Author: azeeadmin

Twitter today is officially launching its first-ever subscription service, Twitter Blue, initially in Australia and Canada. The subscription will allow Twitter users to access premium features, including tools to organize your bookmarks, read threads in a clutter-free format and take advantage of an “Undo Tweet” feature — which is the closest thing Twitter will have to the long-requested “Edit” button.

The company’s plans for the subscription service had been previously scooped by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who uncovered the service’s name, pricing and feature set by digging around inside the mobile app’s code. Twitter Blue also recently showed up as an in-app purchase, further confirming some of Wong’s findings.

The only questions that seemingly remained, then, were when Twitter Blue would finally launch and when it would reach all global users.

Twitter tells TechCrunch it’s starting Twitter Blue with the select markets of Canada and Australia to help it determine whether its existing feature set will meet the needs of those who are looking for more customization over their Twitter experience, as well as to encourage discussion around other features that Twitter should prioritize for future iterations of Twitter Blue.

“We are going to continue to iterate on different tier and pricing opportunities as we continue to learn more about what is — and isn’t — working,” a Twitter spokesperson told us.

In Canada and Australia, the subscription will cost $3.49 CAD or $4.49 AUD, respectively.

Image Credits: Twitter

There are also a few things to know about Twitter Blue’s current feature set, beyond the basics.

The new Bookmark Folders option is designed to help Twitter users organize their saved content, collected through Twitter’s Bookmarks feature. Introduced in early 2018, Twitter’s Bookmarks gives users a private way to save tweets for later reference. This is useful for those who want to read long-form content at a later time, or for those who want to save tweets without alerting others to that fact. For example, if the tweets being saved aren’t those they would normally “Favorite” (the heart icon), perhaps because the user disagrees with the sentiment being expressed, the bookmarks button lets them save the tweet more privately.

The Folders feature will let users create subfolders for their bookmarks, which are also color-coded for easy at-a-glance access. And there’s an “Add Bookmark” button on this screen, so you can add a tweet to the collection from the Bookmarks section directly.

The new Reader Mode feature, meanwhile, may not be exactly what some Twitter users were expecting.

Ahead of Twitter Blue’s launch, Twitter acquired Scroll, a distraction-free reading service that cleans up news articles by removing ads and other clutter for a better reading experience. Scroll CEO Tony Haile then tweeted that the product’s features would be integrated into Twitter’s subscription “later in the year.”

Image Credits: Twitter

But Twitter tells us that Reader Mode isn’t correlated to any of the company’s recent acquisitions, including Scroll, and instead was built separately for the Twitter Blue offering. For the time being at least, Reader Mode is focused on making it easier to read through longer Twitter threads — basically, an alternative to something like the third-party app, Thread Reader App.

When you go into the tweet detail view where it shows you the full Twitter thread, Twitter Blue subscribers will see a button which lets you change the screen to show you long-form text. You can exit Reader Mode to see the thread as usual.

As for Scroll, Twitter says the better reading experiences it brings to the platform will be incorporated into Twitter Blue later on.

Finally, there’s Twitter Blue’s flagship feature, Undo Tweet. While not the Edit button users really want, it will allow you to quickly “unsend” a tweet when you spot a typo or make some other kind of mistake — like forgetting to tag someone, for instance.

Image Credits: Twitter

Users can set their own customizable time of up to 30 seconds to “undo” the tweet or reply from being posted to their Timeline, Twitter says. Before Twitter Blue’s launch, the company had hinted that this “undo” option was the way it would likely address user demand for an Edit button. Twitter had feared actually allowing users to correct their tweets at any time, as it could lead to malicious activity — like changing the text of the tweet to later have a different meaning, for example.

Undo Tweet will address many scenarios, however, where users have quickly posted only to belatedly spot a typo. That alone may be worth a few dollars per month for Twitter power users who tweet frequently.

Twitter stressed today that the launch of Twitter Blue won’t mean anything about the free version of Twitter is changing. The subscription will remain focused on adding enhancements and other complementary features to Twitter’s free tier. And it may grow to include more options over time.

One thing Twitter wouldn’t say, maddeningly, is when Twitter Blue could arrive in the U.S. or other markets. For some context, though, Twitter launched Fleets first in spring 2020 but didn’t roll out the feature to all global users until that November. Asked if Twitter Blue would follow a similar path, Twitter declined to comment.

