Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The CareVoice, a Shanghai-based health insurance software startup with ambitions to expand throughout Asia, announced today that it has raised about $10 million in Series A funding.

The investment was led by LUN Partners Group and an undisclosed global investment manager that specializes in financial services, with participation from DNA Capital and returning investors SOSV and Artesian Capital. It will be used on research and development and to grow The CareVoice’s business in Hong Kong, which it entered last year. After that, the company plans to expand into other markets in Asia.

Founded in 2014, The CareVoice started as an app that let patients leave reviews about medical providers before focusing on software like its flagship product, an SaaS solution that makes healthcare and insurance products more accessible to customers on mobile, with the goal of increasing sales and retention. There are several other startups in China focused on simplifying the process of buying health insurance, like Instony, Datebao, eBaoTech and Bowtie, but a representative for The CareVoice says it focuses less on sales tools and is instead building an end-to-end platform for insurers that can integrate with their existing solutions.

The startup is currently used by 15 insurance providers in China and Hong Kong, including Ping An and AXA. While The CareVoice’s focus has been on improving the enrollment process, customer experience and how claims are processed, it is currently developing 10 new insurance products with health insurance partners, essentially rebranding traditional insurance policies and making them easier to access.

The CareVoice also recently released a platform for insurers called CareVoiceOS, designed to enable insurers to create more customized plans and connect to other online healthcare services, and launched a new unit called StartupCare that allows startups to give founders and employees health benefits.

Remediant, a startup that helps companies secure privileged access in a modern context, announced a $15 million Series A today led by Dell Technologies Capital and ForgePoint Capital.

Remediant’s co-founders, Paul Lanzi and Tim Keeler, worked in biotech for years and saw a problem first-hand with the way companies secured privileged access. It was granted to certain individuals in the organization carte blanche, and they believed if you could limit access, it would make the space more secure and less vulnerable to hackers.

Lanzi says they started the company with two core concepts. “The first concept is the ability to assess or detect all of the places where privileged accounts exist and what systems they have access to. The second concept is to strip away all of the privileged access from all of those accounts and grant it back on a just-in-time basis,” Lanzi explained.

If you’re thinking that could get in the way of people who need access to do their jobs, as former IT admins, they considered that. Remediant is based a Zero Trust model where you have to prove you have the right to access the privileged area. But they do provide a reasonable baseline amount of time for users who need it within the confines of continuously enforcing access.

“Continuous enforcement is part of what we do, so by default we grant you four hours of access when you need that access, and then after that four hours, even if you forget to come back and end your session, we will automatically revoke that access. In that way all of the systems that are protected by SecureOne (the company’s flagship product) are held in this Zero Trust state where no one has access to them on a day-to-day basis,” Lanzi said.

The company has bootstrapped until now, and has actually been profitable, something that’s unusual for a startup at this stage of development, but Lanzi says they decided to take an investment in order to shift gears and concentrate on growth and product expansion.

Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at investor Dell Technologies Capital says it’s not easy for security startups to rise above the noise, but he saw something in Remediant’s founders. “Tim, and Paul came from the practitioners viewpoint. They knew the actual problems that people face in terms of privileged access. So they had a very strong empathy towards the customer’s problem because they lived through it,” Jeevankumar told TechCrunch.

He added that the privileged access market hasn’t really been updated in two decades. “It’s a market ripe for disruption. They are combining the just-in-time philosophy with the Zero Trust philosophy, and are bringing that to the crown jewel of administrative access,” he said.

The company’s tools are installed on the customer’s infrastructure, either on-prem or in the cloud. They don’t have a pure cloud product at the moment, but they have plans for a SaaS version down the road to help small and medium sized businesses solve the privileged access problem.

Lanzi says they are also looking to expand the product line in other ways with this investment. “The basic philosophies that underpin our technology are broadly applicable. We want to start applying our technology in those other areas as well. So as we think toward a future that looks more like cloud and more like DevOps, we want to be able to add more of those features to our products,” he said.

NASA and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have teamed up to build a new supercomputer, which will serve NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and develop models and simulations of the landing process for Artemis Moon missions.

The new supercomputer is called ‘Aitken,’ named after American astronomer Robert Grant Aitken, and it can run simulations at up to 3.69 petaFLOPs of theoretical performance power. Aitken is custom-designed by HPE and NASA to work with the Ames modular data centre, which is a project it undertook starting in 2017 to massively reduce the amount of water and energy used in cooling its supercomputing hardware.

Aitken employs second generation Intel Xeon processors, Mellanox InfiniBand high-speed networking, and has 221 TB of memory on board for storage. It’s the result of four years of collaboration between NASA and HPE, and it will model different methods of entry, descent and landing for Moon-destined Artemis spacecraft, running simulations to determine possible outcomes and help determine the best, safest approach.

This isn’t the only collaboration between HPE and NASA: The enterprise computer maker built a new kind of supercomputer able to withstand the rigors of space for the agency, and sent it up to the ISS in 2017 for preparatory testing ahead of potential use on longer missions, including Mars. The two partners then opened that supercomputer for use in third-party experiments last year.

HPE also announced earlier this year that it was buying supercomputer company Cray for $1.3 billion. Cray is another long-time partner of NASA’s supercomputing efforts, dating back to the space agency’s establishment of a dedicated computational modelling division and the establishing of its Central Computing Facility at Ames Research Center.

If you’re like me, chances are good you just distractedly clicked on this article while scrolling through your feed in, or while waiting for, a Lyft. Maybe, like me, you need that app to get to back-to-back meetings in different locations today, as you’re well on your way to at least a 60-hour workweek between the various things you do. Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe the ride you just took, zoning out on your phone in an Uber on Quiet Mode, was actually a lifesaver.

