, remains to be seen.

Zortrax has launched a new printer, the Inkspire, that prints using an LCD to create objects in high-quality resin in minutes. The printer – essentially an upgrade to traditional stereolithography (SLA) printers – uses a single frame of light to create layers of 25 microns.

Most SLA printers use a laser or DLP to shine a pattern on the resin. The light hardens the resin instantly, creating a layer of material that the printer then pulls up and out as the object grows. The UV LCD in the $2,699 Inkspire throws an entire layer at a time and is nine times more precise than standard SLA systems. It can print 20 to 36 millimeters per hour and the system can print objects in serial, allowing you to to print hundreds of thousands of small objects per month.

“The printer is also perfect for rapid prototyping of tiny yet incredibly detailed products like jewelry or dental prostheses. But there are more possible applications,” said co-founder Marcin Olchanowski. “Working with relatively small models like HDMI cover caps, one Zortrax Inkspire can 3D print 77 of them in 1h 30min. 30 printers working together in a 3D printing farm can offer an approximate monthly output of 360,000 to over 500,000 parts (depending on how many shifts per day are scheduled). This is how Zortrax Inkspire can take a business way into medium or even high scale production territory.”

The printer company, which is now one of the largest in Central Europe, explored multiple technologies before settling on this form of SLA printing.

“At the early stage of this project we were investigating the technology itself, and it seemed very unlikely we were able to create such a device,” said Olchanowski. “We tried SLA and DLP but we were not happy with these technologies. We perceived them undeveloped. But, step by step, we succeeded. We see huge prospects of development for resin 3D printing technology, because nowadays customers expect the higher quality of printed models.”

The company sells 6,500 printers yearly and will see $13.7 million in revenue this year. They are also selling resins for their new printers and they will ship in about two months.

Printers like the Inkspire are a bit harder to use than traditional extruder-based printers like Makerbots. However, the quality and print speed is far better and paves the way to truly 3D-printed production runs for one-off parts.

Smartphone upstart OnePlus’s upcoming 6T flagship promises to bring changes — it’ll see it ditch the headphone jack and sport an in-screen fingerprint reader — but first there’s something else. OnePlus is developing its first smart TV.

CEO Pete Lau revealed the details today, explaining that the device will mark the five-year-old company’s next step to “building a connected human experience.”

“For most of us, there are four major environments we experience each day: the home, the workplace, the commute, and being on-the-move. The home – perhaps the most important environment experience – is just starting to enjoy the benefits of intelligent connectivity,” he wrote on the company’s website.

“We want to bring the home environment to the next level of intelligent connectivity. To do this, we are building a new product of OnePlus’ premium flagship design, image quality and audio experience to more seamlessly connect the home,” Lau added.

Shenzhen-based OnePlus has distinguished itself from a raft of Chinese mobile wannabees with some beautifully designed and well-functioning devices — eight phones to date — while it has developed its own Android-based OS and branched out into headphones. It has seen particular success in India, where it has beaten Samsung and Apple to become the country’s top ‘premium’ smartphone brand, and it has also landed a carrier distribution deal in the U.S. — something that has alluded larger rivals Huawei and Xiaomi. That’s impressive for such a young business.

It has tinkered around before. OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei previously told TechCrunch that the company had developed (and then abandoned) a number of prototype devices outside of phones before, but the TV project is very real. That said, the company is opening it up to its community of five million registered users who will be given the opportunity to name it. You can find more details about that in the announcement post here.

Altaba, the holding company of what Verizon left behind after its acquisition of Yahoo, said it has settled three ongoing legal cases relating to Yahoo’s previously disclosed data breaches.

In a Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former web giant turned investment company said it has agreed to end litigation for $47 million, which the company said will “mark a significant milestone” in cleaning up its remaining liabilities.

The deal is subject to court approval, which attorneys for both sides asked the court to approve the deal within 45 days, according to a filing submitted Friday.

In case you missed it, Yahoo had two data breaches — one in mid-2013, where data on all of the company’s three billion users was stolen, and another breach a year later of 500 million accounts, including email addresses and passwords. The company blamed the attack on state-sponsored hackers, without citing any evidence or pointing any fingers.

Muddying the waters, the breach was discovered during Verizon’s bid to acquire the web giant and its assets for $4.83 billion. Verizon dropped its offer price by some $350 million after the scope of the breach was fully realized, and created Oath. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is also owned by Oath.)

Earlier this year, a federal judge said victims of the breach could sue Yahoo, despite Verizon’s best efforts to dismiss the claims.

