Author: azeeadmin

Since blockchain technology appeared, there has been a persistent problem in its development: how to make it scale to billions of users. Bitcoin was famously never really designed for this, and today other platforms like Ethereum are also struggling. If you could crack this problem, the thinking goes, you’d end up with the hottest property in blockchain right now.

That, a very healthy dose of ambition, and a bench of strong computer science talent are some of the big reasons why investors are gathering around DFINITY, a startup based out of Zug, Switzerland and Palo Alto that is also a foundation, and has a very lofty goal to build what it calls the “Internet Computer”: a blockchain-based, decentralised and non-proprietary network to run the next generation of mega-applications. DFINITY aims to launch an initial version of its public network — which it has also dubbed “Cloud 3.0” — towards the end of the year.

Today, DFINITY is announcing that it has raised $102 million in funding, in a round jointly led by Andreessen Horowitz (via its crypto fund a16z crypto) and Polychain Capital. Both were previous investors in a $61 million round DFINITY announced earlier this year — which has been a blockbuster for blockchain, with at least $1.3 billion being invested into the technology in the first half of 2018 alone. DFINITY has now raised just over $195 million to date since being founded in 2015.

Other investors in this latest round include SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, and Amino Capital, KR1, as well as DFINITY community members.

DFINITY’s approach to the scalability problem is to resolve the dilemma between full decentralization (where every miner runs every instruction of every computation) versus delegating the mechanics to nodes or super nodes (so therefore more centralisation). DFINITY says it has tested its network to the point where it can finalize software computations in under 5 seconds, which is extremely fast. Bitcoin by contrasts takes 3600 seconds, and Ethereum 600 seconds.

DFINITY conducted an airdrop in May of 35 million Swiss Francs worth of tokens to DFINITY community members to help them become early users. Now DFINITY has followed the newer approach of raising a private sale for its token, without going to a public sale.

You can also watch a test demo of the network here:

While a lot of blockchain projects are tied up with currency (an area that DFINITY has also developed, as you can see), what’s notable about what this startup is doing is that its wider focus is on building a platform that could be used across a significantly wider set of applications.

The Internet Computer, as described by founder and chief scientist Dominic Williams, “is a public infrastructure that aims to host the world’s next generation of software and services.” The belief is that by making it open source and non-proprietary, it’s significantly more secure and less costly to maintain. DFINITY claims that R&D on such an architecture is 90 percent lower.

“We are excited to back DFINITY’s Internet Computer and their vision to host the world’s next generation of software and services on a public network,” said Chris Dixon, Partner at a16z crypto. “The Internet Computer is on track to become a critical piece of the future technology stack. This is groundbreaking and a real testament to Dominic and the incredible team at DFINITY.”

“Dfinity is exciting to a new decentralised world because it has the ability to solve the big issues of the day, including scaling and network security. It’s perhaps one of the handful of new blockchain platform’s that can achieve this. We were always impressed with Dominic and his conviction of their approach,” added Keld Van Shreven, CEO of KR1.

In addition to Williams, that team is impressive indeed.

It includes Timo Hanke as head of engineering, who is a former mathematics and cryptography professor who created AsicBoost to increase the efficiency of Bitcoin mining; Mahnush Movahedi, who joined as a senior researcher from Yale where he’s worked on “scalable and fault-tolerant distributed algorithms for consensus and secure multi-party computation, secret sharing, and interactive communication over noisy channels”; ex-Googler Ben Lynn, who is the “L” from BLS cryptography, used in Threshold Relay to “generate randomness and achieve security, speed and scale in public networks”; and Adreas Rossberg, another ex-Googler who had co-designed the WebAssembly virtual machine, which is also used at DFINITY.

While Internet networks and the largest players online today are proprietary entities with their own commercial and strategic agendas, the vision behind DFINITY is that it can be used to run “autonomous software” that will run in a more independent way. These will exist as running open source software that updates itself using inbuilt governance that can provide hard guarantees to users in the form of “smart contracts” (computing and other transactions that can be made without third parties). These can cover how data might be used, or provide guarantees to startups wishing to build functionality without the precarious worry of a platform access getting revoked. You can read more about the technology in its white paper.

DFINITY has not disclosed its valuation with this round.

Natural Cycles, a Swedish startup which touts its body temperature-based algorithmic method for tracking individual fertility as an effective alternative to hormonal birth control, has been wrapped by the UK advertising regulator which today upheld three complaints that an advert the company ran last year via Facebook’s platform was misleading.