And as you settle into each new driver’s backseat, en route to each new destination in your crazy busy life, maybe, like me, you find yourself somewhat unwittingly implicated in one of the most contentious ethical struggles of this generation – a struggle with profound implications for the future of work.

Yesterday, California-based advocacy organizations Gig Workers Rising and Mobile Workers Alliance announced that a caravan of Uber and Lyft drivers will drive from SoCal through San Francisco to Sacramento, next Monday, August 26 through Wednesday, August 28th. Over 200 drivers in more than 75 cars plan to drive south to north, with more drivers joining along the way, to take dramatic action in advocating for California State Legislature bill AB5, and for a drivers union. 

With AB5 almost certain to pass the CA Senate, this coming week presents a crucial moment in the history of gig work and tech more broadly: an opportunity for drivers to demonstrate the efficacy of 21st century labor modes of organizing, even as Uber and Lyft continue ramping up efforts to kill AB5, drop pay rates, and generally mistreat drivers.

For the first time, drivers will use their sole work tool, their cars, to demonstrate publicly (and likely disruptively, though I have no knowledge of the precise actions planned at this time) at key locations like outside Uber’s HQ in downtown San Francisco and the Capitol steps in Sacramento.

I recently had the chance to speak with Annette Rivero, one of the drivers and an organizer of the protest efforts. At the time we spoke, I didn’t know anything about Annette, not even whether she would allow me to use her last name. But this 37-year-old mother of five, a straight-A student and full-time-plus Lyft/Uber driver, told me the story of her life and career, without hesitation, even as it raised what I worried could be the possibility of retaliation against her and her colleagues.

As Annette opened up to me about drivers work conditions and their mental and physical health struggles, I found myself thinking that her family’s story puts human faces on and likely represents the trendline of an industry that, in only a decade, has moved a hundred billion dollars and given new meaning to the word “disrupt.”

I hope everyone with a stake in these issues – whether you work in tech or VC or just occasionally use your smartphone to summon a ride – will read her words and think about where all of us are headed, together.

Greg Epstein: Annette, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me for this TechCrunch series exploring technology and ethics, and what it might mean to use technology ethically and humanistically today. Can you share your full name or is that not something that you’re comfortable sharing? Either way is fine.

Annette Rivero: My name’s Annette Rivero.

Epstein: How old are you?

Rivero: I am 37.

Epstein: And what do you do for your work that you’re connected with what we’re speaking about?

Rivero: I drive for both Uber and Lyft .

Epstein: How long have you been doing that?

Rivero: About two years.

Epstein: Full-time, or how does your schedule work?

Rivero: Right now I’m driving full-time, so I drive about eight to nine hours and I try to drive every day.

Epstein: Seven days a week?

Rivero: Yes.

Epstein: You’ve been trying to do that for a long time?

Rivero: All summer I’ve been really trying. I mean, of course things happen and there’s always one or two days maybe where I don’t get to, but it’s definitely my goal because I only make $150 a day. So, if I miss a day, I try to work longer on the other days.

Epstein: That’s about 60 hours a week or so.

Rivero: Yeah.

Epstein: Wow. You’re a very hard worker, Annette.

Rivero: Oh, thanks.

Epstein: And you live somewhere in California?

Rivero: I live in San Jose, so South Bay area.

Epstein: So, you’re driving 60 hours a week or so, working for a tech company not far from the global epicenter of tech.

Rivero: That’s right.

Epstein: You must get a fair number of tech people in your car with you.

Rivero: Yes, I do.

Epstein: I’ll ask you more about yourself in a moment, but please tell me what you’re involved in and how we got connected for this interview.

Rivero: Around April, or May, I got involved with a group called Gig Workers Rising. I was very frustrated with some of the things going on between me and Uber. I was looking for somebody I could confide in, exchange stories, because I felt very alone, so I signed up with their Facebook group. They invited all their new members to a conference call, which I joined, and then from there they invited us to do a health survey to talk about the problems that we have with our health as far as rideshare goes. From there I’ve been at pretty much every action and meeting.

What we’re trying to do is let everyone know what’s going on. What the drivers are going through, the decreases in pay in contradiction to the increases in rates, and really let people know that they’re kind of manipulating the system to gain profits, but they’re taking those profits from people by paying extremely low rates.

Epstein: You mentioned a health survey: how are you doing health-wise?

Rivero: [When] that was all happening, I was extremely stressed; my anxiety was through the roof and I was probably pretty depressed because my situation was looking very bleak. They had already cut the surge at the end of last year, which probably cut rates about 40% at least. Then in the beginning of this year they cut the bonuses. A combination of those things cut the money I was making per week by two thirds. I was making about $1,500 working probably less than 40 hours. And now I work about 60 hours and I’m making barely a thousand dollars. I do feel better [now], but I think I feel better because I have a community of drivers that I work with and I talk to on a daily basis. And I am working on this project to bring light to the situation. I feel more empowered than I did before.

Epstein: Feeling empowered and being connected with people who are working together for the same cause is, generally speaking, a positive factor in health. I’m glad to hear that.

Rivero: Yeah.

Epstein: Can you tell me about the demonstration you’re about to participate in?

Rivero: Right now we’re preparing for an action to unite all the drivers in California from the north end to the south end and in the middle, which is something we haven’t been able to demonstrate yet. But [we are] going to show it’s not just one area.

We may have differences but we have one thing that’s the same and that is dissatisfaction with the way things are going with rideshare right now. Everything that’s going on is not okay and all drivers across the state have just had it. They’re just done with what’s going on. So, without giving too many details, we will be in pretty big cities throughout the state and we will be making sure that we’re seen.

