Category: UNCATEGORIZED

On Friday, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that Ethereum Foundation staff member Virgil Griffith was arrested. He faces charges of conspiracy following a trip to North Korea and a presentation at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.

In particular, he allegedly provided services to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, also known as North Korea) without obtaining approval from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control.

According to the complaint, Griffith reached out to the U.S. State Department but his permission was denied due to economic sanctions against North Korea. Griffith traveled to China and then North Korea anyway. The complaint also says that Griffith discussed “cryptocurrency technologies to evade sanctions and launder money.”

A special agent for the FBI interviewed Griffith back in May 2019. It was a consensual interview and he talked about his presentation titled “Blockchain and Peace” with the agent. He showed photos of his trip and said he would like to attend the same conference next year.

Griffith discussed his presentation with another individual via a messaging app. “Individual-1 asked, in sum and substance, what interest North Koreans had in cryptocurrency. Griffith replied, in sum and substance, ‘probably avoiding sanctions… who knows,’” the complaint says.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, wrote multiple tweets about Griffith’s arrest. “I don't think what Virgil did gave DRPK any kind of real help in doing anything bad. He *delivered a presentation based on publicly available info about open-source software*. There was no weird hackery ‘advanced tutoring,’” he wrote.

He also says that the Ethereum Foundation has nothing to do with Griffith’s trip to North Korea. “EF paid nothing and offered no assistance; it was Virgil's personal trip that many counseled against,” Buterin wrote.

Earlier today, a judge ruled that there is enough evidence to move forward with a trial. Griffith will be released from jail pending trial.

This is it, code jockeys — your last call to grab a seat and compete in the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We limited participation to 500 people and, with just eight days to go, only a few spots remain. Do you have the skills, stamina and creativity it takes to build a working product in less than 24 hours? Well, do ya? Then apply to the Hackathon today and snag one of the few remaining seats.

Competing in the Hackathon is free, plus we give every participant an Innovator pass to take in the show on day two. Sweet! When you’re done hacking, explore the early-stage startups exhibiting in Startup Alley including the TC Top Picks. Be sure to catch some of our incredible speakers — you can use the Disrupt Berlin ’19 agenda to help you plan your time.

New to the TC Hackathon? Here’s how it works.

You join a team — either one you come with or one you find on site — and pick one of the sponsored challenges. Sponsors look for working solutions to real-world problems, and they pony up cash and prizes for the winning team(s). Plus, TechCrunch will award $5,000 to one team it deems to have created the best over-all hack.

Hackers have roughly 24 sleep-deprived hours to work their magic — and we’ll have plenty of food, drink and caffeine on hand to fuel your genius. When the clock runs out, the judges review every completed project and choose 10 teams to move on to the finals on day two.

Those 10 bleary-eyed teams will have two minutes to pitch their creation to the judges — in front of a live audience on the Extra Crunch Stage. Then it’s time for the big reveal. First, the various sponsors announce their winners and then TechCrunch names the team it deems the best overall hack-at-the-thon. See what we did there?

We’ll announce specifics about this year’s sponsors and challenges soon. In the meantime, check out the other sponsored contests, prizes and winners from DSF ’18 to get a sense of what awaits you in Berlin.

Strut your skills, compete for cash, prizes, adulation and the pure joy of coding something into existence. But don’t wait because we have only a few seats left. Apply to compete in the TC Hackathon, come to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December and show us what you can do.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Under the terms of a a settlement with the ACLU and other civil rights groups earlier this year, Facebook has been taking steps to prevent discriminatory ad targeting.

Specifically, the company says ads in the United States that involve housing, employment or credit can no longer be targeted based on age, gender, ZIP code or multicultural affinity. Nor can the ads use more detailed targeting that connects to these categories.

Today, Facebook is announcing what VP of Ads Product Marketing Graham Mudd described as the next “milestone in our effort to reduce and eliminate discrimination.”

First, it’s expanding the enforcement of these rules beyond Facebook Ad Manager to encompass every other place where someone might buy ads on Facebook: the Ads Manager app, Instagram Promote, the ad creation tools on Facebook Pages and the Facebook Marketing API (which connects with third-party ad-buying tools).