The regulator has banned Natural Cycles from running the advert again, and warned it against exaggerating the efficacy of its product.

The ad had stated that “Natural Cycles is a highly accurate, certified, contraceptive app that adapts to every woman’s unique menstrual cycle. Sign up to get to know your body and prevent pregnancies naturally”, and in a video below the text it had also stated: “Natural Cycles officially offers a new, clinically tested alternative to birth control methods”.

The company has leaned heavily on social media marketing to target its ‘digital contraception’ app at young women.

“We told Natural Cycles Nordic AB Sweden not to state or imply that the app was a highly accurate method of contraception and to take care not to exaggerate the efficacy of the app in preventing pregnancies,” said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) handing down its decision.

While Natural Cycles gained EU certification for its app as a contraceptive in February 2017, and most recently FDA clearance for marketing the app as a contraception in the US (with the regulator granting its De Novo classification request this month), those regulatory clearances come with plenty of caveats about the complexity of the product.

The FDA, for example, warns that: “Users must be aware that even with consistent use of the device, there is still a possibility of unintended pregnancy.”

At the same time, Natural Cycles has yet to back up the efficacy claims it makes for the product with the scientific ‘gold standard’ of a randomized control trial. So users wanting to be able to compare the product’s efficacy against other more tried and tested birth control methods (such as the pill or condoms) are not able to do so.

No birth control method (barring abstention) is 100% effective of course but, as we’ve reported previously, Natural Cycles’ aggressive marketing and PR has lacked nuance and attempted to downplay concerns about the complexity of its system and the chance of failure even though the product’s performance is impacted by multiple individual factors — from illness, to irregular periods. Which risks being irresponsible.

In the ruling, the ASA flags up the relative complexity of Natural Cycles’ system vs more established forms of contraception — pointing out that:

The Natural Cycles app required considerably more user input than most forms of contraception, with the need to take and input body temperature measurements several times a week, recording when intercourse had taken place, supplemented with LH measurements, abstention or alternative methods of contraception during the fertile period.

The company also remains under investigation in Sweden by the medical regulator after a local hospital reported a number of unwanted pregnancies among users of the app.

Despite all that, Natural Cycles’ website bills its product as “effective contraception”, claiming the app is “93% effective under typical use” and making the further (and confusingly worded) claim that: “With using the app perfectly, i.e. if you never have unprotected intercourse on red days, Natural Cycles is 99% effective, which means 1 woman out of 100 get pregnant during one year of use.”

Perfect use of the app actually means a woman would accurately perform daily measurement of her body temperature without fail or fault, and before she’s even sat up in bed, at least several times a week, correctly inputting the data. Forgetting to do so once because — say — you got up to go to the toilet or were otherwise interrupted before taking or inputting a reading could constitute imperfect use.

The BBC spoke to a women who says she made the decision to use the app after seeing that 99% effective claim in Natural Cycles’ marketing on Instagram — and subsequently fell pregnant while using it. “I was sort of sucked into this “99% effective” [claim],” she told the broadcaster. “You know “even more effective than the pill”… What could possibly go wrong?”

In its ruling, the regulator said it investigated two issues related to the advert run by Natural Cycles on Facebook on July 20, 2017, and both issues were upheld.

The complaints were that Natural Cycles’ advert included misleading and unsubstantiated claims — specifically that the product was: 1. “Highly accurate contraceptive app”; and 2. “Clinically tested alternative to birth control methods”.

Natural Cycles told the ASA that the latter claim is in fact a quote from a Business Insider article which it “considered to be correct” and had thus reproduced in its marketing.

After taking expert evidence, and reviewing three published papers on accumulated data obtained from the app, the regulator deemed the combination of the two claims to be misleading.

It writes:

We considered that in isolation, the claim “clinically tested alternative to birth control methods” was unlikely to mislead. However, when presented alongside the accompanying claim “Highly accurate contraceptive app”, it further contributed to the impression that the app was a precise and reliable method of preventing pregnancies which could be used in place of other established birth control methods, including those which were highly reliable in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Because the evidence did not demonstrate that in typical-use it was “highly accurate” and because it was significantly less effective than the most reliable birth control methods, we considered that in the context of the ad the claim was likely to mislead.

The ASA also found the advert to have breached rules for substantiation and exaggeration of marketing messages in the Medicines, medical devices, health-related products and beauty products category, as well as being misleading.

At the time of writing Natural Cycles had not responded to requests for comment.