Epstein: At this point it’s been announced you’ll be stopping in L.A., San Francisco and Sacramento.

Rivero: As far as what we will do in those cities, we want to keep that under wraps. But yes, we are caravaning from LA to Sacramento, and at each stop we will take an action, not just with the [driver] community but other important people in those cities.

Epstein: Sounds like whatever actions you and your colleagues are going to take are going to be the sorts of things that have never quite happened before. People interested in this issue are probably going to want to see what you all are going to do next week, huh?

Rivero: Yeah, definitely. And our message is definitely focused on not just legislators but the Senate and then Governor Newsom, because they’re our next targets — to get their attention, let them know what’s going on and how we feel. We know they’ve already heard some, but we’re trying to really drill it in.

Epstein: Gig Workers Rising is working specifically on this bill, California AB5, with regard to the status of employees and independent contractors and what rights and obligations companies like Uber and Lyft have towards contractors like yourself. What do you want to say about the bill in particular?

Rivero: All [AB5] is doing is defining even more what it means to be an employee and what it means to be an independent contractor. It doesn’t do anything else in my opinion. If there was something on the table about creating the appropriate protections, that applied more to gig workers for lack of a better word, I’m sure everybody would be looking at that.

But there isn’t, so this is what we have. And instead of having people working without protections and for extremely low labor costs, we have to do something. Because there’s a lot of people out there who are barely making it, barely surviving, can’t even put food on the table, can’t even afford healthcare.

And these companies should be held accountable for it. They should be held responsible for it.

It’s their responsibility as a business owner to give back to the community, not just take from the community. Redefining these two things is just going to help make that happen.

Epstein: I don’t mind saying I completely agree with you. If these companies want to exist, they don’t just have a right to exist purely to make their executives rich. We, the people, can take that right away from them by forcing them to shut down, unless they can show that their business model is actually decent for the human beings involved in it.

Rivero: Right. I wish more people felt the way you just worded that. People just don’t understand the power they have.

Epstein: Would you feel comfortable sharing a bit more about yourself, like who you are beyond working for Lyft and Uber, and how you got involved in driving for them originally?

Rivero: I basically worked in healthcare for about 14 years. I’m one of those people where I work hard and it doesn’t matter how much money I make, as long as the work makes me feel good. I work really hard. Throughout the years, I’ve learned many things about healthcare billing.

So, I got to a place where I was doing various things in one position, but didn’t feel like I was getting paid what I should have been paid, even though that’s contradictory to what I just said. I felt like I could be a manager and make more money so I can take care of my kids, send them to school.

And my parents are getting older. So I was thinking, I can also help both of my parents start to retire, because they’re not getting younger and they’re getting sicker.

So, I made a very scary decision to leave my job at Stanford where I was making about $80,000 a year. I decided to go back to school. Some people call me crazy, but I just feel like I’m worth more than that, and I think I could’ve made more than that. So I went back to school full-time to get my degree in business management.

Epstein: When was this?

Rivero: This was about two and a half years ago.

Epstein: So, you were making $80,000 a year or so working in the healthcare system at Stanford University Hospital, essentially? Before that had you gone to college or no?

Rivero: No.

Epstein: And you grew up in the San Jose area, or somewhere else?

Rivero: Half of my life, I grew up in San Jose and then the other half I grew up in a small town called Hollister, an hour South of here. I always wanted to go back to school and it was just such a big thing for me and then I just felt like it was now or never.

Because the situation I was in, we lived in an apartment that was affordable and I had money saved up. It wasn’t impossible. But once I started driving about six months in, or maybe within those first six months, I started to notice a subtle decrease in pay, and it was so subtle, you could hardly tell.

Epstein: You started driving while you were going to school full-time, to put yourself through school?

Rivero: Mm-hmm.

Epstein: Wow.

Rivero: I only had to work about six hours a day.

Epstein: Only! You were working six hours a day and then you would go to class or study?

Rivero: Yeah. And I was only working like four, maybe five days, making more money then than I’m making now. And the classes I did take, I did get straight A’s, so thank you. It was possible. It’s not like something I made up or fabricated. And a lot of people were doing it.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who drove and were going to school or went on elaborate vacations, making extra money off of Uber and Lyft. But you can’t do that now. It’s not possible.

Epstein: You were driving five, six hours a day, studying and getting straight A’s, and did you have a family?

Rivero: One of our kids is already grown, but we have four that we’re raising.

Epstein: What does your partner do during the day?

Rivero: He is a warehouse manager for a plumbing company; he works anywhere from eight to 12 hours a day.

Epstein: You are obviously both extremely hard workers, trying to better your lives. This is very impressive.

Rivero: Thank you.

Epstein: Tell me how it started to get worse.

Rivero: To break it down a little bit, when you first start on, they give you really great bonuses. Then, little by little, they make changes to your bonus amount.

They’ll either lower the amount that you receive or they’ll increase the rides. So gradually you don’t notice, but the amount extra you’re getting per ride is lowering.

After that, [rates] started to decrease, and surge rates changed. What they used to do is a multiplier So, if there is a ride I usually do that I can make $8 off of and there was a surge during that time, then it would say ‘times two.’ That means I would make $16 off of that ride.

Today, they put a dollar amount instead; let’s say they just put $2. That means that I’m only going to make an extra $2 on that eight, from making $16 during surge to $10 during surge. And a majority of rides are during those times of surge, before work and school, when everyone’s trying to get somewhere, after work and school when everyone’s trying to get home, or on weekends when everybody’s partying.

Epstein: Which means drivers like you have to work at some of the times when it would be most convenient to be with your families. I just last week did another column largely about the effects of people having to be constantly available that way.

