Category: UNCATEGORIZED

It’s been seven years since Tencent picked up a 36.5% stake in Sogou to fend off rival Baidu in the online search market. The social and gaming giant is now offering to buy out and take private its long-time ally.

NYSE-listed Sogou said this week it has received a preliminary non-binding proposal from Tencent to acquire its remaining shares for $9 each American depositary share (ADS) it doesn’t already own. That means Sohu, a leading web portal in the Chinese desktop era and the controlling shareholder in Sogou, will no longer hold an interest in the search firm.

Sohu’s board of directors has not yet had an opportunity to review the proposal or determine whether or not to take the offer, the company stated. Sogou’s shares leaped 48% on the news to $8.51 on Monday, yet still far below its all-time high at $13.85 at the time of its initial public offering.

Founded in 2005, Sogou went public in late 2017 billing itself as a challenger to China’s biggest search service Baidu, though it has long been a distant second. The company also operates the top Chinese input software, which is used by 482 million people every day to type and convert voice to text, according to its Q1 earnings report.

Ever since the strategic partnership with Tencent kicked off, Sogou, which means “Search Dog” in Chinese, has been the default search engine for WeChat and benefited immensely from the giant’s traffic. WeChat does have its own search feature, which some speculated might end up replacing Sogou.

The potential buyout will allay concerns amongst Sogou investors. So far WeChat Search appears to be gleaning data mainly within the app’s enclave, from users’ news feed, user-generated articles, e-commerce stores, through to lite apps integrated into WeChat.

That’s a whole lot of content and services targeted at WeChat’s 1.2 billion active users. Many people need not look beyond the chat app to consumer news, order food, play games, or purchase groceries. But there remains information outside the enormous ecosystem, and that’s Sogou’s turf — to bring what’s available on the open web (of course, subject to government censorship like all Chinese services) to WeChat users.

The arrangement reflects an endemic practice on the Chinese internet — giants blocking each other or making it hard for rivals to access their content. The goal is to lock in traffic and user insights. For instance, articles published on WeChat can’t be searched on Baidu. Consumers can’t open Alibaba shopping links without leaving WeChat.

Sogou is hardly WeChat’s sole search ally. To capture a full range of information needs, the messenger has also struck deals to co-opt fellow microblogging platform Weibo, Quora-like Zhihu, and social commerce service Xiaohongshu into its search pool.

It’s been seven years since Tencent picked up a 36.5% stake in Sogou to fend off rival Baidu in the online search market. The social and gaming giant is now offering to buy out and take private its long-time ally.

NYSE-listed Sogou said this week it has received a preliminary non-binding proposal from Tencent to acquire its remaining shares for $9 each American depositary share (ADS) it doesn’t already own. That means Sohu, a leading web portal in the Chinese desktop era and the controlling shareholder in Sogou, will no longer hold an interest in the search firm.

Sohu’s board of directors has not yet had an opportunity to review the proposal or determine whether or not to take the offer, the company stated. Sogou’s shares leaped 48% on the news to $8.51 on Monday, yet still far below its all-time high at $13.85 at the time of its initial public offering.

Founded in 2005, Sogou went public in late 2017 billing itself as a challenger to China’s biggest search service Baidu, though it has long been a distant second. The company also operates the top Chinese input software, which is used by 482 million people every day to type and convert voice to text, according to its Q1 earnings report.

Ever since the strategic partnership with Tencent kicked off, Sogou, which means “Search Dog” in Chinese, has been the default search engine for WeChat and benefited immensely from the giant’s traffic. WeChat does have its own search feature, which some speculated might end up replacing Sogou.

The potential buyout will allay concerns amongst Sogou investors. So far WeChat Search appears to be gleaning data mainly within the app’s enclave, from users’ news feed, user-generated articles, e-commerce stores, through to lite apps integrated into WeChat.

That’s a whole lot of content and services targeted at WeChat’s 1.2 billion active users. Many people need not look beyond the chat app to consumer news, order food, play games, or purchase groceries. But there remains information outside the enormous ecosystem, and that’s Sogou’s turf — to bring what’s available on the open web (of course, subject to government censorship like all Chinese services) to WeChat users.

The arrangement reflects an endemic practice on the Chinese internet — giants blocking each other or making it hard for rivals to access their content. The goal is to lock in traffic and user insights. For instance, articles published on WeChat can’t be searched on Baidu. Consumers can’t open Alibaba shopping links without leaving WeChat.

