Author: azeeadmin

07 Sep 2018

Eventbrite sets IPO range of $19 to $21, valuing it at $1.8B

Eventbrite has taken its final step toward becoming a publicly traded company.

In an updated S-1 filing this morning, the ticketing and events company announced plans to sell 10 million Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange at a price range of $19 to $21 under the ticker symbol EB.

At a midpoint price, Eventbrite will raise $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.

The company filed its initial IPO paperwork confidentially back in July, then unveiled its S-1 to about two weeks ago.

Eventbrite is not profitable and has been losing money since 2016. According to the documents, it posted losses of $40.4 million in 2016 and $38.5 million in 2017. In the first six months of 2018, the company has posted a net loss of $15.6 million. The company is making changes to make up for some of those losses  at the end of August, it announced a new pricing scheme for its customers using the “Essentials” package.

Its revenue is rising though, increasing from $133 million in 2016 to $201 million last year.

Backed by Sequoia, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price, which together own about 48 percent of the company, Eventbrite has raised roughly $330 million from private investors. It was valued at $1.5 billion in 2017.

Based in San Francisco, the company was founded in 2006 by Julia Hartz, Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage.

07 Sep 2018

Live from Disrupt SF 2018 day three!

All good things must come to an end, and Disrupt SF is no different.

But, in many ways, we’ve saved the best for last. Today we’ll hear from Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.

And that’s just the main stage.

In the afternoon, the real drama begins. Five finalists have been chosen to compete in the Startup Battlefield Finals. The winner will take home the Disrupt Cup, $100,000 and endless glory.

You can check out the full agenda right here.

Enjoy!

07 Sep 2018

Tesla shares fall as two more high-profile executives resign

Tesla shares plunged as much as 10 percent Friday morning following two high-profile executive departures.

Tesla shares have since recovered and were down 5.4 percent to $265.77 a share at 8:20 am PT.

The executive departures were just the latest tumult at the automaker headed by CEO Elon Musk . Just hours before, Musk capped off a long-winded interview live-streamed on YouTube with Joe Rogan by smoking what was described as a mix of tobacco and marijuana. The interview covered everything from cars and Tesla to space, AI, alcohol, flamethrowers, horses and digging tunnels.

Dave Morton, the company’s chief accounting officer, resigned from Tesla on Tuesday a month after taking the job, according to an SEC regulatory filing Friday. News of his departure was quickly followed by another. This time it was Gaby Toledano, who joined Tesla in May 2017 after 10 years on the executive team at video game publisher Electronic Arts.

“Since I joined Tesla on August 6th, the level of public attention placed on the company, as well as the pace within the company, have exceeded my expectations,” Morton said in the regulator filing. “As a result, this caused me to reconsider my future. I want to be clear that I believe strongly in Tesla, its mission, and its future prospects, and I have no disagreements with Tesla’s leadership or its financial reporting.”

Morton’s one month on the job has been particularly chaotic. Morton, former CFO at computer-drive maker Seagate Technology, came on board one day before Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent out a tweet that he was considering taking the company private in a buyout at $420 a share. That tweet triggered a series of events that caused chaos at the company, including several lawsuits filed by shareholders and a subpoena from the SEC.

The proposal to go private was scrapped less than three weeks later.

Morton is giving up an annual base salary of $350,000 and, more importantly, a $10 million new-hire equity grant that would have vested after four years.

Tesla’s accounting functions and personnel will continue to be overseen by both Tesla’s chief financial officer and its corporate controller, according to the filing.

Toledano’s resignation, who TechCrunch had previously reported was on a leave of absence, was reported Friday by Bloomberg. Toledano had held the top HR job for 15 months. 

07 Sep 2018

Verizon declines to comment on WSJ report saying Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Oath

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Verizon as soon as next month.

Armstrong heads up the carrier giant’s digital and advertising division, Oath (formerly AOL, prior to the Yahoo acquisition and the subsequent merger of the two units). Oath also happens to be TechCrunch’s parent, of course.

We reached out to our corporate overlords for a confirm or deny on the newspaper report. A Verizon spokesperson told us: “We don’t comment on speculation and have no announcements to make.”

