Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The fate of TikTok in the United States got even more confusing this week. The U.S. Justice and Commerce Departments sent conflicting messages today about TikTok’s future, which is now up in the air with the upcoming administration transition.

The Department of Commerce said Thursday it would abide by an injunction issued October 30 by the District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that would have blocked TikTok from operating in the U.S. starting from today. In a statement, the department said it is complying with the court’s order and its prohibition against TikTok “HAS BEEN ENJOINED, and WILL NOT GO INTO EFFECT, pending further legal developments.”

But on the same day, the Justice Department appealed the Pennsylvania court’s ruling just as it was set to go into effect.

But wait! It gets even more convoluted: another court–the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington–just set new deadlines in December for ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, and the Trump administration, to file documents in a case involving a divestment order that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok to continue operating in the U.S.

ByteDance reached an agreement with Oracle and Walmart in September, but the future of the deal is also uncertain.

The Justice Department’s appeal is part of a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government on September 18 by three TikTok creators, Douglas Marland, Cosette Rinab and Alec Chambers. Each has more than a million followers on TikTok, which has about 100 million users in the U.S., and argues that a ban would impact their ability to earn a living from brand collaborations on the app.

On Oct. 30, Judge Wendy Beetlestone issued an injunction against the U.S. government’s restrictions. In her ruling, Beetlestone wrote that the “government’s own descriptions of the national security threat posted by the TikTok app are phrased in the hypothetical.”

This case is separate from the one ByteDance filed against the U.S. government in a federal appeals court in Washington D.C. Earlier this week, ByteDance asked that court to vacate the U.S. order forcing it to sell the app’s American operations. ByteDance told TechCrunch in a statement that without an extension on the November 12 deadline, it “[had] no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the U.S.”

The Commerce Department’s statement today, along with the Justice Department’s appeal and the new deadlines in the divestment case, underscore the confusion about the future of the Trump administration’s actions against TikTok after President-Elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20.

While some analysts believe the Biden administration may give Chinese tech companies that were targeted under the current administration, including Huawei and ByteDance, a chance to re-negotiate with the government, that may take second priority as Biden deals with domestic issues, including the resurgence of COVID-19 in the U.S.

Reports that Dominion Software, which provides voting tabulation tools to about half the states in the U.S., “deleted” millions of votes have been soundly rebuffed after outgoing President Trump parroted numbers from a random internet forum.

Tweeting Thursday morning about baseless claims of election fraud, Trump cited OANN, a right wing news outlet, which itself seemed to have found its numbers in a thread on pro-Trump Reddit knockoff thedonald.win. (The tweet was quickly wrapped in a warning that the contents are disputed.)

The anonymous person posting there claimed to have compared numbers from Edison Research, a company that does exit polls and other election-related measures, to those from Dominion, and come up with very different sums. The methods are not very well explained, nor are the results. It’s not really clear what is being compared to what and why, or for what reason this alleged fraud was published publicly by the company supposedly perpetrating it. No one has verified (if that’s the word) this analysis in any way.

In a comment to Politifact, Edison President Larry Rosin wrote that “we have no evidence of any voter fraud,” and that it pretty much has no idea what the purported analysis is referring to.

Dominion attracted attention earlier in the week when it seemed that a glitch had caused a number of votes to be registered for President-elect Joe Biden instead of Trump. But the miscount was immediately caught and found to be the result of human error. The company has dedicated a page to combating the misinformation around its software.

Politifact rated Trump’s claim “Pants on Fire,” calling it “ridiculous” for good measure. It’s worth noting that the tweet didn’t even state the numbers of the supposed fraud correctly.

There doesn’t seem to be any merit to the “analysis” at all, but it provides an excellent example of how people who are unfamiliar with how the voting apparatus works — which is to say almost everyone not directly involved — tend to find the software portion inherently untrustworthy.

Yet there is no way to count, tabulate, and verify millions of ballots in hours or days after an election that does not rely heavily on private software tools, and it is in fact highly reliable and secure. The process of elections is bipartisan and extremely closely monitored.

Despite accusations from a dwindling number of highly placed individuals in the government, there has been no evidence presented that there was any significant voter fraud or other irregularities in last week’s election, which resulted in the victory of former Vice President, now President-elect Joe Biden.

The latest Mac operating system arrives, Amazon faces a lawsuit over PPE and Disney+ turns one. This is your Daily Crunch for November 12, 2020.

The big story: Apple releases macOS Big Sur

This update, which was first announced five months ago at WWDC, includes a number of design changes that continue to blur the line between macOS and iOS.

One of the big additions is the Control Center, an iOS/iPadOS feature that presents a translucent pane down the right side of the screen. Meanwhile, Safari added features like built-in translation. And app icons and sounds have been updated throughout.

Brian Heater has been using the beta since June, and he concluded that Big Sur “boasts some key upgrades to apps and the system at large, but more importantly from Apple’s perspective, it lays the groundwork for the first round of Arm-powered Macs and continues its march toward a uniformity between the company’s two primary operating systems.”

