Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Meet Biloba, a French startup that wants to leverage tech to make it easier to keep your children healthy. The company recently launched a new mobile app that lets you chat with a doctor whenever you want between 8 AM and 8 PM. This way, if you have questions about your kids, you can get a quick answer.

Of course, a text conversation will never replace a visit to the pediatrician. But chances are you have a ton of questions, especially if you’re a first-time parent. Instead of browsing obscure discussion forums, you can go straight to a doctor.

Biloba isn’t working with pediatricians specifically. The company is also partnering with nurses and general practitioners. Eventually, the service is going to cost €10 per month but the company is waving fees during the lockdown.

After just three weeks, the startup managed to attract 4,000 users with around 200 conversations per day. Compared to other telemedicine services in France, such as Doctolib, Biloba doesn’t rely on video consultation. This way, it’ll be easier to deal with a large influx of new patients even with a small group of partner doctors.

The subscription business model is interesting for multiple reasons. First, Biloba isn’t covered by the French national healthcare system. In France, patients only get reimbursed if the doctor knows you already. That restriction has been lifted during the lockdown but it’s probably just a temporary lift.

Many parents probably don’t want to pay €120 per year to chat with a doctor when they could pay €0 through the national healthcare system. But if you can afford it, the barrier to medical advice becomes much lower.

Biloba previously released a vaccine reminder app that lets you enter information about your child’s vaccines and get reminders when the next scheduled vaccine is due.

San Francisco and Lagos-based fintech startup Flutterwave has launched Flutterwave Store, a portal for African merchants to create digital shops to sell online.

The product is less Amazon and more eBay — with no inventory or warehouse requirements. Flutterwave insists the move doesn’t represent any shift away from its core payments business.

The company accelerated the development of Flutterwave Store in response to COVID-19, which has brought restrictive measures to SMEs and traders operating in Africa’s largest economies.

After creating a profile, users can showcase inventory and link up to a payment option. For pickup and delivery, Flutterwave Store operates through existing third party logistics providers, such as Sendy in Kenya and Sendbox in Nigeria.

The service will start in 15 African countries and the only fees Flutterwave will charge (for now) are on payments. Otherwise, it’s free for SMEs to create an online storefront and for buyers and sellers to transact goods.

While the initiative is born out of the spread of coronavirus cases in Africa, it will continue beyond the pandemic. And Flutterwave’s CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — is adamant Flutterwave Store is not a pivot for the fintech company, which is an alum of Silicon Valley accelerator Y-Combinator.

“It’s not a direction change. We’re still a B2B payment infrastructure company. We are not moving into becoming an online retailer, and no we’re not looking to become Jumia,” GB told TechCrunch on a call.

He was referring to Africa’s largest e-commerce company, which operates in 11 countries and listed in an NYSE IPO last year.

Flutterwave has a very different business than the continent’s big e-commerce players and plans to stick with it, according to GB.

When it comes to reach, VC and partnerships, the startup is one of the more connected and visible operating in Africa’s tech ecosystem. The Nigerian-founded venture’s main business is providing B2B payments services for companies operating in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad.

Launched in 2016, Flutterwave allows clients to tap its APIs and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications. Existing customers include Uber and Booking.com.

In 2019, Flutterwave processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion, according to company data. Over the last 12 months the startup has been on a tear of investment, product and partnership activity.

In July 2019, Flutterwave joined forces with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba’s Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China.

The Alipay collaboration followed one between Flutterwave and Visa to launch a consumer payment product for Africa, called GetBarter.

Then in January of this year, the startup raised a $35 million Series B round and announced a partnership with Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.

On the potential for Flutterwave Store, there’s certainly a large pool of traders and small businesses across Africa that could appreciate the opportunity to take their businesses online. The IFC has estimated that SMEs make up 90% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s business serving the region’s one-billion people.

Flutterwave confirmed Flutterwave Store’s initial 15 countries will include Africa’s top economies and population countries of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.

Those markets already have a number of players driving digital commerce, including options for small businesses to post their wares online. Jumia’s Jumia Marketplace allows vendors register on its platform and use the company’s resources to do online retail.

