Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Spotify today announced that it has leveraged last year’s SoundBetter acquisition to create a marketplace for artists who make short, looping visuals for Canvas. The feature, which began rolling out widely last year, is an attempt to leverage technology, in order to make a more engaging alternative to the standard album art.

As Sarah pointed out, early reactions to the feature were mixed, though Spotify points to some new numbers around user engagement with the feature. According to the service listeners are:

• 145% more likely to share the track
  5% more likely to keep streaming
  20% more likely to add the song to their personal playlists
  9% more likely to visit an artists’ profile page

Offering up a marketplace is part of a push to broaden adoption of the technology, by offering access to some top names who have created visuals for high profile artists, ranging from Kanye to Billie Eillish. Spotify will also be rolling out Canvas access to more artists across the globe as part of this push.

“Since Canvas is a unique format to Spotify, we want to make it as easy as possible for artists to find visual artists to help them create eye-catching visuals,” the company writes. “After selecting a designer, artists share details on the sonics of their track and their creative vision, which the designer then takes into account to create a custom Canvas tailored to meet their needs.”

Obviously anything that gets artists paid is probably a net positive in the world. Though with prices in the hundreds of dollars per track, this sort of thing gets very expensive, very quickly. It’s something musicians will have to weigh against the on-going issues around streaming compensation. Depending on the size of the artist/number of streams, the investment could, potentially, pay off.

This is the sort of bill that record labels traditionally foot (assuming they don’t have their own preferred artists on staff), though nothing is really a given in the music industry these days.

Wave, the virtual concert platform that’s already produced events for John Legend and The Weeknd, has inked a deal to bring its virtual concerts to China through a partnership with Tencent Music Entertainment Group.

The deal includes Tencent taking a minority stake in the music service, the companies said in a statement.

Under the partnership, TME will be able to air Wave experiences in China across all of its platforms including QQ Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music, and WeSing.

For Wave, it’s another step on its long march to set up a new way for artists to create live events for fans and opens up a massive market for U.S. artists that want to tap into audiences in China.

The two companies are collaborating on ways to incorporate Wave’s virtual events into Tencent’s TME Live production.

“One of the first things we’re going to do is have the Western artists that we’re working with perform in a tour in China,” said Wave chief executive, Adam Arrigo. “Our ambition is to super serve artists and to have an outlet for them to have a global virtual tour.”

Arrigo sees opportunities not just to tap Tencent’s music platform, but also extend the company’s virtual entertainment environments into Tencent’s popular gaming ecosystem as well.

For artists, there’s the added benefit of alternative revenue streams, like in-stream tipping, gifting, and merchandising that haven’t really taken hold yet in the U.S.

“Those models are rooted in those Asian live-streaming audiences. Its’ a huge opportunity to access audiences and these modalities in the West that are going to take longer to get footing,” Arrigo said. 

Tencent has been a dominant player in China’s gaming and entertainment ecosystem for a while now, both through its massively multi-player online games, its messaging service, WeChat, and its payments services.

“The collaboration with Wave marks an important step forward in our efforts to integrate technology and music, aiming to amplify the immersive music experience for our users, enhance user engagement and promote content consumption,” said TC Pan, Group Vice President of Content Cooperation of TME, in a statement. “With this strategic partnership, we will further extend the boundaries of music services through virtual performances, and build a broader music ecosystem.”

Voyager Space Holdings, one of the companies that has been on a bit of an acquisitive spree recently as it looks to put together a comprehensive and multi-vertical space technology offering, has announced that it intends to acquire The Launch Company, an Anchorage-based startup that is focused on “streamlining the launch process,” with the ultimate aim of building a launch site capable of playing host to multiple users for quick turnaround between launches from different providers.

Already, The Launch Company has worked with a number of companies in the new space sector, including Firefly, Relativity, and Virgin Orbit. It’s been involved in the DARPA launch challenge, which was designed to kickstart the development of mobile and responsive multi-vehicle launch capabilities. The company’s focus on flexible and responsive launch services is in high demand not only in the emerging commercial space industry, but also for deep-pocketed and consistent clients like the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force.

