Author: azeeadmin

The success of Airbnb has created a major disruption in how people choose where to stay when they visit other places. Gone are the days of assuming a hotel is the best or only option; a selection of private accommodations might prove to be more interesting, cheaper and more flexible. Now, an Airbnb-like startup out of Germany called Homelike — which focuses on rentals of a month or more, often for business but also other customers — has raised $14 million to expand its business to more of Europe, starting with the UK.

Pointedly, the company, does not believe that it is competing directly with Airbnb, in part because of its focus on those longer rentals and in part because none of the properties posted on the platform are private homes. “Homelike starts where Airbnb ends,” said co-founder and CEO Dustin Figge in an interview. Since being founded in 2015, it’s found a willing customer base on both sides of its marketplace. It currently has listings for 45,000 furnished apartments and works with more than 15,000 corporate clients across 100 cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with the aim to cover all the major business hubs in Europe by the end of next year.

Led by Spark Capital, this round also included previous investors Cherry Ventures and coparion, among others. (Of note, this is the latest in a growing number of investments in Europe for Bay Area-based Spark that have focused on marketplaces and commerce. Others have included another rentals platform, Badi; insurance startup Coya; and elderly care platform Careship, in addition to social payments app Verse.) This brings the total raised by Homelike to $18 million in disclosed investments, alongside earlier, undisclosed rounds, Figge said.

Homelike’s funding and general growth come at a time when Airbnb has been on a roll. The company has said it would be ready to IPO from the end of June 2019, and in the meantime is already profitable on an Ebitda basis as it expands into a plethora of other services to diversify and position itself as a “travel experiences” business — including working with a growing number of corporate clients and integrating with business travel booking services. But with that growth has not always been smooth, with the company facing a fair amount of regulatory tussles across a number of markets.

Figge says that his company’s focus on working with people who own or manage properties that were designed for renting out, and its focus on the longer the timeframe — the minimum is around one month, woth the average stay more like four months, he said — has helped it play nice with official bodies as well as stay out of direct competition with the much larger Airbnb and other big platforms that have been hotly competing with it.

Homelike’s main clients are businesses ranging in size from larger corporates to small startups, and the idea is that it’s tapping into the fact that in our global economy, workers might need to move to new cities on a temporary basis, or might need to make permanent moves with little advance warning. When you are living in a city for more than a week or two, living out of a hotel can become less convenient — not to mention more expensive — and that is the gap that Homelike is hoping to fill.

But there are use cases. For example, if you are living in a home or apartment that you need to vacate if it’s, say, undergoing a big renovation (or maybe you have simply rented it out for too many Airbnb weekends! I kid…), sometimes it can be hard to find short-term leases. This is also where Homelike can come in handy.

Just as Airbnb has expanded into areas like things to do once you arrive at your destination, and helping you plan your travel from point A to point B, so, too, does Homelike hope to grow not just by expanding to more cities and users, but also by expanding the services is provides to its users.

“We want to fix the prob for longer term apartment rental first of all, but when you are relocating you need more services, too,” Figge said. “Local service recommendations, insurance, mobility information, cleaning services, gym memberships, there is a lot where we could help with in the next couple of years. There are so many things you can optimise.”

And that’s on the renter side only. On the supply side, he noted that many property owners are still stuck in the offline world when it comes to the management systems and accounting services they use. The aim, he said, will be to provide something end-to-end for both renting customers and those supplying properties, where information doesn’t need to be entered repeatedly and works more efficiently. Homelike won’t be the first to think about this: Lovely also saw a similar opportunity several years ago in the very-long-term — year or more — rental market. It was eventually was acquired by RentPath.

Interestingly, it sounds like Homelike has also been attracting attention from bigger players in the same space of temporary accommodation, where Homelike’s service and footprint might complement what the bigger business has already built. Figge got cagey when I asked about this, but if the startup keeps growing as it has, I have a feeling this may not be the last time we hear about Homelike.