Second, it’s expanding its searchable ad library — first created in response to concerns about political misinformation — to include housing ads targeted at an U.S. audience.

So moving forward, if a regulatory agency, civil rights group, journalist or anyone else wants to check on how businesses are actually using Facebook to advertise housing, they can check the archive. This portion of the library will start archiving ads from tomorrow (December 4) onward, and Facebook says it will eventually include employment and credit ads as well.

Mudd said that Facebook has also been helping advertisers understand how to work within the new rules. While he described this as “the right tradeoff” to combat discrimination, he also suggested that “there are and have always been very reasonable and legal non-discriminatory advertising practices” that use age- and gender-based targeting.

Now, he said, advertisers are having to “relearn how to use the platform given these restrictions.”

Podcorn, the service that connects brands with podcasters to acquire in-broadcast sponsored time (not pre- or post-roll advertising), is officially launching its services today.

The benefit of Podcorn is that we aim to service podcasters of all sizes, many of which don’t currently qualify for traditional advertising but can still bring a lot of value to brands if matched accordingly. We are giving brands the opportunity to be part of the conversation, where listeners can hear from the brands – so not just pre, mid, and post-roll host read ads but brand interviews, panel discussions with experts and professionals who are within the brand’s industry, etc. It’s not about the podcaster just pushing products. It’s More inquisitive. More journalistic.

“For brands, the benefit is that we are scaling the discovery of relevant podcasters of all sizes and making it possible to work with hundreds of really targeted podcasters within their niche at scale,” writes Podcorn co-founder Agnes Kozera. “Historically, if you look at programmatic pre-roll ads in video, programmatic wasn’t enough to sustain the creator ecosystem in terms of revenue and a lot of audiences skip those ads. And importantly, only a small portion of top creators end up making a sustainable income from programmatic because it is strictly based on impressions so smaller creators with niche but very engaged audiences don’t generate a sufficient amount of revenue.”

The company, which raised $2.2 million in a round of financing led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Alumni Ventures Group, Correlation Ventures and the investment firm Next 10 Ventures, was founded by Kozera and her high school friend, David Kierzkowski.

The two previously launched the influencer marketing company Famebit, which was acquired by Google three years after its launch — and after raising $1.5 million from 500 Startups and the Los Angeles based incubator and early stage investment firm, Science.

“[Podcasts] need alternative monetization such as native sponsorships (why influencer marketing blew up) because creators started making a lot more money from it than traditional ad formats because it takes into consideration other criteria that make their podcast valuable,” Kozera writes. “It also gives brands an opportunity to see the value of creators irrespective of size.”

Like the influencer marketing business which gave Kozera and Kierzowski their first exit, Podcorn connects brands with a range of different podcasting formats and manages the types of contracts these new media broadcasters can offer to increasingly targeted audiences that follow them.

It’s a strategy that’s been a boon for influencer marketing and now that increasing numbers of ad dollars are going to podcasts, it was only a matter of time before the practice made its way into the new format.

Companies like Acast, Midroll, Audiogo, and ThoughtLeaders are also all vying for a piece of the podcast advertising market.

“We are giving brands the opportunity to be part of the conversation, where listeners can hear from the brands – so not just pre, mid, and post-roll host read ads but brand interviews, panel discussions with experts and professionals who are within the brand’s industry,” Kozera wrote in an email.

The four ex-Google employees, also known as the “Thanksgiving Four,” who were fired right before the holiday, are planning to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

“We look forward to hearing the NLRB’s findings, which we expect will confirm that Google acted unlawfully,” ex-Googlers Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers and Sophie Waldman wrote on Medium today.

The plan is to argue that Google fired them for organizing, which is a protected activity. As the Thanksgiving Four outlined on Medium, they organized around a variety of topics, including Google’s treatment of its temporary, vendor and contractor workers, Google’s alleged retaliation against employees who organized, the company’s work with Customs and Border Protection and more.

“Google didn’t respond by honoring its values, or abiding by the law,” the four wrote on Medium. “It responded like a large corporation more interested in revenue growth than in ensuring worker rights and ethical conduct. Last week, Google fired us for engaging in protected labor organizing.”

