Author: azeeadmin

Silicon Valley is about to have another big moment before Congress. On Wednesday, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg will go before the Senate Intelligence Committee to follow-up on their work investigating (and hopefully thwarting) Russian government-linked campaigns to sow political division in the US. The hearing is titled “Foreign Influence Operations and Their Use of Social Media Platforms” and begins tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM ET.

It will be both Dorsey and Sandberg’s first time appearing before Congress on the high-stakes topic, but they’re not the only invitees. Alphabet CEO Larry Page was also called before the committee, though he is the only one of the three to decline to appear on Wednesday. Google also declined to send Sundar Pichai.

“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,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. “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.”

The spokesperson added that the company has briefed “dozens of committee members” and “briefed major Congressional Committees numerous times” regarding its efforts to safeguard US elections from interference originating abroad.

On Tuesday, Google published the written remarks it planned to deliver the following day in a blog post by Kent Walker, the company’s lead legal counsel and now SVP of global affairs.

In the statement, Google predictably reviews the steps it has taken to follow through on previous promises to Congress. Those steps include an ID verification program for anyone seeking to buy a federal US election ad from Google, in-ad disclosures attached to election ads across Google’s products, a transparency report specific to political ads on Google and a searchable ad library that allows anyone to view political ads for candidates in the US. As we previously reported, that database does not include issue-based ads or any ads from state or local races so its utility is somewhat limited though new ads will be added on an ongoing basis.

In the statement to Congress, Google also touted its Advanced Protection Program​, an effort to discourage spear phishing campaigns, and Project Shield, a free DDoS protection service for US campaigns, candidates and political action committees. You can read the full statement, embedded below.

There’s not much surprising in the letter summarizing Google’s progress, nor does the company identify any particular shortcomings or specific areas of concern. That isn’t surprising either. For tech companies on Capitol Hill, the name of the game is ticking off each point of good behavior while divulging as little new information as possible.

Because the committee has decided that it’s heard plenty from Google’s lawyers already, the company’s chair will sit empty tomorrow. Needless to say, the committee —in particular its vice chairman Sen. Mark Warner — isn’t happy about it. The committee is certainly right about one thing: during testimony, a company’s lead counsel is indistinguishable from an empty hot seat.

Tomorrow, we’ll get to see if Dorsey and Sandberg can pull of the same disappearing act. Considering Mark Zuckerberg’s enduring and even performance earlier this year and Facebook’s (in)famously composed public posture, Sandberg is certainly the favorite to make it out without breaking a sweat.

Skype is the communication tool of choice (and necessity) for millions, but it has always lacked a basic feature that no doubt many of those millions have requested: call recording. Well, Microsoft finally heard our cries, and recording is now built into Skype on both desktop and mobile.

Inexplicably, the ability is available in the latest version of the app on every platform except Windows 10. Apparently it’ll be added in a few weeks.

Recording is pretty simple to activate. Once you’re in a call, just hit the plus sign on the lower right and then select “Start recording.”

The others on the call will see a little banner announcing the call is being recorded, “so there are no surprises.” But Microsoft is clearly leery of consent laws and reminds you via that same banner to verbally inform your interlocutors that you’re recording it.

When the call is finished, the recording — video and audio — is stored online as an MP4 for up to 30 days, during which time you and anyone who was on the call can save it locally or share a link to it.

It doesn’t seem like there’s a way to record only audio, which is a bit annoying. A call with 3 people on video can get big fast. Hopefully they’ll address that in an update.

People have used third party apps for years to record their Skype conversations; I’ve been using MP3 Skype Recorder, and it’s been pretty solid. I’m afraid that it might not survive the duplication of its key feature — recording, obviously — inside the app on which it piggybacks. But because, among other things, I’m paranoid, I’ll probably keep it installed as a backup. I’ve asked the creator what he thinks of Skype’s latest feature and what it means for apps like his.

In the meantime everyone except Windows 10 users should start Skyping like never before and recording everything to do a bit of system stressing for Microsoft. It’s what they’d want.