Apple today announced a pair of initiatives that will allow its customers to support America’s National Parks. Starting tomorrow, August 24, and continuing through the 31st, Apple says it will donate $1 to the National Park Foundation for every purchase made using Apple Pay online at apple.com, or through the Apple Store app in the U.S. It’s also introducing a National Park-themed Apple Watch Activity Challenge to accompany the donation program.

Starting on September 1, Apple Watch users worldwide who either walk, run, or do a wheelchair workout of 50 minutes or more will earn an Activity app award and stickers that are inspired by national parks. The 50 minutes is a tribute to Redwood National Park’s 50th anniversary, which is this year.

Related to these efforts, the App Store will also feature a round-up of some of the best apps to use to explore the U.S. National Parks.

Apple says the proceeds from the donation program will support the National Park Foundation’s mission to protect national parks. This includes projects focused on habitat restoration, historic preservation, and the Open OutDoors for Kids program.

“America’s national parks are treasures everyone should experience, and we’re proud to support them again this month by donating a dollar for every purchase made with Apple Pay at one of our stores,” said Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, in a statement about the program. “These awe-inspiring places are our national inheritance, and Apple is doing our part to pass them on to future generations — just as extraordinary, beautiful and wild as we found them.”

The company also took the time today to highlight the success of a related initiative, saying it has protected and created enough sustainably managed forests to cover its current and future paper use. In partnership with The Conversation Fund, Apple has protected 36,000 acres of U.S. forests that are sustainably managed, it noted.

This is not the first time Apple has hosted such a challenge for the U.S. National Parks.

Last year, it ran the same event, making mention of the fact that Apple Pay was accepted at some national parks, like Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Muir Woods National Monument, for example. The event itself now has political undertones, given the current administration’s rethinking of national parks, and its interest in deregulating the oil and gas extraction on public lands.

The Mavic Pro was a revelation. Introduced in 2016, the folding drone wasn’t perfect, but it helped usher in a new era of devices for DJI and the industry at large. The original Mavic helped make consumer drones more portable and accessible, and spurred a line that now includes the Mavic Air and Mavic Spark.

Two years later, the world’s largest drone manufacturer hit New York City to unveil the product’s successor. Like the original Pro, imaging is at the heart of the upgrade. In fact, the Mavic 2 is being positioned as two distinct devices — the Mavic 2 Pro and Mavic 2 Zoom, the on-board camera being the only real difference between the two.

It’s a confusing bit of branding, perhaps, for two products that amount to little more than different SKUs of the same device, but DJI wants to make it clear that the camera’s the thing here. Understandably so — photographers and videographers have long been a core demographic for the company. And more to the point, really, beyond camera upgrades, the Mavic 2 doesn’t represent a huge upgrade over its predecessor.

The company called the products “our most technologically advanced drones” at a press unveiling in New York City this morning. A few of the camera features have been upgraded across the board, including the addition of enhanced dynamic range, for better shots in mixed lighting settings.

The Mavic 2 Pro is, as the name implies, the pricier of the two models. It’s the first DJI device to bask in the fruit of the drone-maker’s 2017 acquisition of Hasselblad. The camera is much larger than the one on the Zoom, bringing with it improved image quality over its predecessor.

The camera captures 20 megapixel shots and uses Hasselblad’s proprietary Natural Color Solution (HNCS) tech to get more accurate color reproduction. The aperture is adjustable as well, giving shooters between f/2.8-f/11 for various lighting conditions.

The Mavic 2 Zoom, meanwhile, is pretty much what it sounds like. The big focus here is the 2x optical (24-48mm) and 2x digital zoom, which combine to simulate the effects of a 96mm lens. The 12-megapixel camera also uses a new “Super Resolution” feature that stitches nine zoomed-in photos for a super high-res 48-megapixel shot, a feature targeted at landscape photography.

Zoom is a solid addition here, given how difficult it can be to try to get a drone close to a subject, for any number of reasons.

There’s also the very cool Dolly Zoom shot mode. This one might be my favorite of the bunch, though while we had the opportunity to fly the new drone atop a Manhattan rooftop, we didn’t have the clearance to try out the new feature, which requires the kind of room that we just weren’t zoned for. The new addition zooms in on an object while the drone flies in the opposite direction, creating a disorienting shot familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Hitchcock film.

