Author: azeeadmin

Lyft launched its scooter business in Denver on Thursday, the first market for the company as it expands beyond ride-hailing and into other means of

Lyft is one of a handful of companies to receive permits from city officials to operate a dockless scooter or bike-share business. Lyft has 250 scooters available for customers and will eventually ramp up to a cap of 350. About 100 of those scooters will be dedicated to what Lyft calls opportunity zones, which focuses on helping customers reach bus and train stops.

It costs $1 to unlock a scooter and 15 cents for each minute it’s in use, including the reservation and hold times.

The company plans to roll out scooters and bikes into other cities as part of CEO John Zimmer’s goal of helping people better connect to public transit.

The move into Denver aligns with recent data that 25% of Lyft’s passengers in the city say owning a personal vehicle is less important to them now. The launch also part of a larger a shift within the company, which became more visible in June with a redesigned app, to emphasize shared rides and public transportation.

Earlier this year, Denver Public Works approved permits for Lime, Bird, Lyft, Spin, and Razer to operate dockless scooters services in the city as part of a one-year pilot program. Permits were issued to Lyft, Jump and Zanster for dockless bike sharing as well. The pilot program is designed to evaluate whether scooters and dockless bikes can help the city reduce single-occupant vehicle commute trips by 2030.

Lyft was one of several companies, including rival Uber lose out in their bid to operate scooters in San Francsico. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) issued one-year permits to Skip and Scoot. Twelve companies applied to operate within the city, including JUMP, which Uber acquired in April, as well as Lyft, Skip, Spin, Lime, Scoot, ofo, Razor, CycleHop, USSCooter and Ridecell.

European regulators have given the green light to Apple’s December 2017 acquisition of music and image recognition discovery firm Shazam.

Apple Music is the second largest music streaming service in Europe, after Spotify . While Shazam offers what has been described as “a leading music recognition app” in the region (and globally).

TechCrunch broke the news of the acquisition last year — reporting the price for Apple picking up the veteran UK startup to be in the region of $400 million. Apple confirmed our scoop a few days later.

But two months later European Union competition regulators said they were reviewing the deal, a move triggered by concerns raised by multiple countries in the European Economic Area (EEA).

Then in April the Commission stepped the review up into a full-blown investigation.

Today, after carrying out its in-depth probe, the Commission says it’s satisfied the deal will not adversely affect competition in the EEA — and has given it the go-ahead.

Commenting in a statement, antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager, said: “Data is key in the digital economy. We must therefore carefully review transactions which lead to the acquisition of important sets of data, including potentially commercially sensitive ones, to ensure they do not restrict competition. After thoroughly analysing Shazam’s user and music data, we found that their acquisition by Apple would not reduce competition in the digital music streaming market.”

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

In reaching this decision, the Commission found that Apple and Shazam mainly offer complementary services that do not compete with each other.

It says its investigation looked at:

• whether Apple would obtain access to commercially sensitive data about customers of its competitors for the provision of music streaming services in the EEA, and whether such data could allow Apple to directly target its competitors’ customers and encourage them to switch to Apple Music. As a result, competing music streaming services could have been put at a competitive disadvantage
• considering Shazam’s strong position in the market for music recognition apps, whether Apple Music’s competitors would be harmed if Apple, after the transaction, were to discontinue referrals from the Shazam app to them

The decision to clear the deal was made after what it describes as “a wide range of investigative measures” were undertaken. It also says it took feedback from “key market participants in the digital music industry, including providers of music streaming and music recognition services, as well as other stakeholders”.

It said today that it does not believe the merged entity will be able to shut out competing providers by accessing commercially sensitive data about their customers — viewing Shazam’s data holdings as unable to “materially increase Apple’s ability to target music enthusiasts”.

It also does not believed the merged entity could shut out competing providers by restricting access to the Shazam app — saying the app has “a limited importance as an entry point to the music streaming services of Apple Music’s competitors”.

