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While French President Emmanuel Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump initially reached a deal on France’s tax on tech giants, the U.S. is moving forward with retaliation tariffs that could be as high as 100% on French goods (wine, cheese, handbags…).

The United States Trade Representative published a report following an investigation into the French tax. In a separate press release, it also recommends new tariffs and says that there could be more investigations into the digital taxes of Austria, Italy and Turkey.

“France’s Digital Services Tax (DST) discriminates against U.S. companies, is inconsistent with prevailing principles of international tax policy, and is unusually burdensome for affected U.S. companies,” the U.S. Trade Representative says.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire already said on French radio that such tariffs could lead to a “strong European riposte.”

Earlier this year, France voted in favor of a new tax on tech giants. In order to avoid tax optimization schemes, big tech companies that generate significant revenue in France are taxed on their revenue generated in France.

If you’re running a company that generates more than €750 million in global revenue and €25 million in France, you have to pay 3% of your French revenue in taxes.

This tax is specifically designed for tech companies in two categories — marketplace (Amazon’s marketplace, Uber, Airbnb…) and advertising (Facebook, Google, Criteo…). While it isn’t designed to target American companies, the vast majority of big tech companies that operate in France are American.

This summer, Trump criticized France’s plans on Twitter. “France just put a digital tax on our great American technology companies. If anybody taxes them, it should be their home Country, the USA,” he wrote. “We will announce a substantial reciprocal action on Macron’s foolishness shortly. I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!”

During the Group of Seven summit, it felt like the French government and the Trump administration found a compromise. The OECD is working on a way to properly tax tech companies in countries where they operate, with a standardized set of rules.

France promised to scrap its French tax as soon as the OECD implements its framework and pay back companies that overpaid before the OECD framework. For instance, if Facebook pays a lot of taxes in 2019 due to the French tax on tech giants and if they would have paid less under the OECD framework, France will pay back the difference.

But we’re back to square one and tariffs could jeopardize the OECD’s work.

Vancouver based mobility startup Damon Motorcycles has entered the EV arena with a preview of its first e-moto, the Hypersport Pro.

The seed-stage company had previously focused on creating digital safety technology — like its 360 degree radar detection system — to augment two-wheelers made by other manufacturers.

Damon has determined to create its own EV model designed to overcome common flaws it sees in existing motorcycle offerings.

“We are for the first time being black and white about the fact that we are a full on producer and we have a motorcycle we’re going to unveil at CES,” Damon Motorcycle founder and CEO Jay Giraud told TechCrunch.

That machine is the fully electric Damon Hypersport Pro. The news is a pre-announcement ahead of the full January debut, so Giraud would not offer much in the way of core specs — such as price, range, charge-time, and performance.

He was clear the motorcycle is meant to be a direct competitor to the latest e-motos released by Harley Davidson and California based venture Zero Motorcycles — and to the gas-motorcycle market overall.

“We’ve come at this and the motorcycle problem in a way that no other company has,” Giraud explained.

“We’re trying to change the industry by addressing the issues of safety and handling and comfort and the problems that have persisted with everyone in the industry, including all the e-moto companies today.”

Damon’s Hypersport Pro is designed around the company’s CoPilot system, which uses sensors radar and cameras to detect and track moving objects around the motorcycle, including blindspots, and alert riders to danger.

Damon has also taken on the problem of one-size fits all in motorcycle design, integrating a system on its Hypersport Pro that allows for adjustable ergonomics. The startup’s debut model will allow riders to electronically shift the motorcycle’s windscreen, seat, footpegs, and handlebars to accommodate for different positions and conditions — from more upright city riding to more aggressive high-speed runs.

Damon Motorcycles is taking pre-orders for its Hypersport Pro and will skip dealers, opting to use a direct-sales and service model similar to Tesla . The startup’s Vancouver facility is equipped to build 500 motorcycles a year, according to Giraud.