Tizeti, the Nigerian internet service provider behind the brand Wifi.com.ng, has raised $3 million in a new round of funding as it expands its unlimited internet service into Ghana.

The new financing was led by 4DX Ventures, a new, Africa-focused fund that’s been deploying capital at an incredibly fast clip since its launch earlier this year. Its portfolio includes Sokowatch, a startup connecting local African retailers to international suppliers; the outsourced programmer placement and apprenticeship service, Andela; and the integrated pharmacy supplier and operator, mPharma.

For Walter Baddoo, one of 4DX Ventures co-founders and a new addition to the Tizeti board, the value in a company that operates as “the Comcast of Africa” was clear.

“If you take the efficiency of point to multipoint wireless technology and you add to that solar infrastructure, you leap-frog a generation of infrastructure. That makes getting cheap data to the hands of customers much easier,” Baddoo says.

Tizeti does exactly that. Using solar energy to power its wireless towers, the company provides residences, businesses, events and conferences with unlimited high-speed broadband internet access, which now covers more than 70 percent of Lagos. Since its launch from Y Combinator’s winter 2017 batch, the company has installed over 7,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria with 150,000 users.

Tizeti co-founders Ifeanyi Okonkwo and Kendall Ananyi

In November, the company partnered with Facebook to offer Express Wi-Fi and roll out hundreds of hotspots across the Nigerian capital of Abuja.

Now, with the new funding, Tizeti is expanding its operations outside of Nigeria, launching a new brand — Wifi.Africa — and pushing its service into Ghana.

“Tizeti was built to tackle poor internet connectivity not only in Nigeria, but on the continent as a whole, by developing a cost-effective solution from inception to delivery, for reliable and uncapped internet access for potentially millions of Africans,” said Kendall Ananyi, the co-founder and chief executive of Tizeti.

The company’s unlimited internet packages cost $30 per-month, a price it’s able to achieve through the use of cheap solar electricity to power its towers.

“Reducing the cost of data in Africa is a critical step in accelerating the pace of internet adoption across the continent,” Baddoo said in a statement. “Tizeti makes it easier and cheaper to connect Africa to the global digital economy and we are excited to partner with Kendall and his team on this mission.”

All of this is being powered by a network of new undersea cables stretching along the ocean floor that is bringing connectivity to the continent.

“There’s a ton of capacity going to 16 submarine cables [coming into Africa],” Ananyi told us back in 2017. “The problem is getting the internet to the customers. You have balloons and drones and that will work in the rural areas but it’s not effective in urban environments. We solve the internet problem in a dense area.”

It’s not a radical concept, and it’s one that has netted the company 3,000 subscribers already and nearly $1.2 million in annual recorded revenue in its first months of operations, Ananyi told us at the time.

“There are 1.2 billion people in Africa, but only 26 percent of them are online and most get internet over mobile phones,” says Ananyi. Perhaps only 6 percent of that population has an internet subscription, he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Steve Song

Tizeti, the Nigerian internet service provider behind the brand Wifi.com.ng, has raised $3 million in a new round of funding as it expands its unlimited internet service into Ghana.

The new financing was led by 4DX Ventures, a new, Africa-focused fund that’s been deploying capital at an incredibly fast clip since its launch earlier this year. Its portfolio includes Sokowatch, a startup connecting local African retailers to international suppliers; the outsourced programmer placement and apprenticeship service, Andela; and the integrated pharmacy supplier and operator, mPharma.

For Walter Baddoo, one of 4DX Ventures co-founders and a new addition to the Tizeti board, the value in a company that operates as “the Comcast of Africa” was clear.

“If you take the efficiency of point to multipoint wireless technology and you add to that solar infrastructure, you leap-frog a generation of infrastructure. That makes getting cheap data to the hands of customers much easier,” Baddoo says.

Tizeti does exactly that. Using solar energy to power its wireless towers, the company provides residences, businesses, events and conferences with unlimited high-speed broadband internet access, which now covers more than 70 percent of Lagos. Since its launch from Y Combinator’s winter 2017 batch, the company has installed over 7,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria with 150,000 users.

