Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Books on tape were the lifeblood of self-help. But eLearning startups like Khan Academy and Coursera demanded our eyes, not just our ears. Then came podcasts that make knowledge accessible yet rarely focus on you retaining and applying what they teach.

Today, a new startup called Knowable is launching to provide gaze-free audio education at $100 per 8-hour course on topics like How To Start A Startup or How To Sleep Better. The idea is that by layering chapter summaries and eventually interactive activities atop premium, long-form, ad-free lessons, it can become the trusted name in learning anywhere. With always-in Bluetooth earbuds and smart speakers becoming ubiquitous, we can imbibe content in smaller chunks in new environments. Knowable wants to fill that time with self-improvement.

The big question is whether Knowable can differentiate its content from free alternatives and build a moat against copycats through savvy voice-responsive learning exercises so you don’t forget everything.

To evolve beyond the podcast, Knowable has raised a $3.75 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz ‘s partner Connie Chan, and joined by Upfront, First Round, and Initialized. “The market is ready for a company like Knowable. Their timing is right and their team possesses the rare combination of product expertise and creative media experience necessary to win. That’s why I’m not just hosting Knowable’s first course, Launch a Startup , we’re also one of the earliest investors in the company” says Initialized’s Alexis Ohanian.

There’s certainly a market opportunity. 32% of Americans listen to podcasts monthly, up from 26% in 2018, with 74% of those citing the desire to learn. Half of Americans have listened to an audiobook. The eLearning market is $190 billion today but projected to grow to $300 billion as bloated and expensive higher education succumbs to cheaper and more focused options.

But to score consistent revenue, Knowable must build up its library and execute on plans to offer a subscription service with access to updates on prior lessons. A major challenge will be bundling classes on the right topics that don’t exhaust users so they keep listening and paying.

Building A School From Sound

“My first-generation immigrant parents came here without college degrees. Great teachers let me move up the socioeconomic ladder pretty quickly” says Knowable co-founder Warren Schaeffer. “The genesis of the idea came from our shared interest in education and the value of great teachers.”

Schaeffer and his co-founder Alex Benzer have already been through the struggles of startup life together. After meeting at MuckerLab in LA and splitting from their respective co-founders, in 2007 they created SocialEngine, a community website builder that sold to Room 214. Next they built up a video platform for independent creators called Vidme that raised $9 million but never became sustainable before selling to Giphy in 2018.

The pair had glimpsed how great content could rope in an audience, but felt like the true potential of the podcast hadn’t been explored. Why did they have to be produced on the cheap, distributed on generic platforms, and supported by ads? Knowable emerged as a way to create luxury audio, delivered through a purpose-built app, and paid for with direct sales or subscriptions. Instead of recording unscripted discussions as episodes, they mapped out course curriculum and filled them with structured advice from experts.

I’m a few hours into the Ohanian-hosted How To Launch A Startup. It’s certainly a lot more efficient than trying to learn the basics just through storytelling from podcasts like Reid Hoffman’s Masters Of Scale or NPR’s How I Built This. One chapter breaks down the top ways startups die and the traits you’ll need to persevere. From optimism and resilience operating in unstructured environments to a refusal to make excuses why you can’t succeed, Ohanian cooly recaps the learnings at the end of the chapter. Open the app, and you’ll get a written summary plus suggested blog posts and books for diving deeper. An accompanying 95-page PDF workbook collects all the key learnings for rapid review later.

The topic is huge, though, and Knowable is at its best when it’s distilling knowledge into neatly packaged lists and frameworks. The course’s weakest moments are when it feels most like a podcast, with somewhat meandering conversations with random founders discussing how they dealt with problems. Meanwhile, it currently lacks some basic tools like in-app notetaking and sharing, or as wide a range of playback speeds and rewind options as you’ll get on Audible. “We don’t think of ourselves as a podcast company” Schaeffer says, but that’s still who he’s competing against.

What’s also missing is any true interactivity. The downside of audio learning is that if you’re not paying full attention, it’s easy to zone out. Knowable needs to develop voice- and touch-controlled exercises to help users apply and retain the lessons. However, Schaeffer says that “we’re on a mission to make education more accessible and quizzes might be an impediment to that” which leaves questions about what the learning activities will look like, even though they’re crucial to users coughing up $100 per class.

Snackable Audio Education

Knowable’s bid for virality is the ability to give a friend a code to take the class with you. It’s also hoping big-name experts and quality driven by a team cobbled together from NPR, Washington Post, William Morris Endeavor, Masterclass, and Vice will set it apart. They’ve got a lot of work ahead to grow beyond the six courses currently available.