The company recently brought on Derek Dorresteyn, the former CTO of e-moto startup Alta, as its COO. Full specs of the Hypersport Pro will come next month at CES, but Giraud did offer a glimpse, saying it would be more competitive and more powerful than existing e-moto offerings.

Harley Davidson released its first e-motorcycle — the $29K LiveWire — in 2019 and California EV startup Zero Motorcycles launched its $19K SR/F, both in bids to go take e-motos mass-market. Aside from the price-gap, both have comparable charge-times (about an hour), performance, and range (around 100 miles for combined city and highway riding).

The U.S. motorcycle industry has been in pretty bad shape since the recession. New sales dropped by roughly 50% since 2008 — with sharp declines in ownership by everyone under 40 — and have never recovered.

Harley Davidon’s EV pivot is likely to bring e-moto offerings from the other large gas manufacturers, such as Honda and Yamaha, who are also attempting to revive sales to younger riders.

With Damon’s pivot to e-moto production, the startup is not alone. Italy’s Energica is expanding distribution of its high-performance EVs in the U.S. Other competitors include e-moto startup Fuell, with plans to release its $10K, 150-mile range Flow in the near future.

Of course, there’s already been some speed-bumps and market attrition, with three e-moto startups — Alta Motors, Mission Motors and Brammo — forced to power down over the last several years.

So how does Damon Motors plan to succeed as a new entrant in a motorcycle market with stagnant  new bikes sales and increased EV competition from established OEMs and startups?

“We have so many advantages the others don’t have and we’re leveraging everyone of their weaknesses,” founder Jay Giraud said. The company’s direct-sale model will lend to more competitive pricing and higher margins for R&D, he said.

Then there are what Damon Motorcycles sees as its Hypersport Pro’s purposely designed comparative advantages over existing manufacturers.

“You’re gonna love the horsepower and range and all that good stuff, but that’s not what makes Damon different from every one else,” explained Giraud.

“What’s different is that it’s a safer motorbike with the safety features and transforming ergonomics that will keep you from smashing into someone’s car,” he said.

Not crashing into other people’s cars is certainly a compelling feature to offer in a motorcycle. Time and sales will ultimately tell how Damon fares in the inevitable cycle of events — profitability, failure, acquisition — that will play out in the increasingly competitive e-moto space.

Do you feel you have been receiving more spam calls of late? You are probably not wrong — or alone.

The volume of spam calls has grown by 18% this year, according to Truecaller. In its annual report published Tuesday, the Stockholm-based firm said users received 26 billion spam calls between January and October this year — up from 17.7 billion during the same period last year.

The United States remains the eighth most spammed country, where the volume of robocalls increased by 35% this year. In a separate report earlier this year, Truecaller estimated that 43 million Americans were scammed last year and lost about $10.5 billion.

Brazil again topped the list for the most spammed country. The culprit behind the increasingly growing spam calls in the country are its own telecom operators and internet service providers. Truecaller said that in the last 12 months, calls from the operators have increased from 32% to 48%.

“These calls are typically seeking to provide special offers and upselling data plans amongst other services. Scam calls continue to be a big problem in Brazil. Two years ago, only 1% of all the top spammers were scam related, last year it went up to 20% – and this year it is up to 26%,” it said.

One of the takeaways from the report is just how complex it is to understand the nature of these spam calls. There is no common thread — or culprit — behind these calls. In some markets, such as South Africa (ranked sixth in the report), spammers are mostly making fraudulent tech support calls and conducting job offer scams.

In some other markets, like Chile (placed seventh in the report), it’s debt collectors that are placing 72% of all spam calls in the nation. In UAE, ranked 12th in the report, like Brazil, telecom operators were the ones making most of these annoying calls.

Peru, ranked second, and Indonesia, ranked third, have seen spam calls explode in the nation. In Peru, users received more than 30 spam calls in the month. Most of these calls were made by financial services that are looking to upsell credit cards and loans.

In Indonesia, spam call volume has doubled in one year. As the nation goes through tough times, scammers have tried to leverage on it, the report said. “One of the more common scams are the ‘one ring scam or Wangiri scam’. Another scam that has been going on lately is the fake hospital/injury call where someone would call and tell you that a family member or a friend is hospitalized and need immediate treatment, and you need to send them money in order for them to treat the patient.”