Tizeti co-founders Ifeanyi Okonkwo and Kendall Ananyi

In November, the company partnered with Facebook to offer Express Wi-Fi and roll out hundreds of hotspots across the Nigerian capital of Abuja.

Now, with the new funding, Tizeti is expanding its operations outside of Nigeria, launching a new brand — Wifi.Africa — and pushing its service into Ghana.

“Tizeti was built to tackle poor internet connectivity not only in Nigeria, but on the continent as a whole, by developing a cost-effective solution from inception to delivery, for reliable and uncapped internet access for potentially millions of Africans,” said Kendall Ananyi, the co-founder and chief executive of Tizeti.

The company’s unlimited internet packages cost $30 per-month, a price it’s able to achieve through the use of cheap solar electricity to power its towers.

“Reducing the cost of data in Africa is a critical step in accelerating the pace of internet adoption across the continent,” Baddoo said in a statement. “Tizeti makes it easier and cheaper to connect Africa to the global digital economy and we are excited to partner with Kendall and his team on this mission.”

All of this is being powered by a network of new undersea cables stretching along the ocean floor that is bringing connectivity to the continent.

“There’s a ton of capacity going to 16 submarine cables [coming into Africa],” Ananyi told us back in 2017. “The problem is getting the internet to the customers. You have balloons and drones and that will work in the rural areas but it’s not effective in urban environments. We solve the internet problem in a dense area.”

It’s not a radical concept, and it’s one that has netted the company 3,000 subscribers already and nearly $1.2 million in annual recorded revenue in its first months of operations, Ananyi told us at the time.

“There are 1.2 billion people in Africa, but only 26 percent of them are online and most get internet over mobile phones,” says Ananyi. Perhaps only 6 percent of that population has an internet subscription, he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Steve Song

Tizeti, the Nigerian internet service provider behind the brand Wifi.com.ng, has raised $3 million in a new round of funding as it expands its unlimited internet service into Ghana.

The new financing was led by 4DX Ventures, a new, Africa-focused fund that’s been deploying capital at an incredibly fast clip since its launch earlier this year. Its portfolio includes Sokowatch, a startup connecting local African retailers to international suppliers; the outsourced programmer placement and apprenticeship service, Andela; and the integrated pharmacy supplier and operator, mPharma.

For Walter Baddoo, one of 4DX Ventures co-founders and a new addition to the Tizeti board, the value in a company that operates as “the Comcast of Africa” was clear.

“If you take the efficiency of point to multipoint wireless technology and you add to that solar infrastructure, you leap-frog a generation of infrastructure. That makes getting cheap data to the hands of customers much easier,” Baddoo says.

Tizeti does exactly that. Using solar energy to power its wireless towers, the company provides residences, businesses, events and conferences with unlimited high-speed broadband internet access, which now covers more than 70 percent of Lagos. Since its launch from Y Combinator’s winter 2017 batch, the company has installed over 7,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria with 150,000 users.

Tizeti co-founders Ifeanyi Okonkwo and Kendall Ananyi

In November, the company partnered with Facebook to offer Express Wi-Fi and roll out hundreds of hotspots across the Nigerian capital of Abuja.

Now, with the new funding, Tizeti is expanding its operations outside of Nigeria, launching a new brand — Wifi.Africa — and pushing its service into Ghana.

“Tizeti was built to tackle poor internet connectivity not only in Nigeria, but on the continent as a whole, by developing a cost-effective solution from inception to delivery, for reliable and uncapped internet access for potentially millions of Africans,” said Kendall Ananyi, the co-founder and chief executive of Tizeti.

The company’s unlimited internet packages cost $30 per-month, a price it’s able to achieve through the use of cheap solar electricity to power its towers.

“Reducing the cost of data in Africa is a critical step in accelerating the pace of internet adoption across the continent,” Baddoo said in a statement. “Tizeti makes it easier and cheaper to connect Africa to the global digital economy and we are excited to partner with Kendall and his team on this mission.”