The WSJ cites “people familiar with the matter” telling it Armstrong is in talks to leave, which would mean he’s set to step away from an ongoing process of combining the two business units into a digital content and ad tech giant.

Though he has presided over several rounds of job cuts already, as part of that process.

Verizon acquired Armstrong when it bought AOL in 2015. The Yahoo acquisition followed in 2017 — with the two merged to form the odd-sounding Oath, a b2b brand that Armstrong seemingly inadvertently outted.

Building an ad giant to challenge Google and Facebook is the underlying strategy. But as the WSJ points out there hasn’t been much evidence of Oath moving Verizon’s growth needle yet (which remains tied to its wireless infrastructure).

The newspaper cites eMarketer projections which have Google taking over a third of the online ad market by 2020; Facebook just under a fifth; and Oath a mere 2.7%.

Meanwhile, Verizon’s appointment of former Ericsson CEO, Hans Vestberg, as its new chief exec in June, taking over from Lowell McAdam (who stepped down after seven years), suggests pipes (not content) remain the core focus for the carrier — which has the expensive of 5G upgrades to worry about.

A cost reduction program, intending to use network virtualization to take $10BN in expenses out of the business over the next four years, has also been a recent corporate priority for Verizon.

Given that picture, it’s less clear how Oath’s media properties mesh with its plans.

The WSJ’s sources told the newspaper there were recent discussions about whether to spin off the Oath business entirely — but said Verizon has instead decided to integrate some of its operations more closely with the rest of the company (whatever ‘integrate’ means in that context).

There have been other executive changes at Oath earlier this year, too, with the head of its media properties, Simon Khalaf, departing in April — and not being replaced.

Instead Armstrong appointed a COO, K Guru Gowrappan, hired in from Alibaba, who he said Oath’s media bosses would now report to.

“Now is our time to turn the formation of Oath into the formation of one of the world’s best operating companies that paves a safe and exciting path forward for our billion consumers and the world’s most trusted brands,” Armstrong wrote in a staff memo on Gowrappan’s appointment obtained by Recode.

“Guru will run day to day operations of our member (consumer) and B2B businesses and will serve as a member of our global executive team helping to set company culture and strategy. Guru will also be an important part of the Verizon work that is helping both Oath and Verizon build out the future of global services and revenue,” he added, saying he would be spending more of his time “spread across strategic Oath opportunities and Verizon… leading our global strategy, global executive team, and corporate operations”.

At the start of the year Oath also named a new CFO, Vanessa Wittman, after the existing officer, Holly Hess, moved to Verizon to head up the aforementioned cost-saving program.

Reaction to the rumour of Armstrong’s imminent departure has sparked fresh speculation about jobs cuts on the anonymous workplace app Blind — with Oath/AOL/Yahoo employees suggesting additional rounds of company-wide layouts could be coming in October.

Or, well, that could always just be trolling.

07 Sep 2018

Starry wants to put high-speed 5G internet in reach of everyone

Starry, a Boston startup, wants deliver high-speed 5G internet in major cities at a reasonable price. Today, it announced it is expanding service from its initial launch in Boston to New York City. The company also announced a deal with Related Companies, a large national affordable housing owner, to host Starry equipment on its buildings and offer Starry service to its tenants.

The Starry solution consists of three parts: The beam sits on a high roof. The point sits on a lower roof and the consumer gets a Starry Station, which acts as a modem of sorts to deliver the internet service to the home. As they put it, internet access becomes an extension of the property.

Diagram: Starry

While the hardware solution is impressive in itself, it allows Starry to offer high-speed internet to consumers at a more affordable price point than traditional large providers. Company founder and CEO Chet Kanojia says his company can provide up to 200 Megabits per second service, up and down, for just $50 a month with no data caps or long-term contracts. Installation is free and the company includes 24/7 customer care at no additional cost.

While it’s hard to compare pricing across services, Starry should appeal to cord cutters, who have dropped cable TV for more affordable streaming alternatives and have been looking for a way to free themselves from large internet service providers. It’s fair to say that no other provider offers this kind of speed up and down for that price.