For the moment, Knowable feels a bit late with its homework. It has the potential and demand to reinvent audio learning but currently sounds too similar to what’s already everywhere. I was hoping for a Bandersnatch for education that made a broadcast experience feel more like a game.

But the opportunity will only continue to grow as we spend more of our lives in earshot of AirPods and Echoes. With a broad enough library and clever editing, one day you might tell Knowable “teach me something about venture capital in 8 minutes” as you walk to the coffee shop. That’s going to have a much better impact on your life than just scrolling through another feed.

 

With $160 million in new financing, Relativity Space is now one step closer to fulfilling its founders’ vision of making the first rockets on Mars.

Tagging along for the ride are a motley assortment of millionaires and billionaires, movie stars and media moguls that are providing the money the rocket launch services provider and manufacturer of large-scale, 3-D printers needs to achieve its goals.

The new financing will give Relativity the cash to fully build its “Stargate” factory, a semi-autonomous, full-scale production facility that will house the company’s massive 3-D printers and produce its first rocket, the Terran 1.

Using its proprietary printing technology, Relativity says it can slash the time it takes to develop a rocket from design to launch by up to two years. Manufacturing can be done within 60 days, according to the company’s claims, and its vehicles have a payload capacity of up to 1250 kilograms (SpaceX’s largest rockets will have roughly 100 times that payload capacity).

Space startups and established companies alike are now rocketing forward with plans to support the race to establish a foothold on the surface of the Moon as a first step toward getting humanity’s first footsteps on Mars.

Even as Relativity was finalizing the details of this new financing round, Elon Musk was unveiling new details . about his Starship, designed to carry heavy payloads to the Moon and Mars; and NASA began doling out cash to companies that would provide transportation, infrastructure, and support for future lunar missions.

For now, Relativity remains focused on the clear, near-term business opportunity of getting more satellites into the Earth’s orbit for telecommunications companies.

The financiers funding the company’s plans are a mix of Silicon Valley venture capital firms and members of Hollywood’s elite, which is only fitting for a company whose headquarters are in Los Angeles, but whose business takes it to the far flung research centers and launch facilities which support the U.S. space industry.

From Hollywood, Relativity has managed to coax cash from the founder of the Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz, and the Academy Award-winning actor Jared Leto (whose venture capital portfolio is as impressive as it is diverse). Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff and Lee Fixel, the former superstar investor for Tiger Global, are also on board.

The two firms leading the deal are Bond Capital, a relatively new growth capital investment firm co-founded by the celebrated Wall Street financial analyst, Mary Meeker, and former private equity investor, Noah Knauf (after their stint running KPCB’s growth capital arm); and Tribe Capital, which was formed in the wake of the dissolution of Social Capital.

If anything, the presence of a growth capital investment firm like Bond, which has not invested in companies operating in what some investors have considered to be frontier markets or technologies, speaks to the strength of the space industry as a whole.

“Our entire investment strategy is to invest at the inflection points where things cross over from froniter to mainstream investments,” says Knauf. “We’ve spoken to what amounts to billions of dollars in potential demand for the company over time… They need a faster, better, cheaper solution.”

Some of Bond’s fears are likely alleviated by the fact that Relativity has already signed a number of agreements with satellite companies looking to get their equipment into space. To date, Relativity has publicly announced contracts with four vendors including: Telesat and Mu Space for their low earth orbit constellations, and Spaceflight and Momentus, which provide ride-share and in-space shuttle positioning services for small and medium-sized satellites.

And, over the past year, the company has been steadily building out launch and manufacturing infrastructure to support its lofty ambitions and initial customers.

Relativity has already built fully printed first and second stage structures; assembled the second stage of the Terran 1;  completed its first turbopump tests; and conducted more than 200 engine hotfire tests at its facility in NASA’s Stennis Space Center. Relativity has also completed tests of its avionics architecture and hardware and conducted an analysis of the vehicle’s design and coupled loads.

Relativity’s launch, manufacturing and test facilities are spread among Cape Canaveral, NASA’s Stennis Space Center and the company’s Los Angeles headquarters. The company expects to secure a polar and Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO) capable launch site by the end of 2019.

It also doesn’t hurt that the company has developed sophisticated manufacturing technologies that have terrestrial applications, if the rocket business fails to take off.

“The fit here is perfect for rockets and perfect for aerospace categories,” Knauf says of the company’s proprietary 3-D printing technology. “These guys have built the world’s largest 3-D printer.” 