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

On the heels of the Getty family regaining control of Getty Images, reportedly for about $3 billion, the company is announcing a move to expand use of its images to a wider set of eyeballs. It will now work with Amazon to provide images from its catalog of 200 million digital images to populate searches on its screen-based Echo Show and Echo Spot devices.

The deal also comes amid rumors of a supposed launch of a screen-based Google Home device (made by the king of search, Google) to compete with the Echo Show, ahead of the holiday season.

It’s not clear if the Getty deal will mean that those building skills for the Echo devices will also be able to tap the Getty catalog, or if this is just for Amazon’s basic search feature — or something in between. We have contacted Amazon and Getty to ask and will update this post as we learn more.

As Getty describes it, the images will appear to enhance how Alexa — Amazon’s AI-based assistant — responds to users’ queries “to shape the visual style of Alexa.”

“Our premier collection of editorial, creative and archival content is a natural fit for Amazon’s Echo products, bringing best-in-class visuals to Echo users,” said Peter Orlowsky, SVP of strategic development, Getty Images, in a statement. “We are honored to unite with Echo’s screen-based products and to use our deep library of content to give Alexa her best look yet.”

Searches will include both current affairs as well as general knowledge. (Some examples Getty gives: pictures of the winners from the Academy Awards as an answer to “who won”; pictures of cities in answer to “What’s the capital of this or that country”; pictures of a recent touchdown or football goal; and so on.)

The deal is an interesting move for a few reasons. For Amazon, it will give the company a wide catalog of images to compel people to use (and buy!) the Echo Show and Echo Spot either in addition to or even instead of the lower-priced audio-only echo devices.

Last year after the Echo Show launched, there was some early criticism that there weren’t enough compelling Skills (Echo apps) being built for the screen-based device. While there are more of these Skills now, the voice-based Echo speakers continue to be the company’s mainstay product — even if it appears that Google Home sales have more recently outpaced those of the Echo — and so this could potentially help Amazon find its feet and sales groove with the screen-based products.

There is also an interesting play here in terms of how Amazon hopes to get an early advance on visual search and establishing a stronger basic app for it for its devices. A year ago, we reported that Google was working on a screen-based Home competitor to the Echo Show, and now reports say that this is likely to make an appearance before the holidays this year.

That means there is a very strong case for Amazon to get its own product in order and looking a little more impressive before Google — a search giant first and foremost — steals a march.

On the side of Getty, the company has for years been trying out different ideas to generate revenues from its vast image catalog. Many of these haven’t really panned out — as evidenced by the fact that the Getty family picked up an asset for $3 billion from an owner that had paid $3.3 billion for it — but the sheer numbers associated with the business — over 300 million images, 200 million digitised — also indicate that there is an inherent value as well.

This, in effect, gives Getty a shot (sorry for the pun) at providing another way of making its assets relevant and valuable, as a lever to help Amazon compete against the mighty Google.

It’s notable to me that the press release had no statement directly from Amazon in it. I’ve asked Amazon for a comment, but as you can see from other integrations — such as last week’s news from Mapillary — sometimes Amazon prefers to remain a silent partner in its collaborations in order to keep its feature and product cards close to its collective chest.

Indonesia’s Go-Jek is planning to raise $2 billion from investors to fuel its ride-hailing battle with Grab in Southeast Asia.

Go-Jek raised $1.5 billion earlier this year from investors that include Chinese trio Tencent, Meituan and JD.com, as well as Google, Allianz and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek. Now it is planning to raise a further $2 billion, two sources with knowledge of details told TechCrunch, as it seeks to expand on numerous fronts.

Those plans include both extending the scope of its services in Indonesia — where beyond rides it offers services on demand and financial products — and moving into new markets. The company recently went live in Vietnam, its first expansion, and it has plans to enter Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore this year.

Bloomberg first reported the fundraising plans, although a source told TechCrunch that the deal is far from being done. Existing investors — which also include KKR and Warburg Pincus — are likely to provide the new capital.

Word of Go-Jek’s financing plan comes after Grab raised $2 billion this summer, including a $1 billion contribution from Toyota. The Singapore-based company — which bought out Uber’s business earlier this year — recently said it plans to raise a further $1 billion before 2018 is out.

That money is likely to be spent on Grab’s ongoing strategy to broaden into services. That’s seen Grab follow Go-Jek’s lead and move into groceries, on-demand services and fintech as part of a desire to be Southeast Asia ‘super app’ for a broad range of local services.

Grab is also doubling down on Indonesia, where it recently announced plans to invest $250 million in local startups. While Go-Jek is largely seen as the dominant player in Indonesia, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country, Grab claims to handle 65 percent of all rides and transactions in the country.

Go-Jek’s most recent valuation was $5 billion. Investors valued Grab at $11 billion when its recent round closed in August.