Category: UNCATEGORIZED

When Salesforce launched Force.com in 2007 as a place for developers to build applications on top of Salesforce, it was a pivotal moment for the concept of SaaS platforms. Since then, it’s been said that every enterprise SaaS company wants to be a platform play. Today, New Relic achieved that goal when it announced the New Relic One Observability Platform at the company’s FutureStack conference in New York City.

Company co-founder and CEO Lew Cirne explained that in order to be a platform, by definition, it is something that other people can build software on. “What we are shipping is a set of capabilities to enable our customers and partners to build their own observability applications on the very same platform that we’ve built our product,” Cirne told TechCrunch.

He sees these third-party developers building applications to enable additional innovations on top of the New Relic platform that perhaps New Relic’s engineers couldn’t because of time and resource constraints. “There are so many use cases for this data, far more than the engineers that we have at our company could ever do, but a community of people who can do this together can totally unlock the power of this data,” Cirne said.

Like many platform companies, New Relic found that as it expanded its own offering, it required a platform for its developers to access a common set of services to build these additional offerings, and as they built out this platform, it made it possible to open it up to external developers to access the same set of services as the New Relic engineering team.

“What we have is metrics, logs, events and traces coming from our customers’ digital software. So they have access to all that data in real time to build applications, measure the health of their digital business and build applications on top of that. Just as Force.com was the thing that really transformed Salesforce as a company into being a strategic vendor, we think the same thing will happen for us with what we’re offering,” he said.

As a proof point for the platform, the company is releasing a dozen open source tools built on top of the New Relic platform today in conjunction with the announcement. One example is an application to help identify where companies could be over-spending on their AWS bills. “We’re actually finding 30-40% savings opportunities for them where they’re provisioning larger servers than they need for the workload. Based on the data that we’re analyzing, we’re recommending what the right size deployment should be,” Cirne said.

The New Relic One Observability Platform and the 12 free apps will be available starting today.

Zume first made waves by entering the scene as a robotic pizza company. Since then, however, the SF Bay Area startup has taken pains to demonstrate that it has its sights set on a loftier goal of providing sustainable infrastructure for the restaurant industry.

Last April, the company made its Zume Pizza wing a wholly owned subsidiary of the newly minted Zume Inc. Seven months later, it reportedly snapped up $375 million from SoftBank, and, in June, used some of that money to purchase Pivot, a plant-based alternative packaging company.

Today, the company takes an important step toward larger industry outreach with the announcement of new partner, &pizza. The chain, which operates 36 “fast-casual” locations, will be utilizing Zume’s “Forward Mobile Kitchen” trucks to expand outreach in its native Washington, D.C.

The food truck model opens the company to some new opportunities not always afforded by the standard brick and mortar model, including the ability to try out new neighborhoods and check the demand for different products.

“Today it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and takes a year, sometimes more, to open up a bricks and mortar store, but by leveraging our infrastructure they can open a new market in a matter of weeks and they can do it with a flexible financial model,” Zume CEO Alex Garden said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Zume’s offering is a combination of bespoke mobile kitchens that double as food trucks and delivery vehicles, combined with AI systems designed to better understand and respond to customer demand, based on location, traffic patterns and the like.

The deal isn’t make or break for Zume, but it’s an important step for a startup whose promises for profitability still appear fairly abstract from the outside. “What I can tell you for sure is that over between now and the end of the year there’s going to be really a staccato of announcements where we’ll talk about things we’re doing with partners and ways that we’re helping improve their businesses,” says Garden. “People can draw whatever conclusions they want from that financially, but all I can tell you about our financial approach to things is that we are good custodians of the investments that people have made in us and we take it really seriously.”

From the outside, at least, it appears as though the company has made a pivot from a focus on robot-made pizza to something much broader in search of a more viable model. Zume is quick to counter such claims, however, as Garden compares the company to the early days of Amazon. The executive notes that the company has shifted its focus to various aspects of the industry as offering real-world services like its pizza trucks has brought to life various solvable problems.

He turns to the example of pizza boxes, which Zume has transformed from the recognizable square cardboard variety to a round one with grates at the bottom, designed with the express purpose of keeping their contents warm.