Those printers and the software-defined, flexible manufacturing capabilities that they enable have massive value on their own, but Relativity co-founders Tim Ellis (a former Blue Origin employee) and Jordan Noone (who worked at SpaceX previously) are focused on building and launching their own rockets — on Earth and eventually on Mars.

“We’re really really truly focused on the rockets for now,” says Ellis. “Being an application layer company is what’s more interesting … [and] we’re seeing so much demand for the rocket launches.”

Ellis also has his eyes fixed beyond the low Earth orbit launch services that the company currently provides. “We’re building the future of humanity space,” he says. “Everyone is on board with this vision of 3-D printing . on Mars.”

Pandora is doubling down on personalization and revamping its app in order to better compete with rivals like Spotify and Apple Music. Today, the company is introducing a new mobile experience which includes a dedicated “For You” tab where a continually updated feed of content is presented to users, including both music and podcast recommendations and more. This content is personalized to the individual, based on factors like the day of the week, the time of day, and Pandora’s predictions about your mood, among other things.

The new personalized feed will also help the company to better showcase more of its exclusive content — like its music-and-podcast combos, called “Pandora Stories,” for example. Or the dozens of SiriusXM talk shows that became Pandora podcasts, following its acquisition.

“Our listeners have told us that they love the utility of Pandora — it’s drop-dead easy, it works, it knows me, It’s really simple,” explains Pandora’s Chief Product Officer, Chris Phillips. “But what they haven’t been able to understand and have easy enough access to is all the content and programming that we have available on Pandora — the new content, new programming, and the unique content that you can’t get other places,” he says.

The For You tab aims to change that by turning Pandora’s personalization capabilities onto its broader catalog and exclusives, then crafting a scrollable feed with dozens of ways to listen.

Here, you’ll be able to tap into Pandora Modes,  for example, which is a new way to listen to Pandora Stations. The feature was previously available on the web, and has now come to mobile for the first time with today’s launch.

Pandora Modes let you toggle between ways to customize your stations. You can opt for modes that will tweak the station to play things like the most popular songs (“crowd faves”), the deep cuts, new releases, artist-only tracks, and more.  You can also opt for a “discovery” mode to have Pandora introduce you to new artists you may like, as related to the station in question.

Another section in the For You tab lets you browse by categories, including by genre, by new music, podcasts, moods, playlists, decades and by trending.

The “Moods & Activities” section, meanwhile, will present collections of music based on current trends — for example, one of the available “moods” is “fall” and another could be “rainy day,” matched up with the day’s weather. You can also dig into this section for moods to match your activity, like workout, gaming, studying, family time, and more.

As you scroll down the For You page, you’ll come across your podcast recommendations and personalized playlists. And Pandora can create some 80 different versions of the latter, which include playlists by moods, activities, genres, and more all powered by its Music Genome.

Plus, the combined Pandora and SiriusXM editorial team of around 25 creates hundreds of human-curated playlists, too.

In total, there are some 35 different modules in Pandora’s new For You feed, some of which are shown to every user while others appear dynamically based on time of day and day of week. Its suggestions will also be tailored to your own likes and interests, thanks to your own listening behavior and explicit signals, like thumbs up and thumbs down.

That means your For You tab will be unique to you, and you can later be targeted with specific promotions — like the content to emerge from that deal between SiriusXM/Pandora and Drake, for example, if relevant to your interests. (Hey, it’s better than that time when Spotify put Drake’s face on every playlist.)

Despite the personalization, the feed will still include some insights powered by the larger Pandora population, so you can see what’s popular and trending more broadly across the service.

In time, Pandora plans to roll out even more modules to build out the experience further.

“100 billion thumbs are what’s powering all this,” adds Phillips, speaking of Pandora’s recent milestone, which measured the number of thumbs up and down clicks from users. Until now, he says, Pandora “hadn’t really brought together the community…and the power of our personalization, but not just for stations — for all the playlists, albums, songs, and artists,” Phillips continues. “And then the idea that we lay on top of all of this…the idea of what time of day it is, and what might be interesting based on what we predict your mood is right now,” he says.

The “For You” tab and other features are arriving today on Pandora for iOS and Android.

The software industry is no spring chicken, and that fact that brought us to an interesting moment in technology: some of the biggest legacy apps — ubiquitous as they may be — are getting revisited by smaller and more fleet-of-foot startups, who are building new apps that they hope will disrupt their respective Goliaths. In the latest turn, a startup out of Berlin — whose founders have already sold a company to Microsoft — is today announcing the closed beta, of Pitch, a new take on presentation software that hopes to compete against the likes of… Microsoft, specifically PowerPoint.