Facebook has made a push into Africa that includes its overall push to get more users to sell on Facebook Marketplace. The social media giant now offers the service in Nigeria — with 200 million people and the continent’s largest economy.

eBay has not yet gone live in Africa with its business to consumer website, that allows any cottage industry to create a storefront. The American company does have an arrangement with e-commerce startup MallforAfrica.com for limited sales of African goods on eBay’s U.S. shopping site.

On where Flutterwave’s new product fits into Africa’s online sales space, CEO GB says Flutterwave Store will maintain a niche focus on mom and pop type businesses.

“The goal is not be become like eBay, that’s advocating for everybody. We’re just giving small merchants the infrastructure to create an online store at zero cost right from scratch,” he said.

That’s something Flutterwave expects to be useful to Africa’s SMEs through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.

Prague based Resistant AI has nabbed a $2.75M seed round. The security startup’s machine learning technology is designed to be deployed on top of AI systems used for financial decision making to protect customers in markets such as financial services and ecommerce from attacks such as targeted manipulation, adversarial machine learning and advanced fraud.

The seed round was co-led by Index Ventures (Jan Hammer) and Credo Ventures (Ondrej Bartos and Vladislav Jez). Seedcamp also participating, along with Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath; Michal Pechoucek, CTO of Avast and other unnamed angel investors. Bartos joins the board of directors on behalf of the investors.

The startup sells an additional layer of protection that’s specifically designed for tightening security around automated functions such as credit risk scoring and anti-money laundering by using tech to detect fake documents that feed such systems. Its tech is also aimed at uncovering suspicious patterns of transactions which might indicate a strategic attack on the model itself or an attempt to copy sensitive data.

“Historically, all systems that make high-value financial decisions become targeted. This is already happening with the automated systems deployed by our fintech and financial customers and we are here to protect them,” said Martin Rehak, founder and CEO, in a statement.

The seed round is Resistant AI’s first tranche of external funding, with the founders bootstrapping the company since starting up in February 2019.

“We have onboarded the first customers in 2019 and the funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” Rehak told us. “We are protecting the AI&ML systems used in financial automation from manipulation or misuse by smart attackers.”

Resistant AI has two products it offers its customers at this stage: First, document inspection. It offers a machine learning system that’s designed to flag and reject “malicious documents” submitted for automated processing. “Bank statements, payslips, invoices, purchase orders and KYC documents submitted to fintechs and banks are frequently manipulated or completely falsified,” explained Rehak. “Resistant Documents, our first service, identifies and rejects the suspicious or malicious inputs.”

A second offering — Resistant Transactions — applies AI to spot problematic transaction patterns.

“We work with the fact that most attacks on AI systems require extensive interaction to discover the vulnerability,” he said. “Our system is unique by inspecting all the customer queries (which can take form or payments, money transfers or credit applications assessed by the system we protect) in context of similar queries. By looking at the stream of queries statistically, we can recognise and block the attacks that seek to steal the information embodied in the model (information stealing) or, worse, aim to nudge the system into making the wrong decision by exploiting an existing bias in the system.”

Resistant AI isn’t breaking out customer numbers yet but Rehak said it onboarded its first customers last year. “The funding will help us scale our sales organisation to meet the rising demand from banks and fintechs,” he added, saying also that it will be spending on building out product features and extending functionality, as well as on beefing up the sales and go-to-market team.

“Right now, our target customers are financial and fintech startups, as well as other companies deploying the automated process (both software and RPA) in their financial processes,” he added. “The financial systems are our current focus, but the attacks on machine learning are relevant in many other areas: process automation, e-commerce, manipulation of ‘trend detection’ algorithms in social media and other opportunities.”

It’s using a SaaS model — preferring a value approach to pricing, per Rehak. “Our problem and approach is new, and we feel that the value pricing model aligns the incentives between us and the customer in the optimal way,” he said on that.

Asked who he sees as the main competitors for the business, he cited Google Brain plus the tech giant’s activities in adversarial machine learning.

The majority of work in this area is currently done in-house by the large tech companies building their own proprietary systems — such as Google and Microsoft, he added.

