Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The Galaxy Fold comes in a nice box. It’s a thing I rarely, if ever, mention in product write-ups, because, if done right, shipping containers are generally the least interesting thing about a product. But Samsung, to its credit, has taken great care. That’s been one of the constants across this admittedly bungled product launch: presentation.

The first time I saw the device, it was well lit, in an elaborate display behind several layers of glass on the floor of Mobile World Congress. Samsung wasn’t letting anyone go past a literal velvet rope a few feet from the device.

When we finally got our hands on the Fold, Samsung had laid out several large boxes, which, when opened, had the effect of raising the device up, toward the viewer. It was a fun thing for a room full of journalists who had largely been engaging with the product through guarded curiosity, wondering aloud whether it would ever actually see the light of day.

That skepticism was warranted, as it turned out. The Fold came back broken from several reviewers. After placing the blame at the feet of users, Samsung eventually changed tack, pushed back the April release date indefinitely and tried to get to the bottom of what was going on with the product.

This week, the Fold returns to North American store shelves — or, rather, it finally debuts, about five months after initially planned. And once again, Samsung’s delivering the device in a nice box. The purpose of this one, however, is as much about setting expectations as it is providing a splashy debut.

Really, it’s like the analog version of the “Caring for Your Fold” video the company debuted on YouTube last week. It was as flashy and well-produced as we’d expect from Samsung, right down to the dramatic piano music while instructing the viewer to “Just use a light touch.” That note arrived with its own (somewhat redundant) footnote: “Do not apply excessive pressure to it.”

Similarly, the Fold box comes with its fair share of paperwork. The first bit is an overview of Galaxy Fold “Premier Service,” the white-glove offering the company announced a while back. That was, it explained, the reason it canceled initial AT&T pre-orders. The 24/7 service comes free with the purchase of the $2,000 phone, offering users phone support, starting with setup. The company’s got a call center in North Carolina fielding the calls during U.S. business hours, and routes them abroad after that.

There are other elements to it, as well, including a $149 screen warranty. All of these pieces add up to a company confident enough to bring the product back to market, but not quite ready to ensure that the Fold’s screens might not crack under pressure for some. In fact, there’s a five-point warranty adhered to the screen that warns against:

• Excessive pressure (It’s the terror of knowing what the world is about / Watching some good friends screaming / “Let me out!”)
• Placing objects like keys on the screen before folding
• Exposing the Fold to water or dust
• Adding your own screen protector to the existing screen protector
• Keeping the device next to easily deactivated objects like credit cards (or, in my experience, hotel key cards) and *gulp* implanted medical devices

The product does, thankfully, ship with a case, which is a thin, two-piece snap-on covering. It won’t protect the front display from scratches, but it may help the product avoid dings if dropped. When closed, at least. I’m very much looking forward to someone purchasing the device for extensive drop testing while open.

Samsung does get some bonus points for also throwing in a pair of its very good Galaxy Buds Bluetooth earbuds for free. A nice gesture, to be sure.

As those who read the site with some regularity likely already know, we’ve actually spent a significant amount of time with the device. I was carrying the original version of the Fold around during our Robotics event back in April. Fitting, I suppose, that I’ll be sporting it next week at Disrupt. I do once again plan to hold onto the phone for a bit to get a better idea of day to day life with the foldable (though I likely won’t be doing daily dispatches this time).

Full disclosure: Samsung just gave us the revised version of the product yesterday afternoon. Hardly enough time to give you anything conclusive, so I’m not going to pretend to do so here. I will say that aesthetically, very little has changed. For better and worse. The one immediate thing that leaps out is the lack of a visible screen protector.

If you’ll recall, that was a major source of the problems last time out. The edges of the built-in screen protector were visible and, yes, it looked an awful lot like the removable screen protectors other Galaxy products ship with. Did I peel it off? No. Was I tempted? You better believe it.