Along with this, Pitch is announcing that it has raised an additional $30 million in funding led by Thrive Capital, with participation also from Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (Instagram’s co-founders) and Rahul Vohra (Superhuman’s founder). It comes on top of a $19 million round Pitch raised a year ago from Index Ventures, BlueYard, Slack, and a number of other angels well versed in the art of software disruption (they included the CEO of Zoom, the CEO of DataDog and the co-founder of Elastic).

Founded by the same people who built Wunderlist — the popular to-do app (backed by many of the same investors) that Microsoft acquired in 2015 and then eventually announced it would shut down to develop its own competing service, To-Do — Pitch has been fairly under the radar since last October, while it has been building the first version of its service. The invite-only phase that we are in now is a gradual advancement on that: the purpose of the beta, CEO Christian Reber noted, is to gather usage information and feedback from beta testers to figure out how to shape the app for a future full launch.

This means that there isn’t really a product to test right now — when I asked, Reber told me that I would need to wait at least a few weeks go get onboarded — but that the wheels are definitely in motion, now fuelled by a significant amount of capital.

The main push behind building Pitch, Reber said, was this idea of revisiting processes that have been around for a long time, that are very entrenched as a result, but don’t actually work that well and could stand to be rethought with all of the advances of technology in mind. PowerPoint is a prime candidate for disruption: launched waaaay back in 1987 (!), it has over 1 billion installations and 500 million users, making it the biggest and oldest rooster in a large field of presentation tools.

“We loved the idea of building pitch as a product,” he said. “There has been so much innovation in design in the last few years, when you consider companies like Figma, and it led us to wonder: why have presentation tools stagnated? We loved the idea of building a better version of PowerPoint, but my business brain told me it’s a terrible idea. Why enter a market with products like Keynote and PowerPoint?”

The answer to that question came when the team started to play around with prototypes to get feedback from friends, which Reber said helped them understand the business opportunity of changing what is essentially a stagnant format into a living one. (That positive progress is also a big reason, I’m guessing, behind why Pitch is continuing to extend the testing and building phase into a closed beta.)

Reber said the choice to build Pitch was also informed by his experience as an investor, where he has focused on a number of apps that are also rebuilding services otherwise dominated by established software. (His investment portfolio includes Notion, which is building a virtual workspace.)

There’s an interesting lesson to be learned in the launch of Pitch when you consider what else has been occupying Reber’s time on the work front: he has also been busy trying to buy back Wunderlist, which despite the announcement that it would shut down, still remains operational and has millions of active users.

Reber said that he has no regrets about selling Wunderlist when he did. Although the company was growing he knew that ultimately there needed to be a bigger platform play that they didn’t feel they had the firepower to build, and looking at the fate and downfall of Evernote — always a big inspiration for Reber and his team — he knew they made the right choice by selling to Microsoft.

Be that as it may, though, seeing the product languish and get ignored at Microsoft has been tough.

“I emailed the leadership team at Microsoft quite a few times to see if I could buy it back, since I could see that it was struggling to shut it down without screwing the users,” he said, making them an offer: “You can give it back to me. Keep the team and everything else if you want. Everyone wins.” Not so fast, though, a year later, and he’s taken his pitch (so the speak!) to Twitter.  “They have gone radio silent,” he said.

While Wunderlist might have emerged at a time when it might not have been possible to conceive of how to build an app without the platform play firmly in place around it, it seems that this is a maxim that is not quite as simple anymore — which is one reason why Reber thought he could buy back Wunderlist and run with it.

“The most challenging question for any new software company, especially if you think of the example of Slack, is the one of platform,” Reber said. “Microsoft is building Teams and pre-installing it on Windows, forcing users to at least try it. It’s an extremely unfair advantage in my opinion and something you are continually fighting against if you are a startup.

“But at the same time I Think all these companies building new stuff are building things that connect deeply with each other — Slack, Zoom and Airtable are all tightly integrated. That means you can build really large companies without having whole suites of products.”

Longer term, there will need to be choices made about which direction a startup takes, whether to stay independent or make a play as a platform itself, or jump to another platform. But for now, it’s not one that Pitch will have to make.

“We invest in fast-growing companies with big market potential, and Pitch is in a strong position to create a great product in a market that’s ripe for change. The demand for Pitch is already clear by the thousands of companies who have expressed interest in the limited preview,” Joshua Kusher from Thrive Capital said in a statement. “We believe in Pitch both because of the product vision but also because of the team. As investors in Wunderlist, we built strong relationships with the founders and are excited to work with them again at Pitch.