“We did internet searches for two weeks trying to find packaging companies that made different pizza boxes and there really wasn’t very much out there, they’re almost all made by a small select group of companies that just repeat the same ideas over and over again,” Garden explains. “So I said, wow that’s really weird. Okay, well, let’s just, we’re a startup, no one can tell us what the rules are. Why don’t we just get a white board and draw what a cool pizza box would be.”

It’s a restless sort of approach to running a startup, but at very least, it has led the company in some interesting directions, and $375 million from SoftBank certainly demonstrates strong investor confidence for a startup with big ideas about revolutionizing the food industry.

Interestingly, it will also make &pizza a potential competitor for Zume Pizza, though the two won’t share a market for now. Garden adds that there’s plenty of space for competition. “People eat a lot of pizza,” he says. “I know it sounds like a trite answer, but there’s no risk at all of cannibalization.”

Google has completed a controversial take-over of the health division of its UK AI acquisition, DeepMind.

The personnel move had been delayed as National Health Service (NHS) trusts considered whether to shift their existing DeepMind contracts — some for a clinical task management app, others involving predictive health AI research — to Google.

In a blog post yesterday Dr Dominic King, formerly of DeepMind (and the NHS), now UK site lead at Google Health, confirmed the transfer, writing: “It’s clear that a transition like this takes time. Health data is sensitive, and we gave proper time and care to make sure that we had the full consent and cooperation of our partners. This included giving them the time to ask questions and fully understand our plans and to choose whether to continue our partnerships. As has always been the case, our partners are in full control of all patient data and we will only use patient data to help improve care, under their oversight and instructions.”

The Royal Free NHS Trust, Taunton & Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust all put out statements yesterday confirming they have moved their contractual arrangements to Google.

In the case of the Royal Free, patients’ Streams data is moving to the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure to support expanding use of the app which surfaces alerts for a kidney condition to another of its hospitals (Barnet Hospital).

One NHS trust, Yeovil District Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, has not signed a new contract — and says it had never deployed Streams, suggesting it had not found a satisfactory way to integrate the app with its existing ways of working — instead taking the decision to terminate the arrangement. Though it’s leaving the door open to future health service provision from Google.

A spokeswoman for Yeovil hospital sent us this statement:

We began our relationship with DeepMind in 2017 and since then have been determining what part the Streams application could play in clinical decision making here at Yeovil Hospital.

The app was never operationalised, and no patient data was processed.

What’s key for us as a hospital, when it comes to considering the implementation of any new piece of technology, is whether it improves the effectiveness and safety of patient care and how it tessellates with existing ways of working. Working with the DeepMind team, we found that Streams is not necessary for our organisation at the current time.

Whilst our contractual relationship has ended, we will remain an anchor partner of Google Health so will continue to be part of conversations about emerging technology which may be of benefit to our patients and our clinician in the future.

The hand-off of DeepMind Health to Google, which was announced just over a year ago, means the tech giant is now directly providing software services to a number of NHS trusts that had signed contracts with DeepMind for Streams; as well as taking over several AI research partnerships that involve the use of NHS patients’ data to try to develop predictive diagnostic models using AI technology.

DeepMind — which kicked off its health efforts by signing an agreement with the Royal Free NHS Trust in 2015, going on to publicly announce the health division in spring 2016 — said last year its future focus would be as a “research organisation”.

As recently as this July DeepMind was also touting a predictive healthcare research “breakthrough” — announcing it had trained a deep learning model for continuously predicting the future likelihood of a patient developing a life-threatening condition called acute kidney injury. (Though the AI is trained on heavily gender-skewed data from the US department of Veteran Affairs.)

Yet it’s now become clear that it’s handed off several of its key NHS research partnerships to Google Health as part of the Streams transfer.

In its statement about the move yesterday, UCLH writes that “it was proposed” that its DeepMind research partnership — which is related to radiotherapy treatment for patients with head and neck cancer — be transferred to Google Health, saying this will enable it to “make use of Google’s scale and experience to deliver potential breakthroughs to patients more rapidly”.

“We will retain control over the anonymised data and remain responsible for deciding how it is used,” it adds. “The anonymised data is encrypted and only accessible to a limited number of researchers who are working on this project with UCLH’s permission. Access to the data will only be granted for officially approved research purposes and will be automatically audited and logged.”

It’s worth pointing out that the notion of “anonymised” high dimension health data should be treated with a healthy degree of scepticism — given the risk of re-identification.