Last month, Google put Rivers and Berland on leave for allegedly violating company policies. At the time, Google said one had searched for and shared confidential documents that were not pertinent to their job, and one had looked at the individual calendars of some staffers.

Following a protest in support of the two, Rivers, Berland, Duke and Waldman were fired.

Google declined to comment but confirmed an internal note published by Bloomberg, which said Google fired a total of four employees for repeatedly violating its data-security policies.

Since the massive employee-led walkout last November, organizers say Google has tried to undermine further attempts to organize. In July, walkout co-organizer Meredith Whittaker left the company following reports of retaliation in April. Organizers of the rally say both Rivers and Berland were put on leave for “simply looking at openly shared internal information.”

The Thanksgiving Four’s terminations came shortly after The New York Times reported Google hired an anti-union firm, IRI Consultants. Google employees, who the Times kept anonymous, discovered Google’s relationship with ISI via internal calendar entries.

“Google fails to understand that workers are the ones who built the company and its most successful products,” the four wrote. “And that we can stop building them. No company — tech giant or otherwise — should be able to interfere with workers’ rights to organize for better working conditions, including ethical business practices.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Google and will update this story if we hear back.

Uberflip is acquiring SnapApp, bringing together two startups that promise help marketers use their content more effectively.

President and Chief Marketing Officer Randy Frisch argued that Uberflip focuses on content experience, not content marketing. In other words, it’s not selling productivity and workflow tools for marketers to write blog posts and and create videos. Instead, it helps them present their existing content in a smarter and more personalized way.

For example, it worked with data warehousing company Snowflake to create content streams highlighting the topics most likely to grab the attention of different sales prospects, then embedded those content streams in Snowflake’s marketing emails.

“Content marketing gotten a bad rap in some ways,” Frisch said, noting that there’s been “a lot of consolidation in that space in last number of years,” so Uberflip has been working to distance itself from that term. (To that end, Frisch recently published a book with the colorful title “F#ck Content Marketing.”)

As for SnapApp, I wrote about the company’s interactive content tools back in 2015, but Uberflip CEO Yoav Schwartz told me that the product has changed dramatically in the last 18 months — it now offers “a better smarter, way to understand a visitor” by “peppering them with questions” as they’re browsing a marketer’s website.

So Schwartz sees this acquisition — Uberflip’s first — as a way to help the company improve its personalized content recommendations.

“We’re going let SnapApp to continue to run as is,” he added. “We’re not going to attempt to integrate on day one. We’re going to allow time to understand how those two technologies can work together.”

Frisch and Schwartz said that about 10 to 15 SnapApp team members will be joining Uberflip, bringing the total headcount to around 150. And SnapApp’s current headquarters will become the Boston office of Toronto-based Uberflip.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. SnapApp previously raised $22 million in funding, while Uberflip has raised $36 million.

Mozilla today announced that its Firefox Private Network (FPN), which lets you encrypt your Firefox connections, is now in an extended beta after a few months of relatively limited testing in the Firefox Test Pilot program. This beta, however, is only available to users in the U.S. and the free service is restricted to 12 hours of encrypted surfing on Firefox’s desktop version for the time being. You’ll also need a Firefox account to use the extension.

What’s maybe even more interesting, though, is that Mozilla is also working on a more fully-featured device-level VPN service that will encrypt all of your Internet surfing and app usage across your Windows 10 devices (with other platforms coming, too). This new service is now accepting invitations.

The introductory price will be $4.99 per month, making this the first service that Mozilla is directly charging users for. Those prices will likely change, though, as Mozilla learns what users are willing to pay and as it evolves the service. Given that running a VPN is costly, it definitely makes sense that the organization can’t offer it for free.

Also new today is an update to Firefox Preview, the group’s next-gen mobile browser based on its own GeckoView engine, as well as picture-in-picture support for all video sites in Firefox desktop. Firefox Preview is the publicly available test version of a new iteration of Firefox for Android. The highlight here is that Firefox Preview will now get enhanced tracking protection, similar to its desktop brethren, in addition to other new features like a new search widget for the Android home screen and a revamped Send tab for sending tabs or collections of tabs to other devices.