All of this is being powered by a network of new undersea cables stretching along the ocean floor that is bringing connectivity to the continent.

“There’s a ton of capacity going to 16 submarine cables [coming into Africa],” Ananyi told us back in 2017. “The problem is getting the internet to the customers. You have balloons and drones and that will work in the rural areas but it’s not effective in urban environments. We solve the internet problem in a dense area.”

It’s not a radical concept, and it’s one that has netted the company 3,000 subscribers already and nearly $1.2 million in annual recorded revenue in its first months of operations, Ananyi told us at the time.

“There are 1.2 billion people in Africa, but only 26 percent of them are online and most get internet over mobile phones,” says Ananyi. Perhaps only 6 percent of that population has an internet subscription, he said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Steve Song

When Netflix recommends you watch “Everything Sucks” after you’ve finished “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” an algorithm decided that would be the next logical thing for you to watch. And when Google shows you one search result ahead of another, an algorithm made a decision that one page was more important than the other. Oh, and when law enforcement wrongly identifies a suspect using facial recognition, that’s another example of algorithms gone wrong.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t see us, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives.

But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

So what does it take to ensure the algorithms used to make decisions about potentially life-changing circumstances like bail and policing are fair? And what does fair even mean?

At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, I’ll be delving further into the topic with Kairos founder and CEO Brian Brackeen, and Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

When Netflix recommends you watch “Everything Sucks” after you’ve finished “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” an algorithm decided that would be the next logical thing for you to watch. And when Google shows you one search result ahead of another, an algorithm made a decision that one page was more important than the other. Oh, and when law enforcement wrongly identifies a suspect using facial recognition, that’s another example of algorithms gone wrong.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t see us, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives.

But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

So what does it take to ensure the algorithms used to make decisions about potentially life-changing circumstances like bail and policing are fair? And what does fair even mean?

At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, I’ll be delving further into the topic with Kairos founder and CEO Brian Brackeen, and Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

When Netflix recommends you watch “Everything Sucks” after you’ve finished “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” an algorithm decided that would be the next logical thing for you to watch. And when Google shows you one search result ahead of another, an algorithm made a decision that one page was more important than the other. Oh, and when law enforcement wrongly identifies a suspect using facial recognition, that’s another example of algorithms gone wrong.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t see us, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives.

But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

So what does it take to ensure the algorithms used to make decisions about potentially life-changing circumstances like bail and policing are fair? And what does fair even mean?

At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, I’ll be delving further into the topic with Kairos founder and CEO Brian Brackeen, and Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group. This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Access to connections with industry and market know-how is critical for ventures looking to scale beyond a Series A funding round. Startups operating in the health and life sciences space — where innovations may take years to see the light of day — commonly require support navigating a heightened regulatory environment and evolving end-user or beneficiary expectations. Young healthcare companies also need reliable sources of ecosystem knowledge as they enter crowded markets with powerful incumbents and attempt to court potential partners. That’s why the need for more specialized incubators to develop capabilities, talent and opportunities for deeply technical fields, like healthcare, which improve lives and help solve the world’s toughest problems, will persist.

Bring innovation under one roof — literally or digitally

Achieving results with the incubator model of innovation depends on geography, environment and access to informed industry resources. For instance, Y Combinator continues to churn out high-impact startups. Techstars employs a market-adaptable model that dives deep on key global industry verticals, with domain experts as partners.

In Toronto, for instance, MaRS Discovery District provides critical startup and innovation infrastructure under one roof (Disclaimer: JLABS is a resident and partner of MaRS). All three incubators employ subject matter advisors that support new companies and help them navigate crowded markets with well-known competitors.

Look to the public and nonprofit sectors for partnerships

Successful incubators also benefit from business-friendly public and academic sectors. In Canada, the government champions open immigration policies that present technology startups and talent with an opportunity to draw success from the world’s best people.