Rivero: Right. I can’t always work those times because I need to be with my family. So, instead of making a little more money during those times when it’s busier, I have to work slow times and make less money. But the reason we’re making less money is because the system is oversaturated with drivers, and that’s been done intentionally.

They were giving out really large bonuses to get drivers on board. I recruited my dad and made $500 for recruiting him. They’re constantly having new drivers recruited and now they have so many drivers, they don’t have to pay a surge anymore.

Because there’s more than enough drivers on the road at all times. Which brings me to another point, which is they’re charging riders for high demand rates when it’s not even necessary because they have so many drivers on the road. They don’t need to charge high rates. There’s somebody around the corner.

Epstein: I stopped using Uber for ethical reasons, but I use Lyft. I live someplace where it’s really hard to get from my house to work with public transportation and I work three or more jobs while spending a lot of time with my young kid, so I’m constantly running from one place to another and I definitely don’t have time to park a car.

it’s amazing: no matter where I am, or when, there’s always a car within a few minutes. And I take all these rides and almost never get the same driver twice. And I go to other cities or states, even remote areas: there are Lyft drivers everywhere.

It’s amazing how many people, like yourself, they’ve put out onto the road. What is that like for you? What have you heard from colleagues or friends through Gig Workers Rising, about what this is like for them?

Rivero: A couple of friends can’t afford their medication. One of them has high blood pressure. I could lose a friend because he can’t afford his high blood pressure medicine, because he doesn’t make enough. But he doesn’t qualify for Medi-Cal because we have to file all that money we’re paying Uber and Lyft on our taxes.

It looks like we’re making all this money, but we’re not. I have another friend who had kidney failure last year because drivers don’t want to drink water. They don’t want to have to stop to go to the bathroom because then that stops them from making money.

Epstein: What do you do about stopping to go to the bathroom, Annette?

Rivero: When I drop the kids off in the morning at 7:15, I’ll have one coffee and I’ll probably have to go to the bathroom once. So I’ll stop either at a Starbucks, a grocery store, or a Target. Then I don’t eat until I get home, which is when I pick up the kids at 3:45 and then I take them home.

Epstein: So, you’re driving around all that time on one or two coffees, no water, and no food?

Rivero: That’s right.

Epstein: First of all, I’m concerned for you. It’s not particularly healthy to sit in a car for eight or nine hours a day. Do you stretch much?

Rivero: Yeah. Sometimes I’ll get out of the car. When people need help, I’ll get out and help them. If I’m-

Epstein: I’m always telling my drivers to get up and stretch because it’s really bad for a person to sit without even stretching their legs for eight, nine hours a day. But then… I say this with a smile and I actually really trust you, you seem like an amazing person. But, are you being safe out there? I mean, all those hours without eating or hydrating, that doesn’t seem like the best mindset to be driving in.

Rivero: I have a goal, every day, to make $150. [Recently,] at the end of [the night] I needed 30 more dollars, and I was like, “Okay, I’m tired and I want to stop.” But I wasn’t at the point where I was dangerously tired. When I say dangerously tired, I mean I have a migraine, my eyes are getting blurry, or I’m so tired I’ve made a mistake, like I was at the light and I could have turned right but I just wasn’t paying attention.

Something small like that. I’ve never caused an accident. I’m not irresponsible in that way, but I notice the subtle things about myself when I know it’s time to go home.

But yeah, without a doubt there are drivers out there who are driving beyond that moment when they realize they shouldn’t be driving. They’re driving anywhere from 10, maybe 14, maybe even 16 hours a day.

And the ones sleeping in their car don’t really sleep. How do you sleep in your car?

Epstein: Are a lot of drivers sleeping in their cars, in your experience?

Rivero: I know a lot of drivers sleep in their car.

Epstein: How do you know that?

Rivero: Well, friends. My dad sleeps in his car. My dad’s too proud to come sleep at my house, but he’ll stay in his car. And he’s not sleeping.

Epstein: Why? Because he doesn’t have someplace to go?

Rivero: He lives in Los Banos, about an hour and a half away. Not only that, he can’t really afford the gas to keep going back and forth every night.

Epstein: Right — if you’re driving Lyft or Uber, almost by definition you can’t afford to live in a high rent area, but of course most rides are in high rent areas. So almost by design, most of the drivers are living far away from where they’re working, and when you get them so exhausted that they can’t drive home, it sounds like they’re essentially living out of their cars for how many days a week.

Rivero: Exactly. I also know another person who, from the loneliness of sleeping in their car and just the loneliness of not talking to anybody, because drivers don’t talk to each other really. He became-

Epstein: Yeah. And there’s even this new… What is the mode again for Uber?

Rivero: Oh, the quiet mode?

Epstein: Can I just say that I find that disgusting? You’re going to make me work for how much? And then you’re going to act like you have the right to just tell me I’m a nuisance to you and don’t talk to you?

Rivero: I understand sometimes people want to just not say anything, but it’s the way that it’s been done that’s terrible. It’s really about why can’t people communicate and just say, “You know what? I’m so sorry but I’m exhausted today. I had a really long day,” or whatever.

You don’t even have to explain. You just have to say, “Do you mind if we just not conversate right now? Just not up for it.”

Epstein: Yes. Suck it up and use your words to say that you don’t want to use your words, bro.

Rivero: Exactly. And that’s how we’re treated on a daily basis from, not all riders, but there are riders that treat us that way.

Epstein: Anyway, I interrupted you earlier. We were talking about you and other drivers risking their health, some people risking the health of others on the road. People certainly putting their mental health at risk is something that I hear here: there’s a lot of loneliness, isolation.