The Commission has also judged the combined user datasets of Shazam and Apple as not able to confer “a unique advantage to the merged entity in the markets on which it operates”.

“Any concerns in that respect were dismissed because Shazam’s data is not unique and Apple’s competitors would still have the opportunity to access and use similar databases,” it added.

Another tech IPO is coming around the corner in what has been a strong year for startups taking the plunge and going public. Upwork — a marketplace connecting 375,000 freelance developers, writers, marketers and others  with close to half a million clients — announced a plan to list on the Nasdaq exchange to trade under the ticker UPWK, filing an S-1 form with the SEC with initial financials and other details about the company.

Upwork’s IPO is yet another mark of the bigger swing we’ve seen of privately-backed tech companies turning to the public markets for their next cash infusions for growth, this week alone seeing listings for Elastic and another freelancer behemoth, Meituan in China. The double-whammy of not one but two freelancer marketplaces (Meituan is more focused on services and tradespeople) underscores also the continuing growth of contractors as a key part of the labor force. There have been reports that Fiverr, another freelancer platform, will also IPO by next year with a $1 billion valuation (news perhaps timed to leak to offset Upwork’s S-1).

So far, Upwork has not disclosed how much it intends to raise in the IPO, but its S-1 provides some details about the financials and other metrics of the company:

— In the 12 months that ended in June 2018, Upwork made $228 million in revenues on Gross Services Value (GSV: the total amount of overall service work ‘purchased’ on its platform) of $1.56 billion. Sales are currently growing at around 20 percent.

— The company, however, operates at a net loss, most recently posting $7.1 million for the six months ending June 2018.

— Upwork calls itself the largest global skilled freelancer marketplace. In the year that ended in June 2018, some 2 million projects were created on its platform engaging finance specialists, developers and designers, marketing specialists and writers of different kinds. It said it currently has some 375,000 freelancers and 475,000 clients registered on its platform.

— Upwork said a whole 10 percent of its business comes from a single, unnamed client in the six months that ended June 2018. (It had two clients each accounting for 10 percent of its revenues in 2016 and 2017.)

— The company operates in 180 countries.

The news comes after reports in July of this year that Upwork — rebranded in 2015 after the merger of Elance and oDesk — had made a confidential filing to initiate the process. Confidential filings is a route that many startups take in the first instance to start to sound out investors and begin the process of listing without as much public scrutiny.

The company most recently disclosed a valuation way back in 2014, when it was valued at around $700 million. The cap table is not completely clear given its merged status. According to Pitchbook, Upwork itself has only raised around $30 million. Investors in the company include DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital , T. Rowe Price, FirstMark Capital, Jackson Square Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Stripes Group.

Upwork said that part of the IPO proceeds will be used to pay back $19 million of a loan made by Silicon Valley Bank.

Skydio launched their self-flying R1 drone a few months back, now the startup is launching a developer platform that will allow users to design and share their own skills for the device, potentially opening it up to a lot of new use cases.

Alongside the platform launch, Skydio has also shared that they sold out of the first run of $2,499 “Frontier Edition” drones and they’ll begin selling the drone at $1,999 albeit with a couple less accessories (but still offer everything a user needs to get airborne).

The new Skydio Autonomy Platform is basically focused on getting developers to move past the functionality that ships in the box with the R1 and to build custom solutions for different industry problems. That could be an inspection or security use case where the user wants to run a program to have the R1 fly itself to a number of points and capture a snapshot from each while having the intelligence to avoid obstacles in the way and prioritize the most efficient safe flight path.

I had a chance to demo the technology and look at how the platform could also be leveraged to suck in photogrammetry data and create a quick-and-dirty spatial map of where it had flown. A cool feature is that the company is shipping a Skydio simulator so even potential users of the device can get a peek at when a skill might look ahead of time with a lifelike virtual simulator of the R1that feeds off a 3D map and works inside a browser.

Some hardware shortcomings will prevent the R1 from becoming some sort of autonomous warehouse inspection bot (short battery life, WiFi connection to a user’s phone), but there are still plenty of untapped capabilities for a self-flying drone that has the intelligence to adjust its own flight paths when necessary.