There are a number of other additional preprogrammed Hyperlapse shots on-board, as well. I’ll defer to DJI’s description of those:

• Free – pilots the drone manually while shooting a Hyperlapse video.
• Circle – automatically flies the drone in a circular pattern around a subject you select to create a timelapse video that captures the action.
• Course Lock – keeps the camera fixed on shooting subject while the drone flies in a straight direction to create a unique perspective.
• Waypoint – plans a complex flight path based on both altitude and GPS coordinates to capture complex shots.

DJI’s done a solid job of creating these sort of single touch features that make you look like a much more competent photographer than you actually are.

The cameras aren’t swappable — that’s why DJI opted to go with two distinct SKUs on this one. It’s a bit of a bummer for photogs, but a modular camera system is certainly the kind of thing that could make sense for future upgrades.

The drone’s body has been tweaked to make it more aerodynamic. DJI says the new design reduces body drag by up to 19 percent, which helps the drone achieve speeds of up to 44 miles per hour. Making the drone larger is a bit of a surprising choice, given how key portability is to the line, though obviously DJI has even more portable choices on the market now for those who prioritize size over everything else.

The propellers have a raked design on the wing tips, designed to help cut down on air drag and reduce sound. The drone is a bit quieter than the first Mavic, though you’re still not going to be able to sneak up on anyone with the thing.

The battery has been increased ever so slightly, as well, in part to compensate for the newer, larger size. Now the drone is capable of flying up to 31 minutes on a charge. That’s not a huge boost from its predecessor’s 28 minutes, but when it comes to keeping a drone in the air, well, you take what you can get.

Obstacle avoidance has been beefed up here — definitely a good thing, given our past track record with Mavics. So too has the Advanced Pilot Assistance System (APAS), helping the drone fly around obstacles rather than simply stopping to avoid collisions. There also are lights on the bottom of the drone to help improve landings in low light.

ActiveTrack, meanwhile, now utilizes three on-board front facing cameras to create a 3D map of its subject, in order to better follow along.

We had the opportunity to fly the drone around a bit on a Manhattan. I wouldn’t recommend flying on a city rooftop for first times, but the drone handled fairly well and was pretty responsive to the included controller. I’ve flown a few other models in the Mavic line and found the handling to be more or less on-par, while a loud alarm sounded every time it came within several feet of an obstacle. Better safe than sorry.

We’ll be able to say a bit more when we’re able to spend a bit more hands-on time with the product, which should be in the very near future.

The 2 Pro and 2 Zoom run $1,499 and $1,249, respectively. There’s also the standard DJI Fly More kit, which includes a bunch of extras, like two batteries, a multi-battery charging hub, extra propellers and a bag to carry all of that around. That’s $319 and can be purchased at any point.

The drones are available starting today through DJI.

Oh, and for those who love to anthropomorphize their devices, here’s an image of the Zoom and Pro, gasping and screaming, apparently witness something horrific happening, just out of frame:

Pets are expensive. I’ll be the first to admit that. The adoption fees, the shots, the food, the medical care. But at the end of the day, it’s worth it for the judgement-free, uninhibited love of a furry companion.

If you’re looking to save a buck a two, a robotic dog is probably not the way to go. Not this robotic dog, at least. For all of its many charms, the rebooted Sony Aibo ain’t cheap. At an event today in New York City, the electronics giant offered a bit more insight into the long-awaited robotic pet, including its $2,899 price tag.

For all of the new Aibo’s charms (and there are many), any suggestion that the product might be anything but a niche device can now be laid to rest. While Sony North America President and COO Mike Fasulo tells me that the company has its sights on playing a key role in the home robotics moving forward, Aibo is not the mainstream device we’ve been promised for decades.

Rather, the robotic dog is a kind of sign post of what we’re capable in this current moment. It’s an opportunity for Sony to showcase the state of the industry of consumer robotics in 2018 — what happens when current artificial intelligence is used to build the foundation of a consumer product. The result, it turns out, is fairly adorable. I was at the company’s CES press conference, when the new Aibo was unveiled for the first time, and there was a collective gasp. It takes a lot to melt the hearts of a roomful of jaded tech journalists, and Aibo succeeded at that in spades.