Moorfields also identifies Google’s “resources” as the incentive for agreeing for its eye-scan related research partnership to be handed off, writing: “This updated partnership will allow us to draw on Google’s resources and expertise to extend the benefits of innovations that AI offers to more of our clinicians and patients.”

Quite where this leaves DeepMind’s ambitions to “lead the way in fundamental research applying AI to important science and medical research questions, in collaboration with academic partners, to accelerate scientific progress for the benefit of everyone”, as it put it last year — when it characterized the hand-off to Google Health as all about ‘scaling Streams’ — remains to be seen.

We’ve reached out to DeepMind for comment on that.

Co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who’s been taking a leave of absence from the company, tweeted yesterday to congratulate the Google Health team.

DeepMind’s NHS research contracts also transferring to Google Health suggests the tech giants wants zero separation between core AI health research and the means of application, using its own cloud infrastructure, of any promising models it’s able to train off of patient data and commercialize by selling to the same healthcare services providers as apps and services.

You could say Google is seeking to bundle access to the high resolution patient data that’s essential for developing health AIs with the provision of commercial digital healthcare services it hopes to sell hospitals down the line, all funnelled through the same Google cloud infrastructure.

As we reported at the time, the hand-off of DeepMind Health to Google is controversial.

Firstly because the trust that partnered with DeepMind in 2015 to develop Streams was later found by the UK’s data protection watchdog to have breached UK law. The ICO said there was no legal basis for the Royal Free to have shared the medical records of ~1.6M patients with DeepMind during the app’s development.

Despite concerns being raised over the legal basis for sharing patients’ data throughout 2016 and 2017 DeepMind continued inking NHS contracts for Streams — claiming at the time that patient data would never be handed to Google. Yet fast forward a couple of years and it’s now literally sitting on the tech giant’s servers.

It’s that U-turn that led the DeepMind to Google Health hand-off to be branded a trust demolition by legal experts when the news was announced last year.

This summer the UK’s patient data watchdog, the National Data Guardian, released correspondence between her office and the ICO which informed the latter’s 2017 finding that Streams had breached data protection law — in which she articulates a clear regulatory position that the “reasonable expectations” of patients must govern non-direct care uses for people’s health data, rather than healthcare providers relying on doctors to decide whether they think the intended purpose for people’s medical information is justified.

The Google Health blog post talks a lot about “patient care” and “patient data” but has nothing to say about patients’ expectations of how their personal information should be used, with King writing that “our partners are in full control of all patient data and we will only use patient data to help improve care, under their oversight and instructions”.

It was exactly such an ethical blindspot around the patient’s perspective that led Royal Free doctors to override considerations about people’s medical privacy in the rush to throw their lot in with Google-DeepMind and scramble for AI-fuelled predictive healthcare.

Patient consent was not sought for passing medical records then; nor have patients’ views been consulted in the transfer of Streams contracts (and people’s data) to Google now.

And while — after it was faced with public outcry over the NHS data it was processing — DeepMind did go on to publish its contracts with NHS trusts (with some redactions), Google Health is not offering any such transparency on the replacement contracts that have been inked now. So it’s not clear whether there have been any other changes to the terms. Patients have to take all that on trust.

We reached out to the Royal Free Trust with questions about the new contract with Google but a spokeswoman just pointed us to the statement on its website — where it writes: “All migration and implementation will be completed to the highest standards of security and will be compliant with relevant data protection legislation and NHS information governance requirements.”

“As with all of our arrangements with third parties, the Royal Free London remains the data controller in relation to all personal data. This means we retain control over that personal data at all times and are responsible for deciding how that data is used for the benefit of patient care,” it adds.

In another reduction in transparency accompanying this hand-off from DeepMind to Google Health, an independent panel of reviewers that DeepMind appointed to oversee its work with the NHS in another bid to boost trust has been disbanded.

“As we announced in November, that review structure — which worked for a UK entity primarily focused on finding and developing healthcare solutions with and for the NHS — is not the right structure for a global effort set to work across continents as well as different health services,” King confirmed yesterday.

In its annual report last year the panel had warned of the risk of DeepMind exerting “excessive monopoly power” as a result of the data access and streaming infrastructure bundled with provision of the Streams app. For DeepMind then read Google now.