The subscription service isn’t just a way to better serve Twitter’s power users, it’s part of the company’s broader plan to reduce its reliance on advertising revenue as its only source of profit. As Twitter has struggled to grow its user base over the years, it’s more recently begun looking to generate more money from the dedicated users it does have. These plans will include offering tools to creators, including the upcoming Super Follow subscription, as well as Twitter Blue.

Twitter told investors earlier this year it plans to at least double its total annual revenue, from $3.7 billion in 2020 to $7.5 billion or more, in 2023, in part thanks to its new initiatives, including subscriptions.

Twitter Blue will initially be available in its supported markets on iOS only. Early adopters are asked to tweet their product feedback to @TwitterBlue.

Builders, creators and developers, this one’s for you! TechCrunch has always been about discovering fresh solutions and shining the light on exciting, new products that have the potential to make a difference. Our past hackathons have been the breeding ground for products like Alexa Shop Assist, Quick Insurance, reVIVE and GroupMe who went on to be acquired by Skype.

This year, we’ve partnered with Product Hunt’s Makers Festival to give builders a platform to unleash your creativity and bring your ideas to reality and even have a chance to get some exposure at Disrupt 2021. This Makers Festival is centered all around green tech and environmental ingenuity. As humans, our daily connections to the environment are all-encompassing including how we eat, pay, invest, shop, advocate, and travel. That means there are better solutions everywhere, too. Get inspired and ask yourself “what haven’t we tried yet?”

The grand prize winner will get a free spot to launch their product to the TechCrunch community at Disrupt 2021 in Startup Alley along with a bunch of other prizes and tools to help you kickstart your product.

So how do you participate?

Register here for free and get your creative juices flowing. Make sure you sign up asap as registration closes tomorrow, June 4. 

And who knows – maybe your product will be the next one that snapped up at Disrupt!

Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer.

Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global. The company raised $200 million last August at a $2.2 billion valuation, and has now raised $584 million, $450 million coming in the last year.

What is making investors open their wallets and pull out such large sums of cash? The company is helping solve a hard problem on how to bring more intelligence to the revenue process. They do this by using artificial intelligence to listen to every customer interaction, whether that’s a sales or service call (or anything else), and use that information to determine valuable information like who is most likely to buy and who is most likely to churn.

It’s been going well and CEO Amit Bendov says the company’s performance really validates the valuation. While he wasn’t ready to discuss specific numbers, he did say that ARR grew 2.3x between Q1 last year and this year, and he says Q2 is on pace to triple ARR.

“The valuation is up about 3x from last summer, but sales are more than 3x. We have high logo customers. [Last year], it was still unclear how COVID was going to impact us. People believed [our business] was going to do well [during the pandemic], but it wasn’t as obvious. Now, it is obvious. And all the […] financials are way better, so from a pure financials [perspective] our multipliers are pretty reasonable for our revenue trajectory,” he said.

With all this growth, the company is adding employees at a rapid pace. It closed the year with 400 people, and is up to around 550 today with a goal of reaching 950 by year end. It has partnered with a consulting firm called ReadySet, which helps companies build diverse and inclusive organizations, and Bendov says they are an equal pay company.

Women represent around 40% of the employees and around 4% are Black, a number he hopes to increase by growing the Atlanta office. In the office in Israel, he has set up employment and training programs to build bridges to the Arab community.

Bendov says he looks forward to meeting his U.S. employees in the coming weeks when he’ll be visiting the Atlanta office for the first time.

Joor, an online marketplace that connects fashion brands and retailers around the world, has opened its first China office in downtown Shanghai as it eyes growth in the region.

The 11-year-old New York-based company works as a virtual showroom for brands, which traditionally would meet with their retail partners in physical venues to showcase the latest collections. With Joor, showrooms become live videos, a feature that has no doubt proven useful during COVID-19.

The company also gives brands a set of data tools to analyze their sales that can inform future productions. For buyers, the benefits are similar — they are able to see which brand or product is trending and make better forecasts.

The expansion into China follows a robust year for Joor in APAC and the opening of its offices in Melbourne and Tokyo. Joor’s wholesale volume ordered by retailers in the region grew 139% year-over-year in 2021, and wholesale volume for APAC-based brands was up 419%, the company said in an announcement.