The position of India, where the number of mobile subscribers has ballooned from 1 million to more than a billion in two decades, is fifth on the table. It’s better than before, but spam calls are still growing in the nation. In India too, it’s the telecom operators, and then telemarketers who are together making up for more than 80% of all spam calls.

Truecaller’s report also noted that users worldwide received more than 8.6 billion spam texts this year. Below is a chart that looks at the markets that are most affected with spam SMSs.

Canadian venture capital firm Portag3 Ventures has closed a second fund focused on investing in fintech startup, with final commitments from institutional and strategic LPs totally $427 million CAD (around $320 million USD). The fund will before costing on early stage investments, and it’ll look to invest in companies globally, but with a particularly focus on Canada, the U.S., Europe and some markets in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We’re on a mission to build global champions from a Canadian base,” Portag3 CEO Adam Felesky told TechCrunch regarding the firm’s base of operations and investment targets. “Canada has the talent, the expertise and one of the biggest markets in the world directly to our south. All the ingredients are there, we just need more success stories – and we are on our way to getting them. Success will breed more success. In order to understand what it takes to succeed globally, you need to invest and work with the best of the best from around the world. Many of the early fintech unicorns are based in Europe on the back of substantive, helpful policy changes. Canada needs to learn from these examples so we get the right ingredients for building a leading, vibrant ecosystem – and we slowly but surely are.”

Contributors to this new fund include Alterna Savings and Credit Union, Aviva France, BDC Capital, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CNP Assurances, The Co-operators, Eldridge Industries, Green Shield Canada and more. The list includes a lot of strategic investors, including LPs from Portag3’s first $198 million CAD ($149 million USD) close for this fund, which was announced in October 2018.

Portag3’s Fund II has already been making investments prior to this final closing, and has already put money into KOHO, Clark, Integrate.ai and startup-builder Diagram Ventures, along with 13 other startups. Its first fund invested in a number of fintech-related companies including Clearbanc, Drop, League, and Wealthsimple, as well as some companies that have already exited including Wave, Quovo and Zensurance.

Alongside the close of this funding, Portag3 has also recently set up a new group of senior advisors to work with the companies it’s investing in, and those advisors include financial industry heavyweights like Rockefeller Capital Management CEO and president Gregory J. Fleming, as well as former AIG president and CEO Peter Hancock.

 

Xometry, the U.S.-based marketplace for on-demand manufacturing that raised $55 million in Series D funding this summer, has acquired Munich-based Shift as a path to European expansion.

Exact terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although the exit sees at least some of Shift’s investors, such as Cherry Ventures, picking up shares in Xometry . I also understand the Shift team is staying on and the company’s founders, Albert Belousov, Dmitry Kafidov and Alexander Belskiy, will now be heading up Xometry’s newly formed European business.

Specifically, via this acquisition, Xometry says will accelerate international expansion into 12 new countries, leveraging a now worldwide network of over 4,000 manufacturers. The company’s on-demand manufacturing marketplace is already used by global companies like BMW and Bosch, which are Europe-based, and so it makes sense to have a much stronger operations in the continent.

“We’re eager to leverage Xometry’s technology to continue to scale our business in Europe,” says Shift’s Kafidov in a statement. “We look forward to providing our customers additional manufacturing capabilities, including additive manufacturing and injection molding”.

Shift claims to have built the largest on-demand manufacturing network in Europe and a customer base that includes some of the leading manufacturing companies in the region. Now operating as Xometry Europe, the subsidiary will continue to be headquartered in Munich in Germany, an area known for its manufacturing heritage.

Cue statement from Christian Meermann, Founding Partner, Cherry Ventures: “The custom manufacturing industry is a massive global market of over $100 billion. We’re excited for Shift to utilize Xometry’s industry-leading technology as well as leverage the global manufacturing expertise from other Xometry investors, including BMW i Ventures and Robert Bosch Venture Capital”.

