Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Nintendo looks set to release wireless SNES controllers for the Nintendo Switch, which likely means it’ll also be bringing classic SNES titles to its Nintendo Online virtual gaming library. The news comes via an FCC filing (hat tip to Eurogamer) , which includes a diagram of what looks very clearly to be the backside of a Super Nintendo-style wireless controller.

The diagram includes a model number that uses the ‘HAC’ code that Nintendo employs to designate Switch accessories, and past history suggests that the arrival of retro-inspired hardware for the Switch also means throwback games are on their way. Nintendo launched wireless NES controllers for the Nintendo Switch in September, and they arrived alongside NES games delivered via Nintendo Online as free perks for subscribers.

The FCC filing is more or less concrete proof that Nintendo intends to release something, but the rest is speculation (if very likely, informed speculation) at this point. Still, it seems inevitable that Nintendo bring its SNES library to the Switch, especially since it did so for the Wii Virtual Console before.

Dostavista, the “crowdsourced” same-day delivery service founded in Russia but operating in several countries, has raised a $15 million Series B. Leading the round is Vostok New Ventures, with participation from existing investors Flashpoint, and Addventure.

Founded in 2012 by Mike Alexandrovski, after he initially considered creating a game where players would be asked to deliver virtual items before pivoting to the real thing, Dostavista promises same-day delivery powered by its network of “trusted couriers”.

Via the Dostavista mobile app, a gig economy-styled courier can be booked to pick up and deliver the requested item in a claimed “less than 90 minutes”.

The company currently operates in 11 countries, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. It employs almost 400 people and says it is on track to hit a $100 million GMV run rate.

Perhaps most noteworthy in the highly competitive and usually cash intensive market of delivery, Dostavista says it is already profitable.

“These days it’s possible to order food to your house in a half-hour, taxi in minutes, but unless you’re an Amazon Prime member, your options for affordable, same-day delivery of goods are very limited,” says Alexandrovski in a statement. “That’s a problem and one we intend to solve”.

Meanwhile, today’s injection of capital will be used to invest further in its product, try out new “bold” product experiments, and for more aggressive marketing and sales. This will include strengthening the global team through additional hires.

When Fortnite reached stratospheric popularity early last year, there were undoubtedly an awful lot of VCs on the sidelines looking enviously at the massive platform and wondering what opportunities could be gleaned from its rapid rise.

Epic Games went on to raise later that year at a nearly $15 billion valuation so some of those investors decided to invest directly in the Fortnite creator’s continued ascent, but others have been looking to get in on the ground floor of new operations that are aiming to rethink the line between video games and social networks.

Today, Andreessen Horowitz announced that it’s leading the $16.5 million Series A of a stealthy gaming startup called Singularity 6. The startup’s ex-Riot Games co-founders claim their venture is less focused on building a button-mashing competitive shooter than it is a “virtual society” where users can develop relationships with in-game characters powered by “complex AI”.

London Venture Partners (LVP) and FunPlus Ventures also participated in the Series A round. LVP led the company’s $2.5 million seed round last year.

“The near term focus is our first product, building a world that begins to tackle the community simulation space, and that’s really combining a strong virtual community with deep and compelling gameplay,” CEO Anthony Leung told TechCrunch in an interview.

He says that the company’s influences for its first title include “Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.”

While the co-founder did specify that Singularity 6 is a “game and tech company” he didn’t have too much to say about what that tech was. “We actually have to roll out a lot of custom tech, because there aren’t really any off-the-shelf solutions for the MMO aspects or the virtual community features,” Leung told us.

A16z has already invested in a company building the underlying tech for MMOs, Improbable, which has raised $600 million+ for its server-stitching SpatialOS platform. Investors like Andreessen Horowitz are largely ambitious that the gaming market will continue to grow as major players invest heavily in platforms that make the titles more accessible to new user bases.