Rivero: The person I was talking about that was lonely actually had a drug addiction: coke. And the coke was initially to stay awake, then became a bad habit because they were lonely and depressed and then they couldn’t stop.

Epstein: And that person’s still out there driving?

Rivero: Not at the moment. Money all went to the coke and they couldn’t pay the bills. Got a ticket, lost a license.

Epstein: Still, what I’m hearing is that these kinds of situations that people are being put into make that kind of story, and its dangers, more likely.

Rivero: Yes. Yes.

Epstein: So, now you’re part of a group taking action to try to bring about some change. What do you most want people to think about and feel when they see you and your fellow drivers, your fellow gig workers, your fellow human beings driving across the state of California and demonstrating next week?

Rivero: I want everybody to think about where they work and to imagine that one day they walk in and their boss tells them, “We’re going to make you an independent contractor today. Congratulations. You get to set your own schedule. You get to have the flexibility you want, but we’re no longer going to pay you your benefits, your retirement plan, or anything else we gave you as an employee.”

Because I have security guards in my building at home, who are independent contractors, who I thought were employees collecting benefits. Companies like Bench, who provide accounting and bookkeeping services, [have] admitted they want to provide the cheapest and fastest service possible.

What that’s going to do is put businesses out of business in [those industries], and they’re not going to be the last. So, I want people to think about their jobs; they could be next if we don’t put a stop to [the current practices of] Uber and Lyft, because they’re the example of where we’re going.

Epstein: There are certainly many billions of dollars involved in Uber and Lyft and a lot of relatively wealthy people feel that they have something riding on the success of those companies.

Is there anything else that you want to share in gearing up for these actions next week?

Rivero: Just that AB5 doesn’t take away anybody’s flexibility, it’s the companies that take away the flexibility. Because I know that that’s something that everyone’s stuck on right now, and it’s a lie. There’s no truth to it.

Epstein: The last question I ask at the end of all of my TechCrunch interviews about technology and ethics is, how optimistic are you about our shared human future? About the future that we all share together, as human beings?

Rivero: That’s a day by day question because I feel like things change so much. Some days it just feels like we go five steps back. Right now, in my world, we’ve gone way back. It’s just evolving. So I really can’t give a defined answer.

Epstein: That’s a good answer, regardless. Thank you very much.

Google today announced a new long-term initiative that, if fully realized, will make it harder for online marketers and advertisers to track you across the web. This new proposal follows the company’s plans to change how cookies in Chrome work and to make it easier for users to block tracking cookies.

Today’s proposal for a new open standard extends this by looking at how Chrome can close the loopholes that the digital advertising ecosystem can use to circumvent that. And soon, that may mean that your browser will feature new options that give you more control over how much you share without losing your anonymity.

Over the course of the last few months, Google started talking about a ‘Privacy Sandbox’ which would allow for a certain degree of personalization while still protecting a user’s privacy.

“We have a great reputation on security. […] I feel the way we earned that reputation was by really moving the web forward,” Justin Schuh, Google’s engineering director for Chrome security and privacy told me. “We provide a lot of benefits, worked on a lot of different fronts. What we’re trying to do today is basically do the same thing for privacy: have the same kind of big, bold vision for how we think privacy should work on the web, how we should make browsers and the web more private by default.”

Here is the technical side of what Google is proposing today: to prevent the kind of fingerprinting that makes your machine uniquely identifiable as yours, Google is proposing the idea of a privacy budget. With this, a browser could allow websites to make enough API calls to get enough information about you to group your into a larger cohort but not to the point where you give up your anonymity. Once a site has exhausted this budget, the browser stops responding to any further calls.

Some browsers also already implement a very restrictive form of cookie blocking. Google argues that this has unintended consequences and that there needs to be an agreed-upon set of standards. “The other browser vendors, for the most part, we think really are committed to an open web,” said Schuh, who also stressed that Google wants this to be an open standard and develop it in collaboration with other players in the web ecosystem.

“There’s definitely been a lot of not intentional misinformation but just incorrect data about how sites monetize and how publishers are actually funded,” Schuh stressed. Indeed, Google today notes that its research has shown that publishers lose an average of 52 percent of their advertising revenue when their readers block cookies. That number is even higher for news sites.

In addition, blocking all third-party cookies is not a viable solution according to Google because developers will find ways around this restriction by relying on fingerprinting a user’s machine instead. Yet while you can opt out of cookies and delete them from your browser, you can’t opt out of being fingerprinted since there’s no data stored on your machine (unless you regularly change the configuration of your laptop, the fonts you have installed and other identifiable traits that make your laptop uniquely yours).

What Google basically wants to do here is change the incentive structure for the advertising ecosystem. Instead of trying to circumvent a browser’s cookie and fingerprinting restrictions, the privacy budget, in combination with the industry’s work on federated learning and differential privacy, this is meant to give advertisers the tools they need without hurting publishers, while still respecting the users’ privacy. That’s not an easy switch and something that, as Google freely acknowledges, will take years.

“It’s going to be a multi-year journey,” said Schuh. “What I can say is that I have very high confidence that we will be able to change the incentive structures with this. So we are committed to taking very strong measures to preserve user privacy, we are committed to combating abuses of user privacy. […] But as we’re doing that, we have to move the platform forward and make the platform inherently provide much more robust privacy protections.”

Most of the big tech companies now understand that they have a responsibility to help their users retain their privacy online. Yet at the same time, personalized advertising relies on knowing as much as possible about a given user and Google itself makes the vast majority of its income from its various ad services. It sounds like this should create some tension inside the company. Schuh, however, argued that Google’s ad side and the Chrome team have their independence. “At the end of the day, we’re a web browser, we are concerned about our users base. We are going to make the decisions that are most in their interest so we have to weigh how all of this fits in,” said Schuh. He also noted that the ad side has a very strong commitment to user transparency and user control — and that if users don’t trust the ads ecosystem, that’s a problem, too.