Xometry has raised $118 million since being founded in 2013. Over the past two years, the company has grown from 100 employees to over 300 while more than doubling revenue each year. Via its partner manufacturing facilities, the company offers CNC Machining, 3D Printing, Sheet Metal Fabrication, Injection Molding, and Urethane Casting.

Contrast that with Shift, which was founded in 2018 and had raised around €4 million (~$4.4m) to date. Sources also tell me that the startup had nearly closed a Series A round before Xometry preempted the investment by making an acquisition offer.

After growing its lending business in West Africa, emerging markets credit startup Migo is expanding to Brazil on a $20 million Series B funding round led by Valor Group Capital.

The San Mateo based company — previously branded Mines.io — provides AI driven products to large firms so those companies can extend credit to underbanked consumers in viable ways.

That generally means making lending services to low-income populations in emerging markets profitable for big corporates, where they previously were not.

Founded in 2013, Migo launched in Nigeria, where the startup now counts fintech unicorn Interswitch and Africa’s largest telecom, MTN, among its clients.

Offering its branded products through partner channels, Migo has originated over 3 million loans to over 1 million customers in Nigeria since 2017, according to company stats.

“The global social inequality challenge is driven by a lack of access to credit. If you look at the middle class in developed countries, it is largely built on access to credit,” Migo founder and CEO Ekechi Nwokah told TechCrunch.

“What we are trying to do is to make prosperity available to all by reinventing the way people access and use credit,” he explained.

Migo does this through its cloud-based, data-driven platform to help banks, companies, and telcos make credit decisions around populations they previously may have bypassed.

These entities integrate Migo’s API into their apps to offer these overlooked market segments digital accounts and lines of credit, Nwokah explained.

“Many people are trying to do this with small micro-loans. That’s the first place you understand risk, but we’re developing into point of sale solutions,” he said.

Migo’s client consumers can access their credit-lines and make payments by entering a merchant phone number on their phone (via USSD) and then clicking on “Pay with Migo”. Migo can also be set up for use with QR codes, according to Nwokah.

He believes structural factors in frontier and emerging markets make it difficult for large institutions to serve people without traditional credit profiles.

“What makes it hard for the banks is its just too expensive,” he said of establishing the infrastructure, technology, and staff to serve these market segments.

Nwokah sees similarities in unbanked and underbanked populations across the world, including Brazil and African countries such as Nigeria.

“Statistically, the number of people without credit in Nigeria is about 90 million people and its about 100 million adults that don’t have access to credit in Brazil. The countries are roughly the same size and the problem is roughly the same,” he said.

On clients in Brazil, Migo has a number of deals in the pipeline — according to Nwokah — and has signed a deal with a big-name partner in the South American country of 290 million, but could not yet disclose which one.

Migo generates revenue through interest and fees on its products. With lead investor Valor Group Capital, new investors Africinvest and Cathay Innovation joined existing backers Velocity Capital and The Rise Fund on the startup’s $20 million Series B.

Increasingly, Africa — with its large share of the world’s unbanked — and Nigeria — home to the continent’s largest economy and population — have become proving grounds for startups looking to create scalable emerging market finance solutions.

Migo could become a pioneer of sorts by shaping a fintech credit product in Africa with application in frontier, emerging, and developed markets.

“We could actually take this to the U.S. We’ve had discussions with several partners about bringing the the technology to the U.S. and Europe,” said founder Ekechi Nwokah. In the near-term, though, Migo is more likely to expand to Asia, he said.

 

Cuvva, the app-based insurance provider that began life offering pay-as-you-go driving cover but has since expanded to also sell travel insurance, has raised £15 million in Series A funding.

Backing comes from RTP Global, Breega, and Digital Horizon, joining existing investors LocalGlobe, Techstars Ventures, Tekton and Seedcamp. A number of angels also joined the round, including Dominic Burke, the CEO of Jardine Lloyd Thompson, and Faisal Galaria, the former chief strategy and investments officer of GoCompare.