Other competitors he mentioned were Inpher, which is enabling machine learning on encrypted data; Sentilink, which is doing detection of synthetic identities in the US; and Bullwall (Denmark) and YC-backed Inscribe (US/Ireland) which are focused on document forgery.

Resistant AI’s founders have a background in machine learning applied to cyber security problems having founded Cognitive Security, an earlier startup which they subsequently sold to Cisco in 2013. Over some 12 years working in the security industry Rehak said they saw how attackers targeting AI systems were getting increasingly sophisticated in avoiding detection — which gave them the idea for their latest business.

Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures, added: “Automation, efficiency and reliability are cornerstones of financial innovation. As machine learning takes more and more nuanced financial decisions, it needs to be protected. And this is not true only in finance, but the attacks will rapidly spread to other domains as well. More of our activity today takes place online, a trend accelerated by COVID-19, and one we believe will last. With criminals ready to take advantage of every vulnerability, the need for solutions such as those from Resistant AI has never been greater.”

Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a newly discovered Android malware that targets banking apps and cryptocurrency wallets.

The malware, which researchers at security firm Cybereason recently discovered and called EventBot, masquerades as a legitimate Android app — like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Word for Android — which abuses Android’s in-built accessibility features to obtain deep access to the device’s operating system.

Once installed — either by an unsuspecting user or by a malicious person with access to a victim’s phone — the EventBot-infected fake app quietly siphons off passwords for more than 200 banking and cryptocurrency apps — including PayPal, Coinbase, CapitalOne and HSBC — and intercepts and two-factor authentication text message codes.

With a victim’s password and two-factor code, the hackers can break into bank accounts, apps and wallets, and steal a victim’s funds.

“The developer behind Eventbot has invested a lot of time and resources into creating the code, and the level of sophistication and capabilities is really high,” Assaf Dahan, head of threat research at Cybereason, told TechCrunch.

The malware quietly records every tap and key press, and can read notifications from other installed apps, giving the hackers a window into what’s happening on a victim’s device.

Over time, the malware siphons off banking and cryptocurrency app passwords back to the hackers’ server.

The researchers said that EventBot remains a work in progress. Over a period of several weeks since its discovery in March, the researchers saw the malware iteratively update every few days to include new malicious features. At one point the malware’s creators improved the encryption scheme it uses to communicate with the hackers’ server, and included a new feature that can grab a user’s device lock code, likely to allow the malware to grant itself higher privileges to the victim’s device like payments and system settings.

But while the researchers are stumped as to who is behind the campaign, their research suggests the malware is brand new.

“Thus far, we haven’t observed clear cases of copy-paste or code reuse from other malware and it seems to have been written from scratch,” said Dahan.

Android malware is not new, but it’s on the rise. Hackers and malware operators have increasingly targeted mobile users because many device owners have their banking apps, social media, and other sensitive services on their device. Google has improved Android security in recent years by screening apps in its app store and proactively blocking third-party apps to cut down on malware — with mixed results. Many malicious apps have evaded Google’s detection.

Cybereason said it has not yet seen EventBot on Android’s app store or in active use in malware campaigns, limiting the exposure to potential victims — for now.

But the researchers said users should avoid untrusted apps from third-party sites and stores, many of which don’t screen their apps for malware.

Tesla said it will reduce the price of its standard range Model 3 vehicle in China to meet the government’s new eligibility requirements for subsidies.

This marks the second time this year that the automaker has reduced the price. Several months ago, the base version of China-made Model 3 was lowered by 9%.

Tesla has to cut the price of the vehicle to continue to qualify for government rebates on electric vehicles. The Chinese government instituted new regulations that require prices below 300,000 yuan for electric vehicles to qualify for subsidies.

The base price of standard range Model 3 made in China is 323,800 yuan, or $45,754 before subsidies.

The price reduction will go into effect tomorrow in China, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a earnings call Wednesday. Musk, who didn’t provide a specific figure, said he is confident that the vehicle will deliver a gross margin despite the reduction in price.

Tesla chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn added that the cost of vehicles produced at its Shanghai factory in the first quarter is already lower than the cost to produce the Model 3 in the United States. That margin should improve as the company improves its local supply chain in China. Tesla still ships some parts from the U.S. to build cars at its Shanghai factory.