WhatsApp users may soon get the ability to have their messages self-destruct after a set period of time. That’s according to a highly-reliable tipster who spotted the feature combing through the code of a beta version of the app.

Twitter user WABetaInfo said on Tuesday that the recently released public beta of WhatsApp for Android — dubbed v2.19.275 — includes an optional feature that would allow users to set their messages to self-destruct.

The ability to have messages disappear forever after a fixed amount of time could come in handy to users who share sensitive information with friends and colleagues on the app. It’s one of the most popular features on instant messaging client Telegram, for instance.

Telegram offers a “secret chat” feature wherein users can engage with each other and their messages disappear from their devices after a set amount of time. The messaging platform says it does not store the text on its servers and restricts users from forwarding the messages, or take a screenshot of the conversation, to ensure there is “no trail” of the texts.

“All secret chats in Telegram are device-specific and are not part of the Telegram cloud. This means you can only access messages in a secret chat from their device of origin. They are safe for as long as your device is safe in your pocket,” it explains.

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, also offers a “secret chat” feature on its Messenger app. But there, the secret chat feature only encrypts end-to-end messages and media content shared between two users. On WhatsApp, messages between users are end-to-end encrypted by default.

Currently, WhatsApp is testing the feature in a group setting that supports participation from multiple individuals. Messages could be set to self-destruct as soon as five seconds after they have been sent and as late as an hour. Additionally, an image shared by WABetaInfo shows that group administrators will have the ability to prevent other participants in the group from texting.

Some third-party WhatsApp apps have allowed self-destructing messages feature in the past. But in recent years, WhatsApp has started to crack down on third-party services to ensure safety of its users.

It remains unclear how soon — if ever — WhatsApp plans to roll out this feature to all its users. We have reached out to them for comment.

Aero, a new air travel startup backed by Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa, is officially announcing the appointment of its first CEO: Uma Subramanian, who previously launched Airbus’ helicopter service Voom.Flights.

The startup is also revealing that it’s raised a total of $16 million in funding. In addition to Expa, GGV Capital also invested.

Aero said its goal is to offer the luxury of private jet travel while charging “less than the cost of commercial first class.” To do this, it matches up travelers who are going to the same destination, putting them on direct flights into and out of private airports.

That means the flight itself should be what Aero described as a luxurious, social experience — and you also get to skip the nightmare of airport security. For example, the company ran test flights over the summer in partnership with a European air carrier, transporting passengers directly between Mykonos (Greece) and Ibiza (Spain), and it plans to start selling tickets to Telluride and La Paz (Mexico) next month.

Camp (who, in addition to Expa, co-founded StumbleUpon and Uber) previously invested in private jet startup BlackJet, which eventually shut down.

When asked for who’s been taking these flights so far, a company spokesperson said, “Our customers are experience driven, and skew towards millennial and Gen Z customers who believe that seamless air should be part of their travel experience.”

Aero also said it’s developing a mobile-first booking and ticketing system.

“I am super excited to be leading the Aero team to bring to life our vision of ushering in a new golden age of air travel,” Subramanian said in a statement. “I believe that flying should be a magical experience – not just getting from A to B, but rather an experience to be savored and shared. We want to be the premier air carrier for the experience economy.”

The digital payments market is forecast to balloon to $3 trillion by 2023, and today a startup that lets businesses implement not just payments, but also the many other related (and necessary) services that go along with them, by way of a single API, has raised a big round of funding to meet that demand.

Rapyd, a London-based startup that bills itself as a “fintech as a service” provider, has picked up $100 million, money it will use to expand its platform — which today lets customers use its API to enable checkout, funds collection, fund disbursements, compliance as a service, foreign exchange, card issuing and integration — as well as to make acquisitions and expand its team.

This brings the total raised by Rapyd to $160 million. We understand that the valuation in this latest round comes at a significant spike and is now at close to $1 billion.

“Rapid” is indeed the operative word when it comes to Rapyd: the company is not only riding a wave of strong growth, but this is the second funding round it has raised this year, after raising $40 million in February. Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of Rapyd, says the total payments volume on the platform (that is, how much Rapyd is moving) has grown more than five times this year, and that next year it’s forecasting that its revenue run rate will triple compared to 2019.

Rapyd doesn’t disclose current revenue numbers, but it counts companies like Uber, other large marketplaces and digital and brick-and-mortar merchants among its customers, to give you an idea of the kinds of companies and businesses that use its white-label service.