Sogou is hardly WeChat’s sole search ally. To capture a full range of information needs, the messenger has also struck deals to co-opt fellow microblogging platform Weibo, Quora-like Zhihu, and social commerce service Xiaohongshu into its search pool.

That Vicariously app you might have seen pop up in your twitter feed via a little viral growth hacking has run aground on Twitter’s automation rules. We reached out about it after it started spamming my feed with ‘so and so has added you to a list’ notifications and Twitter says that the app is not in compliance.

To be fair, they did also say they ‘love’ it — but that it will have to find a different way to do what it does.

“We love that Vicariously uses Lists to help people find new accounts to follow and get new perspectives. However, the way the app is currently doing this is in violation of Twitter’s automation rules,” Twitter said in a statement. “We’ve reached out to them to find a way to bring the app into compliance with our rules.”

The app was made by Jake Harding, an entrepreneur who built it as a side project.

The app, which you can find here, enumerates the followers of a target account and builds a list out of the accounts that it follows. This enables you to create lists that are snapshots of the exact (minus algorithmic tweak) feed that any given user sees when they open their app. Intriguing, right?

Well, it turns out Twitter has done this themselves twice before. Once in 2011 and originally waaaay back in 2009. The product had a built in feature that allowed you to just click through and view someone’s follower graph as a feed with a tap.

I was there in 2009 when it was a thing, and I can tell you that it was just flat out cool to see someone else’s graph going by. In the early growing days it was very interesting to see who was following who or what. It sort of taught you how to ‘do’ Twitter when everyone was learning it together. I can see why Harding wanted a duplicate of this in order to re-create this feeling of ‘snapshotting’ someone else’s info apparatus.

Unfortunately, one of the big side effects of the way that Vicariously duplicates this feature using an automated ‘list builder’ is that it spams every person it adds to the list given that Twitter always notifies you when someone adds you to a list and there is no current way to alter that behavior.

So you see a lot of ‘added to their list‘ tweets and notis.

There are also other issues with the way  that Vicariously works to build public lists of people’s follower graphs. There is potential for abuse here in that it could be used to target the people that a targeted account follows. One of the major reasons Twitter killed this feature twice is that the whole thing feels hyper personal. Your Twitter follower graph is something that you, theoretically, curate. Though a lot of people have become more performative with follows and instead, ironically, add the people they want to ‘follow’ to lists.

Having your graph public is something that felt exciting and connective at one point in Twitter’s life. But the world may be too big and too nasty now for something like this to feel really comfortable if it ever spreads beyond the technorati/Twitter power user crowd. We’ll see I guess.

Oh, and Twitter, it is about time you built in a ‘can not be added to lists’ feature. Otherwise, as someone reminded me via DM, you run the risk of making all of the same mistakes as Facebook.

Cross-border financial transactions are a major headache for individuals and large companies alike, who often have to deal with long wait times and high fees in order to send money to recipients in other countries. EMQ, a Hong Kong-based startup that develops network infrastructure to make international payments faster, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by WI Harper Group.

EMQ’s technology is integrated by clients, including online banks digital wallets, e-commerce and merchant settlement providers and licensed financial institutions, into their existing networks, making it easier for them to perform cross-border remittances.

The funding, which also included participation from AppWorks, Abu Dhabi Capital, DG Ventures, Intudo Ventures, VS Partners, January Capital, Hard Yaka, Vectr Fintech Partners, Quest Ventures and Sparklabs, will be used for expanding EMQ’s international business, product development and licensing in key markets. Along with a Series A announced back in December 2017, its newest round brings EMQ’s total raised to $26.5 million.

EMQ is already licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and registered as a Money Service Business in Canada. It has also been accepted into the regulatory sandbox launched by Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission to encourage innovation by financial tech companies.

The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Max Liu told TechCrunch that EMQ will focus on scaling its operations, especially for business remittances, in China, followed by India and Japan. EMQ’s tech is already used to process business payments in 80 countries.

Until recently, the majority of transactions facilitated by EMQ were between consumers. Then in May, the company launched its enterprise payment solution for companies. Liu said EMQ now expects business-to-business transactions to account for half of its gross transaction volume in 2021.