Voyager has been focusing on assembling holdings that allow it to provide clients across the space industry with more vertical integration throughout the process of designing and launching a mission. They acquired Pioneer Technologies earlier this year, which is working with NASA on Artemis program elements, and also acquired Altius Space Machines, a satellite interface, servicing and design company last year.

Fintech has come into its own the past few years. Once an area of investment widely derided and avoided by VCs due to its regulated nature and entrenched incumbents, fintech has now emerged as one of the most popular categories for investment, buttressed by multiple, multi-billion dollar exits in just the past year like Plaid, CreditKarma, and Galileo.

Yet, building fintech apps and systems still requires a lot of finesse. There are those pesky regulations that make a cold start difficult for a fintech startup, and for founders, getting their feet through the doors of legacy financial institutions can be a major barrier to entry.

Financial Venture Studio wants to bridge the gap between a founder with an idea and the actual reality of getting a fintech startup into the market.

It’s a new firm, but one that is building on an extended legacy as one of the most influential early investors in financial services.

Ryan Falvey and Tyler Griffin founded the firm in 2018. They first worked together at the Financial Solutions Lab (FSL), which was a startup-focused incubator developed by the non-profit Center for Financial Services Innovation and funded by JPMorgan Chase. Falvey founded the lab to extend digital financial services into more areas of the economy, along the way funding such heavyweights as Digit, Nova Credit, Even, Dave, and Point.

Falvey and Griffin spun out of the program to build their own venture firm, with the goal of capturing the same spirit of helping founders make connections and accelerating their way through the thicket of challenges in fintech. Falvey has a background in banking having worked at Silicon Valley Bank, while Griffin co-founded Prism Money before joining FSL and eventually leaving to start the Financial Venture Studio.

Today, the firm announced the closing of their $13 million debut fund, which was funded by a wide number of financial institutions.

Financial Venture Studios’ Shannon Austin, Ryan Falvey, advisor Tom Brown, and Tyler Griffin. Photo via FVS

“We joked around that we should have called it, ‘Too Early Capital’ because you encounter these companies right when you can tell that they have an idea, some product,” Falvey said. “If the team is working on something and we just really know fintech really well, we can say, ‘Hey, we can bring a bunch of these other resources to the table earlier in your life cycle than is common, and hopefully accelerate their growth.’“

Falvey said that fintech, perhaps unlike some other categories, requires unique specialization from investors early on to be effective. “The problem is, you still need to follow the rules, and you’re still operating in the United States, which is a very complex and very expensive market,” he said. “Our ideal models are coming in at the pre-seed and taking them straight to series A.”

Fintech is the name of the game here, and there aren’t too many no-gos for the team within that broad category. I asked about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, and Falvey said that “we’re desperate to do a crypto deal.”

The firm is mostly focused on startups targeting the U.S. market, which can include international startups that are looking to launch or expand locally. Falvey says that the average first check size is $100,000, and that “we want to be providing a degree of support that kind of goes above and beyond.” The firm often makes follow-on investments as startups scale up and find market traction.

Given the amount of previous investment in the space, I was curious how Falvey sees the opportunities today in fintech. He said, “I think a lot of institutions are starting to think, especially in the post-COVID world, very differently about how they develop product, how they deploy it, how they support their staff and employees, which is going to open up a lot of new opportunities for fintech providers there as well.”

We talked a bit about diversity, which while certainly a problem in tech in general, is particularly acute in financial services. Falvey says that for many companies in financial services, one of their first lessons is just how much more diverse their consumers are than their own teams. “It is a user base that is more female, more black and brown, and less coastal than is common in technology,” he said. He notes that startups often learn the need for diversity early in order to communicate better with different consumers. He also pointed out that diversity was a topic brought up by LPs quite consistently.

Already, the firm has made 18 early investments across three “cohorts” and also has made some late-stage investments into a handful of their former startups at the Financial Solutions Lab. Among its first investments have been Everlance, Anvil, Roger, and HoneyBee.

South Korea-based PUBG Corporation, which runs sleeper hit gaming title PUBG Mobile, announced last week that it plans to return to India, its largest market by users. But its announcement did not address a key question: Is India, which banned the app in September, on the same page?