This latest round is being led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Tiger Global, Coatue, General Catalyst, Target Global, Stripe, and Entrée Capital. GC and Stripe led its previous round. Stripe is currently one of the very biggest players in the world of venture-backed fintech startups: in September it announced a $250 million round that values it at over $35 billion. But interestingly, Stripe’s position in Rapyd, at least for now, is not tied to working with the company. Shtilman describes Stripe a “just a financial investor.”

The challenge that Rapyd has identified and is tackling is the fragmentation that exists in the global payments market: each region has its own preferred payment methods (not every consumer globally uses credit or debit cards, and even if they do, accepting them all involves payment deals at the local level), and increasingly there is a lot more regulatory compliance that needs to be followed when making or taking payments.

All of that is not a core competency of most businesses, and that has led to the emergence of fintech companies that knit all that together behind the scenes. Currently, Rapyd’s platform allows these customers to accept cash, bank transfers, e-wallets, and local debit card payments in over 100 countries; make disbursements in more than 170 countries; and multi-currency settlement in 65 currencies, numbers that Shtilman said are continuing to grow as it continues making more interconnection deals with local partners.

Rapyd is not the only company targeting that opportunity: Adyen, PayPal. WorldPay, and increasingly Stripe are among the other big names also providing services in this area. Rapyd’s unique selling point, however, lies in the fact that it offers its services through one Swiss army knife-style API, that continues to grow.

“We are excited to become investors in Rapyd and believe the Company is enabling global internet companies to improve their ability to accept local payments in emerging markets,”.  said Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global Management, in a statement.

Shtilman likes to compare his company to AWS when it comes to continually expanding services and features. He said that since its last funding round in February, the company has not only expanded the number of countries that it covers — he notes that Asia Pacific and Latin America are currently its fastest-growing regions — but it has added in more marketplace features like escrow account management and more compliance-related capabilities.

“We’ve had a significant boost in the platform and now have very large customers in the process of getting on board,” he added.

Given that so much of the e-commerce world is linked to the sale of physical goods (not just services), that presents an interesting opportunity for Rapyd to move into another big area of the ecosystem: logistics. Indeed, Shtilman noted that the company is currently working on its first partnerships in that area, which will likely first launch in Asia Pacific.

Whichever area Rapyd tackles after that, the main idea will be to continue to apply digitised processes to those that have traditionally been done manually, which not only helps to speed up transactions, but make them less prone to errors and more traceable. “With humans in the middle of transactions, it opens you up to disaster,” Shtilman noted.

“As financial services become increasingly digitized and global, Rapyd’s fintech-as-a-service approach has tremendous growth potential,” said Tricia Kemp, co-founder and managing partner at Oak HC/FT, in a statement. “We’re thrilled to back and partner with the Rapyd team as they tackle one of the biggest challenges in financial services by helping businesses navigate the complexity of local and cross-border digital payments.”

Europe’s top court has ruled that pre-checked consent boxes for dropping cookies are not legally valid.

Consent must be obtained prior to storing or accessing non-essential cookies, such as tracking cookies for targeted advertising. Consent cannot be implied or assumed.

It’s a decision that — at stroke — plunges websites into legal hot water in Europe if their cookie notices don’t ask for consent first. As many don’t, preferring not to risk their ability to track users for ad targeting.

Now they could be risking a big fine under EU privacy laws if they don’t obtain valid consent for tracking.

Sites that have relied upon opting EU users into ad-tracking cookies in the hopes they’ll just click okay to make the cookie banner go away are in for a rude awakening.

Or, to put it another way, the ruling should put a stop to some, er, ‘creative’ interpretations of the rules around cookies that manage to completely miss the point of the law…

ehem

The decision is also likely to influence the ongoing reform of ePrivacy rules — which govern online tracking.

While the outcome of that very heavily lobbied piece of legislation remains to be seen today’s ruling is clearly a win for privacy.

Planet49 case

The backstory to today’s ruling is that a German court asked the CJEU for a decision in a case relating to a lottery website, Planet49, which had required users to consent to the storage of cookies in order to play a promotional game.

In an earlier opinion an influential advisor to the court also took the view that affirmative action not simple inaction must be necessary to constitute consent.

Today the CJEU agreed, handing down a final judgement which makes it plain that consent can’t be assumed — it requires an active opt-in from users.

In a punchily brief press release the court writes:

In today’s judgment, the Court decides that the consent which a website user must give to the storage of and access to cookies on his or her equipment is not validly constituted by way of a prechecked checkbox which that user must deselect to refuse his or her consent.