According to Juniper Research, cross-border B2B transactions are expected to exceed $218 trillion by 2022, up from $150 trillion in 2018, thanks in large part to the adoption of new technology. Other fintech companies that also provide tech, including APIs, for cross-border transactions include Currencycloud, Payoneer and Transferwise.

Liu said EMQ’s main selling point is that it is focused on building a flexible infrastructure that can handle a large range of use cases in different countries, including e-commerce, merchant settlement, procurement, remittance and payroll.

He added that EMQ can be integrated into a client’s existing tech infrastructure with as little as two API calls. EMQ gives clients a fully-functional sandbox environment, which mimics real transactions, and allows them to experiment with its tech and work with EMQ’s customer support team before it is formally deployed. Liu said it usually takes clients between two weeks to two months, depending on a company’s size and requirements, to fully integrate EMQ into their business operations.

In a press statement about the investment, Edward Liu, a partner at WI Harper Group, said, “As digital transformation intensifies globally, enterprises today are increasingly international in scale and they will require a network infrastructure like EMQ with greater speed, more certainty, increased flexibility and transparency, to expand their business in Asia and beyond. We are excited to partner with the EMQ team to expand its market-leading position in cross-border business payments globally.”

Early last year, excitement over the burgeoning cannabis industry was palpable in Silicon Valley, with a small number of venture firms writing their first checks to cannabis-related startups. Among them is the cross-border venture firm DCM, which even hosted an “inaugural” cannabis “tech summit” in May 2019 that drew so many investors that finding a seat was difficult.

Yet the buzz began to fade soon after, owing to a confluence of events, including a bubble in publicly traded cannabis companies; legalization that moved more slowly than hoped in certain states like New York; and an outbreak of lung injuries tied to vaping last fall.

The industry is still navigating around some of these trends, but it’s also proving more durable than outsiders might imagine, according to Karen Wadhera, a managing partner at Casa Verde Capital, the cannabis-focused venture firm founded by Snoop Dogg back in 2016. “Four plus months into COVID, cannabis has really proved itself to be a non-cyclical industry,” he said in a chat late last week, where we talked about what went so wrong, what’s happening right now, and whether he ever worries that Casa Verde might be too early to the cannabis party. Parts of that chat, edited for length, follow.

TC: The last time I saw you in person, last year, there was a lot of interest in cannabis. Since then, the headlines have pretty consistently been bad. What’s going on?

KW: What happened to the public perception of the cannabis industry is not too dissimilar to the dotcom bubble of the late ’90s, where there was a lot of hype — a lot of it driven by public companies — and a lot ofspeculative trading and valuations that weren’t really founded in reality. [We’re talking about] projections multiple years out into the future, and then crazy revenue multiples on top of that. Things just got really frothy, and that eventually burst, and last April or May was sort of apex of that of that moment. It’s when things started to trade off. And it’s been those names, the public names in particular, that have been hit particularly hard.

TC: Why?

I don’t know if it was driven purely by scarcity value, but there was definitely an incentive to go public. So you had a lot of companies go public well before they were prepared to. And then you’ve had a lot of companies, which are just, quite frankly, poorly run, with poor management teams, and some with even real ethical concerns [regarding] how they ran their businesses. So I think that all started to come to a head and led to a pretty serious implosion.

It was pretty painful, for sure. But what’s so interesting is that even though that has been the public perception based on these stocks, the reality is the macro has continued to improve. Sitting here today, four-plus months into COVID, cannabis has really proved itself to be a non-cyclical industry. Cannabis has been deemed an essential business everywhere across the U.S. We had record sales in March, April, and May, and the trend has has continued. And now that we are getting into an environment where governments are going to be looking for additional sources of tax revenue, the potential urgency around cannabis legalization is going to be there, which is going to be massively positive for the industry.

TC: I thought the governor of Massachusetts was concerned about people bringing COVID into the state, but I guess he reversed course on dispensaries as essential businesses?

KW: Yeah, he was the one outlier, and he reversed course. What’s been interesting is first, as you can imagine in a moment where people are especially anxious, cannabis has been something many people have been turning to. Then, beyond that, what’s also been interesting is that like many other areas of the economy, we’ve seen e-commerce really [take off]. One of our businesses, Dutchie, which enables retailers to launch their own e-commerce and have their own delivery and pickup, has seen its gross merchandise value increase by like 600% [since March].