Tesla is pushing back plans to produce and deliver its all-electric Class 8 until 2021, the company said in its quarter earnings report Wednesday. The move puts the Tesla Semi two years behind the automaker’s previous target.

“We are shifting our first Tesla Semi deliveries to 2021,” the company said without providing any more details.

The Tesla Semi was first unveiled in November 2017 in splashy ceremony in Hawthorne, Calif. on the grounds of Tesla’s design studio and Musk’s other company, SpaceX . During the initial debut, Musk promised the truck would drive like its other passenger vehicles, the Model X,  Model S and Model 3. The truck also boasted some eye-popping specs that included ability to travel 500 miles on a single battery charge when fully loaded and driving 65 miles per hour.

While the company had interest from customers with companies like Walmart and Anheuser-Busch putting in pre-orders, the vehicle program hasn’t been able to meet the 2019 target.

Earlier this year in its fourth quarter earnings report, Tesla provided one of the first updates on the Tesla Semi in months, stating that it was “planning to produce limited volumes of Tesla Semi this year.”

Researchers at NYU have identified hundreds of groups of Instagram users, some with thousands of members, that systematically exchange likes and comments in order to game the service’s algorithms and boost visibility. In the process, they also trained machine learning agent to identify whether a post has been juiced in this way.

“Pods,” as they’ve been dubbed, straddle the line between real and fake engagement, making them tricky to detect or take action against. And while they used to be a niche threat (and still are compared with fake account and bot activity), the practice is growing in volume and efficacy.

Pods are easily found via searching online and some are open to the public. The most common venue for them is Telegram, since it’s more or less secure and has no limit to the number of people who can be in a channel. Posts linked in the pod are liked and commented on by others in the group, with the effect of those posts being far more likely to be spread widely by Instagram’s recommendation algorithms, boosting organic engagement.

Reciprocity as a service

The practice of groups mutually liking one another’s posts is called reciprocity abuse, and social networks are well aware of it, having removed setups of this type before. But the practice has never been studied or characterized in detail, the team from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering explained.

“In the past they’ve probably been focused more on automated threats, like giving credentials to someone to use, or things done by bots,” said lead author of the study Megan Greenstadt. “We paid attention to this because it’s a growing problem, and it’s harder to take measures against.”

On a small scale it doesn’t sound too threatening, but the study found nearly 2 million posts that had been manipulated by this method, with more than 100,000 users taking part in pods. And that’s just the ones in English, found using publicly available data. The paper describing the research was published in the Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference and can be read here.

Importantly, the reciprocal liking does more than inflate apparent engagement. Posts submitted to pods got large numbers of artificial likes and comments, yes, but that activity deceived Instagram’s algorithm into promoting them further, leading to much more engagement even on posts not submitted to the pod.

When contacted for comment, Instagram initially said that this activity “violates our policies and we have numerous measures in place to stop it,” and said that the researchers had not collaborated with the company on the research.

In fact the team was in contact with Instagram’s abuse team from early on in the project, and it seems clear from the study that whatever measures are in place have not, at least in this context, had the desired effect. I pointed this out to the representative and will update this post if I hear back with any more information.

“It’s a grey area”

But don’t reach for the pitchforks just yet — the fact is this kind of activity is remarkably hard to detect, because really it’s identical in many ways to a group of friends or like-minded users engaging with each others’ content in exactly the way Instagram would like. And really, even classifying the behavior as abuse isn’t so simple.

“It’s a grey area, and I think people on Instagram think of it as a grey area,” said Greenstadt. “Where does it end? If you write an article and post it on social media and send it to friends, and they like it, and they sometimes do that for you, are you part of a pod? The issue here is not necessarily that people are doing this, but how the algorithm should treat this action, in terms of amplifying or not amplifying that content.”

Obviously if people are doing it systematically with thousands of users and even charging for access (as some groups do) that amounts to abuse. But drawing the line isn’t easy.

More important is that the line can’t be drawn unless you first define the behavior, which the researchers did by carefully inspecting the differences in patterns of likes and comments on pod-boosted and ordinary posts.

“They have different linguistic signatures,” explained co-author Janith Weerasinghe. “What words they use, the timing patterns.”