Cloudian, a company that specializes in helping businesses store petabytes of data, today announced that it has raised a $94 million Series E funding round. Investors in this round, which is one of the largest we have seen for a storage vendor, include Digital Alpha, Fidelity Eight Roads, Goldman Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures and WS Investments. This round includes a $25 million investment from Digital Alpha, which was first announced earlier this year.

With this, the seven-year-old company has now raised a total of $174 million.

As the company told me, it now has about 160 employees and 240 enterprise customers. Cloudian has found its sweet spot in managing the large video archives of entertainment companies, but its customers also include healthcare companies, automobile manufacturers and Formula One teams.

What’s important to stress here is that Cloudian’s focus is on on-premise storage, not cloud storage, though it does offer support for multi-cloud data management, as well. “Data tends to be most effectively used close to where it is created and close to where it’s being used,” Cloudian VP of worldwide sales Jon Ash told me. “That’s because of latency, because of network traffic. You can almost always get better performance, better control over your data if it is being stored close to where it’s being used.” He also noted that it’s often costly and complex to move that data elsewhere, especially when you’re talking about the large amounts of information that Cloudian’s customers need to manage.

Unsurprisingly, companies that have this much data now want to use it for machine learning, too, so Cloudian is starting to get into this space, as well. As Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso also told me, companies are now aware that the data they pull in, no matter whether that’s from IoT sensors, cameras or medical imaging devices, will only become more valuable over time as they try to train their models. If they decide to throw the data away, they run the risk of having nothing with which to train their models.

Cloudian plans to use the new funding to expand its global sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team. “We have to invest in engineering and our core technology, as well,” Tso noted. “We have to innovate in new areas like AI.”

As Ash also stressed, Cloudian’s business is really data management — not just storage. “Data is coming from everywhere and it’s going everywhere,” he said. “The old-school storage platforms that were siloed just don’t work anywhere.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is seeking additional information about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses in advance of legislation he’s preparing to introduce on September 5. 

Income inequality was, after all, the centerpiece of Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. It was a populist message that resonated strongly with voters, giving the dark horse candidate a boost among concerned progressives and independents during a tooth and nail primary battle.

But while the message, perhaps, wasn’t enough to put him over the top, it’s a mission that’s remained central to Sanders’ work on Capitol Hill, finding him taking aim at some of the world’s largest corporations. In recent months, Amazon has been in the senator’s sights.

Earlier today, Sanders tweeted out a link asking employees of the online retail giant to share their experiences working for the company. The form allows current and former Amazon employees to share their stories either on the record or anonymously. It asks whether workers “struggle[d] with the demanding working conditions,” and whether they required public assistance.

In a phone call today, Sanders told TechCrunch that his office already knows enough about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses, but is seeking additional information as it prepares to introduce legislation on September 5.

“We know that the median salary for Amazon employees is about $28,000,” the Senator told TechCrunch. “And about half the workers who work for Amazon make less than $28,000 a year.”

It’s easy to see why the company has become a prime target for Sanders. A recent SEC filing put the median salary at $28,446 — less than owner Jeff Bezos makes every 10 seconds.

“We have every reason to believe that many, many thousands of Amazon workers in their warehouses throughout the country are earning very low wages,” Sanders explained. “It’s hard to get this information. Amazon has not been very forthcoming. From what information we’ve gathered, one out of three Amazon workers in Arizona, as we understand it, are on public assistance. They are receiving either Medicaid, food stamps or public housing.”

The Senator acknowledges that nothing about what Amazon is doing, on the face of it, is breaking any laws. But the discrepancy between its highest and lowest wage earners is enough for him to call into question why government subsidies are required to buoy those on the bottom rung. This is precisely what the proposed legislation aims to address.

Put simply, Sanders says we have every reason to believe that the richest man in the world can afford to pay employees more.

“The taxpayers in this country should not be subsidizing a guy who’s worth $150 billion, whose wealth is increasing by $260 million every single day,” said Sanders. “That is insane. He has enough money to pay his workers a living wage. He does not need corporate welfare. And our goal is to see that Bezos pays his workers a living wage.”

While Amazon is notoriously tight-lipped about matters these matters, the company has been on the defensive since the senator made it a kind of pet project. Amazon won’t comment directly on the forthcoming legislation until it’s made official, but the company did provide TechCrunch with comment regarding the blowback.