On the consumer side, the R1 is getting a couple of new 1-click skills that should make for some pretty cool shots. The company has also announced that they are partnering with camera rental company Omni to begin allowing people to rent an R1 if they’re based in the Bay Area or Portland.

Nigerian digital payments startup Paga is gearing up for an international expansion with $10 million in funding let by the Global Innovation Fund. 

The company is planning to release its payments product in Ethiopia, Mexico, and the Philippines—CEO Tayo Oviosu told TechCrunch at Disrupt San Francisco.

Paga looks to go head to head with regional and global payment players, such as PayPal, Alipay, and Safaricom’s M-Pesa, according to Oviosu.

“We are not only in a position to compete with them, we’re going beyond them,” he  said of Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile money product. “Our goal is to build a global payment ecosystem across many emerging markets.”

Founded in 2012, Paga has created a multi-channel network and platform to transfer money, pay-bills, and buy things digitally that’s already serving 9 million customers in Nigeria—including 6000 businesses. All of whom can drop into one of Paga’s 17,167 agents or transfer funds from one of Paga’s mobile apps.

Paga products work on iOS, Android, and basic USSD phones using a star, hashtag option. The company has remittance partnerships with the likes of Western Union and Moneytrans and allows for third-party integration of its app.

Paga has also built out considerable scale in home market Nigeria—which boasts the dual distinction as Africa’s most populous nation and largest economy.

Since inception, the startup has processed 57 million transactions worth $3.6 billion, according to Oviosu.

That’s no small feat given the country straddles the challenges and opportunities of growing digital payments. Only recently did Nigeria’s mobile and internet penetration break 50 percent and 40 percent of the country’s 196 million remain unbanked.

To bring more of Nigeria’s masses onto digital commerce, Paga recently launched a new money transfer-app that further simplifies the P2P payment process from mobile devices.

For nearly a decade, Kenya’s M-Pesa—which has 20 million active users and operates abroad—has dominated discussions of mobile money in Africa.

Paga and a growing field of operators are diversifying the continent’s payment playing field.

Fintech company Cellulant raised $47 million in 2019 on its business of processing $350 million in payment transactions across 33 African countries.

In Nigeria, payment infrastructure company Interswitch has expanded across borders and is pursuing an IPO. And Nigerian payment gateway startups Paystack and Flutterwave have digitized volumes of B2B transactions while gaining global investment.

So why does Paga—a Nigerian payments company—believe it can expand its digital payments business abroad?

“Why not us?,” said CEO Oviosu. “People sit in California and listen to Spotify that was developed in Sweden. And Uber started somewhere before going to different countries and figuring out local markets,” he added.

“The team behind this business has worked globally for some of the top tech names. This platform can stand shoulder to shoulder with any payments company built somewhere else,” he said.

On that platform, Oviosu underscores it has positioned itself as a partner, not a rival, to traditional banks. “Our ecosystem is not built to compete with you, it’s actually complimentary to you,” he said of the company’s positioning to big banks—enabling Paga to partner with seven banks in Nigeria.

Paga also sees potential to adapt its model to other regulatory and consumer environments. “We’ve built an infrastructure that rides across all mobile networks,” said Oviosu. “We’re not trying to be a bank. Paga wants to work with the banks and financial institutions to enable a billion people to access and use money,” he said.

As part of the $10 million round (which brings Paga’s total funding up to $35 million), Global Innovation Partners will take a board seat. Other round participants include Goodwell, Adlevo Capital, Omidyar Network, and Unreasonable Capital.

Paga will use the Series B2 to grow its core development team of 25 engineers across countries and continents. It will also continue its due diligence on global expansion—though no hard dates have been announced.

On revenues, Paga makes money on merchant payments, bank to bank transfers, and selling airtime and data. “As we roll out other services, we will build a model where we will make money on savings and lending,” said the company’s CEO.