“The establishment of JOOR Shanghai will allow us to provide frictionless wholesale management to the range of fine brands and retailers across the country,” said Joor’s CEO Kristin Savilia in a statement. “It builds on our existing leadership position in North America and Europe, and we expect continued expansion across the Asia-Pacific region.”

Joor’s marketplace boasts more than 12,500 brands and over 325,000 retailers around the world to date. The company has raised over $35 million in funding, according to its disclosed rounds. Its investors include venture capital firms Battery Ventures and Canaan Partners as well as the 71-year-old Japanese trading house Itochu.

Low Earth orbit is full of stuff: not only bits of debris and junk, but also satellites — the number of which is growing rapidly alongside the decreasing cost of launch. This can occasionally pose a problem for satellite providers, whose valuable spacecraft run the risk of colliding with other satellites, or with the many thousands of other objects in orbit.

For most of the space age, debris tracking was performed by a smattering of military outfits and other governmental organizations, but that hardly paints a complete and broadly accessible picture. LeoLabs has been aiming to fill what it calls this “data deficit” in orbital object tracking since the company’s founding in 2016. Now it will be scaling its operations with a $65 million Series B financing round, jointly led by Insight Partners and Velvet Sea Ventures. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to over $100 million.

LeoLabs uses ground-based phased array radars – one in Alaska, one in Texas, two in New Zealand and two in Costa Rica – to monitor low Earth orbit, and to track and measure any object that flies through its observational area. One main advantage of LeoLabs’ tracking system is the size of the objects it can detect: as small as 2 centimeters across, as opposed to the much larger 10 centimeter objects tracked by legacy detection systems.

Image Credits: LeoLabs (opens in a new window)

The difference in scale is huge: there are around 17,000 objects in orbit 10 centimeters or larger, but that number jumps to 250,000 when monitoring from 2 centimeters. That’s a lot of opportunity for collision, and though 2 centimeters sounds small (that’s less than an inch), they can do catastrophic damage traveling at orbital velocity. Customers can access this information using a subscription service, which will automatically alert them about collision risks.

“There just isn’t much information about what’s going on,” Dan Ceperley told TechCrunch. “So we’re rolling out this global radar network to generate a lot of data, and then all that software infrastructure to make it useful.”

LeoLabs sees around three to five close approaches involving larger objects, Ceperley said per year. Those are noteworthy because a collision could potentially produce thousands of smaller fragments – even more space junk. When tracking smaller objects, the company sees up to 20 times more collision risks. Fortunately, many satellites have electric thrusters that can be activated to avoid collisions or maintain orbit. With sufficient advance, companies can maneuver a few days prior to the anticipated collision.

With this new injection of funds, Ceperley said the company is looking to expand the number of radar sites around the world and scale its software-as-a-service business. While LeoLabs already has complete orbital coverage, more radars will increase the frequency with which objects are tracked, he explained. LeoLabs will also be scaling its software and data science teams (already the largest in the company), setting up locations outside the U.S., and adding new products and services.

“There’s a once in a lifetime revolution going on in the space industry, all this new investment has driven down the costs of launching satellites, building satellites and operating satellites, so there’s a lot of satellites going into low Earth orbit,” Ceperley said. “There’s a need for a new generation of services to actually track all these things [. . .] And so we’re building out that next generation tracking service, mapping service, for that new era.”

As more people return to the office over the next few months, companies will have to work harder than ever to make sure the environment is comfortable and inviting.

One company that is out to ease the pain of millions of employees leaving the comfy confines of their homes and losing the convenience of conducting meetings in nice tops and sweatpants has just raised new funding to help it advance on its goals.

New York-based New Stand announced it has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Brookfield Property Group, one of the largest commercial real estate owners in the United States. Existing backers Maywic, Fantail Ventures and Raga Partners also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total raised to just over $56 million since its 2015 inception.  

New Stand is a clever take on the “newsstand” concept. The startup has built a modern-looking smart vending physical product that can be set up in all sorts of different spots –– from office lobbies to floors of companies within an office building to hotels to college campuses to airports. The company’s first location was at the Union Square subway station in New York City. Over time, New Stand has combined that physical presence with an app that is designed to give people convenience in getting basics (think snacks, books and personal care items such as umbrellas or pain relievers, for example) as well as access to “location-based media.”