The solution requires high rooftops to place the enabling infrastructure and the arrangement with Related is particularly interesting in this context. The deal is good for both parties, giving Starry the infrastructure it needs to place its equipment in major cities, while providing Related tenants with low-cost internet access starting later this year.

“Our first strategic partnership is with Related Properties, which is a big property ownership company in all the major cities. It allows us to basically extend our network using their infrastructure, rooftops and buildings,” Kanojia said.

The startup plans to provide service to other New York City residents starting in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn this fall, and expanding to other parts of the city over time. They have further plans to expand to Washington and LA later this year with 18 other cities coming on board in the next year.

The company launched in 2014 and spent a couple of years developing the hardware part of the solution. It has raised $163 million, according to data supplied by the company. The most recent round was $100 million Series C in July. It’s worth noting that their new partner, Related joined that most recent investment.

Kanojia helped launched Aereo, a startup that wanted to deliver low-cost television by placing antennas on rooftops and letting consumers view broadcast TV over the internet. That idea was shot down by the US Supreme Court when broadcasters sued for copyright violations, and the company went out of business soon after. Starry could be seen as an extension of that idea, but delivering internet instead of the TV signals themselves.

07 Sep 2018

Sonatype raises $80 million to build out Nexus platform

Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open-source company, has raised $80 million from investment firm TPG.

The company said the financing will help extend its Nexus platform, which it touts as an enterprise ready repository manager and library, which among other things tracks code and helps to keep everything in the devops pipeline up-to-date and secure.

It’s that kind of technology that Sonatype says can prevent another Equifax -style breach of over 147 million consumers’ data. Earlier this year, the company found over dozens of Fortune Global 100 companies that downloaded outdated and vulnerable versions of Apache Struts, which Equifax failed to patch or update.

Sonatype’s chief executive Wayne Jackson his company can help prevent those type of breaches.

“We monitor literally millions of open source commits per day,” he told TechCrunch. “Last year hundreds of billions of components were downloaded by software developers, 12 percent of which had known security defects.”

The funding will go to extend the company’s Nexus platform, Jackson said.

The company said it’s had an 81 percent increase in year-over-year sales in the first-half of the year, and 1.5 million users added to its flagship Nexus platform since January. In all, the company has more than 10 million software developers and 1,000 enterprises on Nexus worldwide.

Sonatype’s last round of funding was in 2016, led by Goldman Sachs, snagging $30 million.

07 Sep 2018

Managing the music business from a mobile phone, Jammber is making the industry sing

The music business is littered with stories about songwriters or studio contributors and session musicians who never get the credit — or money — they’re often due for their work on hit songs.

And for every storied session musician in “The Wrecking Crew” there are perhaps hundreds of other contributors who aren’t getting their just desserts.

That’s where Jammber comes in. The five-year-old company co-founded by serial entrepreneur Marcus Cobb has developed a suite of tools to manage everything from songwriting credits and rights management to ticketing and touring all from a group of apps on a mobile phone. And has just raised $2.4 million in funding to take those tools to a broader market.

Jammber “Muse” gives collaborators a single platform to exchange lyrics and song ideas, while the company’s “Splits” app tracks ownership and credits of any eventual product from a collaboration. The company’s nStudio tracks songwriting credits to assist with chart and Grammy submission — through a partnership with Nielsen Music — and its “PinPoint” helps organize touring. The recording applications even have a presence feature so session musicians, songwriters and artists can actually be tagged in the studio while they’re working. 

“I think we need to get attribution and monetization closer to the creators,” Cobb has said. “Why aren’t we doing that? The industry is growing and thriving. Are we making sure that performers and creators of all different tiers are being equally compensated?”

The answer, sadly, for many in the music industry is no. In fact, while Cobb had originally set out to make a networking tool for creatives with Jammber he wound up shifting the service to the management toolkit after visiting the offices of a music label.