“We encourage anyone to compare our pay and benefits to other retailers,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Amazon is proud to have created over 130,000 new jobs last year alone. These are good jobs with highly competitive pay and full benefits. In the U.S., the average hourly wage for a full-time associate in our fulfillment centers, including cash, stock, and incentive bonuses, is over $15/hour before overtime. That’s in addition to our full benefits package that includes health, vision and dental insurance, retirement, generous parental leave, and skills training for in-demand jobs through our Career Choice program, which has over 16,000 participants.”

Amazon further suggests that those interested in learning more about warehouse conditions book a tour of one of its fulfillment centers to “see for themselves.” 

A representative from Sanders’ office tells TechCrunch that Amazon invited the senator on a tour of a fulfillment center, and he plans to take the company up on the offer.

Of course, the concerns over Amazon’s treatment of workers aren’t new. Mother Jones ran an exposé of what it was like working as an Amazon warehouse slave in 2012. In 2013, Gawker published a series of emails from employees discussing life in fulfillment centers citing things like “unrealistic goals,” “very short breaks” and “below zero temps” in warehouses. A protestor cited by The Guardian in 2014 said it was better to be homeless than work for the retailer. And, most recently, Business Insider documented the “horror stories” faced by the Amazon warehouse workers, including nonstop surveillance and so little ability to take breaks, they couldn’t even use the facilities, when needed.  

Amazon has since been on something of a charm offensive in response to those PR headaches.

Last week, there was the odd phenomenon of an army of Twitter accounts claiming to be warehouse workers who were serving up similar talking points.

“Hello!” one wrote, cheerfully. “I work in an Amazon FC in WA and our wages and benefits are very good. Amazon pays FC employess [sic] ~30% more than traditional retail stores and offers full medical benefits from day 1. Working conditions are very good- clean/well lit- Safety is a top priority at my facility!”

That Amazon positions its own offerings as “highly competitive” can, perhaps, be seen as something of an indictment of larger issues with warehouse fulfillment. While the company is an easy target, it’s certainly not alone. And Sanders notes that his office is casting the net wider than just Amazon. Disney and Walmart have also been targeted by the senator.

In June, Sanders told a crowd at an Anaheim church, “I want to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry. Tell me how that is right.” 

A month later, he took to Twitter to call out CEO Bob Iger directly, writing, “Does Disney CEO Bob Iger have a good explanation for why he is being compensated more than $400 million while workers at Disneyland are homeless and relying on food stamps to feed their families?”

Earlier this week, however, Disney reached an agreement with the Walt Disney World union to pay workers a $15 minimum wage.

“We’ve seen real progress at the Disney corporation,” Sanders told TechCrunch, “and I believe that Jeff Bezos can play a profound role in American society today if he were to say, ‘yes, I’m the richest guy in the world. I will pay my workers a living wage at least $15 and make sure all of my workers have the security and dignity they need. I will improve conditions.’”

Amazon and Walmart, meanwhile, remain the two key targets for the impending legislation. With Democrats in the minority in the U.S. Senate, it seems unlikely that a hearing will be called where Bezos would be asked to testify à la Mark Zuckerberg, but the senator plans to go ahead with the legislation next week, regardless.  

“That legislation is pretty simple,” explained Sanders. “It says: if you are a large company of 500 or more employees and you’re paying your workers wages that are so low that they have to go on food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, etc., then you have to pay taxes commensurate to how much the government is now spending for that assistance. It’s going to be the employer – the Jeff Bezos, the Walton family – who will pick up the tab for these public assistance programs, rather than the middle class of the country.”

Sarah Kunst has filed to raise $10 million for her debut venture capital fund, Cleo Capital. According to Axios, the firm will give cash to female entrepreneurs who will act as scouts. 

Scouts look for viable early-stage startups for firms to invest in and then receive a cut of the profits on the investments. Kunst, pictured above, is a scout for Sequoia; it’s unclear if that will change now that she’s running her own firm. She’s also the founder of ProDay, a fitness tech startup that had raised at least $500,000 from angel investors, including Arielle Zuckerberg, but folded earlier this year.

We’ve reached out to Kunst for comment.

Cleo isn’t the only female-focused fund with which Kunst is involved. She joined Bumble as a senior adviser in February, and earlier this month, the popular dating app announced the launch of a VC fund targeting early-stage startups with women at the helm. Kunst is co-leading fund strategy alongside Bumble’s COO, Sarah Jones Simmer.