On top of that, it wants to partner with companies to offer its platform as a way to communicate internal news in a more fun and engaging manner. The company is making a big push in the office vertical with the launch of its New Stand at Work, a workplace amenity.

So it’s not entirely surprising that Brookfield, one of the biggest commercial landlords in the country, would want to back a company that aims to make tenants and their employees happier.

TechCrunch talked with co-founder and CEO Andrew Deitchman about the new raise and plans for the capital. He earnestly describes New Stand as a “day improvement company” that aims to make people’s days easier and more interesting.

“And we do it by making sure we have basic stuff that people need, but also curating things that we think they would like,” he said. “We have little shops or touch points that are like convenience stores, and we combine that with an app that introduces people to content, and also allows them to interact in other ways to accumulate points and rewards.”

“So what New Stand really is building is a media and technology company, using convenience points as a means of accessing people’s lives and making their days a little bit better,” Deitchman added.

New Stand is working to evolve from being primarily a consumer business to an enterprise one.

“We can take care of basic needs but also engage people in a deeper relationship,” Deitchman said. “If you’re an employer who wants to relate to an employee or if you are a landlord who wants to relate better to your tenants, we can help make that happen.”

The company is planning to use its new capital primarily toward expanding into new spaces, office and otherwise. Currently, it’s in about 20 locations. 

It’s also planning to create “new engaging services and formats” and “grow and densify its distribution.”

In line with its investment, Brookfield Properties said it plans to “further activate” its properties in New York and, ultimately beyond, with New Stand’s offering.

Ben Brown, managing partner and head of the U.S. office in Brookfield’s Real Estate group, notes that prior to this investment, Brookfield had already partnered with New Stand at its flagship property, Brookfield Place New York — both as an amenity for its tenants and as an offering in its own office space for employees.

“On both fronts, New Stand has provided an elevated experience with tangible benefits,” he told TechCrunch. “As one of the largest — if not the largest — commercial real estate owners in the country and world, we have a particular interest in investing in enterprises we ourselves use, see the value in, and can help scale over time.”

Brown said the combination of New Stand’s physical assets and media platform has given Brookfield the opportunity to boost engagement with its tenants’ employees as well as its own, something “all landlords are trying to do.”

“Helping the world’s leading companies attract, retain and motivate their workforces has long been job one for us, and that has only intensified today as firms increasingly look for ways to have the office compete with the home,” he added.

TikTok announced a ban on political advertising all the way back in 2019. So you’d be forgiven for thinking the ugly problem of democracy-denting political disinformation doesn’t apply inside its walled garden of dancing Gen Zers. But you’d be wrong.

New research by Mozilla suggests that policy loopholes and lax oversight, especially around influencer marketing, coupled with an ongoing lack of ads transparency by TikTok — which offers no publicly searchable ad archive — are making its video-sharing platform vulnerable to passing off political ads as organic content.

Mozilla says it found over a dozen instances of TikTok influencers across the political spectrum who were being paid (or otherwise compensated) by a variety of political organizations to promote partisan messages without disclosing that these posts were sponsored.

“Our research found that TikTok influencers across the political spectrum had undisclosed paid relationships with various political organizations in the U.S.,” it writes. “Several right-wing TikTok influencers appear to be funded by conservative
organizations like Turning Point USA, a tax-exempt nonprofit which has a dedicated influencer program specifically targeted at funding young conservative content creators on social media.”

Examples of TikTok influencers spreading political messaging (Image credits: Mozilla)

It similarly found evidence of left-leaning sponsored political messaging being spread without proper disclosures by TikTok influencers, noting that: “We found some evidence that progressive influencers supported by left-leaning political organizations were posting pro-Biden messages prior to the U.S. presidential election. For instance, The 99 Problems created and funded the Hype House account House of US, where influencers post political messaging.”

In the report, Th€se Are Not Po£itical Ad$: How Partisan Influencers Are Evading TikTok’s Weak Political Ad Policies, Mozilla calls out the platform for not offering adequate tools for ‘influencers’ — aka users who have amassed a large enough number of followers to become attractive targets for advertisers to target for making paid postings — to report sponsorships, pointing out that other major social media platforms (like Facebook/Instagram) do offer such tools and can flag influencer content if they’re found failing to properly report ads.

