Author: azeeadmin

AnchorFree, a maker of a popular virtual private networking app, has raised $295 million in a new round of funding, the company announced Wednesday.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based app maker’s flagship app Hotspot Shield ranks as one of the most popular VPN apps on the market. The app, based on a freemium model, allows users across the world tunnel their internet connections through AnchorFree’s servers, which masks users’ browsing histories from their internet providers and allows those under oppressive regimes evade state-level censorship.

The app has 650 million users in 190 countries, the company said, and also has a business-focused offering.

The funding was led by WndrCo, a holding company focusing on consumer tech businesses, in addition to Accel Partners, 8VC, SignalFire, and Green Bay Ventures, among others.

“The WndrCo team brings deep operational experience in launching and scaling global tech products, and we look forward to working closely with them in pursuit of our mission to provide secure access to the world’s information for every person on the planet,” said AnchorFree’s chief executive David Gorodyansky in remarks.

The news was first reported by The New York Times.

At today’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked by vice chair Sen. Mark Warner whether users should have “a right to know” if they are talking to a bot or a human on its platform — to help people better navigate the information they are being exposed to.

Dorsey agreed that “more context” around tweets and accounts is good, but — when pressed by Warner on whether Twitter should have a policy to ID bots vs humans on the platform — he said Twitter is actively considering it, albeit cautioning “as far as we can detect them”.

“We can certainly label and add context to accounts that come through our API,” he continued. “Where it becomes a lot trickier is where automation is actually scripting our website to look like a human actor. So as far as we can label and we can identify these automations we can label them — and I think that is useful context.”

“It’s an idea that we have been considering over the past few months,” he added. “It’s really a question of the implementation — but we are interested in it. And we are going to do something along those lines.”

A bit later in the session, answering questions about fake accounts, Dorsey said Twitter has had more success in identifying inauthentic activity on its platform by using deep learning and machine learning technologies that are focused on identifying “behavioral patterns” — so looking at account behavior across the network — rather than trying to identify where specific accounts are located in real-time.

“We’ve got a lot more leverage out of that in terms of scale vs systems that try and identify fake profiles,” he added.

Volvo unveiled Wednesday its vision for future travel. And it’s an electric autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or other traditional means of control that would serve multiple purposes for its passengers, and ultimately disrupt the domestic air travel industry.

The 360c concept is just a concept. Meaning, the vehicle shown Wednesday in Sweden won’t be going into production anytime soon, if at all. But as most concepts aim to do, the 360c gives us insight into Volvo’s thinking and hints at where the company is headed.

In short, the 360c concept is a conversation piece. And Volvo wants to talk about how autonomous vehicles, like this one, will be used and how the technology might change societies.

The 360c concept shows four potential uses of autonomous driving vehicles: a sleeping environment, mobile office, living room and entertainment space.

“The business will change in the coming years and Volvo should lead that change of our industry,” said xVolvo Cars president and CEO Håkan Samuelsson. “Autonomous drive will allow us to take the big next step in safety but also open up exciting new business models and allow consumers to spend time in the car doing what they want to do.”

The concept is also supposed to represent what Volvo describes as a “potentially lucrative competitor to short-haul air travel. Volvo contends that shorter routes, where the distance between origin and destination is around 300 kilometers (186 miles), “are prime candidates for disruption by an alternative mode of travel.”

Volvo doesn’t say how fleets of 360c vehicles—presuming they were ever built—might affect trains, a present-day mode of travel that often shuttles people short distances between cities.

The company also introduced a proposal for a global standard in how autonomous vehicles can safely communicate with all other road users. Engineers created a system for the 360c made of up external sounds, colors, visuals, and movements to communicate the vehicle’s intentions to other road users, a critical feature for self-driving cars when they eventually are deployed en masse on pubic roads. 

Alex Canter knows the restaurant business.

The scion of Los Angeles’ famous first family of the deli business — the owners of the eponymous Canters restaurant — Canter has been in the food business longer than many seasoned restauranteurs twice his age.

While some people had a Bar Mitzvah party, the thirteen year old Canter had section four of his family’s restaurant. But as technology started making its way inside the restaurant business, Canter realized that the delicatessen on Fairfax would need to upgrade to keep up with the times.