The company says it will locally store Indian users’ data, open a local office and release a new game created especially for the world’s second-largest internet market. To sweeten the deal, PUBG Corporation also plans to invest $100 million in India’s gaming, esports and IT ecosystems.

But PUBG’s announcement, which TechCrunch reported as imminent last week, is treading in uncharted territory and it remains unclear if its efforts allay the concerns raised by the government.

Since late June, the Indian government has banned more than 200 apps — including PUBG Mobile, TikTok and UC Browser, all of which identified India as their biggest market by users — with links to China.

New Delhi says it enforced the ban over cybersecurity concerns. The government had received complaints about the apps stealing user data and transmitting it to servers abroad, the nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said at the time. The banned apps are “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India,” it added.

KRAFTON, the parent firm of PUBG Corporation, inked a deal with Microsoft to store users’ data of PUBG Mobile and its other properties on Azure servers. Microsoft has three cloud regions in India. Prior to the move, PUBG Mobile data concerning Indian users was stored on Tencent Cloud. In addition, PUBG said it is committed to conducting periodic audits of its Indian users’ data.

In India, PUBG has also cut publishing ties with Chinese giant Tencent, its publisher and distributor in many markets. This has allowed PUBG Corporation to regain the publishing rights of its game in India.

At face value, it appears that PUBG Corporation has resolved the issues that the Indian government had raised. But industry executives say that meeting those concerns is perhaps not all it would take to return to the country.

Here’s where things get complicated.

Not a single app India has blocked in the country has made its comeback yet. Some firms such as TikTok have been engaging with the Indian government for more than four months and have promised to make investments in the country, but they are still not out of the woods.

PUBG Corporation, too, has not revealed when it plans to release the new game in India. “More information about the launch of PUBG Mobile India will be shared at a later day,” it said in a statement last Thursday. According to a popular YouTuber who publishes gameplay videos on PUBG Mobile, the company has privately released the installation file of the new game and has hinted that it plans to release the game in India as soon as Friday. (There’s also a big marketing campaign in the works, which could begin on Friday, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.)

Diagnoss, the Berkeley, Calif.-based startup backed by the machine learning-focused startup studio The House, has launched its coding assistant for medical billing, the company said.

The software provides real-time feedback on documentation and coding.

Coding problems can be the difference between success and failure for hospitals, according to Diagnoss. Healthcare providers were decimated by the COVID-19 outbreak, with hospitals operating below 60% capacity and one-fourth of them facing the potential for closing in a year if the pandemic continues to disrupt care.

The cost pressures mean that any coding error can be the financial push that forces a healthcare provider over the edge.

“For every patient encounter, a physician spends an average of 16 minutes on administration, which adds up to several hours every single day. In addition, codes entered are often wrong – up to a 30% error rate – resulting in missed or delayed reimbursements. We believe that, with the great progress we’ve seen with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we can finally address some of these inefficiencies that are leading to physician burnout and financial strain,”  said Abboud Chaballout, founder and chief executive of Diagnoss, in a statement.

Diagnoss acts like a grammar checking tool, but its natural language processing software is focused on reading doctor’s notes. The company’s tools can provide evaluation and management code for patient encounters; point out missing information in doctors’ notes; and provide predictions about the diagnosis and procedure codes that could apply after reviewing a doctor’s notes.

In a study of 39,000 de-identified EHR charts, the company found that its machine coding service was about 50% more accurate than human coders, according to a Diagnoss review.

Physician practices are already using Diagnoss’ service through a previously announced partnership with the mobile EHR vendor, DrChrono .

Instagram is continuing to develop its standalone messaging app, Threads. Last month, the company modified the app to make it possible for users to message everyone, instead of just “close friends,” as its other messaging app, Direct, once did. Today, Instagram is releasing a redesigned version of the Threads app with updated navigation and a Status tab, as well as support for posting photos and videos to your Instagram Story.

The changes address some of Threads’ shortcomings in usability. Though the app offered a way to update your Status or even automatically update it, based on your location, it was difficult to move between the different sections of the app.

The redesign attempts to make it easier for Threads users to view and interact with friends’ statuses and their Stories, or quickly switch back to the Camera interface or their messaging inbox, through a new navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. This navigation change, which adds the Status tab, will go live globally starting on November 19, says Instagram.