The tech giants

Facebook’s Snapchat-like ‘Vanish Mode’ feature arrives on Messenger and Instagram — The feature, meant for more casual conversations, allows users to set chats to automatically delete after the message is seen and the chat is closed.

Amazon faces lawsuit alleging failure to provide PPE to workers during pandemic — The class action suit alleges Amazon failed to properly protect its warehouse workers and violated elements of New York City’s human rights law.

Apple HomePod Mini review: Remarkably big sound — A smart speaker for the masses.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Menlo Security announces $100M Series E on $800M valuation — CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim told us the startup remains focused on web and email as major attack vectors.

Livestorm raises $30M for its browser-based meeting and webinar platform — It’s purely browser based, without requiring presenters or attendees to install any software.

Nana nabs $6M for an online academy and marketplace dedicated to appliance repair — Nana runs a free academy to teach people how to fix appliances, then gives them the option to become a part of its repair marketplace.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Are subscription services the future of fintech? — As subscriptions become an increasingly alluring business model, fintechs will have to consider whether this strategy is worth the risk.

Conflicts in California’s trade secret laws on customer lists create uncertainty — Read this before you jump ship or hire a salesperson who already has.

As public investors reprice edtech bets, what’s ahead for the hot startup sector? — Selling edtech on the vaccine news (as investors did) was a bet that growth in the sector would be constrained by a return to normalcy.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Disney+ has more than 73M subscribers — The streaming service launched one year ago today.

L’Oréal rolls out a line of ‘virtual makeup’ — This builds on L’Oréal’s 2018 acquisition of an augmented reality filter company called Modiface.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Just over a week after the U.S. elections, Twitter has offered a breakdown of some of its efforts to label misleading tweets. The site says that from October 27 to November 11, it labeled some 300,000 tweets as part of its Civic Integrity Policy. That amounts to around 0.2% of the total number of election-related tweets sent during that two-week period.

Of course, not all Twitter warnings are created equal. Only 456 of those included a warning that covered the text and limited user engagement, disabling retweets, replies and likes. That specific warning did go a ways toward limited engagement, with around three-fourths of those who encountered the tweets seeing the obscured texts (by clicking through the warning). Quote tweets for those so labeled decreased by around 29%, according to Twitter’s figures.

The president of the United States received a disproportionate number of those labels, as The New York Times notes that just over a third of Trump’s tweets between November 3 and 6 were hit with such a warning. The end of the election (insofar as the election has actually ended, I suppose) appears to have slowed the site’s response time somewhat, though Trump continues to get flagged, as he continues to devote a majority of his feed to disputing the election results confirmed by nearly every major news outlet.

His latest tweet as of this writing has been labeled disputed, but not hidden, as Trump repeats claims against voting machine maker, Dominion. “We also want to be very clear that we do not see our job as done,” Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead Vijaya Gadde and Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour wrote. “Our work here continues and our teams are learning and improving how we address these challenges.”

Twitter and other social media sites were subject to intense scrutiny following the 2016 election for the roles the platforms played in the spread of misinformation. Twitter sought to address the issue by tweaking recommendations and retweets, as well as individually labeling tweets that violate its policies.

Earlier today, YouTube defended its decision to keep controversial election-related videos, noting, “Like other companies, we’re allowing these videos because discussion of election results & the process of counting votes is allowed on YT. These videos are not being surfaced or recommended in any prominent way.”

Truebill, a startup offering a variety of tools to help users take control of their finances, announced today that it has raised $17 million in Series C funding.

When I first wrote about the startup in 2016, it was focused on helping users track and cancel unwanted subscriptions. Since then, it’s expanded into other financial products, like reports on your personal expenses and the ability to negotiate lower bills.

This week, Chief Revenue Officer Yahya Mokhtarzada told me that with the pandemic leading to a dramatic reduction in ad costs, Truebill was able to make TV advertising a key channel for reaching new users.

And of course, the financial uncertainty has made the product more appealing too — particularly its smart savings tool, where users can automatically set aside money for their goals.

“People became aware of the need to have some cushion,” Mokhtarzada said. “You should start saving when things are going well, before you need it, but [saving during the pandemic] is better than not doing it at all. We’ve seen a big bump in smart savings adoption, which is at an all-time high.”

The new round brings Truebill’s total funding to $40 million. It was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Eldridge Capital, Cota Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Day One Ventures.

The startup says the round will allow it to develop new products and features, including net worth tracking, automated debt payments and shared accounts.

Mokhtarzada added that the company will be making big investments in data science to help follow its “north star” of financial health, where he said, “”The data challenge is significant.”

Sure, it’s pretty straightforward to recognize whether someone’s doing well or poorly financially, but the real goal is to “recognize trends and shortfalls before they happen.”

For example, instead of simply alerting users when they’ve been charged an overdraft fee on their account, Mokhtarzada said, “What is helpful is to predictive models analyze data to anticipate a cashflow shortage and have the right tools in place that prevent it.”