“It shows our capability of innovation,” Fasulo tells TechCrunch. “There’s 4,000 parts in this product. Its eyes are made of OLEd, which makes it adorable, but also makes it a great device for photo capturing. The core technology inside is built around our image sensors. It’s got 22 axes of movement and more flexibility than I’ve seen in a robot. It’s showing Sony’s innovation and commit to the future and probably a bit of branding along the way.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first generation of the product was ahead of its time. Consumer AI, cloud technology and any number of other aspects that have since come to fruition simple weren’t in place at the time. But have the advancements the industry has made in the intervening 19 years been enough to create a truly compelling robotic pet?

Sony is certainly hedging its bets with the new Aibo. At $2,899, the product is too expensive to appeal to all but the most enthusiastic early adopters. That said, the product sold surprisingly well in Japan, at around 20,000 units — more than Sony bargained for, apparently. The goal for the U.S. market is “in the thousands,” according to Fasulo.

But while Aibo isn’t destined to be a mainstream product and future generations likely won’t see a major price cut, the company’s committed to the line for a few years at least, this time around. The robot will be available in the U.S. as the “First Litter Edition,” which ships with a three-year AI Cloud Plan, meaning the dog should be kicking for that long at least.

Those looking for an insanely expensive holiday gift can purchase Aibo starting in September. It will also be on display at the Sony Square store in New York, through late October.

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is updating its physical box that lets you connect to your cloud computer instance. Shadow Ghost is a tiny device that provides all the ports and wireless technologies that you need to plug to a TV or a monitor and start playing.

Shadow has been building a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you get a gaming PC in a data center near you. Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

The company started with a dedicated box from day one. The first Shadow box was an oddly-shaped black box with a few USB ports and DisplayPorts. This way, you could replace your PC at home with this box and use the same peripherals.

When you turn it on, it feels like you’re booting up your gaming PC, but you’re actually just starting a computer with a low-powered CPU that connects to your gaming PC in the cloud.

Over the past few months, Shadow has slowly decorrelated the service from the physical device in your home. When you subscribe, you don’t get a box by default. You can install the Shadow app on your existing computer, phone or tablet and start playing.

If you still want the box to connect to your Shadow instance without an existing PC, you can rent it for $10 per month or purchase it for $140. It could be particularly useful for a TV for instance.

Compared to the previous generation, Shadow Ghost is completely silent as the fan is gone — that was my main complaint with the first Shadow box. You won’t need as many dongles either as there’s an HDMI port by default (instead of a DisplayPort) and it supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s also much more energy efficient as it should consume three times less power than the existing Shadow device.

Shadow Ghost will be available for the same price at some point during the last quarter of 2018. The service itself is currently available in France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In the U.S., the company has a data center near San Francisco and another one on the East Coast.

Armory, a startup that has built a CI/CD platform on top the open source Spinnaker project, announced a $10 million Series A today led by Crosslink Capital. Other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, YCombinator and Robin Vasan.

Software development certainly has changed over the last several years, going from long cycles between updates to a continuous delivery model. The concept is actually called CI/CD or continuous integration/continuous delivery. Armory’s product is designed to eliminate some of the complexity associated with deploying this kind of solution.

When they started the company, the founders made a decision to hitch their wagon to Spinnaker, a project that had the backing of industry heavyweights like Google and Netflix. “Spinnaker would become an emerging standard for enabling truly multi-cloud deployments at scale. Instead of re-creating the wheel and building another in-house continuous delivery platform, we made a big bet on having Spinnaker at the core of Armory’s Platform,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel R. Odio wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.

The bet apparently paid off and the company’s version of Spinnaker is widely deployed enterprise solution (at least according to them). The startup’s ultimate goal is to help Fortune 2000 companies deploy software much faster — and accessing and understanding CI/CD is a big part of that.

As every company out there becomes a software company, they find themselves outside their comfort zones. While Google and Netflix and other hyper-scale organizations have learned to deploy software at startling speed using state of the art methodologies, it’s not so easy for most companies with much smaller engineering teams to pull off.