In addition, Instagram says Threads users can now take a photo or video and share it out to their Instagram Story, in addition to only their Close Friends Story directly in the Threads app.

The more recent change to the inbox, which added a new tab for “Everyone Else,” is also now globally available, as of today’s update.

These changes represent another step away from Threads being an app only meant to be used to keep with close friends.

The updates to Threads follow a period of overhaul for Facebook’s family of mobile messaging apps, including Messenger and Instagram itself, which saw another set of updates to its own inbox in recent weeks. Yesterday, Facebook announced that more features that were a part of the big overhaul of the Instagram messaging experience had become available, including an expanded co-watching feature, Watch Together, which now lets users watch IGTV, Reels and TV shows together in real-time over video chat.

It also rolled out chat themes, including a new one that featured characters representing the seven members of BTS. The company in September had announced cross-app communication with Messenger for users who upgraded their messaging experience on Instagram. That update had included the ability to change your chat color, react with any emoji, among other new features. Vanish mode is still to come to Instagram, but should arrive soon, Facebook said.

These changes, focused on Facebook’s flagship apps, may have left some wondering what would become of Threads — an app that hasn’t gone mainstream. As of the time of writing, the app was ranked No. 66 in the Photo & Video category on the U.S. App Store, and No. 1,031 Overall. But as these new efforts show, Instagram is continuing to tweak the user experience on Threads, in an effort to cater to those often use Instagram for messaging.

To be clear, some users may have had access to the new features ahead of today’s announcement, but they’re now broadly available.

Go SMS Pro, one of the most popular messaging apps for Android, is exposing photos, videos and other files sent privately by its users. Worse, the app maker has done nothing to fix the bug.

Security researchers at Trustwave discovered the flaw in August and contacted the app maker with a 90-day deadline to fix the issue, as is standard practice in vulnerability disclosure to allow enough time for a fix. But after the deadline elapsed without hearing back, the researchers went public.

Trustwave shared its findings with TechCrunch this week.

When a Go SMS Pro user sends a photo, video or other file to someone who doesn’t have the app installed, the app uploads the file to its servers, and lets the user share a web address by text message so the recipient can see the file without installing the app. But the researchers found that these web addresses were sequential. In fact, any time a file was shared — even between app users — a web address would be generated regardless. That meant anyone who knew about the predictable web address could have cycled through millions of different web addresses to users’ files.

Go SMS Pro has more than 100 million installs, according to its listing in Google Play.

TechCrunch verified the researcher’s findings. In viewing just a few dozen links, we found a person’s phone number, a screenshot of a bank transfer, an order confirmation including someone’s home address, an arrest record, and far more explicit photos than we were expecting, to be quite honest.

Karl Sigler, senior security research manager at Trustwave, said while it wasn’t possible to target any specific user, any file sent using the app is vulnerable to public access. “An attacker can create scripts that could throw a wide net across all the media files stored in the cloud instance,” he said.

We had about as much luck getting a response from the app maker as the researchers. TechCrunch emailed two email addresses associated with the app. One email immediately bounced back saying the email couldn’t be delivered due to a full inbox. The other email was opened, according to our email open tracker, but a follow-up email was not.

Since you might now want a messaging app that protects your privacy, we have you covered.

The UK has announced a massive boost in defense spending — £16.5 billion ($21.8BN) over four years, the biggest such spending bump for 30 years — in what prime minister Boris Johnson has described as a “once in a generation modernization” of the UK’s armed forces and “the end of the era of retreat” on funding for defense.

Overall the UK prime minister said the spending hike will create 40,000 jobs, adding that it will cement the country’s position as the biggest military defense spender in Europe and the second largest in NATO after the US.

Johnson said the focus for investment will be on cutting edge technologies that can “revolutionize” warfare — implying a major role for artificial intelligence and sensor-laden connected hardware in “forging our military assets into a single network designed to overcome the enemy”, as he put it in a statement to parliament, setting out the first conclusions from an the (ongoing) review of security, defense, development and foreign policy.