This time out, the laminate has been extended to under the outer edges to avoid that temptation altogether. The other big fixes include plugging the gaps in the hinges that previously allowed debris to fall behind the screen, damaging it when pressure is applied. There’s also a new, unseen layer of metal under the display designed to reinforce the screen. This gives the device a slightly more rigid feel.

Otherwise, the hardware is largely unchanged, including the small 4.6-inch window display up front and the large 7.3-inch foldable screen inside, which still has a visible seam when the light reflects it at an angle.

There’s a tacit understanding that the Fold is an imperfect device. The product builds upon a decade of experience creating Galaxy flagship smartphones, along with all of Samsung’s prior electronics knowledge, but the foldable category is still very much a kind of uncharted territory. Companies are going to fail plenty before they succeed here, and at very least, Samsung deserves some kudos for being among the first to try the thing, tumbling a bit and getting back up and trying again.

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There remains the important question, however, of whether consumers are okay with what feels a little like an extended beta test — albeit one that costs $2,000 to join. Thankfully, Samsung got some of those unfortunate bungles out of the way before bringing the product to market. Along with a reinforced display, however, Samsung does appear to be girding itself for the possibility that consumers will find creative and new ways to mangle the display — accidentally and otherwise.

Suffice it to say, I’ve got a lot more thoughts on the matter, many of which I’ll be formulating over the coming days and weeks. So, stay tuned for those. Meantime, if you’d like to leap before you look, the Fold can be yours this Friday, starting at $1,980 U.S.

A recently revealed mobile malware campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims also ensnared a number of senior Tibetan officials and activists, according to new research.

Security researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab say some of the Tibetan targets were sent specifically tailored malicious web links over WhatsApp, which, when opened, stealthily gained full access to their phone, installed spyware and silently stole private and sensitive information.

The exploits shared “technical overlaps” with a recently disclosed campaign targeting Uyghur Muslims, an oppressed minority in China’s Xinjiang state. Google last month disclosed the details of the campaign, which targeted iPhone users, but did not say who was targeted or who was behind the attack. Sources told TechCrunch that Beijing was to blame. Apple, which patched the vulnerabilities, later confirmed the exploits targeted Uyghurs.

Although Citizen Lab would not specify who was behind the latest round of attacks, the researchers said the same group targeting both Uyghurs and Tibetans also utilized Android exploits. Those exploits, recently disclosed and detailed by security firm Volexity, were used to steal text messages, contact lists and call logs, as well as watch and listen through the device’s camera and microphone.

It’s the latest move in a marked escalation of attacks on ethnic minority groups under surveillance and subjection by Beijing. China has long claimed rights to Tibet, but many Tibetans hold allegiance to the country’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. Rights groups say China continues to oppress the Tibetan people, just as it does with Uyghurs.

A spokesperson for the Chinese consulate in New York did not return an email requesting comment, but China has long denied state-backed hacking efforts, despite a consistent stream of evidence to the contrary. Although China has recognized it has taken action against Uyghurs on the mainland, it instead categorizes its mass forced detentions of more than a million Chinese citizens as “re-education” efforts, a claim widely refuted by the west.

The hacking group, which Citizen Lab calls “Poison Carp,” uses the same exploits, spyware and infrastructure to target Tibetans as well as Uyghurs, including officials in the Dalai Lama’s office, parliamentarians and human rights groups.

Bill Marczak, a research fellow at Citizen Lab, said the campaign was a “major escalation” in efforts to access and sabotage these Tibetans groups.

In its new research out Tuesday and shared with TechCrunch, Citizen Lab said a number of Tibetan victims were targeted with malicious links sent in WhatsApp messages by individuals purporting to work for Amnesty International and The New York Times. The researchers obtained some of those WhatsApp messages from TibCERT, a Tibetan coalition for sharing threat intelligence, and found each message was designed to trick each target into clicking the link containing the exploit. The links were disguised using a link-shortening service, allowing the attackers to mask the full web address but also gain insight into how many people clicked on a link and when.