The younger Canter upgraded the menu, brought in a point of sale system and renovated the bar. “I was the guy in the restaurant to pitch whenever there was a service or product,” Canter says. “All of a sudden online ordering started up. All of these different ordering services began to pop up and each one added more customers and incremental revenue, but each one brought challenges into our staff.”

At one point, Canters had nine tablets, two laptops and a fax machine, all managing incoming delivery orders. “It was a complete train wreck and I realized restaurants shouldn’t have to work like that” says Canter. Indeed, his staff was begging Canter to shut down online ordering, but given that online delivery orders had become a third of Canters business, that was an impossibility.

The answer came when Canter met Mike Jacobs, a former federal investigator turned entrepreneur who had launched a company called TapInto which was managing mobile orders for stadium concession stands and food trucks.

Jacobs pitched Canter on the idea of a single unified hardware system that would aggregate all of a restaurant’s online orders in a single place and Canter bought in immediately. Thus, Ordermark was born. The deli proprietor also knew which place would be a great first beta test for the software.

After rolling out in Canters, the company reached out to other mom and pop restaurants in the Los Angeles area. “What’s crazy is that when we were first building this business i had gone out to my own network of restaurants and my friends. The first ten restaurants that i approached all want to sign up immediately,” said Canter.

The next stop for the company was capital to build out the technology. Ordermark raised from local Los Angeles investors including Mucker Capital, TenOneTen Ventures and Act One Ventures. After securing that $3.1 million in funding Ordermark moved to the big leagues — the Western Food Service and Hospitality Expo.

“It was an expo that i had grown up going to every year. It was interesting to be on the other side of the table,” says Canter. “One of the first restaurants to sign up was a franchisee of Johnny Rockets… that’s when we decided that we needed to ramp up our tech.”

So Canter went back out to the market. This time securing $9.5 million from the company’s previous investor and new lead investor Nosara Capital. Additional new investors included Vertical Venture Partners, RiverPark Ventures (an investment firm from the founder of Seamless, Andy Appelbaum), Techstars Ventures, and Matchstick Ventures.

Currently, with the fundraising in hand, Canter’s business has managed to sign up 500 restaurant brands including Sonic, Qdoba, and TGIFridays. The company has 35 people on staff and is looking to hire more.

“We built a standalone independent online ordering fulfillment solution. Rather than integrating with the POS service we started by building a fully standalone system. So that we can work with any restaurant of any shape at any size including restaurants that have robust older point of sale systems that don’t integrate very well with others,” said Canter. 

With the new capital the company is looking to expand into most of the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. Ordermark’s system is already live in 20 states — including Hawaii .

Ordermark isn’t alone in its quest to ease restaurants’ online ordering pain. Companies like Chowly in Chicago, and Checkmate in New York that are both competing for restaurant owners’ hearts and minds.

Canter isn’t too worried about the competition. “Right now we’re just laser focused on making as much of an impact on restaurants across America,” Canter says. 

Fashion is the second-largest category in online retail, and so Amazon — now a trillion-dollar e-commerce behemoth — is making sure that it will have key role to play in it. In the latest development, the company today announced that it has collaborated with J.Crew on a snazzy new storefront to sell items from J.Crew Mercantile, the label’s discount line.

“Discount” is a relative term here: Amazon says all items will cost “under $300”. The new shop will kick off with a selection from its Fall 2018 collection that will include “reimagined classics, everyday necessities and statement pieces at friendly prices,” plus denim and outerwear, and free two-day shipping for Prime members.

Although your local mall or shopping precinct may already have a J.Crew store or two, the company has its roots in selling clothes to people remotely, by way of a catalog-based business that targeted waspy upper middle class types well before the days of online retail.

J.Crew has made a name for itself for being one of the bigger and more successful vertically-integrated brands — designing and selling only its own lines — so it’s notable that it is now taking the plunge to associate itself with an upstart that has no roots in fashion, but has most definitely been doubling down on its fashion ambitions and is on track to becoming the nation’s biggest apparel retailer. From a market share of five percent in 2015, Amazon is projected to have 14 percent of the fashion market by 2020 (and I wonder if that figure is too conservative).