“A soldier in hostile territory will be alerted to a distant ambush by sensors or satellites or drones instantly transmitting a warning using artificial intelligence to device the optimal response and offering an array of options — from summoning an air strike to ordering a swarm attack by drones, or paralyzing the enemy with cyber weapons,” Johnson told the House of Commons today, speaking via video conference as he continues to self isolate following a coronavirus contact.

“New advances will surmount the old limits of logistics,” he went on, fleshing out the rational for spending on upgrading military technology. “Our warships and combat vehicles will carry directed energy weapons — destroying targets with inexhaustible lasers. And for them the phrase out of ammunition will become redundant.”

“Nations are racing to master this new doctrine of warfare and our investment is designed to place Britain among the winners,” he added.

The review sets out at least £1.5BN extra — and £5.8BN total — spending on military R&D which Johnson said would be “designed to master the new technologies of warfare”.

There will also be a new R&D center set up with a dedicated focus on artificial intelligence, he added.

An RAF Space Command center is also in the works — with the aim of launching British satellites including the UK’s first rocket from Scotland in 2022.

While the airforce will get new fighter system that Johnson specified will incorporate AI and drone technology.

He also confirmed the existence of a National Cyber Force — a joint unit consisting of personnel from the UK’s intelligence agencies and military personnel which runs cyberops targeting terrorism, organized crime and hostile foreign state actors.

He suggested the hike in military spending on emerging technologies will filter down into wider societal tech gains, telling MPs: “The returns will go far beyond our armed forces — from aerospace to autonomous vehicles — these technologies have a vast array of civilian applications, opening up new vistas of economic progress.”

Responding to Johnson’s statement, the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, welcomed the announcement of increased spending for defense and the armed forces — but accused the government of issuing another “press release without a strategy” — pointing out that successive Conservative governments have eroded defense spending over the past ten years.

“This is a spending announcement without a strategy. The government has yet again pushed back vital parts of the integrated review and there’s no clarity over the government’s strategic priorities,” said Starmer, going on to query how the spending hike would be funded, given the economic crunch facing the UK as a result of the pandemic — asking whether it will require tax rises or cuts to public spending elsewhere, such as to the international development budget.

Starmer also raised the awkward matter of the Russia report — wondering why Johnson’s government has not acted on the “urgent” national security risks identified there.

The report, by parliament’s intelligence and security committee, found the UK lacks a comprehensive and cohesive strategy to respond to the cyber threat posed by Russia and other hostile states that are deploying online disinformation and influence ops to target democratic institutions and values.

It also sounded the alarm about how much Russian money is finding its way into UK political party coffers.

“The prime minister speaks of tackling global security threats, improving cyber capability — and that is all welcome, and we welcome it — but four months after the intelligence and security committee published its report concluding that Russia posed… an immediate and urgent threat to our national security,” noted Starmer.

Replying, Johnson dodged all Starmer’s questions — branding his criticisms “humbug [that] takes the cake” and opting to attack the Labour leader for having served under the party’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who did not support increasing UK defense spending.

Using machine learning to analyze medical imaging seems like an obvious application for the novel visualization tools that have been developed over the past decade, and now a clutch of investors have backed Subtle Medical — a company that aims to bring those technologies to the healthcare market.

The company has raised $12.2 million in a new round of funding from investors including: 3E Bioventures Capital with participation from Fusion Fund, Data Collective, Delta Ventures, Tsingyuan Ventures and its seed investors.

The company’s technology has been FDA-cleared and CE-marked and is used to boost image quality and speed up analysis of diagnostic scans, according to a statement.

“Our mission is to make medical imaging better, safer and more comfortable for patients while creating new workflow efficiencies for hospitals and imaging centers,” said Dr. Enhao Gong, the company’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. 

Subtle Medical’s technology is already being used in 50 locations around the world including Affidea, which is the largest imaging service in the European Union.

The company said it would use the new financing to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and its product development.

“Subtle Medical is paving the way for a new generation of AI-powered medical imaging.  In a short time, the company has proven to have a profound impact on the radiology community, and  the value they bring to improve patient care and increase scanner capacity is instrumental and timely in the current healthcare environment,” said Dr. Lue Sun, Vice President at 3E Bioventures.