Independent experts raising concerns about monopoly power unsurprisingly doesn’t align with Google’s global ambitions in future healthcare provision.

The last word from the independent reviewers is a Medium post penned by former chair, professor Donal O’Donoghue — who writes that he’s “disappointed that the IR experiment did not have the time to run its course and I am sad to say goodbye to a project I’ve found fascinating”.

“This was a fascinating exploration into how a new governance model could be applied to such an important area such as health,” he adds. “It’s hard to know how this would have developed over the years but… what is clear to me is that trust and transparency are of paramount importance in healthcare and I’m keen to see how Google Health, and other providers, deliver this in the future.”

But with trust demolished and transparency reduced Google Health appears to have learnt exactly nothing from DeepMind’s missteps.

We’re all well aware that Nintendo is a nostalgia hound, capitalizing on its rich history to keep today’s gamers on board with its sometimes derivative but always lovingly crafted offerings. Link’s Awakening is no exception, and this remake of the under-played Game Boy title is a great opportunity to revisit a classic and get your Zelda fix while waiting for the sequel to Breath of the Wild. But it must be said that the price tag is a bit steep.

The Link’s Awakening remake was announced earlier this year, and we got a chance to play through a bit of it then. I’ve now gotten through a good deal of it and can say that, barring a few technical issues, this is a praiseworthy thing Nintendo has done, and I hope they do it with more of their classic library.

The game is pretty much block-for-block the original, with the same screen layouts, enemies, and dungeons. It’s a strict remake in that sense, so if you’ve played the Game Boy version and are hoping for new items and monsters, temper your expectations.

On the other hand, the fluidity of the gameplay has been brought up to modern standards and several quality-of-life improvements added. The multiplicity of inputs on the Switch allows the sword, shield, and dash to have their own buttons, while two items can be assigned freely to the others. There’s also a detailed map that you can put stamps on a la Breath of the Wild, for caves to revisit, strong enemies, and so on. No doubt the game has been tweaked otherwise here and there to accommodate modern conveniences, but those are the big ones.

The colorful graphics are, obviously, a big improvement over the 1993 Game Boy title, and rather than exposing it as dated instead make the original level design shine. Koholint Island is like a miniature Hyrule and the tilt-shift effect reinforces that feeling. Monsters and NPCs are rendered in a slightly toylike fashion that reminds me of N64 RPGs, but there’s a level of detail lavished on them that makes it clear this is a modern title.

Unfortunately the graphics also lead to some performance issues, rather unexpected for a first-party title. I found that especially on the overworld, the game chugs along for a few seconds whenever loading a new area, reducing the framerate considerably and affecting the controls. Loading is rare on the island (hence the issue mentioned) but frequent, albeit brief, in dungeons.

Speaking of dungeons, there you’ll find the big addition to Link’s Awakening: the Chamber Dungeon creator. But don’t expect a full-blown Zelda Maker to match Mario Maker. By speaking to Dampe the gravekeeper past a certain point in the story, you unlock the ability to make new dungeons out of tiles with various configurations — a three-exit room with a treasure chest and a solid wall on the left, for instance.

You fit these tiles together to form a complete dungeon (there’s a little tutorial) and then you go through it to earn… well, more tiles. And some rupees. But these haphazard, thematically mixed dungeons (you might have to put a dark, overgrown room next to a desert one) pale in comparison to the normal ones, which are of course in Zelda fashion carefully tuned and rewarding experiences.

There’s no way to share your dungeon with others, either, which further reduces the draw. Perhaps after completing a certain amount you get a heart piece or the like, but so far I haven’t found much reason to continue doing it.

That said the game itself is excellent, and for those like me who never finished it (or never played it at all) this remake is a real treat. A genuine time capsule of concentrated classic Zelda fun in a new style and with a few quality of life changes that make it absolutely worth playing even (and perhaps especially) if you finished the original.

The price, however, is rather unrealistic. Nintendo is charging $60 for Link’s Awakening, which is of course what it went for 25 years ago, and what a brand new AAA game costs now. While I don’t want to downplay the amount of work and love that obviously went into this remake, it is just that: a remake. I’d happily recommend it at $30, but $40 would be pushing it and $60… well.

Here’s hoping Nintendo brings this level of love to more of its classics, but here’s also hoping they don’t charge an arm and a leg for them. As soon as this is on sale, snatch it up.