“J.Crew’s mission to engage our customers wherever they want to shop makes Amazon the right partner for J.Crew Mercantile,” said Aaron Rose, J.Crew Chief of Emerging Business, in a statement. “Their broad-reaching shopping destination supported by our shared interest in service and convenience will introduce the initial collection of colorful everyday basics and fashion to a new audience. We look forward to working together to expand the Mercantile Shop on Amazon and help our customers build their wardrobes.”

Amazon already works directly with various third-party brands — notably, in 2016 Nike made a u-turn and started selling items directly to Amazon for resale after years of resisting and favoring its own direct-to-consumer and more traditional retail channel approaches, and last year Amazon Fashion worked with Calvin Klein on holiday period pop-ups.

The J.Crew effort is different in that the two have partnered to create a full-fledged storefront with dynamic imagery to improve the experience. Notably, it looks nothing like standard Amazon, it’s here to stay, and doesn’t appear to have a direct corresponding site on J.Crew itself (a description of the stores is on the company’s discount Factory site). And as another point of comparison, if you go to amazon.com/nike it simply produces your average Amazon results list.

“From seasonal trends to everyday essentials across known and emerging brands, we are delighted to offer our customers selection for all their wearing occasions,” said Michelle Rothman, Vice President of Amazon Fashion, in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with J.Crew, an iconic brand our customers love, to offer Mercantile and thereby make it even easier to access great styles and premium selection. We are focused on continually enhancing our assortment and innovating the shopping experience to enable fashion discovery and inspiration on Amazon, and we are excited about the opportunities we see ahead for customers and brands alike.”

What is also interesting is how this complements what Amazon has been doing under its own steam. For years now, the company has been quietly courting and making acquisition offers to a number of other brands like Le Tote, Rent The Runway, ThirdLove and PreeLine, businesses built in the J.Crew mould — vertically integrated and selling only their own lines to a fairly specific demographic of users through the channels that they prefer best.

While it seems that those efforts have yet to materialise (sorry) into any deals, Amazon has also been making a massive push into reseller deals, and also building its own range of private-label brands like Lark & Ro, Franklin & Freeman, and North Eleven.

And it has also been leveraging its deep technical experience, and logistics prowess, to change the experience of how one buys clothes online. Last year, the company acquired UK’s Body Labs to ramp up its technology for how it can provide a better fit to shoppers remotely, and for those who still can’t quite get a hole in one, it’s sweetening the deal for taking Prime membership by offering subscribers a free “try before you buy” option to make it easier to send back what you don’t like without paying a penny in advance.

In all, you might see how ultimately these moves technology and logistics might be what helps to win over intransigent brands: in the race to grab consumers before the abandon their carts, or even more fundamentally, to give them the confidence of shopping with you in the first place, it’s developments like these that might feel too challenging for brands to tackle on their own. Amazon (and in this case J.Crew) are taking their first steps in discounted and “good deal” items — which are at the heart of Amazon’s apparel pitch to users — but you can see how this could easily progress and eventually take in more luxury brands over time.

 

Last fall, eBay took on fashion resale sites like TheRealReal with the debut of its own authentication program for luxury goods. Today, that program will now authenticate luxury watches, in addition to the handbags and wallets it was already verifying. At launch, there are nearly 7,000 authenticated watches for sale on eBay’s site, including those from brands like Rolex, Patek Philippe, Omega, Audemars Piguet, Breitling and Panerai.

The watches range in price from $500 to over $50,000 for a selection that includes both pre-owned and vintage items.

Similar to the luxury handbag verification service, the new authentication program for watches will utilize third-party experts to verify the watches’ authenticity. The authenticators will also list, sell and ship the watch to the buyer, taking a 20% cut of the sale price – which is competitive with if not lower than the rest of this market.

When eBay Authenticate first arrived, the company explained it was reacting to increasing consumer demand to buy pre-owned luxury items online, but found that eBay shoppers were hesitant to do so because of the potential for forgeries and knock-offs.