Jammber chief executive Marcus Cobb

“I saw stacks and stacks of payroll checks that were returned to sender,” Cobb, told Crain’s Chicago Business. “These checks were taking three months to two years to print, and they were wrong addresses, or there were stage names instead of legal names.”

That experience convinced Cobb of the demand, but it was Nashville that gave the serial entrepreneur the crucible within which to develop the full suite of tools that now make up Jammber’s soup-to-nuts platform.

Cobb likes to say that Jammber was conceived in Chicago (where the company spun up from the city’s massively influential 1871 entrepreneurship center) and born in Nashville — the home of the multi-billion dollar American country music industry. All of the tools in Jammber, Cobb says, were created with input from a local musician, producer, artist and repertoire person or a label executive.

In 2015, the company came down to Nashville as part of the first batch of companies in Project Music, a joint venture between the Country Music Association and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center meant to encourage the development of technology for the music industry.

For the 41-year-old Cobb, programming and entrepreneurship has literally been a life saver. Growing up in Texas and Nevada with an abusive, drug-addicted stepfather took a toll on Cobb and programming became an outlet — thanks to a particularly well-equipped computer lab at his high school. “I had moved 24 times,” Cobb said in an interview. “My stepfather was a full-blown crack addict. He would disappear with money; we got evicted a lot.”

But the experience with computers led to an early job out of high school, which launched Cobb’s tech career. He sold his first company, Eido Software in 2007 a year after launching it and has used that money to pursue other endeavors.

And while Cobb is a gifted programmer, that’s not his only interest. His next big foray into business was as the owner and lead designer of Marc Wayne Intimates, a boutique lingerie company that also provided the business-savvy Cobb with his first window into the music business — outfitting dancers in music videos for artists like Pitbull.

Cobb has invested $300,000 of his own money into Jammber and raised roughly $400,000 in early seed funding. The $2.3 million that the company raised in its most recent round came from a who’s who of music executives including former Sony Nashville, chief executive Joe Galante; Hootie and the Blowfish manager Clarence Spalding; and Kings of Leon manager Ken Levitan.

These investors know the tension at the heart of the music business better than anyone, Cobb says. Which is that the creative act of making music can often be at odds with the mundanity of organizing and running an effective business to ensure that the music getting made is actually heard by an audience that then pays the musician for their work.

“The irony about making a living in a copyright industry like the music industry is you have to be very organized to make money in a timely manner or even get credit for your work,” said Cobb. “Over 40% of the money creators are owed is tied up by bad or wrong data because it’s very difficult to be organized while you create. These tools finally change that.”

Jammber’s services are currently in a closed, invite-only beta that will be capped at 10,000 users. There’s a basic set of services that will be available for free, with pricing for “unlimited” access to the toolkit starting at $10 per month. In addition to the applications, the company also has an online platform that integrates with the mobile suite. Pricing for that service starts at $25 per month.

“This is an ecosystem play for us. I’ve been in software for a long time and the realization for me is that it’s not just mobile-first or cloud-first anymore, it’s simplicity-first. Independent artists and record labels generated $5.2 billionin revenues last year and the sector continues to grow — all while largely using paper and spreadsheets for their back office tools,” said Cobb. “This is a massive, underserved market and we believe we’ve figured out how to provide the value they’ve been waiting for.”

07 Sep 2018

Latin America is the next stage in the race for dominance in the ride-hailing market

As the number of competitors in the ride-hailing industry dwindles, geographic expansion is emerging as the next proving ground to determine who will be the victor in the ride-hailing market.

The race for control of the industry, which is estimated by Goldman Sachs to grow eightfold to $285 billion by 2030, is escalating with China’s Didi Chuxing already surpassing Uber as the most valuable startup in the world. With a recent valuation of approximately $56 billion, compared to Uber’s $48 billion, Didi is posing a real threat to Uber’s operations and shows no signs of slowing down. Cementing its position as the top ride-hailing service in China, Didi is now turning its attention to another region of the world that is still filled with vast opportunities and not yet dominated by a single taxi alternative: Latin America.