As for profitability, Paga does not release financials, but reached profitability in 2018, according to Oviosu—something that was confirmed in the due diligence process with round investors.

On the possibility of beating Interswitch (or another venerable startup) to become Africa’s first big tech IPO, Oviosu plays that down. “For the next 3-5 years I see us staying private,” he said.

Episerver, the Irvine, California-based company which provides services for marketers to manage content, was bought by Insight Venture Partners for a cool $1.1 billion from the private equity firm Accel-KKR.

The company said it would use the money to fuel its plans for global expansion

“Episerver is at the center of a global digital transformation market that IDC expects to reach $1.7 trillion through 2019 and is expertly helping businesses of all sizes to digitize, optimize and personalize customer experiences,” said Deven Parekh, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, in a statement.

Back in 2015, Accel-KKR (the joint venture between ;one of Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firms, Accel Partners, and private equity giant KKR),  had merged Episerver (known as EPiServer) with Ektron (we reported on the Ektron acquisition when it happened) to bulk up the content management business.

At the time of the merger, Episerver had 8,800 customers in roughly 30 countries, serving up digital assets to over 30,000 websites.

The company’s service allows businesses to have a single repository for all of their marketing messaging to enable for information to be disseminated from a central location to different national and international websites.

The idea is to make the customization and personalization of marketing messaging easier for far flung corners of a business.

Here’s what we wrote about the market around the time that Ektron was sold to Accel -KKR before its merger with Episerver.

… web content management itself has become increasingly commoditized as vendors share a common set of functionality, making it much more difficult to differentiate products in the market. One way companies including Ektron are trying to do that is to have a greater digital focus. In fact, the entire industry is pivoting to what they are calling customer experience management where they attempt to provide the optimal experience for the customer, however they interact with a company based on what they know about them.

This means that increasingly companies are trying to provide a more customized experience, rather than give everyone the same generic content. We recently reported on how Acquia is trying to provide ways to tell marketers more about visitors and present more customized content based on what they can glean from them, even when they are anonymous. You can still understand things like device, IP address and other information even when customers don’t choose to share information explicitly about themselves.

“We knew that Episerver had world-class products and people when we made the investment.  Accel-KKR worked to augment the leadership team, make a number of strategic acquisitions, help build out a stronger channel and significantly grow SaaS revenue,” said Jason Klein and Dean Jacobson, managing directors of Accel-KKR — in a weirdly jointly attributed statement (I’m assuming the two directors dictated the statement in unison to the public relations pro who served as a stenographer for this release… seriously y’all? A joint statement? That’s just stupid).

Episerver was advised by Goldman Sachs and Lazard, while Houlihan Lokey was a special advisor to Accel-KKR

The transaction, in which Episerver worked with advisors Goldman Sachs and Lazard, Houlihan Lokey acted as special advisor to Accel-KKR, and Insight Venture Partners was advised by Evercore.

Dreamforce, Salesforce’s massive customer conference is coming later this month to San Francisco, but the news is starting already well ahead of the event. Today, the company announced updates to its core Sales Cloud with an emphasis toward automation and integration.

For starters, the company wants to simplify inside phone sales, giving the team not only a list of calls organized by those most likely to convert, but walking them through a sales process that’s been defined by management according to what they believe to be best practices.

High Velocity Sales is designed to take underlying intelligence from Salesforce Einstein and apply it to the sales process to give sales people the best chance to convert that prospect. That includes defining contact cadence and content. For calls, the content could be as detailed as call scripts with what to say to the prospect. For emails, it could provide key details designed to move the prospect closer to sale and how often to send that next email.

Defining sales cadence workflow in Sales Cloud. Photo: Salesforce

Once the sales teams begins to move that sale towards a close, Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote) capabilities come into play. That product has its roots in the company’s SteelBrick acquisition several years ago, and it too gets a shiny new update for Dreamforce this year.