“The ruse was persuasive,” the researchers wrote. During a week-long period in November 2018, the targeted victims opened more than half of the attempted infections. Not all were infected, however; all of the targets were running non-vulnerable iPhone software.

The researchers said tapping on a malicious link targeting iPhones would trigger a chain of exploits designed to target a number of vulnerabilities, one after the other, in order to gain access to the underlying, typically off-limits, iPhone software.

The chain “ultimately executed a spyware payload designed to steal data from a range of applications and services,” said the report.

Once the exploitation had been achieved, a spyware implant would be installed, allowing the attackers to collect and send data to the attackers’ command and control server, including locations, contacts, call history, text messages and more. The implant also would exfiltrate data, like messages and content, from a hardcoded list of apps — most of which are popular with Asian users, like QQMail and Viber.

Apple had fixed the vulnerabilities months earlier (in July 2018); they were later confirmed as the same flaws found by Google earlier this month.

“Our customers’ data security is one of Apple’s highest priorities and we greatly value our collaboration with security researchers like Citizen Lab,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The iOS issue detailed in the report had already been discovered and patched by the security team at Apple. We always encourage customers to download the latest version of iOS for the best and most current security enhancements.”

Meanwhile, the researchers found that the Android-based attacks would detect which version of Chrome was running on the device and would serve a matching exploit. Those exploits had been disclosed and were “obviously copied” from previously released proof-of-concept code published by their finders on bug trackers, said Marczak. A successful exploitation would trick the device into opening Facebook’s in-app Chrome browser, which gives the spyware implant access to device data by taking advantage of Facebook’s vast number of device permissions.

The researchers said the code suggests the implant could be installed in a similar way using Facebook Messenger, and messaging apps WeChat and QQ, but failed to work in the researchers’ testing.

Once installed, the implant downloads plugins from the attacker’s server in order to collect contacts, messages, locations and access to the device’s camera and microphone.

When reached, Google did not comment. Facebook, which received Citizen Lab’s report on the exploit activity in November 2018, did not comment at the time of publication.

“From an adversary perspective what makes mobile an attractive spying target is obvious,” the researchers wrote. “It’s on mobile devices that we consolidate our online lives and for civil society that also means organizing and mobilizing social movements that a government may view as threatening.”

“A view inside a phone can give a view inside these movements,” they said.

The researchers also found another wave of links trying to trick a Tibetan parliamentarian into allowing a malicious app access to their Gmail account.

Citizen Lab said the threat from the mobile malware campaign was a “game changer.”

“These campaigns are the first documented cases of iOS exploits and spyware being used against these communities,” the researchers wrote. But attacks like Poison Carp show mobile threats “are not expected by the community,” as shown by the high click rates on the exploit links.

Gyatso Sither, TibCERT’s secretary, said the highly targeted nature of these attacks presents a “huge challenge” for the security of Tibetans.

“The only way to mitigate these threats is through collaborative sharing and awareness,” he said.

Jellysmack originally started as a social media company with popular brands on Facebook and other social platforms, such as Beauty Studio, Oh My Goal, Gamology and Riddle Me This. The company is now branching out and expanding with a different product, the ‘Creator’s Program.’

The startup is going to partner with popular YouTube creators and grow their audience on other social media platforms, starting with Facebook and Snapchat. This way, YouTube creators get a new audience on a separate platform, which reduces dependency on YouTube’s algorithm.

Jellysmack has developed several tools for its own media brands, such as tools to detect popular content, optimize content itself and improve distribution on social platform. The company now attracts 88 million unique viewers per month in the U.S.

“We realized that we could reuse this suite of tools with many other creators and not just on our own content,” Jellysmack co-founder and CEO Michael Philippe told me.

The startup already identified a bunch of YouTube creators that could benefit from these tools. It has partnered with Reaction Time, Infinite, Karina Garcia, How Ridiculous and others.