Universities in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver churn out educated computer and data scientists with design to use their talents for noble pursuits. The onus is on local companies to attract and retain them. That’s where incubators can play a crucial role. The country’s academic scene complements the incubators by partnering with startups to conduct research — especially in the fields of healthcare, biotechnology, clean energy and artificial intelligence.

Keep your friends close and fellow startups closer

The healthcare industry still struggles with diversity in leadership: less than 1 percent of CEOs in the life science industry are women; minority ownership of STEM companies is only 8 percent. Incubators can help change that by bringing diverse groups together to share ideas and build technologies.

In general, a key feature of incubators that helps sell the model to prospects is proximity to fellow entrepreneurs and subject matter experts. That’s why it is especially important for incubators to understand the nuances of the industry or technology they select. Incubators with focused offerings — specializing in launching healthcare startups with hefty or opaque go-to-market requirements, for instance — will have a better chance of success if they deliver quality services to a smaller, more targeted brand of startup that aligns with their expertise. Incubators fail when they over-extend and over-promise offerings — something to avoid at all costs.

Indeed, supporting early-stage innovators with a place to work and resources to run their business ultimately benefits the global life science ecosystem overall. I believe this will persist and the next generation of startups that launch to tackle the world’s biggest — and smallest — healthcare issues will need financial, regulatory and technological support to achieve their goals.

Thanks to advances in both medicine and technology, the opportunities to make a real impact on the world will continue to grow. Achieving results through incubators will require focus on quality of services, expertise of subject matter advisors and access to potential partnerships with industry, academic and public sector peers.

The goal when launching, and sustaining, an incubator for science-driven fields like healthcare should be to enable innovators to deliver much-needed healthcare solutions that reach people all over the world. Importantly, incubators should aim to help entrepreneurs do so at the speed of innovation experienced by other industries like transportation or finance. Ultimately, by removing operations, facility management, technical support and equipment needs common among independent companies, incubator-resident entrepreneurs can focus their time and money on what matters most — world-changing health innovation.

Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on top of the Salesforce platform that looked to be heading toward an IPO in recent years has taken a different tack, instead being acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo today.

The company did not reveal the purchase price, but said it could be ready to share more details about the arrangement after the deal closes, probably next month. “What we can say is that Apttus views this development positively and believes Thoma Bravo can instill greater operational excellence, strengthen our market leadership and allow us to continue providing indispensable value to our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

They are describing this not as a full on acquisition, but as ‘taking a majority stake’. However you describe it, it probably wasn’t the ending the company envisioned after taking $404 million in investment since launching in 2006, one of the earliest startups to build a business on top of the Salesforce platform.

If the company believed that Salesforce would eventually buy it, that never happened. In fact, that dream probably went out the window when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a similar company also built on Salesforce, at the end of 2015 for $360 million.

In spite of this, in an interview in 2016, CEO Kirk Krappe still was confident that an exit was coming, either by IPO or a possibly a Salesforce acquisition.

“We will be IPOing this year. That may be a function to figure what Salesforce wants to do and they may think about that [after purchasing SteelBrick at the end of last year]. There’s no reason they can’t buy us too. For me, I have to run the business, and we’re growing 100 percent year on year. If Salesforce came to the table, that would be great if the numbers work. If not, we have an amazingly strong business,” he said at the time.

That never came to pass of course, and the company tried to separate itself from Salesforce in April of 2016 when it released a version of Apttus that would work on Microsoft Dynamics. Krappe saw this as a way to show investors he wasn’t completely married to the Salesforce platform.

While Salesforce provided a system of record around the customer information and all that involved, once the salesperson actually closed in on a sale, that’s when software like Apttus came into play, allowing the company to generate a detailed proposal, a contract once the deal was agreed upon and finally collecting and recording the money from the sale.

Apttus took its last funding rounds in Sept 2017 for $55 million and later a debt financing round for another $75 million in February this year, according to data on Crunchbase.

Thoma Bravo has bought a number of enterprise software products over the years including Qlik, Sailpoint, Dynatrace, Solar Winds and others. Apttus should fit in well with that family of companies.