For the time being, though, there’s nothing here for you to try out or any bits being shipped in the Chrome browser. For now, this is simply a proposal and an effort on the Chrome team’s part to start a conversation. We should expect the company to start experimenting with some of these ideas in the near future, though.

Just like with its proposed changes to how advertisers and sites use cookies, this is very much a long-term project for the company. Some users will argue that Google could take more drastic measures and simply use its tech prowess to stop the ad ecosystem from tracking you through cookies, fingerprinting and whatever else the adtech boffins will dream up next. If Google’s numbers are correct, though, that would definitely hurt publishers and few publications are in a position to handle a 50 percent drop in revenue. I can see why Google doesn’t want to do this alone, but it does have the market position to be more aggressive in pushing for these changes.

Apple, which doesn’t have any vested interest in the advertising business, has already made this more drastic move with the latest release of Safari. Its browser now blocks a number of tracking technologies, including fingerprinting, without making any concessions to advertisers. The results of this for publishers is in line with Google’s cookie study.

As far as the rest of Chrome’s competitors, Firefox has started to add anti-fingerprinting techniques as well. Upstart Brave, too, has added fingerprinting protection for all third-party content, while Microsoft’s new Edge currently focuses on cookies for tracking prevention.

By trying to find a middle path, Chrome runs the risk of falling behind as users look for browsers that protect their privacy today — especially now that there are compelling alternatives again.

 

Earlier this year, the world turned very sour on a group of rich and famous parents who were exposed for having paid big money to get their not-so-academic offspring into competitive universities, using tactics like cheating on tests and more to get those offers. But even if you put illegal manoeuvres to one side, money and power have (frustratingly) long played roles in gaming the system to access higher learning.

Now, a startup that’s created an alternative route for those who are smart and willing to put in the work to get into those hallowed halls has raised some funding as it continues to grow. New Zealand’s Crimson Education, which has built a tech platform and consulting service to help students identify top schools and what they need to do in terms of academic and other activity to get in, has closed a $5 million round of funding. With this latest investment, the company is now valued at $245 million post-money, a big jump on the $160 million (NZ$220 million) valuation Crimson had in 2016 when Tiger Global invested $30 million.

This latest is a small but strategic round: the money is coming from Solborn Investment, the VC arm of the Korean holding company Solborn, and it’s specifically aimed at helping Crimson build out its business in that country (Korea has a huge population of young people who are very keen to study outside the country.) The startup has raised $42 million to date, and from what we understand it’s quietly gearing up to raise another round to double down on another new market for the company: students in the US, looking for better guidance to get into schools in the US.

The leap in Crimson’s valuation is due to the startup’s success, both in terms of student achievements and the business model that has been built around this.

The company currently works with 1,500 tutors and has had 20,000 students use its platform to date. There have been more than 60 offers of places at Ivy League schools to Crimson students; a further 160+ to Oxford, Cambridge and other competitive schools; and over 500 successful applications to the top 50 universities in the US.

As for the business model, pricing varies depending on the stage of the student (it offers programs for kids as young as 11), and what that student does — eg straight SAT tutoring or a full-service program that includes identifying schools, getting the right qualifications in order and applying — but in either case, it’s lucrative for Crimson. The average revenue per student in the US ranges between $5,000 and $10,000. Tutoring starts at $80 per hour, and $2,000 per module for the younger program.

These costs are not small — you might even say it sounds like an extra year or two of college education — and indeed some 15% of students get some form of financial aid to use Crimson.

Ivy League dogfooding

Crimson was started in 2014 after one of the founders, Jamie Beaton, decided he wanted to apply to top schools beyond his native New Zealand. He eventually ended up at Harvard, and on the way he identified a gap in the market for international students who wanted to do the same but found navigating how to map one country’s educational system and experience onto another’s. So, he decided to build his own experience and methods into a business with two equally ambitious co-founders (Sharndre Kushor, pictured below with Beaton, and Fangzhou Jiang). He was still a student at Harvard when the startup was incorporated, hence the “Crimson” of the name.

The company today is based around not just a network of human tutors, but a set of proprietary algorithms to identify what a student needs to do and the likelihood of achieving it, an app, a popular YouTube channel, a Q&A board, and a “philanthropy” arm which is focused on providing financial aid to people to use Crimson, and to help Crimson students access and get scholarships and other financial aid to study.

Initially focused on international students who need help navigating the waters of applying to schools elsewhere, it turns out that domestic students need and want the same kind of advice and help, too.

Beaton is now 24, and unsurprisingly he has become something of a poster child for Crimson because of his own grit-and-determination success.

But to be clear, Beaton was not your average high school student, and he isn’t even your average over-achiever.

Before he turned 18, he’d done some 10 A-Levels (somewhat akin to AP exams in the US, but more rigorous. Focused on the whole of your last two years of school and mandatory, most people take only three focused on what they eventually want to major in in undergrad).

Beaton had made the effort to engage outside tutors to work with for all the subjects that his New Zealand high school could not accommodate, and engaged others to help him prepare for US-specific exams like the SAT, as well as work through the application process for the many schools whose admissions applications he filled out.

And since his undergrad years at Harvard, where he studied applied mathematics, he received a masters at Harvard in the subject, then an MBA and a masters of education at Stanford, and is now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford studying public policy.

So as the company continues to grow, it will be worth watching how it navigates its brand, its message, and the inevitable involvement of more than the early adopting high-achievers who have used Crimson to date.