After that, Jellysmack obtains all the back catalog of videos, recuts them and shares them on Facebook and Snapchat — 10-minute videos on YouTube will become 3-minute videos on Facebook for instance.

Jellysmack then tests multiple thumbnails and video names using A/B testing and a bit of paid promotion. When the startup has found a name and thumbnail that generates a lot of engagement, the company releases the video.

The company then invests some of its money to grow the audience of a Facebook page or Snapchat account using paid acquisition. “We have developed a proprietary acquisition tool that finds the right audiences,”

Everything is then tracked using Jellysmack’s tools. Each video is tagged and gets a score based on retention, monetization, etc. Creators could potentially leverage those insights for future videos.

Reaction Times had 80,000 Facebook fans before partnering with Jellysmack. It now has 3 million Facebook fans and generates 100 million views per month on the platform.

With today’s new program, Jellysmack says that its own brands will also stick around — this is just a new bet for the company. The company also plans to launch a new vertical in the future.

Cledara, a startup that has developed a SaaS to help companies manage their SaaS spending — as if things couldn’t get any more meta — has picked up pre-seed backing from the recently announced Anthemis/BBVA strategic partnership, and others.

In total, the startup has raised $930,000. This includes completing the Techstars London accelerator, along with investment from various angels, such as Chris Adelsbach.

Founded in July 2018 by Cristina Vila, after she experienced the SaaS management nightmare first-hand while working at London fintech Dopay, Cledara has developed software to let companies track and manage their SaaS usage and spending, including analytics to help understand if it is money well spent.

Another feature is unlimited virtual debit cards to empower employees and even outside teams to purchase appropriate SaaS offerings independently. This includes the option for management to approve every purchase before it happens and access real-time updates on what everyone is buying.

“Previously, I was responsible for the operations of a fintech company, and as part of my job I had to streamline processes which meant that I had to know what software people were using to do their job,” Vila tells me.

“Turns out, that that was a real challenge. We had offices in 3 different countries, remote developers, people working from home all signing up for different SaaS products and then expensing them back to the company. So I had to manually go around and ask everyone to fill in a spreadsheet to get the data, which was impossible because people only wrote those that they were actively using and could remember”.

Villa says this also caused problems for the finance team, since they could see payments going out each month but didn’t always know what they were for. “I looked around for solutions, spoke to founders to see how they were managing it and when the best answer was ‘Google Sheets’ I realised that something like Cledara had to exist”.

Describing the macro problem that Cledara hopes to solve, Villa says that every year companies waste more than $20 billion on duplicate, unused or forgotten software subscriptions. “There are dozens of companies that help sellers of subscription software optimise their sales but there is basically none that helps companies buy and manage their software subscription in a scalable way,” she adds. “We believe that unless companies have a way to manage cloud software at scale, it will be very difficult for SaaS to reach the mass market”.

To that end, Cledara is being pitched as a purchasing and analytics platform that enables companies to manage and control recurring subscription payments. In this sense, it is a fintech as much as a traditional SaaS — hence the Anthemis/BBVA backing.

Villa cites direct competitors as companies like Soldo, Pleo or Spendesk. “We are different in that we are fully focused on helping tech companies with the purchase and the ongoing management of their subscriptions because everything is becoming a subscription and the way to manage one off payments if very different to the way in which we manage recurring payments,” she argues.

“Also, we are building a collaborative platform, hence breaking the traditional finance silo where all the data is gathered but not shared. We want to provide that data to the business as they are the ones that can take action based on the analytics and insights”.

Meanwhile, the startup generates revenue from subscription fees, and through interchange fees via the Cledara virtual Mastercard debit cards its customers use to make SaaS purchases.

Honestbee, the Singapore-based grocery delivery startup that has been struggling with financial issues, owes 217 employees a total of almost USD $1 million in unpaid salary. The Strait Times reported that the figure was revealed in an affidavit filed in court on Sept. 20 by Honestbee CEO Ong Lay Ann as part of the startup’s debt moratorium application.