“Of course, it’s hard to know exactly how self-disclosure ad policies are being enforced across platforms but TikTok is significantly far behind Instagram and YouTube when it comes to providing tools and enacting clear, strict, and transparent policies,” Mozilla writes in the report.

Per TikTok’s rules, content creators are supposed to self-identify any paid content (typically by using the hashtag #ad or #sponsored), in keeping with U.S. Federal Trade Commission guidelines for the disclosure of paid influence.

But, as Mozilla points out, if TikTok isn’t actively monitoring or scrutinizing influencer ads (as the report suggests) it raises an obvious concern over how the platform can claim to be enforcing its “trust and safety” protocols.

Mozilla’s report also points to rumours that TikTok is testing features that will allow influencers to pay to further promote specific posts — which could dial up the ‘dark money’ political disinformation problem further, i.e. if not combined with active policing and enforcement of sponsorship disclosures.

“There do not appear to be any safeguards preventing creators from using this feature to promote paid political messages,” it warns. “It is unclear how TikTok is monitoring this content to ensure that it complies with their political ad policy.”

Another major criticism in the report is the general lack of ads transparency by TikTok vs other social platforms — with Mozilla’s report pointing out that it does not offer public, searchable ad databases as others (including Facebook/Instagram, Snap, and Google/YouTube) do. Twitter has also had a searchable ads archive since 2018.

“Mozilla believes Facebook and Google are doing a poor job on ad transparency, so the fact that TikTok can’t match even them is troubling,” the report notes.

In recommendations to TikTok (or to policymakers shaping laws aimed at preventing abuse of such platforms) Mozilla suggests that it needs to develop specific mechanisms for content creators to disclose partnerships; invest in comprehensive advertising transparency, including launching an ad database which includes paid partnerships (not just native platform ads); and update its policies and enforcement processes to cover all the ways that paid political influence can happen on its platform.

TikTok was contacted with questions on its approach to ads transparency and sponsored content. It sent this statement:

There are signs that TikTok is trying to get ahead of criticisms in the report — as Mozilla’s researcher, Becca Ricks, notes that the company has very recently (“within the past week”) created a branded content policy.

“It includes mention of a ‘branded content toggle‘ to help influencers disclose paid partnerships,” she went on, adding: “We’re currently analyzing the feature to learn more. But we’re cautiously optimistic that this could be a (small) step in the right direction, especially after we raised these issues directly with TikTok two weeks ago in the course of our research.

“That said, Mozilla’s other recommendations — and the entirety of the problems we uncovered in the research — remain. So TikTok has a long road to being truly transparent.”

Mozilla’s report is just the latest black cloud to fall over TikTok’s platform which is under pressure on a variety of fronts related to its content and wider policies, including around ad disclosures.

Last week, EU regulators kicked off what they couched as a formal “dialogue” with TikTok following a number of complaints by consumer protection groups which have accused the platform of hidden marketing, aggressive advertising techniques targeted at children and misleading and confusing contractual terms.

Other regional complaints have called out TikTok’s approach to privacy and user data. And it’s being sued in the UK over its handling of children’s data.

Concerns over weak age verification also led to an intervention by Italy’s data protection regulator earlier this year — acting on concerns for the safety of underage users. In that case TikTok was forced to remove over half a million accounts which were suspected of being used by children younger than 13.

In recent months TikTok has been trying to burnish its image with policymakers, announcing what it bills as a ‘Transparency Center’ in the U.S. last year — and another for Europe this April — saying these centers would provide a space for outside experts to access information about its content moderation and security policies.

However Mozilla said the centers suffer from a lack transparency vis-a-vis ads, writing in the report that they “do not provide detailed transparency regarding advertisements”, and specifying TikTok does not disclose specific data about “how many or which ads were rejected under TikTok’s ban on political advertisements”, for example.

TikTok’s opacity arounds ads looks to be on borrowed time as the issue of online political ads transparency is coming into sharper focus around the world.

In the U.S. a bipartisan bill to try to regulate online platforms that sell ads was introduced in 2017 — although progress stalled as the bill failed to pass ahead of the 2019 US presidential election.

In Europe lawmakers are expected to put forward a regulatory proposal this fall that will tighten ad disclosure and reporting requirements on platforms, as part of a wider package of digital reforms that aim to drive safety, transparency and accountability.