It’s no surprise Kunst is working to deploy capital to the next generation of female-founded companies. She’s been actively championing female and minority founders at least for the last several years and was one of the most vocal in the industry during tech’s #MeToo moment.

She spoke to The New York Times last year about her experience with 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who sent her inappropriate messages on Facebook in 2014. McClure followed up with a public apology in the form of a Medium post titled “I’m a creep. I’m sorry,” and shortly after resigned from the accelerator. 

Kunst spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt last year a few months after The New York Times piece was published. On a panel focused on diversity in tech, she called out tech founders for a lack of diverse hiring practices: “I do this crazy thing that is hiring people that aren’t just white dudes. It works really great — you guys should try it,” she said.

In 2017, only 11.3 percent of partners at VC firms were women, according to PitchBook data. Female founders, meanwhile, raised just 2.2 percent of all venture funding.

On the bright side, it looks like more women are fundraising on the other side of the table. Women-run VC firms have gathered nearly $2.5 billion so far this year, putting them on pace to surpass last year’s decade high of $3.2 billion. That includes Cowboy Ventures’ $95 million fundraise and Aspect Ventures’ $181 million sophomore vehicle. Cowboy is led by Aileen Lee, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins, while Aspect is co-led by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing director Jennifer Fonstad and former Accel partner Theresia Gouw.

While cryptocurrencies have generated the lion’s share of investment and attention to date, I’m more excited about the potential for another blockchain-based digital asset: security tokens.

Security tokens are defined as “any blockchain-based representation of value that is subject to regulation under security laws.” In other words, they represent ownership in a real-world asset, whether that is equity, debt or even real estate. (They also encompass certain pre-launch utility tokens.)

With $256 trillion of real-world assets in the world, the opportunity for crypto-securities is truly massive, especially with regards to asset classes like real estate and fine art that have historically suffered from limited commerce and liquidity. As I’ve written previously, imagine if real estate was tokenized into security tokens that you could trade as safely and easily as you do stocks. That’s where we’re headed.

There’s a lot of forward momentum around tokenized securities, so much so that based on their current trajectory, I believe security tokens are going to become a common part of Wall Street parlance in the near future. Investors won’t just be able to buy and sell tokens on mainstream exchanges, however; “crypto-native” companies are also throwing their hats into this ring.

The starter pistol has been fired

 

Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not classified as securities, it’s been much easier to facilitate trading on a large scale. Security tokens are more complex, requiring not just capabilities around trading, but also issuance and, critically, compliance. (See more of my thoughts on compliance here.) It’s a major undertaking, which is why we haven’t seen the Coinbase or Circle of security token trading emerge yet (or seen these companies expand their platforms to address this—more on that later).

Meanwhile, regular exchanges are blazing the trail and moving into providing tokens trading. The founder and chairman of the company that owns the NYSE announced a new venture, Bakkt, that would provide an on-ramp for institutional investors interested in purchasing cryptocurrencies. Last month, the SIX Swiss Exchange—Switzerland’s principal stock trading exchange—announced plans to build a regulated exchange for tokenized securities. The trading and issuing platform, SIX Digital Exchange, will adhere to the same regulatory standards as the non-digital exchanges and be overseen by Swiss financial regulators.

This announcement confirms a few things:

1. Most assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc) will be tokenized and supported on regulated trading platforms.

2. Incumbents like SIX have a head start due to their size, regulatory licensing and built-in user base. They are likely to use this advantage to defend their position of power.

3. Most investors will never know they are using distributed ledger technology, let alone trading tokenized assets. They will simply buy and sell assets as they always have.

I expect other major financial exchanges to follow SIX’s lead and onboard crypto trading before long. I can imagine them salivating over the trading fees now, Homer Simpson style.

 

Crypto companies are revving their engines

Stock exchanges won’t have the space to themselves, however. Crypto companies like Polymath and tZERO have already debuted dedicated platforms for security tokens, and all signs indicate announcements from Circle and Coinbase unveiling their own tokenized asset exchanges are not far behind.

Coinbase is much closer to offering security token products after acquiring a FINRA-registered broker-dealer in June, effectively backward-somersaulting its way into a state of regulatory compliance. President and COO Asiff Hirji all but confirmed crypto-securities are in the company’s roadmap, saying that Coinbase “can envision a world where we may even work with regulators to tokenize existing types of securities.”

Circle is also laser-focused on security tokens. Circle CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire explained the company’s acquisition of crypto exchange Poloniex and launch of app Circle Invest in terms of the “tokenization of everything.” In addition, it is pursuing registration as a broker-dealer with the SEC to facilitate token trading—it could also attempt to take the same backdoor acquisition approach as Coinbase.