That’s where a company like Armory could come into play. It takes this open source project and it packages it in such a way that it simplifies (to an extent) the complex world that these larger companies operate in on a regular basis, putting Spinnaker and CI/CD concepts in reach of organizations whose core competency might not involve sophisticated software deployment.

All of this relates to multi-cloud and cloud-native approaches to software development, which lets you manage your applications and infrastructure wherever they live across any cloud vendor or even on-prem in consistent way. Being able to manage continuous deployment is part of that.

Armory launched in 2016 and is based in the Bay area. It has raised a total of $14 million with a $4 million seed round coming last year. They were also a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2017 class and count Y Combinator as an investor in this round.

Grab, the ride-hailing company that consumed Uber’s business in Southeast Asia, today made a big push to grow the number of electric vehicles in its fleet after it partnered with energy supplier Singapore Power.

The deal will see Grab add 200 new ‘fast-charging’ EVs to its fleet in Singapore with SP providing “preferential” pricing at the organization’s charging stations. Grab said drivers who opt for an EV — which will be “progressively rolled out” from early 2019 — can expect to increase their earnings by as much as 25 percent over drivers using petrol engines thanks to SP’s ‘mates’ rate.’

The partnership with SP is important to Grab because infrastructure such as charging stations and cost savings are crucial to persuading the most active car drivers to make a move to electric. Ride-sharing drivers certainly rank in the group that can make a difference.

SP has committed to operating 500 charging stations by 2020, which would become Singapore’s largest of its kind. An initial 30 are expected to be up and running before the end of this year and, when ready, Grab said they will charge its upcoming EV model in just 40 mins. Each charge would allow 400km of driving, the company added.

Grab said it has a number EVs within in its Singapore fleet today — it declined to disclose numbers but claimed it is “the largest electric and hybrid vehicle fleet in Southeast Asia” — but these charging stations and the potential to earn additional income are sure to help boost that number, whatever it may be.

This initiative applies to Singapore, but a Grab spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company intends to expand its EV fleet regionally in due time. The company didn’t provide any specifics on that plan, however.

Grab operates in seven countries in Southeast Asia, but Singapore is the most advanced in terms of EV infrastructure. The company recently raised $2 billion from Toyota and others. It acquired Uber’s regional business in March and today it claims over 100 million downloads with more than two billion rides completed to date. Grab recently claimed its annual revenue run rate has surpassed $1 billion, but it has not provided profit or loss numbers.

Outside of electric, Grab has previously forayed into self-driving vehicles through a partnership with Nutonomy. That relationship appears to have ended after Nutonomy was acquired by auto firm Delphi last year. A month before that deal, Grab made an investment in another self-driving car startup, Drive.ai, which said it planned to open an office in Singapore.

Who needs VCs? The largest companies in the crypto world are continuing to build the ecosystem through aggressive investments of their own, as I forecasted at the start of this year.

Binance, the world’s largest exchange, is the latest example. The company is marching beyond a gargantuan $1 billion fund it unveiled earlier this year after it announced an incubator program that’s focused on nurturing early-stage blockchain startups.

The Binance Labs Incubation Program was teased back in June when the company announced its fund, but now the company has taken off the wraps and provided more details — the venture is very aggressive.

The program will take on around 8-10 companies per batch for a 10-week period, Binance Labs CEO Ella Zhang told TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the target is to hold one program per quarter.

That frequency is unheard of, even by those who do incubators full-time, but there’s more. Binance Labs will hand out $500,000 to each program participant in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the business. Again, that’s a big effort compared to most other programs, although it is worth noting that Binance hasn’t decided whether that investment will be in fiat, crypto or a combination of both.

Beyond money, the company wants to open itself up and allow participants to access the benefits of being the world’s top crypto exchange. That’ll include mentoring, technical advice, access to the Binance network and also support on non-technical organization-building activities like HR, admin and more.

The maiden program will be held in San Francisco starting October 9 — applications to take part are open until September 14. As is commonplace, the program will close with a demo day — the “BUIDLer Day” — which will see startups pitch to an audience of investors, media and other industry figures.