The Ministry of Manpower told the Strait Times that 44 employees have filed claims with the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management, with some of the employees settling mediation by agreeing to a payment schedule with Honestbee that will be monitored by the alliance.

In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, an Honestbee spokesperson said, “There is a communicated salary delay for Honestbee’s ex-employees and employees currently serving notice. While there are regular injections of working capital, the amount remains insufficient for all headcount. As a result, the company has made the difficult decision to prioritize existing staff in Singapore. The company has the full intention in meeting its obligations to staff and will be, if not already in active discussions with staff in relation to a feasible payment schedule.”

TechCrunch reported in April that Honestbee was running out of money and trying to find a buyer. The company, which used to operate in eight markets across Asia, has stopped operating in Hong Kong and Indonesia, temporarily halted services in Japan and the Philippines and suspended its food delivery service in Thailand.

The affidavit filed by Ong says Honestbee currently has 190 employees, down from 523 full-time employees and 77 part-time workers in January.

Ong also said that Honestbee chairman Brian Koo resigned from the board on on Sept. 12.

According to the affidavit, Koo and associates including investment vehicles he set up, are owed about $258 million, or about 90% of Honestbee’s debt. Koo, a founding managing partner of venture capital firm Formation Group, was one of Honestbee’s earliest investors and served as interim CEO from May to July after former chief executive Joel Sng stepped down.

Kik Interactive CEO Ted Livingston announced today that the company is shutting down Kik Messenger to focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, the target of a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company’s team will be reduced to 19 people, a reduction that will affect over 100 employees, as it focuses on converting more Kin users into buyers.

“Instead of selling some of our Kin into the limited liquidity that exists today, we made the decision to focus our current resources on the few things that matter most,” Livingston wrote in a blog post, adding that the changes will reduce the company’s burn rate by 85%, enabling it to get through the SEC trial.

Kin launched two years ago, raising nearly $100 million in its ICO, one of the first held by a mainstream tech company.

But in June, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Kik Interactive, claiming the ICO was illegal, as part of the Commission’s wider crackdown on companies it alleges are issuing securities illegally.

The SEC also claimed that the company’s management had predicted Kik Messenger would run out of money by 2017, when it started planning the launch of Kin. Kik Interactive hit back in a court filing last month, saying that the SEC’s claims about its finances were “solely designed for misdirection, thereby prejudicing Kik and portraying it in a negative light.”

One of the core issues in the lawsuit is whether or not Kin is a security. The SEC alleges that it is and that the token sale violated securities laws. Kik Interactive denies Kin is a security.

“After 18 months of working with the SEC the only choice they gave us was to either label Kin a security or fight them in court. Becoming a security would kill the usability of any cryptocurrency and set a dangerous precedent for the industry,” Livingston wrote in today’s blog post. “So with the SEC working to characterize almost all cryptocurrencies as securities we made the decision to step forward and fight.”

Livingston added that since Kin isn’t available on most exchanges, it doesn’t rely on speculative demand. Instead, Kin is used by “millions of people in dozens of independent apps,” with more than two million monthly active users and 600,000 monthly active spenders, he wrote. Kik Interactive’s objective now is to increase those numbers.

To get more people who buy Kin to use the currency, Livingston said the company will focus on three things: enabling the Kin blockchain to support a billion consumers making a dozen transactions a day, with confirmation times of less than a second; increasing adoption and growth for developers who use Kin in their apps; and building a mobile wallet that makes it easier to buy and use Kin.

If you’re a VC or founder in London, Bangalore or San Francisco, you’ll likely interact with some part of Africa’s tech landscape for the first time — or more — in the near future. When measured by monetary values, the continent’s tech ecosystem is small by Shenzhen or Silicon Valley standards.

But when you look at year-over-year expansion in venture capital, startup formation and tech hubs, it’s one of the fastest-growing tech markets in the world.