That decision is unaffected by whether or not the information stored or accessed on the user’s equipment is personal data. EU law aims to protect the user from any interference with his or her private life, in particular, from the risk that hidden identifiers and other similar devices enter those users’ terminal equipment without their knowledge.

The Court notes that consent must be specific so that the fact that a user selects the button to participate in a promotional lottery is not sufficient for it to be concluded that the user validly gave his or her consent to the storage of cookies.

Furthermore, according to the Court, the information that the service provider must give to a user includes the duration of the operation of cookies and whether or not third parties may have access to those cookies.

So, to sum up, pre-checked consent boxes (or cookie banners that tell you a cookie has already been dropped and pointlessly invite you to click ‘ok’) aren’t valid under EU law. 

Furthermore cookie consent can’t be bundled with another purpose (in the Planet49 case the promotional lottery) — at least if that fuzzy signal is being used to stand for consent.

There’s also an interesting new requirement which looks set to shrink the ability of service operators to obfuscate how persistently they’re tracking Internet users.

For consent to cookies to be legally valid the court now says the user must be provided with some specific information on the tracking, namely: How long the cookie will operate, and who their data will be shared with. So, er, awkward…

“Extending information requirement to include cookie configuration details is an interesting twist that will provide more information to users,” Dr. Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity advisor and research associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University, told us.

“Sites will need to be wary to be sure that the user-facing text matches the actually used values of max-age or expires attributes. It is also interesting to wonder if sites will want to provide similar information about other cookie attributes.”

Safe to say, there will be some long faces in the ad industry today.

“The Court has made clear that consent should always be manifested in an active manner, and may not be presumed. Therefore, online operators should ensure that they do not collect consent by asking users to unclick a pre-formulated declaration of consent,” said Luca Tosoni, a research fellow in computers and law at the University of Oslo, also commenting on the court ruling.

ePrivacy reform

As we’ve reported before very many sites and services in Europe have, at best, been playing lip-service to EU cookie consent requirements — despite the advent of tighter rules coming into force last year under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which says that consent must be specific, informed and freely given to be a valid legal basis. And despite — more recently — further guidance from DPAs clarifying the rules around cookie consent.

“Before the entry into force of the GDPR, the conditions for consent were interpreted differently across Europe. Today’s judgment is important as it brings some clarity on what should be considered valid consent under EU data protection law,” Tosoni also told us, saying he expects the ruling to result in changes to many cookie notifications.

“National courts and data protection authorities across the EU will need to follow the Court’s interpretation when assessing whether controllers have validly obtained consent. In turn, this should lead to more harmonization in enforcement across Europe, in particular with regard to cookie notices. Thus, I would expect many operators to change their non-compliant consents to conform with the ruling.”

EU law on cookie consent dates back much earlier than the GDPR — to the prior Data Protection Directive and the still in force ePrivacy Directive — Article 5(3) of which specifies that for cookies to be used users must give opt-in consent after being provided with clear and comprehensive information (with only a limited exception for ‘strictly necessary’ cookies).

Although European legislators have been trying for years to agree on an update to the ePrivacy Directive.

A draft proposal for an ePrivacy Regulation was introduced by the Commission at the start of 2017. But negotiations have been anything but smooth — with a blitz of lobbying from the adtech and telecoms industries pushing against a firm requirement for opt-in consent to tracking.

The CJEU’s clarity that consent is required to store and access cookies pushes in the opposite direction. And that firm legal line protecting individual privacy from background tracking technologies should be harder for legislators to ignore.

“Today’s ruling is likely to have a significant impact on the ongoing negotiations on the ePrivacy Regulation which is set to regulate cookie usage, an issue on which European legislators are struggling to find an agreement,” Tosoni also told us, adding: “In the past, the Court’s rulings have had an important impact on the development of the GDPR.”

In the meanwhile, the judgement should at least force some of the more cynical and/or stupid cookie banners to be quietly replaced with something that at least asks for consent.

Cookie walls

That said, the ruling does not resolve all the problems around cookie consent.

Specifically the court has not waded into the contentious forced consent/cookie wall issue. This is where a site requires consent to advertising cookies as the ‘price’ for accessing the sought for service, with the only other option being to leave.

Earlier this year the Dutch DPA deemed cookie walls to be illegal. But the agency’s interpretation is open to legal challenge. Only the CJEU can have the final word.