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Salv, an anti-money laundering (AML) startup founded by former TransferWise and Skype employees, has raised $2 million in seed funding.

The round is led by Fly Ventures, alongside Passion Capital and Seedcamp. Angel investors also participating include N26 founder Maximilian Tayenthal (who seems to be doing quite a bit of angel investing), Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, and Taavi Kotka, former CIO for Estonia (the actual country!).

Founded in June 2018 and initially offering consultancy, Estonia-based Salv has built a software platform that helps banks find and stop financial crime. The idea, says co-founder and CEO Taavi Tamkivi, is to move AML beyond just compliance to something more proactive that actually does defeat crime. That’s quite the promise, although he and his co-founders have a lot experience to draw from, both within fast-growing startups and AML.

Tamkivi built the AML, fraud, and Know Your Customer (KYC) teams at TransferWise and Skype. COO Scott McClelland also worked in the anti-fraud team at Skype, followed by a stint at TransferWise, first as an analyst and then in HR. And CTO Sergei Rumjantsev was also formerly at TransferWise, leading the engineering team responsible for KYC and verification.

“This was a highly demanding role, especially given how fast TransferWise was growing, how many new markets were coming online, and how central user verification is for compliance,” Tamkivi tells me. “Under Sergei’s leadership, the team made the verification process incredibly smooth over time for genuine customers. But also robust enough to protect TransferWise from on-boarding bad actors”.

Bad actors within financial services are aplenty, of course. Yet, despite the European banking sector spending billions tackling the problem, it is estimated that only 1-2% of global money-laundering is detected.

“AML should be all about stopping money laundering but, particularly in the last decade, layer upon layer of regulations have been added for banks to comply with,” says Tamkivi. “This would be great if that meant that there was no more money laundering, but sadly, that’s a long way off. Today, between $1-2 trillion a year is still laundered. But the excessive regulations mean that nearly all of a bank’s compliance team’s effort goes into compliance. They have very little energy left to actually focus on improving their financial crime-fighting abilities. The software they’re using is similar, focused almost wholly on compliance, not crime-fighting”.

That is where Salv wants to step in, and Tamkivi says the main difference between the startup’s AML software and other existing solutions is a much greater emphasis on crime-fighting rather than a box-ticking compliance exercise.

“We’re aiming to create a transformation similar to what’s happened in virus scanning,” he says. “10-15 years ago virus scanners on everyone’s PCs were an enormous hassle, consumed tons of resources and stopped you from getting work done. The same is true in financial institutions today. They’re using outdated, heavy software and processes to handle AML. But today, virus scanning still happens, but nobody’s worried about it. It happens in the background, with few resources. We’ll do the same in the AML world”.

In addition, the Salv CEO claims that the company’s software is faster than competitors’ offerings, both in terms of set up time and integration, and making changes to the rules the system adheres to.

“Our system, by contrast, takes a month or less to set up and minutes to modify the rules,” he says. “As a result, our customers can take everything they learn today from new criminal patterns, encode it in automated rules tomorrow, and repeat that cycle every day to protect their bank. Moving fast is the only way to keep up with the innovative organised criminals moving millions or billions around the world”.

To that end, Salv already counts Estonian bank LHV as its first customer. “They offer a full suite of banking products across Estonia,” says Tamkivi. “They’re also active in London, in particular, supporting fintechs. We have another couple of customers in the Lithuanian fintech scene. One of those is DeVere e-Money”.

More generally, Salv’s product is said to be suitable for Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks, as well as regulated fintechs and challenger banks.

Meanwhile, the business model is straightforward enough. Salv charges a monthly subscription, while the price varies based on the number of active customers a bank or fintech has.

Marvel has a trailer out for Black Widow, the story focused on the member of the Avengers team played by Scarlett Johansson. This preview of the movie features a lot of heart-pumping action, and an all-star cast that includes Rachel Weisz, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, and of course, Johansson herself.