TC: You’re also an investor in [the same-day delivery startup] Eaze, where former executives were accounting for consumer sales as if they were transactions made to third party vendors. What do you think of that situation? 

KW: It’s certainly in the past, but as you know, there’s always been a massive issue with the cannabis business [in that it] can’t really access traditional banking like other industries can, and one of the big issues there is credit card processing. So it sounds that an issue earlier in Eaze’s history was that it was able to process credit card payments potentially by not fully disclosing what was actually being transacted. I don’t know a ton of the details and where that lies currently, but I know that’s not anything that Eaze is involved in anymore.

TC: Bigger picture, does it tarnish the industry and make it harder for everyone to raise money? What are you seeing? Are new investors coming to the table? Are early investors still believers in this opportunity?

KW: It’s been fascinating for sure. The conversations have changed dramatically from when I first entered the industry to today. Initially, we [as a venture firm] were unable to get in front of a lot of pensions and endowments to have those conversations. Now, we’re at least having those conversations and they’re interested to hear about what we’re doing. I’m not quite sure if they’re ready to pull the trigger, but certainly even just the fact that they’re interested in understanding the industry better is a huge change.

TC: What are the biggest pockets of opportunity you see in cannabis investing right now?

KW: We have two main areas of focus. We love the ancillary tech-lead opportunities for businesses that are going to benefit from the overall macro theme of legalization and globalization of the cannabis industry, whether it’s software for retailers or manufacturers, or ancillary services like staffing and financial services. One of our businesses is Bespoke Financial, which helps with short-term financing for the industry. So we still see a lot of development in those areas.

We’re also very interested in consumer-facing brands. For a long time, cannabis sales were driven by potency and price. To use the alcohol equivalent, it would be as if every consumer made their decisions by walking into a liquor store and asking what’s the highest-proof vodka for the best price. We know that’s not how decisions are made.

TC: You and I talked before about precision dosing, soon after you’d invested in a vaping company that made it easier to understand how you’ll be impacted by what you’re ingesting.

KW: So that is business called Indose, which has created a medical-grade device that [enables users to] dial in the exact amount that they’re taking in . . . It’s much more of a business that’s going to be working with other consumer brands and allow them to use its technology to have that precision.

TC: How are these consumer-brands reaching customers? Do they have to be more . . . careful?

KW: Yeah, I mean, again, with cannabis businesses, that’s another huge restriction that a lot of them face. You can’t use a lot of the traditional channels that would be available to to non-cannabis businesses, so no Facebook ads, no Instagram, no Google AdWords, things like that, which is now a lot of the new brands’ playbook. So you have to be creative. There’s a lot of marketing happening in store within the dispensaries. You can rent billboards. Experiential marketing, pre COVID, was something that was people were very actively doing. There is also influencer influential marketing online that can still happen through Instagram channels or [channels] that a brand may own. But oftentimes those get get shut down as well. So yeah, it’s a tricky world from a marketing perspective for cannabis businesses.

TC: From a 20,000-foot level, one of the limitations of investing in cannabis would seem to be exit opportunities. There aren’t a whole lot of companies that are in a position to buy a cannabis business because of legal issues in part. How do you address that?

KW: There are a few ways to look at that. I think for ancillary, periphery businesses, there will be a lot of acquisition opportunities in the future from strategics that decide that they want exposure to the cannabis industry and may get it by buying a point-of-sale business or an e-commerce player or a financial services businesses, because that’s less directly touching the plant.

It’s going to be a question of how comfortable you are on the risk curve. Until we see kind of full-scale legalization, or until we see at least some of the the current bills in front of Congress passed or the rescheduling of cannabis from schedule 1 to schedule 2 or lower [by the Drug Enforcement Agency], some companies are going to be concerned about jumping into the space. But that’s the opportunity, as well, and as long-term investors, that’s how we see it.

In the meantime, we’ve had a couple of exits driven mainly by follow-on investors who want portions of our business, [including] a private equity firm that’s pursuing the roll-up of a particular category, and [to] a financial investor.

TC: Do you see the climate changing around acquisitions and legalization with a Biden administration?