If there’s a reason Circle and Coinbase haven’t moved into security token services even more rapidly, it’s that there simply aren’t that many security tokens yet. Much of this is due to the lack of compliance and issuance platforms, keeping high-quality securities on legacy systems issuers feel more comfortable with. As projects like Harbor ramp up more, this comfort gap will grow smaller and smaller, driving the big crypto players deeper into security token services.

The old guard vs. the new wave

 

This showdown between traditional finance incumbents and crypto giants will be worth watching. One is incentivized to preserve the status quo, while the other is looking to create a new, more global financial system.

The Swiss SIX Exchanges of the world enjoy some distinct advantages over the likes of Coinbase — they have decades of traditional financial operating experience, deep relationships throughout the industry and a head start on regulatory compliance. Those advantages probably mean that such incumbents will probably be the first to make infrastructural and logistical upgrades to their systems using security tokens. The first time you interact with a security token, it is likely to be through the Nasdaq.

Having said that, incumbents’ greatest disadvantage will be transporting an old-finance-world mentality to these innovations. Coinbase, Circle, Polymath, Robinhood and other newer players are better suited to harnessing the stepchange elements of security tokens — particularly asset interoperability and imaginative security design.

University of Oregon Professor Stephen McKeon, an authority on security tokens, told me that “the potential for programmable securities to enable the expression of new investment types is the most exciting feature.” Harbor CEO Josh Stein explained why private securities in particular will be transformed: “by automating compliance, issuers can allow their investors to trade to the limit of their liquidity across multiple exchanges. Now imagine a world where buyers and sellers around the world can trade 24/7/365 with near instantaneous settlement and no counterparty risk – that is something only possible through blockchain.”

Those hypergrowth startups are going to experiment with these new paradigms in ways that older firms won’t think of. You can see evidence of this forward thinking in Circle’s efforts to build a payment network that allows Venmo users to send value to Alipay users — exactly embracing interoperability, if not in an asset sense.

The race is on

As Polymath’s Trevor Koverko and Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano have been saying for the past year, the financial services world is moving towards security tokens. As the crypto economy matures, we’re inching closer to a new era of real-world assets being securitized on the blockchain in a regulatory compliant manner.

The challenge for both traditional and crypto exchanges will be to educate investors about this new way to buy and sell investments while powering these securities transactions via a smooth, seamless experience. Ultimately, security tokens lay the groundwork for granting investors their biggest wish — the ability to trade equity, debt, real estate and digital assets all on the same platform.

Pandora announced three new capabilities for advertisers today — the ability to dynamically assemble different audio ads for different listeners, the ability to sequentially target ads so that they fit together into a larger strategy and shorter ad formats that range from four to 10 seconds in length.

Claire Fanning, Pandora’s vice president of ad strategy, told me via email that the company is announcing these capabilities at the same time because “they work together in really powerful ways.”

For example, she also sent along campaign mock-ups that showed how ads could be tailored to include both the day of the week and a call-to-action tied to the listener’s location, and how the ads could be also specifically sequenced so that listeners start with the longer message, then hear shorter and shorter spots.

“We believe that an advertiser’s personalized audio strategy will not only be unique to that advertiser, but also unique to each campaign,” Fanning said. “In some cases, leveraging one capability may be best (short form, dynamic, sequential) — and in other cases, leveraging 2 or 3 may be most powerful. It’s really dependent on the advertiser’s creative strategy and which solution, or solutions, will support that strategy best.”

While Pandora launched its own on-demand music service last year, advertising remains the main way the company monetizes its 72.3 million active listeners. It says it’s the first company to make these features available in a large-scale way, and it’s already been testing them with 20 advertisers, enlisting Veritonic to measure the results. For one thing, it says that Lay’s found short-form audio had a 56 percent higher return on ad spend.

As the company looks to deliver more personalized advertising, it may face more questions about privacy, but Fanning said Pandora doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information about users except for their email addresses.

“We use industry-standard security practices to protect our data and have developed internal tools and processes to ensure compliance with our privacy commitment,” Fanning added. “We’ll continue to fortify this by tightening certain contractual language, auditing existing 3rd-party data partners, and evaluating future partnerships with enhanced rigor.”

Civil, the two-year-old crypto startup that wants to save the journalism industry by leveraging the blockchain and cryptoeconomics, has partnered with the 172-year-old Associated Press to help the wire service stop bad actors from stealing its content.