In the Planet49 case the court sidestepped the issue — saying the referring court did not ask it to rule on the question of “whether it is compatible with the requirement that consent be ‘freely given’, within the meaning of Article 2(h) of Directive 95/46 and of Article 4(11) and Article 7(4) of Regulation 2016/679, for a user’s consent to the processing of his personal data for advertising purposes to be a prerequisite to that user’s participation in a promotional lottery, as appears to be the case in the main proceedings”.

“In those circumstances, it is not appropriate for the Court to consider that question,” it wrote.

Likely it’s doing so because another case is already set to consider that question. Tosoni says he expects the Orange Romania case — which is pending before the court — to further clarify the requirements of valid consent in the context of it being ‘freely given’.

“Some uncertainty on the requirements of valid consent remains. Indeed, in today’s judgment, the Court has primarily clarified what constitutes unambiguous and specific consent, but the Court has, for example, not clarified what degree of autonomy a data subject should enjoy when choosing whether or not to give consent for the latter to be considered “freely given”,” he said.

“Today’s judgment does not provide an answer on the legality of cookie walls, which require consent to access the underlying service.  The Court found that it was unable to address this point, as the referring German court had not asked the ECJ to assess the legality of making participation in a lottery — the service at issue in the case — subject to giving advertising cookie consent.  Further clarity on this issue may come from the Orange Romania case, which is currently pending before the ECJ.”

We’ve reached out to the IAB Europe for a response to the ruling and to ask what advice it will be issuing to its members. At the time of writing it had not yet responded to these questions. 

A team of security researchers found they could tap into Webex and Zoom video meetings because many weren’t protected with a code.

Researchers at Cequence, a startup focused on protecting applications from scraping and account takeovers, programmed a bot to cycle through lists of valid meeting IDs and get access to active conference calls. The vulnerability works because many companies and users don’t protect their meetings with a password, either for convenience or they had not checked their default settings, coupled with a limited pool of meeting IDs.

By targeting the platforms’ APIs, they were able to automate the process.

The researchers reported the flaws to both Cisco, which owns Webex, and Zoom in July. Both companies have since pushed out fixes.

The attack would not be silent, however: callers who successfully access a meeting are announced. But it represents

Cisco said it was “not aware” of any malicious exploitation of the vulnerability on its platform. Zoom said it was “grateful” to the researchers, adding that it improved its server protections to prevent bot attacks.

Zoom caught flack in July when it failed to remove a web server from Macs when users uninstalled the app, causing a security scare. The company fixed the issue, but Apple was later forced to intervene to ensure all Mac users were protected.

Cequence earlier this year secured $17 million in its Series B backed by Dell Technologies Capital and Shasta Ventures, bringing the total raised to $30 million.

Rhino, the insurtech startup incubated by Kairos and co-founded by Kairos CEO Ankur Jain, has today announced the close of a $21 million Series A round led by Kairos and Lakestar.

Rhino was founded in 2017 with the goal of putting the billions of dollars that are locked up in cash security deposits to renters, all while protecting landlords and their property. As it stands now, landlords usually take one month’s rent to cover any damage that might be done to the apartment during the lease. This is piled on top of first and sometimes last month’s rent, and even at times a broker’s fee of one month’s rent, which adds up to an incredibly steep cost of moving.

Because of certain regulations, this money is held in an individual escrow account and can’t really generate interest, which results in billions of dollars zapped out of the economy and instead sitting dead in some account.

Rhino is looking to give renters the option to pay a small monthly fee (as low as $3) to cover an insurance policy for the landlord. Rhino is itself a managing general agent, allowing the company to both sell and create policy plans for landlords through partnerships with carriers.

Thus far the startup has saved renters upwards of $60 million in 2019, with users in more than 300,000 rental units across the country.

“The greatest challenge is working against legacy and industry norms,” said Rhino CEO and cofounder Paraag Sarva. “That start has begun, but there is a huge amount of inertia behind the status quo and that is far and away what we are most challenged by day in and day out.”

To help speed up the process, Rhino is working alongside policymakers to enact change on a federal level.

Alongside the funding announcement, the company is announcing its new policy proposal that was created in collaboration with federal, state and local government officials. The policy essentially allows for renters to be given a choice when it comes to cash deposits, including allowing residents to cover security deposits in installments or use insurtech products like Rhino to cover deposits.

Rhino says it will be sharing the policy proposal with 2020 Presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle.

Rhino is one of a handful of companies that has been incubated by Kairos, a startup studio led by Ankur Jain with the goal of solving the biggest problems faced by everyday Americans. The studio focuses on housing and healthcare, with companies such as Rhino, June Homes, Little Spoon, Cera and a couple startups still in stealth.