KW: I think regardless of who’s in office, we’re going to see we’re going to see a lot of progress in the next four years. And that’s because this is no longer purely a partisan issue. I think Biden will be very helpful. He has laid out many of the things that he wants, and [while] he isn’t taking it as far as full-scale legalization, he’s certainly in favor of full-scale decriminalization, [meaning] letting states have full authority over what happens with their businesses, and also the rescheduling of cannabis down from the current schedule 1 level. So all of that will be incredibly helpful and will bring a lot more players who will feel comfortable investing in the space and potentially acquiring some of these businesses, as well.

To listen to this interview in its entirety, you can find it in podcast form here.

The bitcoin bulls are back in town.

The price of bitcoin surged today by $1,268.19, reaching a six-month high of $11,203.90, or a one-day gain of 12.73%. It’s another indication of the resurgence of both investor interest in the technology and renewed confidence in its long-term prospects after a rough year of regulatory scrutiny and declining value in the major cryptocurrencies.

For cryptocurrency investors like Alyse Killeen, an advisor to Mantis VC (the investment firm launched by the celebrity music duo The Chainsmokers), the climb in Bitcoin prices reflects the increased stability of the infrastructure that undergirds Bitcoin specifically, and distributed ledger technologies more broadly. 

“Bitcoin has much more intrinsic value today than it did a year ago just from an infrastructure perspective,” Killeen wrote in a direct message. “[The] Lightning network is working, sidechains are working. And so you can do more with bitcoin today than you could last year.”

The Lightning network is a second-layer technology for bitcoin that scales the blockchain’s ability to conduct transactions and it’s increasing people’s ability to actually use the network.

It’s more than just increasing capacity driving the surge in investor interest and prices, Killeen wrote. There’s also the decreased supply of available bitcoin — a function of the halving of coins in circulation which happened earlier this year.

Moreover, financial institutions are now holding cryptocurrencies — giving investors more confidence in the security and fungibility of the assets, Killeen wrote.

Some blockchain experts, like Willy Woo, who is an analyst now working at Lvl to launch Bitcoin banking services even called the timing for the most recent bull run.

Killeen also expected the markets to rise in the third quarter or early fourth quarter thanks to the increasing infrastructure to support transactions and activity on the blockchain, the increasing amount of bitcoin in circulation, and a response to the halving of currency in circulation.

“What’s happening now is that larger institutions are offering purchase facilitation and custody (e.g. Fidelity),” Killeen wrote. “This is bullish for Bitcoin AND self-custody. With ‘real banks’ holding bitcoin for their customers, the average person will view bitcoin more like money, and [the] differentiation of being your own bank becomes even more clear.”

The Berlin-based startup behind Tandem, an app for practicing a second language, has closed a £4.5 million (~$5.7M) Series A round of financing to capitalize on growth opportunities it’s seeing as the coronavirus crisis continues to accelerate the switch to digital and online learning.

With many higher education institutions going remote as a result of concerns over virus exposure risks of students mixing on physical campus there’s a growing need for technology that helps language students find people to practice with, as Tandem tells it. And while language learning apps make for a very crowded space, with giants like Duolingo and Babbel, Tandem focuses on a different niche: Native speaker practice.

As the name suggests, its app does pair matching — connecting users with others who’re trying to learn their own language for mutual practice, by (their choice of) text, phone chat or video call.

The platform also incorporates a more formal learning component, by providing access to tutors. But the main thrust is to help learners get better by practicing chatting to a native speaker via the app.

Because of the pandemic push to socially distant learners, that’s a growing digital need, according to Tandem co-founder and CEO Arnd Aschentrup. He says the coronavirus crisis spurred a 200% increase in new users — highlighting a “clear appetite” among consumers for digital language learning.

The team has taken another tranche of funding now so it can scale to meeting this growing global opportunity.

The Series A is led by European VC firm Brighteye Ventures, with Trind Ventures, Rubylight Limited and GPS Ventures also participating. It brings the startup’s total raised to date to £6.8M.

“Given the accelerated user-uptake and clear market opportunity, we felt that 2020 was the right time to partner with the team at Brighteye to bring Tandem into the mainstream,” says Aschentrup, adding: “We anticipate significant growth opportunities for online learning and social learning in the wake of Coronavirus.”

He says two “key trends” have emerged over the past few months: “Firstly, schools and universities providing language courses have either temporarily shut down, or moved almost entirely to remote lessons. Students are therefore relying on additional platforms to learn and practice languages, which is precisely what Tandem offers.