Launched in 2016 when founder Freddy Macnamara (pictured) become frustrated he couldn’t let others drive his car intermittently because of lack of insurance cover, Cuvva was an early pioneer of pay-as-you-go car insurance.

The idea, which was easier explained than done, was to make it possible to insure a car only when it was being driven, and therefore be cheaper for low mileage drivers, and via an app and access to the DVLA database, make it easier to on-board new drivers for pay-as-you-drive cover.

The insurtech still offers hourly car insurance but its product line has since been expanded to daily covery, as well as a product specifically aimed at learner drivers. In addition, Cuvva entered the travel insurance space, no doubt spotting overlap with its presumably younger, millennial demographic.

To that end, Cuvva says it will use the new capital to launch a new pay-monthly motor product in early 2020 that it says could cut average annual bills for car owners “significantly”. It will do this by cutting out various middle people, including brokers and comparison websites, which it says charge insurers about £70 on each policy sold.

“Unlike legacy insurers, Cuvva will not charge a fee to spread payments over the year and it will not penalise loyal customers with dual pricing,” says the startup. Cuvva also says it will offer the same savings, whether you are signing up as a new customer or a returning customer, and won’t charge admin fees to alter personal details registered with your policy.

Cue canned statement from Macnamara: “”I started Cuvva when I couldn’t find flexible insurance to help me share my car. Four years on from launch we are still discovering how big the problem we are solving really is. We’re now selling 3% of all UK motor insurance policies but we’ve got so much further to go. Cuvva is going to be the place where you buy all your insurance, all through our mobile app”.

Penta, the Berlin-based business banking challenger that also now operates in Italy, has partnered with BBVA-backed card reader company SumUp in a bid to attract more offline businesses.

Up until recently, Penta had been targeting digital businesses, such as startups and e-commerce SMEs, but has since re-positioned itself for wider business banking appeal.

By partnering with a POS provider offering easy card reader-enabled payments, the German challenger bank wants to extend that of offline, such as restaurants, craftsman, healthcare and architects.

Specifically, Penta says businesses can order a SumUp Card Reader via Penta, and in doing so will save money on the initial SumUp setup fee and be able to seamlessly integrate SumUp-powered payments with their Penta account.

They’ll also get access to the existing Penta features, such as being able to open a business banking account entirely digitally, issue multiple payment cards, grant limits and permissions per card for staff, facilitate expense management and integrating with popular accounting tools.

In future, the SumUp integration is planned to go deeper. This will include the ability to use SumUp payments data to forecast future sales and feed into a businesses credit worthiness when they seek a loan.

“One request that we’ve had since day one has been for our customers to easily and quickly accept card payments, so we are very proud to be able to offer this with our newest partner SumUp,” says Penta CEO Marko Wenthin in a statement.

Adds James Henry, Head of Sales and Partnerships at SumUp: “By cooperating with Penta, we will enable even more small and medium-sized companies to digitize their business and make the payment experience as convenient as possible for their customers. Penta, with its growing customer base of companies, is the ideal partner for us to reach the broad mid-market”.

In the waning years of the last millennium, at my university, one of the cause célèbres of the progressive left was a concept known as “Manufacturing Consent,” the title of a book and film, by and starring Noam Chomsky. Its central thesis was that US mass media “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship.”

It’s fair to say that history has been pretty kind to this theory. Consider the support drummed up by mass media for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. To quote the public editor of the New York Times, “To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.” Consider the September 2002 dossier published by the UK government “to bolster support for war” which turned out to be full of spectacularly incorrect information, and the media’s failure to interrogate those claims.

It’s hard to overstate just how cataclysmic these errors were. If the mass media had pushed back against the false claims of weapons of mass destruction, we might have avoided the Iraq war, which killed hundreds of thousands and cost trillions of dollars. Saddam Hussein was not exactly a tough act to follow, but the US still managed to follow its falsely motivated war with a botched occupation which turned Iraq, and arguably the larger Middle East to this day, into a bloodbath.