Arch Rao, the former head of product at Tesla who was behind the company’s Powerwall home energy storage is system, is back with a new company pitching energy management and efficiency for homes.

SpanIO is looking to upgrade the electrical fusebox for homes with a digital system that integrates into the existing circuit breaker technology that has been the basis for home energy management for at least a century. 

Rao and his team are looking to make integrating renewable power, energy storage, and electric vehicles easier for homeowners by redesigning the electrical panel for modern energy needs.

“We packaged the metering controls and compute between the bus bar and the breaker,” says Rao. “Energy flows through the panel through a breaker bar and the breaker bar has tabs that you slot your breakers into… that tab is usually a conductor. We have designed a digital sub-assembly that packages current metering, voltage measurement and ability to turn each circuit on or off.”

The technology is meant to be sold through channels like solar energy installers or battery installers. The company already has plans to integrate its power management devices with energy storage systems like the ones available from LG .

Initially, Span expects to be selling its products in states like California and Hawaii where demand for solar installations is strong and homeowners have significant benefits available to them for installing renewable energy and energy efficiency systems.

For homeowners, the new power management system means that they have control over which parts of the home would be powered in the event of an outage. The company’s technology connects the entire home to a renewable system. Using existing technologies, installers have to set up a separate breaker and rewire certain areas of the home to receive the power generated by a renewable energy system, Rao says.

That control is handled through a consumer app available to download on mobile devices.

SpanIO is backed by a slew of early investors including Wireframe Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Ulu Ventures, Hardware Club, Energy Foundry, Congruent Ventures and 1/0 Capital, and intends to raise fresh cash for before the end of the year. Rao said the round would be “in the low double digits” of millions.

Supply chain logistics is a headache and a half across any industry, but the difficulty level goes way up within the world of cannabis. Because of federal laws, FedEx, UPS and USPS are not an option. Distributors need a variety of licenses and must operate within specific regulation. For example, cannabis brands must either become their own first-party distributor, with W2 employees and company-owned cars, distribution centers, etc., or use a licensed third-party distributor.

Wayv, the B2B cannabis logistics platform founded by serial entrepreneur Keith McCarty, is looking to solve this problem with the launch of its Dynamic Distribution platform. Of course, Wayv has been operational for upwards of a year, having received $5 million in seed led by Craft Ventures’ David Sacks (former coworker to McCarty from the Yammer days) back in October 2018.

Today, however, marks the public launch of Dynamic Distribution, which not only connects brands, retailers and distributors to streamline cannabis supply chain logistics, but allows brands to list themselves as third-party distributors for other brands. Plus, the platform automatically checks for compliance with all parties on the platform across federal, state and local laws.

While companies like Anvyl and Flexport are looking to support other, less regulated industries in their supply chain logistics evolution, the cannabis industry has been mostly left in the paper age. Wayv aims to streamline that by providing a single interface for brands, retailers and distributors to move cannabis products within the state of California.

For the past year, Wayv’s platform has helped power logistics among several cannabis brands — Caliva, Kurvana, High Style Brewing Company, and GoldDrop to name a few — as well as distributor Sierra Pacific Warehouse Group.

With Dynamic Distribution, brands who handle their own distribution can hop on the Wayv platform and get listed as a third-party distributor for other brands, opening up new revenue streams. Plus, this will allow brands across the state to access a much bigger pool of distribution options, allowing for small upstart brands to get selling without scaling up their own distribution operation.

Wayv generates revenue on a per transaction basis, charging a 15 percent fee to brands. Thus far, the startup has more than 80 brands on the platform.

McCarty says that one of the obstacles of an on-demand logistics business is supply constraint. He likened it to consumer on-demand services, like Uber and Lyft, whose growth is dependent on the number of drivers they can get on the platform.

“In the cannabis environment, there are so many compliance and licensing requirements, along with packaging and product testing requirements — which are all amazing and necessary — that we live in this environment that is very fragmented,” said McCarty. “It’s the fastest growing industry in the world, and there’s no Coca-Cola or Starbucks. There are no big chains. Just small companies individually. This means a lot more friction and a lot more need for something like Wayv to help solve the problem.”