As you might expect, strangers obligated to comment on posts they don’t actually care about tend to use generic language, saying things like “nice pic” or “wow” rather than more personal remarks. Some groups actually warn against this, Weerasinghe said, but not many.

The list of top words used reads, predictably, like the comment section on any popular post, though perhaps that speaks to a more general lack of expressiveness on Instagram than anything else:

But statistical analysis of thousands of such posts, both pod-powered and normal, showed a distinctly higher prevalence of “generic support” comments, often showing up in a predictable pattern.

This data was used to train a machine learning model, which when set loose on posts it had never seen, was able to identify posts given the pod treatment with as high as 90 percent accuracy. This could help surface other pods — and make no mistake, this is only a small sample of what’s out there.

“We got a pretty good sample for the time period of the easily accessible, easily findable pods,” said Greenstadt. “The big part of the ecosystem that we’re missing is pods that are smaller but more lucrative, that have to have a certain presence on social media already to join. We’re not influencers, so we couldn’t really measure that.”

The numbers of pods and the posts they manipulate has grown steadily over the last two years. About 7,000 posts were found during March of 2017. A year later that number had jumped to nearly 55,000. March of 2019 saw over 100,000, and the number continued to increase through the end of the study’s data. It’s safe to say that pods are now posting over 4,000 times a day — and each one is getting a large amount of engagement, both artificial and organic. Pods now have 900 users on average, and some had over 10,000.

You may be thinking: “If a handful of academics using publicly available APIs and Google could figure this out, why hasn’t Instagram?”

As mentioned before, it’s possible the teams there have simply not considered this to be a major threat and consequently have not created policies or tools to prevent it. Rules proscribing using a “third party app or service to generate fake likes, follows, or comments” arguably don’t apply to pods, since in many ways they’re identical to perfectly legitimate networks of users. And certainly the threat from fake accounts and bots is of a larger scale.

And while it’s possible that pods could be used as a venue for state-sponsored disinformation or other political purposes, the team didn’t notice anything happening along those lines (though they were not looking for it specifically). So for now the stakes are still relatively small.

That said, Instagram clearly has access to data that would help to define and detect this kind of behavior, and its policies and algorithms could be changed to accommodate it. No doubt the NYU researchers would love to help.

The global pandemic has tested the bounds of businesses across the world and transformed the way many of us live our lives. For those among us who are unable to leave our homes at all as COVID-19 virus rages, online retail and food services have been a kind of lifeline.

But as contact-free delivery becomes the norm, it can be easy to forgot all the people working to provide those services at risk to their health. And more often than not, employees are working for low wages or tips.

A number of protests have been organized at companies like Amazon and Instagram in the intervening weeks and months, but a wide-scale, cross-company event hasn’t really surfaced. That could change on May 1, as employees mark the longstanding tradition of International Workers’ Day with a May Day general strike.

Material for the event has been circulating online, rebadged “Essential Workers’ Day,” as a nod to the exemptions to stay at home orders for retail and food delivery, among others. The event is framed as a combination strike and boycott, targeted at Amazon/Whole Foods, Instacart and Target/Shipt (as well as Walmart and FedEx, according to various sources). 

Specific demands differ from employer to employer, but workers have broadly asked for essential health protections, sick leave and hazard pay as the pandemic has continued to wear on and profits have spiked for many providers. 

Vice spoke to Christian Smalls, one of the organizers, the Staten Island Amazon employee who was fired after organizing a walkout at one of the company’s fulfillment centers. “We formed an alliance between a bunch of different companies because we all have one common goal which is to save the lives of workers and communities,” he told the site. “Right now isn’t the time to open up the economy. Amazon is a breeding ground [for COVID] which is spreading right now through multiple facilities.”

Amazon workers have been particularly vocal about the retail giant’s response to the pandemic. In addition to Smalls, two other employees who were publicly critical of the company were fired by Amazon — though the company denied the direct link. Instacart employees have also organized boycotts and strikes, including one in late March.

“We remain singularly focused on the health and safety of the Instacart community. Our team has been diligently working to offer new policies, guidelines, product features, resources, increased bonuses, and personal protective equipment to ensure the health and safety of shoppers during this critical time,” the company said in a statement. “We welcome all feedback from shoppers and we will continue to enhance their experience to ensure this important community is supported.”