Zhang explained that the focus on startups for the program is similar to the Binance fund. That, she said, includes projects focused infrastructure, public chain scalability, security, decentralized exchanges, wallets, custody, payment, coin stability, compliance, decentralized apps, gaming, virtual goods and more.

Ideal candidates have not taken any investment yet since Binance is aiming to be the first check, said Zhang — who joined the crypto firm in May and was formerly an investment director with KPCB China.

Going forward, Binance is aiming to operate the program in different parts of the world each time to address what it sees as global opportunities for blockchain businesses.

“We’re looking at different cities across the world because blockchain and crypto are international. We see problems and opportunities in different regions with different ways to leverage the blockchain,” Zhang said. She added that Africa and Asia are of particular interest at this point but no other destinations have been decided yet.

Zhang and Binance Labs director Christy Choi explained that the large equity check is designed to “facilitate” startup founders by allowing them to focus on developing a product or service, rather than having to set up a business.

With that in mind, the $500,000 investment will cover flights, accommodation and living costs associated with the incubator program and provide the capital to get a product off the ground and towards deployment. The program will maintain close links with the Binance fund, which is also managed by Zhang’s Binance Labs division, so there will be follow-on investment opportunities once the batch is done and as companies scale.

“Binance Labs began to do investments in the past few months and we’ve seen a lot of market hype which is distracting many founders from launching and delivering because there’s a huge demand from investors to get into their project,” Zhang said. “They need a lot of help to become a more mature team and company in order to really shape what they want to do.”

Unlike traditional companies that tap private investors for capital to start out and then as they grow, blockchain and crypto projects typically jump quickly into ICOs. Though often lucrative, the process can leave them dealing with retail investor expectation and concerns around legalities and other areas, all of which steals resources from actually building the business itself. Zhang believes the Binance program will help founders “get rid of those noises and focus on their product.”

Binance’s aggressive investment strategy makes perfect sense. As the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume — with over $1 billion trade in the last 24 hours at the time of writing — it is practically printing money but is also wholly reliant on the crypto industry.

Binance made a profit in the region of $450-$500 million (dependent on token prices) from its first year of operations —  according to figures from the company, which uses 20 percent of its quarterly profits to buy back and ‘burn’ its BNB token — but it will always be a reflection of the crypto industry, and thus it needs it to be healthy.

That vested interest means it must ensure that there are meaningful blockchain and crypto companies in the world. That goes some way to explaining why it is offering a whopping $500,000 per participant and operating a massive $1 billion fund, which will be used to invest in funds as well as direct investments into startups.

To her credit, Zhang acknowledged the situation, stating that real use cases for blockchain and crypto are what will make Binance “thrive.” The incubator and fund are aimed at identifying those cases and enabling them to flourish, the question is whether Binance can find enough of what it is looking for.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

It used to be a one-vendor, stack-driven world in the enterprise. Today, the cloud has changed that and best of breed and interoperability are the watchwords of the day. Two enterprise cloud stalwarts have announced a new integration that brings Box content directly into ServiceNow.

For ServiceNow customers, it means that they can access Box content without leaving a ServiceNow application and changing focus. Company CTO Allan Leinwand says the two share a lot of common customers, and it made sense to bring them together.

“When you’re inside of a ServiceNow record, for example, you’re looking at an incident or problem or a knowledge base article, you are going to link to directly with a Box document or save files directly to Box from ServiceNow. There’s a lot of very practical things that help people get their work done faster,” he explained.

Jeetu Patel, Box’s Chief Strategy and Chief Product officer says the two companies are working to drive innovation inside organizations and that means working with multiple products to solve organizational issues.

“Our goal has been to be a neutral central content layer for every business process. Part of that ambition is to be able to plug into best of breed applications like ServiceNow. Companies already use these tools, and use Box, and they want to be sure they work seamlessly with each other,” Patel said.