An interesting question is: what would have happened if today’s social media had been around in 2003? Today, if a wrong assertion is promoted by the mass media, it doesn’t take long for subject-matter experts to appear on Facebook and Twitter, correcting them, and either going viral themselves or becoming the subjects of countervailing media stories.

This doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophe would have been averted. But at least a possible corrective to the collective hysteria of the mass media would have existed, unlike in 2002-3. (Yes, those were the days of Blogspot and LiveJournal, but they didn’t have anything like the reach or significance of today’s social media.)

Consider a more recent event: the 2016 American presidential election. It has become an article of faith, in certain quarters, that it was won and lost by the diabolical use of Facebook ads, especially in conjunction with the psychographic superscience of Cambridge Analytica. This is ridiculous. First, no one credible thinks CA’s purported ability to mind control Facebook users by showing them “psychographically” targeted ads was anything other than snake-oil nonsense.

Second, as Nate Silver points out, the impact of social-media ads was enormously less than the impact of mass media. Remember the months of hysteria about Hillary Clinton’s emails? Remember how it turned out to be a complete non-story? Doesn’t this remind you of Iraq’s WMDs?

“The media’s coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was probably literally 50 times more important to the outcome of the 2016 election than Trump ads on Facebook.” Perhaps, my fellow mass media, the fault lies not in our psychographic bullshit artists, but in ourselves

Social media has many downsides. You don’t have to go particularly deeply into my own back catalog to discover that I am a harsh critic of Facebook myself. But let’s not pretend that mass media, just because it’s older, is therefore perfect. It has its own catastrophic failure modes itself. In fact — whisper it — maybe we’re a lot better off, net, with social media and mass media, in that each can act as a counterbalancing corrective on the other’s flaws and failure modes.

The progressive left may have gone from “mass media is the enemy” to “Big Tech social media is the enemy,” but maybe, and I know this sounds crazy because it’s on the Internet, but hear me out here, maybe there’s room for a little nuance; maybe they both have good and bad aspects, and could possibly balance one another out. If you don’t think mass media needs a corrective, let me remind you once again of the Iraq War and But Her Emails, to name but two of many, many examples. Maybe there exists a future in which social and mass media are each a cure for what ails the other.

Apple now has its own music awards, with winners picked by Apple Music’s editorial team or based on streaming data from the service. The first recipient of its top award, Global Artist of the Year, is Billie Eilish. The Apple Music Awards will be streamed live on Dec. 4 at 6:30PM Pacific Standard Time from the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, with a performance by Eilish.

The Apple Music Awards has five categories. Its editorial team picks the winners for Global Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year and Breakthrough Artist of the Year. Album of the Year and Song of the Year are awarded based on streaming data. Eilish also won the Album of the Year and (along with her brother Finneas) the Songwriter of the Year awards, for “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?”, Apple Music most played album of the year, with more than a billion streams.

Breakthrough Artist of the Year went to Lizzo, for “Cuz I Love You,” while the first Song of the Year is “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, the service’s most streamed track this year.

Winners will be given an trophy that contains “Apple’s custom silicon wafer suspended between a polished sheet of glass and a machined and anodized aluminum body… in a symbolic gesture, the same chips which power the devices that put the world’s music at your fingertips sit at the very heart of the Apple Music Awards,” read the company’s press release.

The launch of Apple Music Awards underscores the company’s increasing focus on services, as revenue from hardware slows. This year, it launched new subscription services like Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade, both of which emphasize exclusive content.

Apple Music competitor Spotify also recently announced its own music awards, with winners picked based on streaming and user engagement data. The first Spotify Awards event will be held in March 5 in Mexico City (the service’s biggest single market) and broadcast live on TNT in all Spanish-language countries in the region.

“The Apple Music Awards are designed to recognize the passion, energy and creativity of the world’s favorite artists. The musically diverse group of inaugural winners have sparked deep social conversation, influenced culture and inspired our customers around the world. We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate them,” said Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music and International Content, in its press release.