Other companies have previously issued similar statements regarding employment during the crisis. We’ve reached out to them for additional comment on the planned protests.

The quarantine lockdown is driving a record number of users to Facebook’s products. On a conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed a number of new metrics highlighting a significant bump in Facebook usage during the broader quarantine lockdown.

In the past month, more than 3 billion internet users logged onto a Facebook service including its central app, Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp, Zuckerberg disclosed. This number constitutes roughly 2/3 of the world’s total internet users. This was a record for the platform which reported average monthly active users of 2.60 billion in Q1.

The company’s communications tools saw major surges in the past several weeks with Zuckerberg also disclosing more granular metrics that voice and video calling usage had doubled, views on Facebook and Instagram Live videos had doubled and the amount of time on group video calling had surged 1000% in recent weeks.

The company predicted that usage would settle down once shelter-in-place was discontinued, though Zuckerberg highlighted opportunities Facebook could realize during the lockdown. “When the world changes quickly, people have new needs and that means that there are more things to build,” he said.

Facebook reported its Q1 earnings Wednesday, sharing they had earned revenues of $17.74 billion during the quarter. While the company shared that usage of certain services had surged, they also disclosed that the company had seen a “significant reduction” in the demand for ads at the end of the quarter, sharing that they had seen flat year-over-year growth in the first few weeks of April.

Tesla reported Wednesday that it earned $16 million and generated $5.985 billion in revenue in the first quarter, results buoyed by improved automotive margins and reductions in operating expenses.

Tesla’s first quarter earnings were lower than the previous period as the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted operations and dampened sales. But the company still managed to squeeze in a profit, its third consecutive quarter of profitability, despite the COVID-19 related disruption.

Its automotive gross margins grew to 25.5% in the first quarter up from 20.2% in the same period last year. Tesla includes regulatory credits in its automotive revenues, which figure into its gross margins. Regulatory credits in the first quarter were $354 million, a 64% increase from the first quarter of 2019.  Revenue from credits dropped after the first quarter of last year, hovering between $111 million and $134 million, before popping again in this latest quarter.

Tesla’s $5.985 billion in revenue was 19% lower than the fourth quarter when it generated $7.38 billion. However, its first quarter revenue is 32% higher than the $4.5 billion it generated in the same period last year.

Tesla earned $16 million, or 9 cents a share in the first quarter, 85% lower than the fourth period when it earned $105 million in net income, or or 56 cents a diluted share. Tesla’s first quarter earnings were wildly ahead of the same period last year when it posted a $702 million loss.

When adjusted for one-time items, Tesla earned $227 million, or $1.24 a share in the first quarter.

The first quarter was full of milestones for Tesla. It was the first full quarter that its Shanghai factory was at volume production. It’s also the first quarter that the automaker began producing and delivering the Model Y.

Tesla also appeared remained committed to its earlier sales outlook for 2020, noting that it has capacity installed to exceed 500,000 vehicle deliveries this year, despite announced production interruptions.

“For our US factories, it remains uncertain how quickly we and our suppliers will be able to ramp production after resuming operations. We are coordinating closely with each supplier and associated government,” the company said in its shareholder letter.

Tesla reported its first quarter earnings a day after CEO Elon Musk sent out a FREE AMERICA NOW tweet to his 33.4 million followers in response to the seven Bay Area counties extending a stay-at-home order through the end of May. Tesla is headquartered in Palo Alto and its main factory as well as several other related facilities are located in Fremont, Calif. and are subject to the order.

The company suspended production at the factory March 24. It had planned to bring it back online May 4. The company’s other U.S. operations have also been temporarily shut down, including its factory in Sparks, Nevada and its solar facility in Buffalo, New York.

Earlier this month, Tesla reported that it delivered 88,400 vehicles in the first quarter, beating most analysts expectations despite a 21% decrease from the previous quarter as the COVID-19 pandemic put downward pressure on demand and created logistical challenges.

Tesla produced 103,000 electric vehicles in the first quarter, about 2% lower than the previous period.