Its delay to address consumer interests here allowed other retailers like TheRealReal,Tradesy, ThredUp to specialize in this type of authentication service and cater to that audience on their own sites. There are also sites that focus specifically on certified pre-owned luxury watches, like Crown & Caliber, Gray & Sons, WatchBox, and others. Even Amazon has a selection of certified pre-owned watches, verified by WatchFacts.

With eBay having recently reported weak growth and a lowered revenue forecast in its latest earnings, it needs to pursue higher-ticket items to bring visitors back to its site. 

It believes luxury watches can help boost its sales, as it’s already a top site where people shop for secondhand watches – a market estimated at $5 billion. In the U.S. alone, a watch is purchased every five seconds on eBay, the company notes,

“eBay has the largest selection of luxury goods – from rare and designer handbags to fine wristwatches – and we know this community wants an added layer of trust and confidence when buying in these categories,” said James Hendy, Senior Director of eBay Authenticate, in a statement about the launch. “We’re adding third-party authentication to this inventory because we know the importance buyers place on trust for high-value purchases.”

eBay Authenticate for watches is available today in the U.S., and several European markets, including the U.K. and Germany.

Alphabet’s decision to decline to send its CEO Larry Page to today’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing — to answer questions about what social media platforms are doing to thwart foreign influence operations intended to sow political division in the U.S. — has earned it a stinging rebuke from the committee’s vice chair, Sen. Mark Warner.

“I’m deeply disappointed that Google – one of the most influential digital platforms in the world – chose not to send its own top corporate leadership to engage this committee,” said Warner in his opening remarks, after praising Facebook and Twitter for agreeing to send their COO and CEO respectively.

Alphabet offered its SVP of global affairs and chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to testify in front of lawmakers but declined to send CEO Page or Google CEO Sundar Pichai .

Committee chairman, Richard Burr, was slightly less stinging in his opening remarks but also professed himself “disappointed that Google decided against sending the right senior level executive”.

“If the answer is regulation let’s have an honest dialogue about what that looks like. If the key is more resources or legislation that facilitates information sharing and government co-operation let’s get it out there,” he concluded. “If it’s national security policies that punish the kind of information and influence operations that we’re talking about this morning to the point that they aren’t even considered in foreign capitals then let’s acknowledge that. But whatever the answer is we’ve got to do this collaboratively and we’ve got to do this now. That’s our responsibility to the American people.”

Warner said committee members have “difficult questions about structural vulnerabilities on a number of Google’s platforms that we will need answered“, calling out a number of Google products by name and identifying abuse associated with those services.

“From Google Search, which continues to have problems surfacing absurd conspiracies….To YouTube, where Russian-backed disinformation agents promoted hundreds of divisive videos….To Gmail, where state-sponsored operatives attempt countless hacking attempts, Google has an immense responsibility in this space.  Given its size and influence, I would have thought the leadership at Google would want to demonstrate how seriously it takes these challenges and to lead this important public discussion.”

We’ve reached out to Google for a response.

Warner concluded his opening remarks with some policy suggestions for regulating social media platforms, saying he wanted to get the companies’ constructive thoughts on issues such as whether platforms should identify bots to their users; whether there’s a public interest in ensuring more anonymized data is available to researchers and academics to help identify potential problems and misuse; why terms of service are “so difficult to find and nearly impossible to read; why US lawmakers shouldn’t adopt ideas such as data portability, data minimization, or first party consent — which are already baked into EU privacy law — and what further accountability there should be related to platforms’ “flawed advertising model”.

Update: A Google spokesperson sent us its earlier statement — in which it writes:

Over the last 18 months we’ve met with dozens of Committee Members and briefed major Congressional Committees numerous times on our work to prevent foreign interference in US elections. Our SVP of Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer, who reports directly to our CEO and is responsible for our work in this area, will be in Washington, D.C. on September 5, where he will deliver written testimony, brief Members of Congress on our work, and answer any questions they have. We had informed the Senate Intelligence Committee of this in late July and had understood that he would be an appropriate witness for this hearing.