As sales moves toward a win, it typically moves the process to the the proposal stage where pricing and purchases are agreed upon, and if all goes well a contract gets signed. Updates to CPQ are designed to automate this to the extent possible, pulling information from notes and conversations into an automated quote, or relying on the sales person when it gets more complex.

The idea though  is to help sales automate the quote and creation of bill once the quote has been accepted to the extent possible, even providing a mechanism for automatic renewal when a subscription is involved.

The last piece involves Pardot Einstein, a sales and marketing tool, designed to help find the best prospects that come through a company’s sales process. This is also getting some help from the intelligence layer in a couple of ways.

Einstein Campaign Insights looks at the range of marketing campaigns that are coming out of the marketing organization, determining which campaigns are performing — and those that aren’t — and pushing the art of campaign creation using data science to help determine which types of activities are most likely to succeed in helping convert that shopper into a buyer.

The other piece is called Einstein Behavior Score, which again is using the company’s underlying artificial intelligence tooling to analyze buying behavior based on intent. In other words, which people coming through your web site and apps are most likely to actually buy based on their behaviors — pages they visits, items they click and so forth.

Salesforce recognized the power of artificial intelligence to drive a more automated sales process early on, introducing Einstein in 2016. In typical Salesforce fashion, it has built upon that initial announcement and tried to use AI to automate and drive more successful sales.

The core CRM tool that is the center of the Sales Cloud, is simply a system of record of the customers inside any organization, but the company is trying to automate and integrate across its broad family of products whenever possible to make connections between products and services that might be difficult for humans to make on their own.

While it’s easy to get lost in AI marketing hype — and calling their AI layer by the name “Einstein” certainly doesn’t help in that regard — the company is trying to take advantage of the technology to help customers drive more sales faster, which is the goal of any sales team. It will be up to Salesforce’s customers to decide if it works.

Imagine Peloton-style courses streamed to a smart mirror, and you’ve got a pretty close approximation of what Mirror is bringing to market today. The New York-based startup came out of stealth onstage today at TechCrunch Disrupt to show its self-titled flagship product to the world.

It’s an intriguing product that turns the Peloton concept on its head by circumventing gym equipment for a full body mirror designed to help people motivate themselves into improving their at-home workout experience.

The hardware combines an LCD camera, one-way mirror, microphone, speakers and camera to provide a two-way interactive experience. As with Peloton, classes are filmed in-studio in New York City and streamed directly to the device live or on-demand. At launch, Mirror will have access to more than 50 classes, including cardio, strength, yoga, Pilates and boxing.

The system will tailor the experience to users based on personal goals, preferences and biometrics pulled from connected devices like heart-rate monitors or an Apple Watch. Instructors provide feedback and stats are displayed on the mirror in real time.

The company was founded by CEO Brynn Putnam, who also founded the Refine Method fitness studio and once worked as a dancer in the New York City Ballet.

“Mirror is the first to bring the collective benefits of quality fitness studios into the home with a beautiful piece of hardware that enhances any room,” Putnam said in a release tied to the news. “Studio classes are great for high-quality, hands-on training, but are often draining on time and budget. We’re creating a personalized experience with the best trainers and classes around the world, so anyone can enjoy the benefits of a workout, whenever and wherever they want.”

Mirror is available starting today for $1,495 — a price that will likely make it prohibitively expensive for most. That’s especially notable, given that a Peloton bike will run you around $2,000 and includes, you know, a bike. On top of that, there’s a $39 monthly subscription fee for content.

In addition to the product launch, Mirror used the opportunity to announce that it has secured $25 million in funding from Spark Capital, bringing its total to $38 million.

South African startup Yoco has raised $16 million in a new round of funding to expand its payment management and audit services for small and medium sized businesses as it angles to be one of Africa’s billion dollar businesses.

To get there the company that “builds tools and services to help SMEs get paid and manage their business” plans to tap $20 billion in commercial activity that the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Katlego Maphai estimates is waiting to move from cash payments to digital offerings.

Yoco’s already posted significant numbers for its business connecting small companies to digital payment and enterprise software products.