Join us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF where we will host a Q&A session on VC in Africa with Orange Digital Ventures’ Marieme Diop, International Finance Organization‘s Wale Ayeni and 500 Startups’ Sheel Mohnot, three Africa-based investors who bring plenty of experience screening startups across its top tech hubs. We’ll open up the bulk of the session to allow Disrupt attendees to ask questions of each speaker.

Marieme Diop oversees Africa VC investments at Orange Digital Ventures, the funding arm of France’s largest telecom, Orange.

Under her tutelage, Orange Digital Ventures  (ODV) participated in a $16 million round for South African fintech startup Yoco and the $8.6 million round to Africa’s Talking—a Pan-African business enterprise software startup.

Formed in 2017, ODV is a €150 fund with €50 allocated for Africa, according to Diop. Orange was one of the early investors in Africa focused e-commerce unicorn, Jumia, which recently went public in a NYSE IPO.

Diop is also working to bridge the resource gap for startups in French-speaking Africa — or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.

This year she was a co-founder of Dakar Angels Network, a seed fund offering $25,000 to $100,000 investments and entrepreneurial guidance to early-stage ventures in Francophone Africa.

Wale Ayeni leads the IFC venture capital practice focused on Sub-Saharan Africa — IFC is part of the World Bank Group. The IFC’s venture capital team focuses on technology companies in frontier markets, and has deployed ~$800 million in early/growth-stage tech investments over the past decade.

Recent funding includes co-leading a $6.5 million Series A round in South African fintech company Lulalend and participating in one of the larger tech investments in African tech this year — the $20 million Series A round raised by Nigerian trucking logistics startup Kobo360.

Sheel Mohnot leads fintech investments for 500 Startups . The San Francisco based accelerator has been out front on Africa, taking its Geeks on a Plane tour to the continent in 2017, and racking up over 40 Africa related investments, according to Mohnot.

He recently led 500 Startups’ seed-stage investment in Chipper Cash, an Africa focused cross-border payment venture.

Startups building financial technologies for Africa’s 1.2 billion population are gaining greater attention of investors. As a sector, fintech (or financial inclusion) attracted 50% of the estimated $1.1 billion funding to African startups in 2018, according to Partech.

So bring your bring your questions on investing in fintech and other sectors in Africa to Disrupt SF on October 4, where speakers Diop, Ayeni, and Mohnot will take the Q&A stage to share their expert insights.

Facebook is buying CTRL-labs, a NY-based startup building an armband that translates movement and the wearer’s neural impulses into digital input signals, a company spokesperson tells TechCrunch.

CTRL-labs raised $67 million according to Crunchbase. The startup’s investors include GV, Lux Capital, Amazon’s Alexa Fund, Spark Capital, Founders Fund, among others. Facebook didn’t disclose how much they paid for the startup, but we’re digging around.

The acquisition, which has not yet closed, will bring the startup into the company’s Facebook Reality Labs division. CTRL labs’ CEO and co-founder Thomas Reardon, a veteran technologist whose accolades include founding the team at Microsoft that built Internet Explorer, will be joining Facebook while CTRL-labs’ employees will have the option to do the same, we are told.

CTRL-labs’ technology isn’t focused on text-entry as much as it is muscle movement and hand movements specifically. The startup’s progress was most recently distilled in a developer kit which paired multiple types of sensors together to accurately determine the wearer’s hand position. The wrist-worn device offered developers an alternative to camera-based or glove-based hand-tracking solutions. The company has previously talked about AR and VR input as a clear use case for the kit. Facebook did not give details on what this acquisition means for developers currently using CTRL-labs’ kit.

This acquisition also brings the armband patents of North (formerly Thalmic Labs) to Facebook. CTRL-labs purchased the patents related to the startup’s defunct Myo armband earlier this year for an undisclosed sum.