There is a good chance you’ve never heard of TAPPP, but you probably know some of its customers like Major League Baseball (MLB) and the NFL. And if you’ve ever seen pre-paid cards for access to the NFL Game Pass subscription services or MLB’s streaming service in your local supermarket, then you’ve seen its product, too. TAPPP focus is on making access to this premium live sports content available as a pre-paid service for these leagues.

As the company announced today, it has raised a $5 million Series A funding round led by leAD Sports/OurCrowd’s ADvantage Fund, with additional backing from Accomplice, Elysian Park, Go4it, Courtside VC and Sterling.VC.

The ADvantage Fund is backed by leAD Sports, a sports accelerator launched by the grandchildren of Adi Dassler, who you may know as the founder of Adidas.

TAPPP is currently available at over 5,000 retailers, including Walmart and Gamestop. The company notes that it makes access to these sporting events available to both the unbanked who can’t otherwise get a credit cards, as well as consumers who opt out of having one.

“TAPPP is a perfect fit for ADvantage’s debut fund. Its approach to serving untapped viewer segments through a combination of traditional payments and an innovative, on demand viewing experience, is unique and creative,” said Jeremy Pressman, a partner at ADvantage. “We at ADvantage are thrilled at the opportunity to leverage our deep connections in the sports market to broaden TAPPP’s reach even further.” Pressman will join TAPPP’s board.

Ahead of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg testifying before Congress later today, where she will be questioned alongside Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as US lawmakers wrestle with how to regulate social media platforms (and even just to get bums on seats, given Google’s Larry Page declined to attend), the Pew Research Center has published new research suggesting Americans have become more cautious and critical in their use of Facebook over the past year.

It’s certainly been a year of scandals for the social media behemoth, which started 2018 already on the back foot already in the wake of Kremlin-backed election interference revelations — and with Mark Zuckerberg saying his annual personal mission for the new year would be the embarrassingly unfun challenge of “fixing Facebook”.

Since then things have only got worse, with a major global scandal kicking off in March after fresh revelations about the Cambridge Analytica data misuse sandal snowballed and went on to drag all sorts of other data malfeasance skeletons out of Facebook’s closet.

‘Locking down the platform’ is the new ‘closing the stable door after the horse has bolted’.

All of which led Zuckerberg to be perched on a booster cushion in the Senate and Congress, where he was berated by US lawmakers for dodging their questions. (Lawmakers in Europe berated him for avoiding their questions too.)

So if US Facebook users are changing how they use the platform as a result of all this scandalabra it’s hardly surprising (or only if you believe the lie Zuckerberg has fenced for years that people don’t care about privacy).

Pew sees evidence of a change in US users’ relationship with the service, noting that many users have adjusted privacy settings (52%); taken a break from Facebook of at least a few weeks (42%); while around a quarter (26%) said they had deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone.

All told, it said that almost three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users told it they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.

Most worryingly for Facebook, it found differences in the reaction of users depending on their age — with younger users (18 to 29) by far the most likely to say they had deleted the Facebook app in the past year.

So privacy alive and kicking among the young then — not, er, dead.

Similarly, Pew found that older users are much less likely to say they have adjusted their Facebook privacy settings in the past 12 months: Only a third of users 65 and older have done this vs a full 64% of younger users.

It also found that only around one-in-ten Facebook users (9%) have downloaded the personal data about them available on Facebook — a possibility which was given extra publicity by Zuckerberg’s testimony to US lawmakers.

Despite this group representing a relatively small slice as a share of the Facebook population, Pew couches these users as “highly privacy-conscious” — saying roughly half (47%) of the users who have downloaded their personal data from Facebook have deleted the app from their cellphone, while 79% have elected to adjust their privacy settings.

Ergo it looks like awareness of data risks strengthens pro-privacy behavior among users. Who’d have thought it?!

Pew’s study was carried out between May 29 and June 11, 2018 — so well after the Cambridge Analytica scandal had snowballed into a major PR crisis for Facebook — with the research firm polling more than 4,500 respondents

A separate Pew study, also conducted at the same time and published today, suggests many US users don’t understand how Facebook’s News Feed works.

The survey found that “notable shares” of Facebook users ages 18 and older lack a clear understanding of how the site’s News Feed operates; feel they have little control over what appears there; and have not actively tried to influence the content the feed delivers to them.