NUE Life Health, a telemedine startup in the USA, is developing what it describes as a “next-generation mental wellness solution” employing treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapies, combined with a graph database-driven app.

The Miami-based startup has raised a $3.3m Seed round from investors including Jack Abraham (Atomic Ventures, Hims), Shervin Pishevar (Shervin Pishevar (formerly of Sherpa Ventures, UBER), Martin Varsavsky (Prelude Fertility, Overture), and Jon Oringer (Shutterstock, Pareto Holdings), James Bailey (a capstone supporter of the Multidisciplinary Assoc. for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)) and Christina Getty. All the above are part of the recent diaspora from Silicon Valley to Miami.

NUE Life Health is currently operating in California, Texas, and Florida, with plans for expansion across the United States. The platform will offer at-home ketamine therapy, considered the fastest-acting anti-depressant in the market, combined with music therapies and a data-led approach.

NUE Life says research from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College in London on MDMA and psilocybin assisted psychotherapy appears to indicate that these are “safe alternatives” in treating mental illness.

Juan Pablo Cappello, NUE Life’s CEO said: “We view ketamine therapy and psychedelic therapy simply as catalysts for change. While helping patients reset is important, we at NUE Life are committed to helping our members find community and connection through our digital platform well after the effects of any psychedelic therapies have faded.”

NUE Life’s digital platform will leverage “Knowledge Graphs and AI to deliver personalized evidence-based therapies that approach patient care in a holistic manner,” said Demian Bellumio, co-founder and CTO of NUE Life Health. Its enterprise HIPPA-compliant health platform plans to launch in the late summer of 2021.

Christina Getty a co-founder and investor in NUE Life Health said: “With one of five women in the United States relying on an antidepressant to get through the day, and with our losing 22 veterans a day to suicide, we felt compelled to launch a different kind of mental wellness company.”

NUE Life comes as players in psychedelic medicine such as MindMed and ATAI are going public.

Bellumio added: “The mental wellness platform leverages Knowledge Graphs and AI to deliver personalized evidence-based therapies that approach patient care in a holistic manner.  Our platform also rigorously measures outcomes and improves over time,”

He said the platform creates a detailed “knowledge graph” of the patient. This allows it to understand everything about them in order to diagnose and treat their mental health condition, using an approach called integrated psychiatry. AI algorithms are then deployed to personalize recommendations, from what treatments use, what supplements to take, and what music to listen to during therapy. A proprietary music streaming service will be part of the offering.

Bellumio formerly worked on graph databases while at Accenture (where he ran the Knowledge Graph Center of Excellence for 2 years) and at NEORIS. The approach is also employed by United Healthcare, user its “Connected Healthcare” platform.

European Union lawmakers have asked tech giants to continue reporting on efforts to combat the spread of vaccine disinformation on their platforms for a further six months.

“The continuation of the monitoring programme is necessary as the vaccination campaigns throughout the EU is proceeding with a steady and increasing pace, and the upcoming months will be decisive to reach a high level of vaccination in Member States. It is key that in this important period vaccine hesitancy is not fuelled by harmful disinformation,” the Commission writes today.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok and Twitter are signed up to make monthly reports as a result of being participants in the bloc’s (non-legally binding) Code of Practice on Disinformation — although, going forward, they’ll be switching to bi-monthly reporting.

Publishing the latest batch of platform reports for April, the Commission said the tech giants have shown they’re unable to police “dangerous lies” by themselves — while continuing to express dissatisfaction at the quality and granularity of the data that is being (voluntarily) provided by platforms vis-a-via how they’re combating online disinformation generally.

“These reports show how important it is to be able to effectively monitor the measures put in place by the platforms to reduce disinformation,” said Věra Jourová, the EU’s VP for values and transparency, in a statement. “We decided to extend this programme, because the amount of dangerous lies continues to flood our information space and because it will inform the creation of the new generation Code against disinformation. We need a robust monitoring programme, and clearer indicators to measure impact of actions taken by platforms. They simply cannot police themselves alone.”

Last month the Commission announced a plan to beef up the voluntary Code, saying also that it wants more players — especially from the adtech ecosystem — to sign up to help de-monitize harmful nonsense.