“Secondly, we know that lockdown has enormously limited people’s ability to socialise. Friendships have been harder to maintain, and new connections more difficult to spark. We’re excited about Tandem’s ability to connect people all across the globe despite lockdown. Since Coronavirus began, engagement on Tandem’s video chat feature has increased three-fold, and new user signups have increased 200%.”

Tandem had been growing usage prior to COVID-19 — increasing membership from around a million back in 2017 (when we last spoke), to more than 10 million members now, spread across 180 countries.

Aschentrup couches the underlying growth as “strong organic demand”, noting the platform has been profitable since 2019 (hence not taking in more outside funding ’til now). But, with the pandemic curve ball accelerating the switch to remote learning, it’s expecting usage of its platform to keep stepping up.

“We’ve successfully increased our community numbers 10 fold in recent years, profitably and organically,” he tells TechCrunch. “More people than ever value digital learning solutions combined with human connection, and so the time is ripe to introduce Tandem to language learners more widely around the globe. With the team at Brighteye on our side we’re excited to further develop Tandem’s reach and voice over the coming period.”

“We expect increased interest in online-learning to sustain well after lockdown lifts. In China — where lockdown sanctions were implemented and lifted earlier — user engagement has remained buoyant.”

“Once people experience the value of learning as part of a like-minded global community, it often becomes a lasting part of their lifestyle,” he adds.

Tandem’s best markets for language learners are China (10%), the US (9%) and Japan (9%) — which combined make up close to a third (27%) of its user base.

While the most popular language pairs (in ranked order of popularity) are:

1. English – Spanish
2. Spanish – Portuguese
3. English – Chinese
4. English – French
5. Chinese – Japanese

While the vast majority (94%) of Tandem’s user-base is making use of the freemium offering, it monetizes via a subscription product, called Tandem Pro, which it introduced in 2018 to cater to members who “preferred taking a community approach to language learning”, as Aschentrup puts it.

“For $9.99 per month, members can access key features such as: translating unlimited messages, finding Tandem partners nearby or in specific locations — for example ahead of international travels or studying abroad — and having enhanced visibility in the community as a featured Pro member,” he explains.

Aschentrup describes the “community aspect” of Tandem as a key differentiator vs other language learning apps — saying it helps users “develop and maintain cross-cultural friendships”.

“Members are often on opposite sides of the world to each other, yet able to enjoy a window into another culture entirely. Now more than ever, we’re pleased to be facilitating members’ healthy curiosity about other languages, countries, and styles of living.”

The new funding will go on developing additional features for the app, and expanding the team across marketing and engineering, per Aschentrup. Currently Tandem has 24 full-time employees — it’s planning to double that to a 50-member team globally, post-Series A.

Commenting in a statement, Alex Spiro, managing partner at Brighteye Ventures, lauded the team’s “innovative and effective strategy” in building a community platform that tackles the language gap by connecting learners with fluent speakers.

“The product has not only proven resilient in this global crisis but has seen impressive growth during the period, and the team is now very well equipped to come out of it stronger and to continue to support loyal language learners that now number in the millions and will number many more in the coming years,” he added.

Apple is expanding its relationship with media mogul Oprah Winfrey. The company announced today its plans for a new series, “The Oprah Conversation,” which will feature timely discussions between Oprah and “newsmakers, though leaders and masters of their craft” across a range of topics. The first few episodes will focus on conversations around race, given recent events like the BLM protests.

The series, which was filmed remotely during the pandemic, will begin on July 30 at  4 PM PST with an episode titled “How to Be an Antiracist,” which will see Oprah and bestselling author Professor Ibram X. Kendi talking with book readers who are on a journey to learn how to become anti-racist. This episode will then be followed by a two-part interview with athlete, commentator, activist and creator and host of “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man,” Emmanuel Acho on August 1.

Oprah will also converse with Equal Justice Initiative founder and bestselling author Bryan Stevenson later in the series.

The show’s format will include Oprah speaking with guests, but will also incorporate audience engagement, like viewer questions.

This is the third series that Oprah is now doing for Apple, having launched “Oprah Talks COVID-19” in late March, and “Oprah’s Book Club” last year, as part of her multi-year agreement with the company. Another show, produced in partnership with Prince Harry and focused on mental health, has yet to arrive. Oprah also participated in Apple’s documentary series, “Visible: Out on Television.”