While many ride-hailing and sharing services have already sprung up and faced regulation in cities across Latin America such as Mexico City, Montevideo, and São Paulo, the region still presents an enormous opportunity for the companies that can adapt and move fast enough.

The current opportunities in Latin America

Unlike many other regions of the world, Latin America is still very much reliant on traditional forms of public transportation such as buses, trains, and subway systems. What’s more, larger cities such as São Paulo, Mexico City, and Bogota simply cannot support any more vehicles on the road without an infrastructure overhaul. Large metro areas are already at or above maximum capacity during peak hours, making owning and commuting with a car more of a hassle than a luxury. As a result, many commuters across Latin America are putting less importance on owning a vehicle and opting to use alternative modes of transportation and on-demand services instead.

Beyond the rising demand for alternative transportation options, it’s also worth noting that Latin America is the world’s second-fastest-growing mobile market. In a region of approximately 640 million people, there are more than 200 million smartphone users. By 2020, predictions say that 63% of Latin America’s population will have access to the mobile Internet. Latin American smartphone users have quickly adopted global apps, such as Uber and Facebook. However, tech companies have yet to fully tap into the region’s potential.

Chilean taxi drivers demonstrate along Alameda Avenue against US on-demand ride service giant Uber, in Santiago, on July 10, 2017.
Uber smartphone app has faced stiff resistance from traditional taxi drivers the world over, as well as bans in some places over safety concerns and questions over legal issues, including taxes. (MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images)

The key players

Uber

According to a Dalia survey, Latin Americans with smartphones that live in urban areas are the most likely to have used a ride-hailing app or site. Overall, 45% have used an app, with Mexico taking the top position in the region at 58%.

Uber entered Latin America in 2013 and claims to have more than 36 million active users in the region, proving employment for more than a million drivers. The company quickly dominated Mexico, which is now its second-largest market after the U.S. In fact, up until recently Uber claimed a near monopoly on ride-sharing in Mexico with few competitors. Uber also has operations in more than 16 Latin American countries.

99 (formerly 99Taxis)

With an urban population of approximately 180 million, Brazil is the ultimate prize for ride-hailing and taxi companies with several services competing for market share. Most notably, 99 (formerly “99Taxis”) was able to gain momentum early on with exclusive services that extended beyond basic ride-hailing (such as its 99 TOP and 99 POP services) and better tools for its drivers.

With over 200,000 drivers and 14 million users, 99 attracted the attention of investors worldwide, including that of China’s Didi Chuxing. Didi invested $100 million into 99 in January 2018 before acquiring 99 entirely months later for nearly $1 billion to take on Uber in Latin America, shortly after it acquired Uber’s operations in China.

Easy Taxi

Rocket Internet -backed taxi booking service, Easy Taxi, started in Latin America in 2011, two years after Uber first started in San Francisco. The company provides an easy way to book a taxi and track it in real-time. Today, the company is owned by Maxi Mobility, which acquired the company from Rocket Internet in 2017 for an undisclosed amount. Maxi Mobility also owns Cabify, and operates across many Latin American markets, including Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Panama, Brazil, Peru, and Chile, in addition to a handful of markets elsewhere.

To solidify its position in the region, Easy Taxi merged with Colombian taxi-booking app Tappsi in 2015. Tappsi launched in Bogotá in 2012 and was doing quite well in the Colombian market. The merger allowed the companies to pool their resources just as other competitors, such as Uber, began entering the region.

Easy Taxi maintains impressive traction, raising more than $75 million to date. But as the ride-hailing battle in Latin America pushes forward, the company is rumored to be a likely investment or acquisition target for Uber, Didi, or the largest global investor in this space, Softbank.

Cabify

Cabify is a Spanish company that provides private vehicles for hire via its smartphone app. Although founded in Madrid, Cabify has always positioned itself as a Latin American company, investing heavily across the region. The company was able to gain a strong foothold due to some significant funding raised by its parent company, Maxi Mobility. In January 2018, Maxi Mobility raised another $160 million and said the funding would be used to accelerate both of its companies, Cabify and Easy Taxi, in the 130 cities where they operate throughout Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.