On a practical level, customers can grab the Box plug-in from the ServiceNow Store. It comes with some prebuilt workflows fpr typical ServiceNow product usage scenarios, but the integration is flexible and allows customization. As an example, in an HR scenario, the ServiceNow administrator might build a workflow for onboarding a new employee in ServiceNow’s HR application. Using the company’s Flow Designer workflow-building tool, they can pull in all the documents a new employee needs to sign with other tasks into a single workflow.

It comes down to helping customers work more efficiently. “We’re both cloud companies, and we’re both driving digital transformation for our customers. And we’ve really seen a lot of synergy between the way people work in Box, and how people are working in ServiceNow. We think we can integrate together and make work get done better,” Leinwand said.

How best to counteract the Facebook effect in political and other discourse? Consider a plan to create an alternative funded by public money. That was the suggestion today put forward by Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in the UK, who proposed the creation of a “British Digital Corporation” (BDC) that would be a sister organization to the BBC (the publicly-funded British Broadcasting Corporation), and would work as both a think-tank to lead on digital policy and technology, as well as become the home of non-profit services to rival those that are for-profit, including a Facebook alternative.

“A BDC could use all of our best minds, the latest technology and our existing public assets not only deliver information and entertainment to rival Netflix and Amazon, but also to harness data for the public good,” Corbyn said today, in a speech delivered during the Edinburgh TV festival. “A BDC could develop new technology for online decision making and audience-led commissioning of programmes and even a public social media platform with real privacy and public control over the data that is making Facebook and others so rich.” The full text of his lecture can be found here.

The BBC today is largely financed by something called a “TV license”, where people living in the UK pay annual fees for the “right” to receive terrestrial channels. Corbyn suggested that the BDC would be run in a similar way: the government should introduce a digital license fee, he said, to supplement the TV license fee. This would be paid either by way of ISPs (who might pass the cost on to their customers), or by “tech giants”, or perhaps a combination of the two. Poorer households would pay a reduced fee.

Corbyn’s comments and ideas come at a time when the we are still getting to the bottom of just what role widely-used social media platforms like Facebook played — if not actively, then passively, as a highly influential social media platforms manipulated by others — to influence the outcome of key democratic processes, such as the Brexit referendum in the UK and the most recent US Presidential election.

In that vein, he also suggested a wave of proposals to increase transparency in media communications.

They included a Freedom of Information reform that removed ministerial vetoes and expanded it to include cases where private companies are delivering public services; allowing local, investigative and public interest journalism to be taxed as charities; asking “tech giants” to contribute to an independent fund for public interest journalism; and expanding an existing BBC scheme to foster more local journalism (which has really died a death in the UK, as it has in many other places). Digital delivery would, of course, have a big role to play in this.

The issue of there being too few for-profit tech companies that control tech services has a precedent in the media industry, something that Corbyn also directly attacked. “We must also break the stranglehold of elite power and billionaire domination over large parts of our media,” he said. “Just three companies control 71% of national newspaper circulation and five companies control 81% of local newspaper circulation.”

Corbyn, coming in the wake of moderate leaders like Tony Blair and others in his mold, is one of the more left-wing Labour Party leaders in recent times who has advocated for a much wider set of social services and a move away from for-profit organizations and their encroaching role in how these are delivered. In that context, any comments about publicly funded social media services shouldn’t come as a surprise.

And even if he is not the Prime Minister, Corbyn’s comments should not be taken lightly. In his role as leader of the opposition, his speech sets an agenda and debating points around how publicly-funded digital services might take shape in years to come. That is something that the Tories (whose leader, Theresa May, is the Prime Minister) have also been contemplating. Up to now the focus has been in areas like developing AI, 5G and cybersecurity, although with a heavy emphasis on helping fund and boost private-sector businesses.

There are a number of issues that Corbyn’s comments raise, not just about the free market, but about what a publicly-funded model might imply for startups — which are (in theory!) for profit and part of a large push to boost entrepreneurship and small businesses. Similarly, in cities like London, the same oversized tech companies that Corbyn might be criticising have had a big part to play in boosting the local economy, and threats of much higher taxes could have a chilling effect on their activities here. Ultimately, all that will need to be considered when and if we see these ideas mature from their early introduction in a summertime speech.