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

The full Equity crew was on hand to debate the current venture capital market, curious about how risk-on, or risk-off things really are today. Danny, Natasha and I framed the conversation around a number of news items from the week, including:

• Wrkfrce has launched, and we wanted to chat more about the future of niche media, bringing The Juggernaut’s own recent round, and the Quartz shakeup into the conversation.
• And on the media front — always a risky venture capital investing domain — Spotify has snapped up another podcasting company, this time paying $235 for Megaphone. Our take? A string of small exits probably won’t encourage VCs to take on more risk in the space (Hunter Walk said the same thing here.)
• Turning to risk more generally, I asked Natasha to weigh in on the earlier-stages of the venture market, and Danny on its later tranches. There’s still lots of money, but it appears more focused on chasing winners than bolstering or supporting less-obvious startups.
• That market is not slowing a risk-on move towards more venture capital players, as the Spearhead news showed a new focus for the firm to invest in emerging fund managers.
• And there’s still plenty of risk tolerance in remote-work solutions like Hopin, which just raised $125 million at a $2+ billion valuation. We’re torn on the round, but Danny likes it and he’s a former VC.
• And we wrapped with a chat about upcoming IPOs, and the recent SoftBank results. If DoorDash, Airbnb and others are going to go this year, they need to go soon. So far, no dice.

It was a busy week, despite the month. Expect more of the same next week.

Finally, don’t forget that our own Chris Gates is cutting Equity videos out of every episode that you can find over on YouTube. He does a great job and it’s great to be on video, as well as audio platforms.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Buying someone a gadget is a time-honored tradition, but these days it can be particularly fraught, considering you may buy them a fitness tracker that also monitors emotions, or a doorbell that snitches to the cops. Mozilla has put together a helpful list of popular gadgets with ratings on just how creepy they are.

“Privacy not included” has become an annual tradition for the internet rights advocate, and this year has an especially solid crop of creepy devices, given the uptick in smart speakers, smart security cameras, and smart litterboxes.

On the “creepy” end of the spectrum is… pretty much everything by Amazon except the Kindle. The devices in question send tons of data to Amazon by design, of course, but Mozilla feels the company hasn’t yet earned the trust to make that sort of thing acceptable. Facebook’s Portal earns a creepy spot for a similar reason.

Some random gadgets like a smart coffee maker and Moleskine smart notebook get creepy ratings because they don’t give the kinds of assurances about data and security that any company collecting that information should give. That sort of thing is common in smart gadgets — they may not be fundamentally creepy, but the company that makes them reserves the right to make it creepy at any time.

On the other end of the spectrum, Withings earns points for its smart devices with reasonable privacy policies and security. Non-Ring smart doorbells get good marks, and Garmin’s smart watches too.

These are informal rankings based on the potential for abuse or exposure of your data, and it doesn’t mean that they’re perfectly safe or private. If you’re buying one of these things, it’s best to immediately go through the settings and preferences and disable anything that smells invasive or creepy. You can always enable features again, but once you’ve put your data out there, it’s hard to get it back.

Check out the rest of the list here.

If you’re on a Mac running a relatively new version of macOS and it’s having all sorts of weird issues right now: you’re not alone.

We’re seeing a flood of reports from both users and developers of an issue preventing apps — particularly those not made by Apple — from properly launching. Most are reporting that apps they already had open are fine, but attempts to open any new apps will result in it just bouncing around in the dock for minutes at a time.

The issue first popped up this morning (curiously coinciding with the launch of macOS Big Sur) and seems to be improving for some.. but for the time being, be aware your apps might not work as expected.

It’s unclear exactly what’s happening, but the most popular theory is that there’s a server-side issue with Gatekeeper, the security feature that verifies the authenticity of macOS apps at launch.

Story developing… 

Disney+, the streaming service that launched one year ago today, grew to 73.7 million paid subscribers as of early October.

That’s according to The Walt Disney Company’s fourth quarter earnings report, which covers the company’s finances through October 3. The company previously said Disney+ had 60.5 million subscribers as of August 3.

The release also includes subscriber numbers for Disney’s other streaming services — Hulu had 36.6 million (including 4.1 million subscribers to Hulu + Live TV), while ESPN had 10.3 million (more than doubling from 3.5 million a year earlier).

Overall, Disney’s direct-to-consumer segment saw revenue grow 41% year-over-year to $4.9 billion, while its operating loss fell from $751 million in Q4 2019 to $580 million this year. Disney attributed the shrinking losses to “improved results at Hulu and ESPN+, partially offset by higher costs at Disney+, driven by the ongoing rollout.”

It was a tough quarter for Disney overall, with the pandemic forcing the company to keep some parks closed and the rest operating at reduced capacity. Disney’s revenue fell to $14.7 billion (compared to $19.1 billion during Q4 2019), with a loss of $0.39 per share.

“The real bright spot has been our direct-to-consumer business, which is key to the future of our company, and on this anniversary of the launch of Disney+ we’re pleased to report that, as of the end of the fourth quarter, the service had more than 73 million paid subscribers – far surpassing our expectations in just its first year,” said CEO Bob Chapek in a statement.

During the investor call, Chapek also noted that Disney+ is currently available in more than 20 countries worldwide, with plans to launch in Latin America on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, earlier today, Disney+ pushed the premiere date of its first Marvel series, “Wandavision,” from December until January 15.