What we get in this trailer is a look at a movie that appears to span multiple genres – it starts off looking very much like a Bourne-esque spy thriller with exciting, somewhat gritty hand-to-hand fight scenes. Later on, though, it seems to show more superhero vibes in the tradition of the big and glossy Marvel cinematic universe, though leaning more towards Captain America: Winter Soldier than the big tent circus set pieces of the core Avengers lineup, or the wacky, neon glare of the Guardians franchise and the most recent Thor.

Black Widow’s Russian spy background is clearly on display here, and it looks like there’s going to be a very weird ‘family reunion’ on display with some Russian heroes. Overall, it looks entertaining as heck – and it has a lot to live up to, as the first Marvel Studios film after Avengers: Endgame (Spider-Man: Far From Home only gets partial credit because of the shared character ownership with Sony).

Xiaomi, the top smartphone vendor in India, today joined a growing wave of fintech startups in the nation that are offering credit to aspirational young professionals and millennials.

The Chinese electronics giant said today it is launching Mi Credit, its curated marketplace for digital lending, that offers users credit between Rs 5,000 ($70) to Rs 100,000 ($1,400).

Xiaomi said it has partnered with a number of startups such as Bangalore-based ZestMoney, CreditVidya, Money View, Aditya Birla Finance Limited, and EarlySalary to determine who should get a credit and then finance it.

Users are required to let Mi Credit app access their texts and call logs to look for transactional information and some other details to assess whether they are credit worthy. This whole process takes just a few minutes and eligible users can walk out with some credit, said Manu Jain, Vice President of Xiaomi, at a conference in New Delhi.

He added that having multiple partners for the crediting platform ensures that the likeliness of a user securing a loan is high. Once a user has secured a credit from the app, they can avail more credit in the future with a single click, the company said.

For startups that have partnered with Xiaomi, the big draw is access to a large user base, an executive with one of the partner startups said.

Xiaomi, which has been the top smartphone vendor in India for nine consecutive quarters, has an install base in tens of millions in the country. The company has shipped more than 100 million smartphones in the country, it recently revealed.

Xiaomi said the Mi Credit app will be preinstalled on all Xiaomi smartphones running Android -based MIUI operating system. The app is also available for non-Xiaomi smartphone users from the Google Play Store. (It’s not available for iPhone users.)

A wave of fintech firms have emerged in recent years in India to help millions of users secure credit and other financial services for the first time in their lives. The penetration of credit card remains very low in the country (roughly three in 100 people in India have a credit card.) This has meant that very few people in the nation have a traditional credit score.

This void has created an immense opportunity for startups to explore a range of other data points to determine who should get a loan. In emerging markets such as India, where the laws are lax, nobody appears to be alarmed with the idea of a company gleaning a lot of personal details.

As of today, Mi Credit is available to users in 1,500 zip codes, or 10 states in India. The company said it plans to extend the credit service to all of India by March next year.

Partner startups involved declined to comment on the financial arrangement they have with Xiaomi. The aforementioned unnamed executive said the agreement would vary with partners and the kind of product they are bringing to the table.

Xiaomi said it has deeply integrated its partners’ offerings into the app. As a result, users are able to see details such as disbursement of loans, lower interest, and credit score in real time.

The company began testing the app with some users in India last month. During the trial, it disbursed loans of over 280 million Indian rupees ($3.9 million).

For Xiaomi, the new offering would help it make its services ecosystem more engaging to consumers. The company, which recently posted one of its slowest growing quarterly reports, has been attempting to cut its reliance on hardware products and make more money off its internet services and through ads.

In March this year, Xiaomi launched Mi Pay, a UPI-powered payments app, in India. The company said the app has already amassed over 20 million registered users in the country.

Hong Feng, co-founder and senior vice president of Xiaomi, said the company understands the consumption behaviour of its 300 million users. “It is one of the strengths we aim to leverage to build a stronger Mi Finance business globally. We see a huge opportunity for consumer lending in India with estimations reaching up to $1 trillion dollars in digital lending by 2023, as per a report from BCG. This makes us believe that our Mi Finance business, based on solutions such as Mi Pay and Mi Credit can truly revolutionise the Indian FinTech industry.”