CTRL-labs acquisition brings more IP and talent under Facebook’s wings as competitors like Microsoft and Apple continue to build out augmented reality products. There is plenty of overlap between many of the technologies that Oculus is building for Facebook’s virtual reality products like the Quest and Rift S, but CTRL-Labs’ tech can help the company build input devices that are less bulky, less conspicuous and more robust.

“There are some fundamental advantages that we have over really any camera-based technology — including Leap Motion or Kinect — because we’re directly on the body sensing the signal that’s going from the brain to the hand.”  CTRL-labs Head of R&D Adam Berenzweig told TechCrunch in an interview late last year. “There are no issues with collusion or field-of-view problems — it doesn’t matter where your hands are, whether they’re in a glove or a spacesuit.”

Facebook is holding its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference later this week where the company will be delivering updates on its AR/VR efforts.

Engage:BDR announced today that it has raised $23.25 million in new funding.

CEO Ted Dhanik told me that this includes both debt and equity funding, and will be used to the grow the company’s NetZero payments program.

NetZero is designed to address the ongoing issue of long delays faced by publishers before they get paid by advertisers. Dhanik said “the terms are getting worse and worse,” with publishers being asked to wait 30, 60, 90 or even 120 days after they invoice their advertising partners before payment.

Other companies like FastPay have tried to fill in the gap, but Dhanik said these loans can have interest rates as high as 25%. So the team at Engage:BDR (which is publicly traded on the Australian Securities Exchange) asked itself: “Hey, what if we could just pay publishers exact same day that they invoice us?”

Rather than making money by charging interest, Dhanik said his company is trying to drive more publishers to its programmatic advertising platform.

“We just want the business — the incremental revenue,” he said.

Engage:BDR says web, mobile and connected TV publishers in North America, Australia and Europe are eligible to participate in the NetZero program, though they’ll need to be approved by the company first.

“If you think about NetZero, you might think: Hey, if there’s fraud, it’s pretty dangerous you don’t have the ability to clawback [the payment],” Dhanik said. But apparently Engage:BDR has “a lot of technology in place to qualify them pretty quickly, within the first few days.”

Stationhead, the mobile app that turns its users into streaming radio DJs, got a big upgrade today. Where Stationhead DJs were previously limited to broadcasting live, they can now record their shows, making them available on-demand for anyone to listen later.

The idea behind Stationhead is to democratize and recapture the personality of traditional radio broadcasts — the kind of conversation and personal connection that’s missing from a playlist.

The app includes features like the ability to call guests to join the show, and integration with Spotify and Apple Music. For Stationhead, that means it doesn’t have to make its own licensing deals with the music labels; for listeners, it means that when a DJ plays a song, you’re hearing it stream from the music service of your choice.

That integration will continue with these new on-demand broadcasts — so they don’t really exist as a single, continuous recording, but rather as DJ recordings interspersed with cued-up songs from Apple or Spotify. (That’s presumably why these broadcasts won’t be available for offline listening.)

CEO Ryan Star has said that he co-founded Stationhead as a result of his own frustrations as an independent musician, particularly the difficulty and cost of getting a single played on the radio.

More recently, he told me that Stationhead is becoming a real alternative for independent musicians trying to get attention, with more than 200,000 shows created since November of last year.

“Some shows are mostly talk, some shows are mostly music, but just having the ability to play the song completely changes the way it’s consumed,” said COO Levison.

The company isn’t sharing overall listener numbers, but it pointed to success stories like Burrell Kobe, who said he drove 23,000 streams on Stationhead.

And Star described the Stationhead approach as combining “creative freedom and real human connection. While the most popular Stationhead broadcasts can get more than 1,000 live listeners, he suggested that the connection can happen even when the audience is much smaller:  He recalled stumbling on a broadcast where he was literally the only person listening, but the host was “spilling her guts — this was her therapy.”

And by making these broadcasts available on-demand, he said Stationhead is “tapping into something proven to be the most intimate form of communication.”

He added, “For the first time, you’re actually able to create binge-able audio content around these streams.”