McCarty has plenty of experience in the cannabis sector. Prior to Wayv, McCarty founded Eaze, the on-demand cannabis delivery platform for consumers. Before Eaze, McCarty was an early employee at Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft in June 2012 for $1.2 billion.

Google said today it is bringing its mobile payments app — Google Pay — to businesses in India and introducing a jobs discovery feature as the Android-maker rushes to maintain its lead in one of its key overseas markets before its global rival Facebook expands its payment offerings in the country.

At its annual event in India, the company said even as more than 400 million people in India are online today, most businesses in the nation remain unconnected. Through a Google Pay for Business standalone app, they will be able to quickly start accepting digital payments and build their digital business profile.

Additionally, Google announced Spot Platform that will allow businesses to create their own store fronts on Google Pay app itself. For instance, they can use QR-like codes to offer some offerings to customers without having to build their own apps, company executives said.

Google launched its payments app Google Pay (called Tez then) in 2017. Its payments service, built on top of Indian government-backed UPI payments infrastructure, is already among the top payment apps in the category.

But without any additional services, Google Pay would have had a tough time competing with Facebook’s WhatsApp, which is set to expand its mobile payments feature, also built on top of UPI, to all of its 400 million users in India. WhatsApp’s popularity remains unmatched in India.

The payments market in India — which is projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2023, according to a Credit Suisse — is aggressively crowded and competitive. Google today competes with Flipkart’s PhonePe, Amazon Pay, and Paytm, the country’s most popular mobile wallet app whose parent company has raised over $2.3 billion from investors.

Paytm is currently focusing on expanding its reach in the nation and not profits. The company, which posted more than half a billion of loss last year, said earlier this month it intends to invest another $3 billion into its business in the next two years.

The company is also bringing a feature that will enable users to discover jobs through Google Pay apps itself.

Over the years, Google has expanded the reach of its digital assistant service to include people who own internet-enabled feature phones. Now the search giant is bringing the service to users who don’t have access to internet at all.

At an event in New Delhi on Thursday, the company announced phone line that will anyone on Vodafone-Idea telecom network could dial to have their questions answered.

Users will be able to dial 000-800-9191-000 and they won’t be charged for the call or the service.

More to folliow…

French startup Qwant, whose non-tracking search engine has been gaining traction in its home market as a privacy-respecting alternative to Google, has made a change to its senior leadership team as it gears up for the next phase of growth.

Former Mozilla Europe president, Tristan Nitot, who joined Qwant last year as VP of advocacy, has been promoted to chief executive, taking over from François Messager — who also joined in 2018 but is now leaving the business. Qwant co-founder, Eric Leandri, meanwhile, continues in the same role as president.

Nitot, an Internet veteran who worked at Netscape and helped to found Mozilla Europe in 1998, where he later served as president and stayed until 2015 before leaving to write a book on surveillance, brings a wealth of experience in product and comms roles, as well as open source.

Most recently he spent several years working for personal cloud startup, Cozy Cloud.

“I’m basically here to help [Leandri] grow the company and structure the company,” Nitot tells TechCrunch, describing Qwant’s founder as an “amazing entrepreneur, audacious and visionary”.

Market headwinds have been improving for the privacy-focused Google rival in recent years as concern about foreign data-mining tech giants has stepped up in Europe.

Last year the French government announced it would be switching its search default from Google to Qwant. Buying homegrown digital tech now apparently seen as a savvy product choice as well as good politics.

Meanwhile antitrust attention on dominant search giant Google, both at home and abroad, has led to policy shifts that directly benefit search rivals — such as an update of the default lists baked into its chromium engine which was quietly put out earlier this year.

That behind the scenes change saw Qwant added as an option for users in the French market for the first time. (On hearing the news a sardonic Leandri thanked Google — but suggested Qwant users choose Firefox or the Brave browser for a less creepy web browsing experience.)

“A lot of companies and institutions have decided and have realized basically that they’ve been using a search engine which is not European. Which collects data. Massively. And that makes them uncomfortable,” says Nitot. “They haven’t made a conscious decision about that. Because they bring in a computer which has a browser which has a search engine in it set by default — and in the end you just don’t get to choose which search engine your people use, right.

“And so they’re making a conscious decision to switch to Qwant. And we’ve been spending a lot of time and energy on that — and it’s paying off big time.”