That is to say, the company naturally attracts parents and kids who — even if they are only fractionally as self-motivated as Beaton seems to be — will already have a lot of focus and academic ability and may therefore be predisposed to succeeding through the platform. How will that change as it grows in popularity, and how will Crimson measure its success?

In answer to the question, Beaton said that there is already a lot of academic analysis in place to make sure that Crimson is not effectively an echo chamber, providing help to those who are already well along the way to academic success. “When we bring a student on board we do a lot of academic assessments,” Beaton said. “We then look at baseline achievement level, and we can use that to track our contribution.”

Similarly, the aim is not just for prestigious schools — even though that is essentially what it is right now — it’s to find the right school and right subject for the right person.

If Crimson can capture that sucessfully, there is a lot of potential for the company to transcend the university admissions use case and provide an effective platform to replace those slightly stilted, standardised careers quizzes that exist today to help wayward teenagers figure out what they might want to do, and how to get there.

“This is about helping to unlock future opportunities and providing advice,” Beaton said. “You can’t just push students into something.”

Apple is getting ready for its usual fall iPhone launch event, which is rumored to be happening September 10, though the event hasn’t been officially confirmed this year. A new report from Bloomberg offers a preview of the lineup of hardware products it’s looking to debut this year. There are new iPhones, of course, including a new iPhone Pro model that replaces the XS line and adds a third, wider angle rear camera (which has been rumored previously), and a refreshed iPhone XR at the entry level that will also get a second, optical zoom camera.

These new iPhone Pros would pack a lot of other updates besides, though they’ll look visually similar beyond the changed camera module. They’ll offer wireless charging for AirPods with the Qi-enabled wireless charging case, for instance, for a quick top-up when you’re the road, and they’ll also get new matte finishes on some models vs. the glossy look common to all iPhone models today. Updated Face ID will offer unlocking at more angles, and they’ll pack “dramatically” better water resistance, as well as improved shatter resistance to shrive drops.

Also new this year, though not necessarily debuting at the same event, will be a new MacBook Pro with a display size somewhere over 16-inches, which Bloomberg reports will still manage to be similar overall in physical footprint to the current 15-inch MacBook Pros, thanks to a new bezel. There are also plans to roll out new AirPods, with a higher price tag but also added water resistance and noise cancelling features that the current AirPods lack.

On the iPad side, Apple will refresh its iPad Pro this year, with updated versions of the 11-inch and 12.9-inch models that will get spec bumps, plus better cameras, but otherwise remain the same in terms of form factor. The entry-level iPad will also get an update, with a screen size increase from 9.7-inches to 10.2-inches, which could mean that it also slims down its bezel and does away with the dedicated Home button, though the Bloomberg doesn’t make mention of how it will actually change to accommodate the larger display size.

Apple Watch will also be updated, with the same case design introduced last year, but with at least new case finishes, which have leaked via the watchOS 6 update as coming in titanium and ceramic.

Other planned updates in the report include details about the iPhone to follow in 2020, which it says will a rear-facing 3D camera, as well as 5G network support. The HomePod will also apparently get a sequel next year – a smaller version that will likely be a lot more affordable vs. the current $300 speaker.

Challenger bank N26 is announcing two things this week. First, the company lets you share sub-accounts with other N26 users in just a few taps. Second, after a limited beta test, the company is officially launching in the U.S. with open registration.

Shared Spaces could be seen as an alternative to joint accounts. The feature could be particularly useful for groups with more than 2 persons and situations that temporarily require a shared account. For instance, you could use Shared Spaces for a vacation, to split bills with your roommates, etc.

Only a small subset of the company’s user base can access the feature for now. N26 plans to gradually roll out Shared Spaces to all users.

The company is building this feature on top of Spaces. This feature has been around for a while. It lets you create a sub-account and set aside some money in that separate sub-account. You can set savings goal and transfer money on a regular basis.

Shares Spaces is basically a multiplayer version of Spaces. When a user creates a Space, they can invite up to 10 other N26 users to that Space. While the original user remains the owner of the Space, other users can freely deposit and withdraw money from the shared account.

Sending an invite is the equivalent of granting a power of attorney on a Space. The admin of the Shared Space is the only person who can add and remove participant to the Shared Space. So it’s not technically a joint account as joint accounts have multiple owners.

Interestingly, N26 is launching this as a premium feature. You need a premium N26 account in order to create a Shared Space, such as an N26 You subscription (€9.90 per month) or an N26 Metal subscription (€16.90 per month). You can invite free users, but free users are limited to two active Spaces. Those limitations will most certainly foster premium subscriptions.

Unfortunately, you can’t spend money from a Shared Space directly for now. Your card and bank transfers remain tied to your main N26 account. You have to tap on a transaction and tap on “Pay back from a space” to get your money back from a Shared Space.

N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me that there could be a feature that lets you attach different cards to different Spaces in the future.

When it comes to the U.S., N26 started accepting customers in the U.S. in early July. And it looks like it’s been working well as anyone in the U.S. can now download the app and open a bank account. N26 is also launching MoneyBeam in the U.S., a Venmo-like feature that lets you instantly send money to other N26 users.

N26 is also launching perks in the U.S. You’ll get small discounts on some monthly subscriptions if you pay with your N26 card. Current partners include Aaptiv, Blinkist, Luminary and Tidal.

I already coved the U.S. launch back in July, so head over to my previous article to learn more.

Zomato, one of India’s biggest food delivery startups, has major ambitions. It is increasingly expanding its reach in the country to serve dozens of new cities and towns every few weeks.