When asked whether they understand why certain posts but not others are included in their news feed, around half of U.S. adults who use Facebook (53%) say they do not — with a fifth (20%) saying they do not understand the feed at all well.

Older users are especially likely to say they do not understand the workings of the News Feed: Just 38% of Facebook users ages 50 and older say they have a good understanding of why certain posts are included in it vs 59% of users ages 18 to 29.

While Facebook offers some tools for users to control what they see in the Feed, such as by giving priority to certain people or hiding posts from others, Pew found that just 14% of Facebook users believe ordinary users have a lot of control over the content that appears there – and twice that share (28%) said they felt they have no control.

Older Facebook users in particular feel they have little agency in this regard: Some 37% of Facebook users 50 and older think users have no control over their News Feed, roughly double the share among users ages 18 to 49 (20%), Pew also found.

The existence of user controls on Facebook’s platform was a factor that Zuckerberg deferred to multiple times during his testimony to lawmakers earlier this year, claiming for example that Facebook users have “complete control” over how their information is used as a result of the settings the platform offers them.

Whatever the truth of the substance of that claim, many Facebook users clearly feel they have little control over what they are exposed to on the service — which in turn undermines the company’s claims that it puts its users in the driving seat when it comes to data (be that how their own data is used, or what other data the service exposes them to).

The lack of transparency around algorithmically controlled content platforms is likely to be a key theme in the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s questioning of the social media execs later today. (More for how to watch the hearings here.)

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on Pew’s research.

Snapchat isn’t revealing sales numbers of version 2 of its Spectacles camera sunglasses, but at least they’re not getting left in a drawer as much as the V1s. The company tells me V2 owners are capturing 40 percent more Snaps than people with V1s.

And today, Snapchat is launching two new black-rimmed hipster styles of Spectacles V2 — a Wayfarer-esque Nico model and a glamorous big-lensed Veronica model. Both come with a slimmer semi-soft black carrying case instead of the chunky old triangular yellow one, and are polarized for the first time. They look a lot more like normal sunglasses, compared to the jokey, bubbly V1s, so they could appeal to a more mature and fashionable audience. They go on sale today for $199 in the US and Europe and will be sold in Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom later this year, while the old styles remain $149.

 

Snap is also trying to get users to actually post what they capture, so it’s planning an automatically curated Highlight Story feature that will help you turn your best Specs content into great things to share. That could address the problem common amongst GoPro users of shooting a ton of cool footage but never editing it for display.

The problem is that V1 were pretty exceedingly unpopular, and those that did buy them. Snap only shipped 220,000 pairs and reportedly had hundreds of thousands more gathering dust in a warehouse. It took a $40 million write-off and its hardware “camera company” strategy was called into question. Business Insider reported that less than 50 percent of buyers kept using them after a month and a “sizeable” percentage stopped after just a week.

That means the bar was pretty low from which to score a 40 percent increase in usage, especially given the V2s take photos, work underwater, come in a slimmer charging case, and lack the V1s’ bright yellow ring around the camera lens that announces you’re wearing a mini computer on your face. Snap was smart to finally let you export in non-circular formats which are useful for sharing beyond Snapchat, and let you automatically save Snaps to your camera roll and not just its app’s Memories feature.

I’ve certainly been using my V2s much more than the V1s since they’re more discrete and versatile. And I haven’t encountered as much fear or anxiety from people worried about being filmed as privacy norms around technology continue to relax.

But even with the improved hardware, new styles, and upcoming features, Spectacles V2 don’t look like they’re moving the needle for Snapchat. After shrinking in user count last quarter, Snap’s share price has fallen to just a few cents above its all-time low. Given most of its users are cash-strapped teens who aren’t going to buy Spectacles even if they’re cool, the company needs to focus on how to make its app for everyone more useful and differentiated after the invasion of Instagram’s copy-cats of its Stories and ephemeral messaging.

Whether that means securing tentpole premium video content for Discover, redesigning Stories to ditch the interstitials for better lean-back viewing, or developing augmented reality games, Snap can’t stay the course. Despite its hardware ambitions, it’s fundamentally a software company. It has to figure out what makes that software special.