Cabify reported it has over 13 million users and grew its installed-base by 500% between 2016 and 2017, tripling its user base and fulfilling six times more trips in 2017.

Cabify competes directly with Uber, 99, and Easy Taxi in Brazil; however, it reportedly has around 40% market share in Sao Pãolo, one of the largest cities in all of Latin America.

Smaller players to watch

Beat (Formerly Taxibeat)

Beat is a profitable ride-hailing service founded in Athens, Greece that also operates in Peru. Beat is slowly expanding its operations across Latin America, though expansion appears to be limited to Chile for now.

As of January 2017, Beat had around 15,000 drivers and 800,000 customers in Peru.

Nekso

Toronto-based Nekso bet on the Latin American taxi-hailing market before its home market with a pilot launch in Venezuela in 2016. Nekso was able to gain acceptance from the taxi industries in Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Panama with its slightly different approach to ride-hailing.

The company connects a network of 550+ licensed taxi companies with thousands of drivers and allows users to flag down a cab off the street and without using in-app requests. Nekso also uses artificial intelligence technology to offer drivers real-time updates on weather, events, and traffic data to predict areas of a city which may need more drivers. The company claims taxi drivers can spend up to two-thirds of their day looking for or waiting for riders and that Nekso technology helps drivers increase their daily rides by more than 25% percent.

At the end of 2017, Nekso boasted around 150,000 users and facilitated approximately 400,000 rides per month. Now, the company plans to make its debut in Canada as well as expand to more countries in South America, including Argentina, Colombia, Chile, and Peru.

Didi, 99, and the next phase

99’s new owner, Didi, which dominates the Asian market and was able to defeat Uber in China, has big plans for international expansion. Its acquisition of 99 reveals the potential it sees in Latin America but also adds to the complicated web of global ride-hailing services.

After Didi shut down and acquired Uber’s assets in China, it also bought a stake in Uber for $1 billion. Uber, Didi, and 99 are all backed by Softbank. However, everywhere outside of China, Didi and Uber are competing with each other. Didi’s full plans for 99 are not yet obvious, but the company has already set up an office in Mexico and begun poaching staff from Uber in Mexico.

With an infusion of capital, Latin America’s ride-hailing industry is multiplying. That said, companies that want to compete in the region will need to use an aggressive and strategic approach that can withstand the uniqueness of commuters and transportation options in the region. It’s only a matter of time until we see if these companies continue ramping up their operations for geographic domination, or if we see more and more partner up to advance their technologies and address other looming threats – such as bike sharing, scooter sharing, and even autonomous vehicles.

Two of the founders of 99, who sold their company to Didi, have already launched a dockless bike sharing startup called Yellow in Brazil and raised $9 million to grow its operations. No other scooter company has taken the plunge into Latin America yet besides Grin Scooters in Mexico City, but other larger cities such as Buenos Aires, Bogota, Santiago, and Lima would be ideal markets if the companies can figure out pricing as well as security and safety issues first.

Didi’s activity in Brazil and Mexico is sure to trigger a new wave of competition between existing ride-hailing players and create an even more tangled web of alliances and acquisitions. Whether or not these companies can adapt and move fast enough to rise to the top, and deal with the other looming alternative modes of transportation, remains to be seen.

07 Sep 2018

A top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store will steal your browser history

A popular top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store was found pilfering browser histories from anyone who downloads it.

Yet still, at the time of writing, the rogue app — Adware Doctor — stands as the number one grossing paid app in the app store’s utilities categories. But Apple was warned weeks ago and did nothing to pull the app offline.

As of publication, the app is still in the store. We’re not linking to it for that reason.

Apple’s walled garden approach to Mac and iPhone security is almost entirely based on the inability to install apps outside the app store, which Apple monitors closely. While it’s not unheard of to hear of dangerous apps slipping into Google’s Play store, it’s nearly unheard of for Apple to face the same fate. Any app that doesn’t meet the company’s strict security and sometimes moral criteria will be rejected, and users won’t able to install it.