The Code of Practice initiative pre-dates the pandemic, kicking off in 2018 when concerns about the impact of ‘fake news’ on democratic processes and public debate were riding high in the wake of major political disinformation scandals. But the COVID-19 public health crisis accelerated concern over the issue of dangerous nonsense being amplified online, bringing it into sharper focus for lawmakers.

In the EU, lawmakers are still not planning to put regional regulation of online disinformation on a legal footing, preferring to continue with a voluntary — and what the Commission refers to as ‘co-regulatory’ — approach which encourages action and engagement from platforms vis-a-vis potentially harmful (but not illegal) content, such as offering tools for users to report problems and appeal takedowns, but without the threat of direct legal sanctions if they fail to live up to their promises.

It will have a new lever to ratchet up pressure on platforms too, though, in the form of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The regulation — which was proposed at the end of last year  — will set rules for how platforms must handle illegal content. But commissioners have suggested that those platforms which engage positively with the EU’s disinformation Code are likely to be looked upon more favorably by the regulators that will be overseeing DSA compliance.

In another statement today, Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the EU’s Internal Market, suggested the combination of the DSA and the beefed up Code will open up “a new chapter in countering disinformation in the EU”.

“At this crucial phase of the vaccination campaign, I expect platforms to step up their efforts and deliver the strengthened Code of Practice as soon possible, in line with our Guidance,” he added.

Disinformation remains a tricky topic for regulators, given that the value of online content can be highly subjective and any centralized order to remove information — no matter how stupid or ridiculous the content in question might be — risks a charge of censorship.

Removal of COVID-19-related disinformation is certainly less controversial, given clear risks to public health (such as from anti-vaccination messaging or the sale of defective PPE). But even here the Commission seems most keen to promote pro-speech measures being taken by platforms — such as to promote vaccine positive messaging and surface authoritative sources of information — noting in its press release how Facebook, for example, launched vaccine profile picture frames to encourage people to get vaccinated, and that Twitter introduced prompts appearing on users’ home timeline during World Immunisation Week in 16 countries, and held conversations on vaccines that received 5 million impressions.

In the April reports by the two companies there is more detail on actual removals carried out too.

Facebook, for example, says it removed 47,000 pieces of content in the EU for violating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation policies, which the Commission notes is a slight decrease from the previous month.

While Twitter reported challenging 2,779 accounts, suspending 260 and removing 5,091 pieces of content globally on the COVID-19 disinformation topic in the month of April.

Google, meanwhile, reported taking action against 10,549 URLs on AdSense, which the Commission notes as a “significant increase” vs March (+1378).

But is that increase good news or bad? Increased removals of dodgy COVID-19 ads might signify better enforcement by Google — or major growth of the COVID-19 disinformation problem on its ad network.

The ongoing problem for the regulators who are trying to tread a fuzzy line on online disinformation is how to quantify any of these tech giants’ actions — and truly understand their efficacy or impact — without having standardized reporting requirements and full access to platform data.

For that, regulation would be needed, not selective self-reporting.

Climate change is intensifying across the globe, and one of the most challenging cases is Japan. In addition to lying on a major fault, the archipelago is increasingly inundated from rising sea levels that make the country more prone to disasters. A decade ago, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami dealt billions of dollars in damage, and the recovery from that tragedy remains a major international relations flashpoint.

Technology to address disasters and resilience is a key area of venture capital investment these days, and now another startup in the space is proving that there is widespread interest in this growing market.

One Concern, which builds a platform to model and simulate community resilience and response to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, announced this morning that it has raised $45 million from SOMPO Holdings, the venture wing of Japan’s SOMPO, one of the country’s largest insurers. The investment is part of a total $100 million, multi-year deal that will plug One Concern’s platform into the Japanese market.

Japan has been something of a gem in One Concern’s market development the past few years. The startup hired Hitoshi Akimoto as country manager for Japan in late 2019 before formally announcing that it was expanding to Japan in February 2020. In August last year, it announced a strategic partnership with SOMPO, and the insurer’s venture wing invested $15 million. Today’s deal expands that partnership further.

According to its press release, One Concern will sell its platform to six or more Japanese cities as part of the tie-up.

Previously, One Concern had raised three rounds of capital according to Crunchbase and SEC filings: a seed round in October 2015, a $33 million Series A round led by NEA in 2017, and a $37 million round also co-led by NEA. The company was founded in 2015.