Civil, using its blockchain-enabled licensing mechanism, which is still in development, will help the AP track where its content is going and whether it’s licensed correctly. In exchange, the AP has granted the newsrooms in Civil’s network licenses to its content. Civil, which has raised $5 million from the blockchain venture studio ConsenSys, plans to make the licensing tool available to all the newsrooms in its ecosystem once it’s up and running.

Matthew Iles, the founder and CEO of Civil, told TechCrunch he wants the company to become the new economy for journalism, uprooting the long-standing ad-based revenue model and providing journalists ownership of their content. Beyond that, he wants to reinstate trust and credibility in the journalism industry, which, in an era of  “fake news,” has taken a hard hit to its reputation.

“We have a problem now of not even just dealing with literal fake news, but dealing with the social aspects of people not really knowing what to trust anymore because people are throwing around allegations,” Iles told TechCrunch. “We think [Civil] is going to create far better signals for consumers to really know if a news organization is trusting and credible, despite whatever powerful people might be saying.”

The AP-Civil deal has benefits for both sides. For Civil, they’ll get the opportunity to learn the ropes of the licensing business from the premier news wire service, and the AP will get a lesson in blockchain tech, with a goal of determining what kind of impact, if any, the blockchain can really have on journalism. Additionally, as part of the deal, the AP will be proud new owners of Civil’s cryptocurrency, CVL, which will begin selling via its upcoming initial coin offering on September 18.

If all goes well, the AP will rake in more revenue as a result of the partnership and Civil will have a nice use case of its blockchain-enabled licensing tool to show off.

Iles added that Civil has plans to announce a more partnerships in the coming weeks. Just last month, the company announced a deal with Splice, a media company based in Singapore, that has the pair investing $1 million in 100 media projects in Asia over the next three years.

“This project was founded on the idea that the digital media business is and was on a dangerous path,” Iles said. “I was motivated to look at the ways media platforms were constructed. Could we redesign a media platform from the ground up? I thought about it in conventional ways at first, but one of the things I ran into was a strong desire to make this platform decentralized. I had no idea how to do that until I found blockchain technology.”

Civil is among a new generation of blockchain journalism startups that includes Nwzer, Userfeeds, Factmata and Po.et, which was founded by Jarrod Dicker, a former vice president at The Washington Post.

Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that prevented Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it.

TechCrunch was alerted to the problem by a reader who couldn’t find any information about the issue in Facebook’s Help Center. We’ve since confirmed the issue ourselves with several affected parties and confirmed it with Facebook.

Given the real-time nature of social media — and how difficult it is to pull up old posts — it’s possible that many of the impacted Facebook users have yet to realize their old posts have been removed.

In fact, we only found a handful of public complaints about the deletions, so far.

For example:

Above: selected complaints from Twitter about the data loss

Above: a comment on TechCrunch following our post on the API changes 

Some of those who were impacted were very light Facebook users and had heavily relied on the cross-posting to keep their Facebook accounts active. As a result of the mass removals, their Facebook profiles are now fairly empty.

TechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino is one of those here who was impacted. He points out that the ability to share tweets to Facebook was a useful way to reach people who weren’t on Twitter in order to continue a discussion with a different audience.

“I’ve had tweet cross-posting turned on for years, from the early days of it even existing. This just removed thousands of posts from my Facebook silently, with no warning,” Matthew told me. “Even though the posts didn’t originate on Facebook, I often had ongoing conversations about the posts once my Facebook friends (and audience) saw them. Many of them would never see them on Twitter either because they don’t follow me or they don’t use it,” he said.

“It’s wild to have all of that context just vanish,” he added.

As you may recall, Facebook earlier this month made a change to its API platform to prevent third-party apps from publishing posts to Facebook as the logged-in user. The change was a part of Facebook’s larger overhaul and lockdown of its API platform in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where as many as 87 million Facebook users had their data improperly harvested and shared.

Since then, Facebook has been trying to plug up the holes in its platform to prevent further data misuse. One of the changes it made was to stop third-parties from being able to post to Facebook as the logged-in user.

For existing apps, like Twitter, that permission was revoked on August 1, 2018.

Above: Twitter’s cross-posting feature, on the day it was disabled by the Facebook API change

Before the API changes, Twitter users were able to visit the “Apps” section from Twitter on the web, then authenticate with Facebook to have their tweets cross-posted to Facebook’s social network. Once enabled, the tweets would appear on the user’s page as a Facebook post they had published, and their friends could then like and comment on the post as any other.