As well as the French administration’s circa 3M desktops being switched by default to Qwant (which it expects will be done this quarter), the pro-privacy search engine has been getting traction from other government departments and regional government, as well as large banks and schools, according to Nitot.

He credits a focus on search products for schoolkids with generating momentum, such as Qwant Junior, which is designed for kids aged 6-12, and excludes sex and violence from search results as well as being ad free. (It’s set to get an update in the next few weeks.) It has also just been supplemented by Qwant School: A school search product aimed at 13-17 year olds.

“All of that creates more users — the kids talk to their parents about Qwant Junior, and the parents install Qwant.com for them. So there’s a lot of momentum creating that growth,” Nitot suggests.

Qwant says it handled more than 18 billion search requests in 2018.

A growing business needs money to fuel it of course. So fundraising efforts involving convertible bonds is one area Nitot says he’ll be focused on in the new role. “We are raising money,” he confirms.

Increasing efficiency — especially on the engineering front — is another key focus for the new CEO.

“The rest will be a focus on the organization, per se, how we structure the organization. How we evolve the company culture. To enable or to improve delivery of the engineering team, for example,” he says. “It’s not that it’s bad it’s just that we need to make sure every dollar or every euro we invest gives as much as possible in return.”

Product wise, Nitot’s attention in the near term will be directed towards shipping a new version of Qwant’s search engine that will involve reengineering core tech to improve the quality of results.

“What we want to do [with v2] is to improve the quality of the results,” he says of the core search product. “You won’t be able to notice any difference, in terms of quality, with the other really good search engines that you may use — except that you know that your privacy is respected by Qwant.

“[As we raise more funding] we will be able to have a lot more infrastructure to run better and more powerful algorithms. And so we plan to improve that internationally… Every language will benefit from the new search engine. It’s also a matter of money and infrastructure to make this work on a web scale. Because the web is huge and it’s growing.

“The new version includes NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology… for understanding language, for understanding intentions — for example do you want to buy something or are you looking for a reference… or a place or a thing. That’s the kind of thing we’re putting in place but it’s going to improve a lot for every language involved.”

Western Europe will be the focus for v2 of the search engine, starting with French, German, Italian, Spanish and English — with a plan to “go beyond that later on”.

Nitot also says there will also be staggered rollouts (starting with France), with Qwant planning to run old and new versions in parallel to quality check the new version before finally switching users over.

“Shipping is hard as we used to say at Mozilla,” he remarks, refusing to be fixed to a launch date for v2 (beyond saying it’ll arrive in “less than a year”). “It’s a universal rule; shipping a new product is hard, and that’s what we want to do with version 2… I’ve been writing software since 1980 and so I know how predictions are when it comes to software release dates. So I’m very careful not to make promises.”

Developing more of its own advertising technologies is another focus for Qwant. On this front the aim is to improve margins by leaning less on partners like Microsoft .

“We’ve been working with partners until now, especially on the search engine result pages,” says Nitot. “We put Microsoft advertising on it. And our goal is to ramp up advertising technologies so that we rely on our own technologies — something that we control. And that hopefully will bring a better return.”

Like Google, Qwant monetizes searches by serving ads alongside results. But unlike Google these are contextual ads, meaning they are based on general location plus the substance of the search itself; rather than targeted ads which entail persistent tracking and profiling of Internet users in order to inform the choice of ad (hence feeling like ads are stalking you around the Internet).

Serving contextual ads is a choice that lets Qwant offer a credible privacy pledge that Mountain View simply can’t match.

Yet up until 2006 Google also served contextual ads, as Nitot points out, before its slide into privacy-hostile microtargeting. “It’s a good old idea,” he argues of contextual ads. “We’re using it. We think it really is a valuable idea.” 

Qwant is also working on privacy-sensitive ad tech. One area of current work there is personalization. It’s developing a client-side, browser-based encrypted data store, called Masq, that’s intended to store and retrieve application data through a WebSocket connection. (Here’s the project Masq Github page.)

“Because we do not know the person that’s using the product it’s hard to make personalization of course. So we plan to do personalization of the product on the client side,” he explains. “Which means the server side will have no more details than we currently do, but on the client side we are producing something which is open source, which stores data locally on your device — whether that’s a laptop or smartphone — in the browser, it is encrypted so that nobody can reuse it unless you decide that you want that to happen.