The company offers a point of sale card reader that links to its proprietary payment and performance software at an entry cost of 1799 South African Rand, or just over $100.

With this kit, cash based businesses can start accepting cards and tracking metrics such as top selling products, peak sales periods, and inventory flows.

“Many of these businesses were using cash only and paper ledgers” according to Maphai—who co-founded Yoco with Carl Wazen and fellow South Africans Bradley Wattrus and Lungisa Matshoba. The company’s name is derivative of “Your Commerce.”

Yoco has positioned itself as a missing link to “solving an access problem” for SMEs. Though South Africa has POS and business enterprise providers — and relatively high card (75 percent) and mobile penetration (68 percent) — the company estimates only 7 percent of South African businesses accept cards.

Why such a low percentage? “It doesn’t just come down to cost and technology, but the rules that have been set in the market for getting card machines,” said Maphai.

He named requirements to provide extensive transaction history, shop location, and revenue requirements as exclusionary factors for SMEs to connect to POS services in South Africa.

“Our vision is around open commerce. How do we open things up and remove exclusivity,” said Maphai.

“If someone wants to start a company, we want it to be as simple as getting our software and card reader and your good to go.”

Yoco says it is already processing $280 million in annualized payment volume for just under 30,000 businesses.

The startup generates revenue through margins on hardware and software sales and fees of 2.95 percent per transaction on its POS devices.

Yoco will use the $16 million round on product and platform development, growing its distribution channels, and acquiring new talent.

Round leader Partech confirmed the investment and continued involvement with Yoco. “We do act as a strategic hands on investor, not just a financial investor,” Partech General Partner Tidjane Deme told TechCrunch. “We will assist and support the development of the company to accelerate growth through business development and internationalization.”

On expanding outside South Africa, Yoco’s Maphai said it’s in the company’s future, but not just yet.

“We’ll continue to explore new markets and geographies across Africa’s payments landscape,” he said. “But on the market readiness side, we still see some maturity gaps on the P2B side…and we’re waiting very patiently for this to turn.”

Chinese Internet giant Tencent has announced it’s bringing in a new system of age checks to its video games which will be linked to a national public security database — in an effort to reliably identify minors so it can limit how long children can play its games.

The new real name-based registration system will initially be mandated for new players of its popular Honour of Kings fantasy multiplayer role-playing battle game.

It will be introduced around September 15, according to Reuters.

Tencent said the planned ID verification system — which Bloomberg couches as equivalent to a police ID check — is the first of its kind in the Chinese gaming industry, and claimed it will enable it to accurately identify underaged players and impose existing play time restrictions.

Last July Tencent said it would impose a playtime maximum of one hour per day for children up to aged 12, and a maximum of two hours a day for those between 13 and 18. But if kids can get around age checks such limits are meaningless.

“Through these measures, Tencent hopes to continue to better guide underaged players to game sensibly,” it said in a statement on its official WeChat account about the beefed up checks. It also said it plans to gradually expand the requirement to its other games.

In total Tencent’s gaming portfolio is reported to have more than 500 million players in China.

The move comes amid a crackdown by the Chinese government on video gaming over fears of health problems and addiction among children.

Late last month a statement posted on the Education Ministry website said new curbs were needed to counter worsening myopia among minors.

Ministers have long said they want to limit the amount of time kids can play games — although achieving that outcome is clearly a major challenge, given the popularity of video games and the proliferation of devices from which they can be accessed.

Tencent’s move to link age verification to a public security database does seem to represent a significant new step towards the government achieving its goal of also controlling kids’ digital activity. And investors reacted negatively to the announcement — pushing Tencent’s shares down more than 3%.

Shares in the company also dived around 3% last week when the government announced its latest gaming crackdown.

Reuters notes that shares in two other major Chinese game developers, China Youzu Interactive and Perfect World, also dropped 5.5% and 3.6%, respectively, as investors digested the regulatory risk.

Last year the Chinese government also tightened general Internet regulations, doubling down on its long standing real-name registration rules.