In theory, the API changes should only have prevented Twitter users from continuing to cross-post their tweets to Facebook automatically. It shouldn’t have also deleted the existing posts from Facebook users’ profiles and business users’ Facebook Pages.

This is a breach of trust from a company that’s in the process of trying to repair a broken trust with its users across a number of fronts, including data misuse. Regardless of whatever new policy is in effect around apps and how they can post to Facebook, no one would have ever expected that Facebook would actually remove their old posts without warning.

We’re hoping that the problem is a bug that Facebook can resolve, and not something that will result in permanent data loss.

Facebook tells us while it doesn’t have further information about the problem at this time, it should have more to share tonight or tomorrow about what’s being done.

Instagram is at last quenching the thirst of its thirsty, thirsty unverified users.

The company just introduced a trio of new features designed to make Instagram a generally safer and more authentic place to hang out (third-party 2FA — enable it!) and for the first time the platform now offers users a straightforward way to request verification.

On Instagram, blue check marks are fairly rare, even among pretty big brands and public figures. Getting verified on the platform has long been the stuff of legend — no one quite knows what goes on behind the scenes but knowing a guy doesn’t hurt. Remarkably, there’s even a super sketchy black market where people charge thousands of bucks to hook you up with verified status (or more likely to just rip you off). The whole thing has always been kind of mysterious, with little blue checks quietly sprinkled around in no discernible pattern.

It looks like those days are over. While it’s too early to tell if Instagram will be handing out more verified badges to users, they’ve at least made the process much more transparent. Now, any user can request to be verified with a few steps. As a note: In our testing, the option to request verification is live now in iOS but hasn’t yet popped up in the updated Android app.

If you’re curious if you might qualify to begin with, here’s how Instagram framed the new verification system in its latest announcement:

… The blue verified badge is an important way for you to know that the account you are interacting with is the authentic presence of a notable public figure, celebrity, global brand or entity. Today we are enabling a new way for accounts that reach large audiences and meet our criteria to request verification through a form within the Instagram app.

Does that sound like you? Here’s what you need to do.

1) Request Verification

From your profile, navigate to the Settings menu and then find an option to “Request Verification.”2) Show your stuff

Provide the relevant documents. Instagram accepts government-issued IDs (driver’s license, passport or other national ID cards). In lieu of that, you can submit official documents like a utility bill, tax filing or article of incorporation. These documents won’t be public on your profile.

If your official documentation isn’t a match for your legal name, you might be out of luck. We’ve asked Instagram to clarify if these documents need to match your account information exactly or if they just need them on file for reference.

3) Wait and wonder

Wait while Instagram reviews your request. Instagram says that you’ll receive a notification letting you know if you’ve been approved or rejected, so look out for that. If you are rejected you can reapply after 30 days.

Tips and requirements

Before you apply, it’s worth reading over what Instagram requires for a verified account. According to its hub on verified badges, Instagram will evaluate your account for “authenticity, uniqueness, completeness and notability” — the criteria it must meet in addition to abiding by the platform’s terms of service.

What do those things mean? Instagram defines an authentic account as one that “represent[s] a real person, registered business or entity.”

When Instagram demands an account be “unique” what it really means is that it intends to only approve one account per business or individual except in cases of “language-specific accounts.” Instagram reminds users that it “[doesn’t] verify general interest accounts (example: @puppymemes).”

To make sure your account is complete, it must be public, with a profile photo, bio and one post minimum. Importantly, Instagram stipulates that your account “can’t contain ‘add me’ links to other social media services,” so prune anything like that.

The last criterion is the toughest. Instagram requires that your account be “notable.” You might think that your account is [100 emoji], but unless you are a “well-known, highly searched for person, brand or entity” you probably won’t make the cut. Instagram explains further that it reviews accounts “featured in multiple news sources” and paid content doesn’t count. While Instagram’s process is way more transparent now, this bit does leave some room for interpretation.

Even with the new request form, keep in mind that most users won’t make the cut. Historically, it’s kind of unpredictable. Popular users who seem like a no-brainer for a verified account sometimes don’t have verified status, while others with a far less substantial public profile do. Even here at TC, some of us (like @panzer with his assiduous sneaker content) sport a little blue check while others don’t. We don’t know if there is more rhyme or reason to verification now, but at least the process is public and available for everyone.