“And it’s open source so that it’s transparent and can be audited and so that people can trust the technology because it runs on their own device, it stores on their device.”

“Right now it’s at alpha stage,” Nitot adds of Masq, declining to specify when exactly it might be ready for a wider launch.

The new CEO’s ultimate goal for Qwant is to become the search engine for Europe — a hugely ambitious target that remains far out of reach for now, with Google still commanding in excess of 90% regional marketshare. (A dominance that has got its business embroiled in antitrust hot water in Europe.)

Yet the Internet of today is not the same as the Internet of yesterday when Netscape was a browsing staple — until Internet Explorer knocked it off its perch after Microsoft bundled its rival upstart as the default browser on Windows. And the rest, as they say, is Internet history.

Much has changed and much is changing. But abuses of market power are an old story. And as regulators act against today’s self-interested defaults there are savvy alternatives like Qwant primed and waiting to offer consumers a different kind of value.

“Qwant is created in Europe for the European citizens with European values,” says Nitot. “Privacy being one of these values that are central to our mission. It is not random that the CNIL — the French data protection authority — was created in France in 1978. It was the first time that something like that was created. And then GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] was created in Europe. It doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a matter of values and the way people see their life and things around them, politics and all that. We have a very deep concern about privacy in France. It’s written in the European declaration of human rights.

“We build a product that reflects those values — so it’s appealing to European users.”

Indonesia has one of the fastest-growing e-commerce markets in the world, but the logistics industry there is still very fragmented, creating headaches for both vendors and customers. Shipper is a startup with the ambitious goal of giving online sellers access to “Amazon-level logistics.” The company has raised $5 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Ventures, Floodgate Ventures, Insignia Ventures Partners and Y Combinator (Shipper is part of the accelerator’s winter 2019 batch), which will be used for hiring and customer acquisition.

Shipper was launched in 2017 by co-founders Phil Opamuratawongse and Budi Handoko, and is now used by more than 25,000 online sellers. Indonesia’s e-commerce market is growing rapidly, but online sellers still face many logistical hurdles.

The country is large (Indonesia has more than 17,500 islands, of which 600 are inhabited) and unlike the United States, where Amazon dominates, e-commerce sellers often use multiple platforms, like Tokopedia, Shopee, Bukalapak and Lazada. Smaller vendors also sell through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media. Once an order has been placed, the challenge of making sure it gets to customers starts. There are more than 2,500 logistics providers in Indonesia, many of whom only cover a small area.

“It is really hard for any one provider to do nationwide themselves, so the big ones usually use local partners to fulfill locations where they don’t have infrastructure,” says Opamuratawongse.

The startup’s mission is to create a platform that makes the process of fulfilling and tracking orders much more efficient. In addition to a package pick-up service and fulfillment centers, Shipper also has a technology stack to help logistics providers manage shipments. It is used to predict the best shipping routes and consolidate packages headed in the same direction and also provides a multi-carrier API that allows sellers to manage orders, print shipping labels and get tracking information from multiple providers on their phones.

When it launched three years ago, Shipper began by focusing on the last-mile for smaller vendors, who Opamuratawongse says typically keep inventory in their homes and fulfill about five to 10 orders per day. Since many give customers a choice of several logistics providers, that meant they needed to visit multiple drop-off locations every morning.

Shipper offers pick-up service performed by couriers (who Opamuratawongse says are people like stay-at-home parents who want flexible, part-time work) who collect packages from several vendors in the same neighborhood and distribute them to different logistics providers, serving as micro-fulfillment hubs. Shipper signs up about 10 to 30 new couriers each week, keeping them at least 2.5 kilometers apart so they don’t compete against each other.

The company began setting up fulfillment centers to keep up with vendors whose businesses were growing and were turning to third-party warehouse services. Shipper has established 10 fulfillment centers so far across Indonesia, including Jakarta, with plans to open a new one about every two weeks until it covers all of Indonesia.

Opamuratawongse says he expects the logistics industry in Indonesia to remain fragmented for the next decade at least, and perhaps longer because of Indonesia’s size and geography. Shipper will focus on expanding in Indonesia first, with the goal of having 1,000 microhubs within the next year and 15 to 20 fulfillment centers. Then the company plans to tackle other Southeast Asian countries with rapidly-growing e-commerce markets, including Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.