It is investing heavily in building cloud kitchens to quickly meet demand for certain food items. And it is internally working on “Project Kisan”, something which has not been reported earlier, to procure raw material directly from farmers and fishermen to better control the supply of items to restaurants. It also wants to deliver food by drones in the coming future.

To boost its usage, Zomato is also trying to bring Zomato Gold, a two-year-old subscription program as part of which it allows customers dining in at a restaurant to access a number of discounted deals on food and drinks, to customers who prefer to eat at home, sources familiar with the matter have told TechCrunch in recent weeks.

Zomato Gold is already a hit with a customer. The company expects Gold, which has amassed more than 800,000 customers, to bring in $20 million to $25 million in revenue by end of this year.

But before Zomato goes about extending the program, Zomato Gold’s foundations have come under severe scrutiny from a number of restaurant partners in India who say that the startup’s offering is hurting their bottom line and brand image.

More than 2,000 of the 6,500 partners of Zomato Gold have opted out of the program in recent days. The disruption occurred over the weekend after the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), a trade body that represents more than 500,000 restaurants in the country, kick started a #LogOut campaign against Zomato and other dining startups such as Nearbuy, Dineout, EazyDiner, and Magicpin.

Deepinder Goyal, CEO of Zomato, quickly acknowledged the resistance and admitted that the company has made mistakes. “Somewhere, we have made mistakes and things haven’t gone as planned. This is a wake up call that we need to do 100x more for our restaurant partners than we have done before,”

Zomato, which operates in two dozen countries, and other food startups and restaurant partners met earlier this week to reach a conclusion. They could not find one.

“Over the past two days, NRAI has held extensive meetings with all restaurant aggregators and we were bemused to learn that the aggregators were promoting deep discounts to stay competitive amongst each other. While one aggregator gave 1+1 (one drink or food item free on purchase of another drink or food item), the other had to adopt a 50% discount scheme in order to stay relevant,” Rahul Singh, President of the NRAI, said in a statement.

“What hurts the most is that these deep discounts are funded by the restaurant industry and not the aggregators. Restaurants do not get any share of the proceeds that aggregators generate from guests as subscription fees,” he added.

Zomato, on its part, assured that it will bring changes to its Gold program by mid-September to introduce measures to prevent over usage by customers. But late Wednesday, NRAI rejected the proposal calling it insufficient and said restaurants will continue to stay off Zomato.

The restaurant association said the problem is deep discounting that Zomato is bandying out through its Gold program and the startup’s proposed changes don’t really address that.

“It’s a tweak in the drug, which doesn’t solve the addiction. Since the launch in November 2017, this program has been shifting goalposts. What started as an exclusive invite only privilege, became a marketplace for bargain hunters, a word admitted by the Zomato founder in recent tweets. This Gold has lost its sheen. We stand united in the cause to obviate the deep discounting phenomenon and will therefore #stayloggedout,” the NRAI said in a statement.

Restaurants have also complained that if they do not accept Zomato Gold program, customers are disappointed and leave bad ratings on the platform, which significantly hurts their sales. Zomato makes most of its revenue from promoting listings on its platform.

A Zomato spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company was committed to making some changes to its program, but declined to comment further.

Commerce and marketing are radically changing these days. Consumers are increasingly looking for brands they identify with, while at the same time, the cost of acquiring users is increasing year-over-year for marketers. For brands, that math makes marketing complicated: they want to reach the right customers with the most efficient acquisition channels in order to drive the best return.

Toronto-headquartered Drop thinks it has a formula — and one that might put some dollars (Canadian and U.S.) in consumers’ pockets. Drop is a mobile app that scans your credit card purchases and then proceeds to give you offers on things you might want to spend.

Those offers have now led to a big offer from VCs, to the tune of a $44 million series B round of capital led by Onsi Sawiris of HOF Capital . In addition, the Royal Bank of Canada joined the round as a strategic investor.

When we last caught up with CEO and founder Derrick Fung, Drop had recently raised its series A from NEA. In the interim, the startup has continued to grow rapidly, providing customers $19 million in rewards and helping to drive $350 million in sales to 300 merchant partners, according to the company.

Fung said that “our thesis … from two years ago is generally the same: consumers, especially this new generation of consumers, are all looking for new ways to save money and improve their financial health.” Meanwhile, “with retailers, they’re all hungry to find more cost-effective ways to market. And I’d say more than ever before, Facebook, Google, and the traditional platforms are just very expensive.”

Drop wants to take those digital ad dollars and turn them into much more direct engagement with actual consumers. “What we’ve introduced, which we think is very unique, is instead of displaying ads, we are essentially cutting the consumer in on the deal. […] That’s what makes our platform more cost effective, because the consumer actually gets something in return.”

While Drop is now available in the U.S. and Canada on both iOS and Android, Fung says that the company’s next two markets will be Australia and the United Kingdom.

The loyalty space has heated up in the last few years with different strategic plays. Bumped, an app that pays consumers in the stock of the companies they shop at, has raised capital from Canaan. Meanwhile, New York City-based Lolli has taken a similar approach but pays out bitcoin instead.

Despite those new entrants, Fung believes that Drop’s current focus on points is the right call. “I’d say that based on research we’ve done, points is still the most favorite reward for consumers,” he said.

Since the company’s last fundraise, it acquired YC-backed Canopy Labs, which offered a service that helped companies evaluate customer journeys on their sites. The acquisition was designed to accelerate Drop’s machine learning capabilities to better match merchants and consumers as the company expands the depth of its two-sided marketplace.

The company currently has 77 employees across its Toronto and New York offices, and expects to double that count in the next 18 to 24 months. In addition to HOF and RBC, the round was joined by previous investors NEA, Sierra, and White Star Capital.