This app promises to “keep your Mac safe” and “get rid of annoying pop-up ads” — and even “discover and remove threats on your Mac.” But what the app won’t tell you is that for just a few bucks it’ll steal and download your browser history — including all the sites you’ve searched for or accessed — to servers in China run by the app’s makers.

Thanks in part to a video posted last month on YouTube and with help from security firm Malwarebytes, it’s now clear what the app’s up to.

Security researcher Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now chief research officer at cybersecurity startup Digita Security, dug in and shared his findings with TechCrunch.

Wardle found that the downloaded app jumped through hoops to bypass Apple’s Mac sandboxing features, which prevents apps from grabbing data on the hard drive, and upload a user’s browser history on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers.

Wardle found that the app, thanks to Apple’s own flawed vetting, could request access to the user’s home directory and its files. That isn’t out of the ordinary, Wardle says, because tools that market themselves as anti-malware or anti-adware expect access to the user’s files to scan for problems. When a user allows that access, the app can detect and clean adware — but if found to be malicious, it can “collect and exfiltrate any user file,” said Wardle.

Once the data is collected, it’s zipped into an archive file and sent to a domain based in China.

Wardle said that for some reason in the last few days the China-based domain went offline. At the time of writing, TechCrunch confirmed that the domain wouldn’t resolve — in other words, it was still down.

“Let’s face it, your browsing history provides a glimpse into almost every aspect of your life,” said Wardle’s post. “And people have even been convicted based largely on their internet searches!”

He said that the app’s access to such data “is clearly based on deceiving the user.”

Apple was contacted weeks ago. The email it responded with, in not so many words, said “we can’t tell you anything,” but forwarded the feedback.

A meagre $4.99 for the app may not seem much to the average user, but it’s a heavy price to pay for having the app steal your browser history — which users will never get back. And given that Apple makes a 30 percent cut of every purchase of this popular app, there isn’t much financial incentive to withdraw the app from the store.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

07 Sep 2018

Kry expands its telehealth service to France — under new brand, Livi

Swedish telehealth startup Kry, which bagged a $66M Series B in June for market expansion, is executing on that plan — announcing today it will launch into the French market on September 15.

This will be the fourth market for the 2014 founded European startup, after its home market of Sweden, along with Norway and Spain. When we spoke to Kry in June it also said it was eyeing a UK launch, and it says now the country is “coming up next” on its launch map.

Kry’s boast for its service is it lets patients ‘see’ a healthcare professional within 15 minutes — via a remote video consultation on their smartphone or tablet. It recruits doctors locally, in each market where it operates.

The French launch introduces a new brand name for the service, which will be called Livi in the market.

Livi will also be Kry’s brand for all markets outside the Nordics (derived from the Swedish word for ‘life’ — which is ‘liv’).

European state-funded healthcare services vary by country but in France Kry says the government is implementing a national system for public reimbursement of digital healthcare consultations via video — “in light of unequal access, increasing costs and over-usage of emergency services”.

So it’s evidently aiming for Livi to tap into that public money pot.

“I am very excited about bringing our service to French patients,” said Kry CEO and co-founder Johannes Schildt in a statement. “Our vision is great healthcare for everyone, regardless of who you are or where you live. Using digitalization we will fast forward the future of healthcare, making it patient focused, proactive and economically sustainable. The fact that France is opening up for digital healthcare on a national level should be an inspiration to the rest of Europe.”

Over in the UK, the new minister responsible for health, Matt Hancock — who was previously in charge of digital matters — has made increasing the National Health Service’s use of technology one of his key priorities, announcing yesterday a further £200M to plough into upgrading NHS IT systems.

Which will also, presumably, be music to health app makers’ ears.

Kry says its telehealth service has now generated more than half a million patient meetings, across its existing markets, saying it grew 740% in 2017 — which it claims makes it the largest digital healthcare provider in Europe.

In its home market of Sweden it also says it accounts for more than 3% of all primary care doctor visits.

While in March this year it added an online psychology service to its offering, and says it’s now the largest provider of cognitive behavioral therapy treatments in Sweden.

Investors in the digital health business include Index Ventures, Accel, Creandum, and Project A.