Unfortunately for Apple, Oprah’s multi-year deal is overlapping with a pandemic which has shut down TV production leading to the launch of these “filmed remotely”-style series.

Oprah’s COVID series, for example, was quickly put together in reaction to the health crisis and used lower production values, making it a first of its kind on Apple TV+. Before its arrival, Apple TV+ content had been highly produced and offered in 4K. But those initial experiments in remote TV production made further shows like this new series possible.

While much of Apple TV+ content requires a subscription, “The Oprah Conversation” will debut exclusively on the service for free on Thursday, July 30, Apple says. After the first free episode, the remainder of the series will require a $4.99 per month Apple TV+ subscription to view. The Apple TV+ service is available across devices, including Apple’s own, as well as select smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku.

Everyone wants more bandwidth from the skies, but it takes a lot of testing to turn laboratory research projects into real-world performant infrastructure. A number of new technologies, sometimes placed under the banner of “5G” and sometimes not, is embarking on that transition and being deployed in real-world scenarios.

Those research trials are crucial for productizing these technologies, and ultimately, delivering consumers better wireless broadband options.

We’ve talked a bit about one of those testbeds called COSMOS up in northern Manhattan near Columbia University, which is pioneering 5G technologies within a dense urban environment. The same National Science Foundation-funded research group that financed that project, the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program (PAWR), has now selected two finalists for its fourth location, which has a specific focus on rural infrastructure.

Research teams in Ames, Iowa affiliated with the Iowa State University and Lincoln, Nebraska affiliated with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln each won $300,000 grants to accelerate their planning for the testbeds. Those teams will use the grants to optimize their proposals, with one expected to receive the final full grant next year.

The goal for this latest testbed is to find next-generation wireless technology stacks that can deliver cheaper and better bandwidth to rural America, areas of the country that are not well-served by traditional cable and fiber networks nor current wireless cell tower coverage.

Whoever wins will join the existing three wireless testbeds in New York City, Salt Lake City, and the Research Triangle in North Carolina.

PAWR itself is a joint public-private initiative with $100 million in funding to accelerate America’s frontier wireless innovation. It’s co-led by US Ignite, a NSF run initiative to bring smart city ideas to fruition, and Northeastern University.

Joseph Kitonga, the 23-year-old entrepreneur behind Vitable Health, first saw the need for a new kind of healthcare service growing up in Philadelphia and seeing the experience of the home healthcare workers who worked at his parents’ business.

The Kitongas immigrated to the United States a decade ago and settled down in Philadelphia, where they started a home-care business matching workers with patients in need. What was surprising to the younger Kitonga was that the people who worked for his parents taking care of others couldn’t afford basic healthcare coverage themselves.

It was that observation that provided the seed for the business idea that would become Vitable Health, Kitonga’s first business and a recent member of Y Combinator’s latest summer cohort.

The company provides affordable acute healthcare coverage to underinsured or un-insured populations and was born out of his experience watching employees of his parents’ home healthcare agency struggle to receive basic healthcare coverage.

A lot of caregivers make $10 per hour, which is too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford health insurance, Kitonga says.

Even with the Affordable Care Act, many workers in the home-care business that Kitonga’s parents ran in Philadelphia were unable to receive care.

So Kitonga built a service that could cover everything but catastrophic coverage for lower costs than the company’s customers would have to pay if they went to an urgent care facility.

Vitable is able to lower the cost of care through its use of nurse practitioners instead of doctors to provide the care. For a small monthly fee, the company will send providers to make house calls or customers can receive a consultation over the phone.

“We focus on acute and preventive coverage,” says Kitonga. “Most high deductible plans are geared toward providing catastrophic coverage.”

What Kitonga saw with his parents’ employees was that they would wind up going to the emergency room and put $1,300 in charges on their credit cards rather than pay for insurance per month.

Vitable’s lowest plan levels start at $15 per month and the co-payment is $30, according to Kitonga. Vitable’s technicians will do in-home lab tests.

There’s just no low-cost care option available for the population that Kitonga wants to serve, he said. These are people who will be referred to emergency rooms by nearby care providers because they lack the necessary insurance. “The population that we service has been ignored by healthcare providers,” said Kitonga.

For now, the service is only available in Philadelphia, but Kitonga says there are already 1,000 people who receive care through Vitable. “We work with a lot of small businesses that might have 10 or 20 employees,” Kitonga said.