“Interactive entertainment has become more mainstream and approachable than ever before, as technology use is no longer for fringe or techy groups – this new generation of ‘gamers’ is becoming more inclusive of everyone – as immersive, digital experiences will become as accessible and commonplace as the social forums we know and love today.” wrote a16z Partner Andrew Chen, who is taking a seat on Singularity 6’s board as part of this deal, in a blog post.

Singularity 6 isn’t sharing a release date for its “virtual society” quite yet, but Leung tells me the title is “still a ways out” from launch.

Caterwings, the Rocket Internet-founded corporate catering marketplace that operates in 8 countries, has acquired German competitor Lemoncat.

Terms remain undisclosed, although I understand from a source close to the company that it was an “8-digit all stock” deal and sees investors, which include Lukasz Gadowski, Target Global, Point 9, and Northzone, pick up shares in Caterwings’ parent company B2B Food Group.

Noteworthy, Rocket Internet was also an investor in Lemoncat, despite founding Caterwings, as it is prone to do.

Meanwhile, the two combined companies are disclosing the completion of another financing round to bolster the newly rolled up venture. The sees a further €5 million invested into B2B Food Group, bringing total investment to €13 million in the last 9 months.

I’m told Lemoncat’s legacy investors participated, signalling that they remain bullish on the corporate catering market, essentially doubling down on their investment in the space rather than seeking an exit.

“The market in Europe is clearly there and the question is not whether it will be digitalized, but only when,” says Lemoncat founder and CEO Doreen Huber. “Hence I am thrilled to be part of the further expansion of the international market leadership of the B2B Food Group”.

The merger of the two companies also comes shortly after takeout food behemoth Just Eat acquired City Pantry, a rival to Caterwings in the U.K., for £16 million.

“It proves to us that also the big consumer food platforms see how great the B2B market is,” Huber tells me. “The baskets are much higher and therefore a business customer is more attractive”.

Facebook has denied contradicting itself in evidence to the UK parliament and a US public prosecutor.

Last month the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee wrote to the company to raise what it said were discrepancies in evidence Facebook has given to international parliamentarians vs evidence submitted in response to the Washington, DC Attorney General — which is suing Facebook on its home turf, over the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

Yesterday Bloomberg obtained Facebook’s response to the committee.

In the letter Rebecca Stimson, the company’s head of U.K. public policy, denies any inconsistency in evidence submitted on both sides of the Atlantic, writing:

The evidence given to the Committees by Mike Schroepfer (Chief Technology Officer), Lord Allan (Vice President for Policy Solutions), and other Facebook representatives is entirely consistent with the allegations in the SEC 
Complaint filed 24 July 2019. In their evidence, Facebook representatives truthfully answered questions about when the company first learned of Aleksandr Kogan / GSR’s improper transfer of data to Cambridge Analytica, which was in 
December 2015 through The Guardian’s reporting. We are aware of no evidence to suggest that Facebook learned any earlier of that improper transfer.

 As we have told regulators, and many media stories have since reported, we heard speculation about data scraping by Cambridge Analytica in September 2015. We have also testified publicly that we first learned Kogan sold data to Cambridge Analytica in December 2015. These are two different things and this 
is not new information.

Stimson goes on to claim that Facebook merely heard “rumours in September 2015 that Cambridge Analytica was promoting its ability to scrape user data from public Facebook pages”. (In statements made earlier this year to the press on this same point Facebook has also used the word “speculation” to refer to the internal concerns raised by its staff, writing that “employees heard speculation that Cambridge Analytica was scraping data”.)

In the latest letter, Stimson repeats Facebook’s earlier line about data scraping being common for public pages (which may be true, but plenty of Facebook users’ pages aren’t public to anyone other than their hand-picked friends so… ), before claiming it’s not the same as the process by which Cambridge Analytica obtained Facebook data (i.e. by paying a developer on Facebook’s platform to build an app that harvested users’ and users friends’ data).

“The scraping of data from public pages (which is unfortunately common for any internet service) is different from, and has no relationship to, the illicit transfer to third parties of data obtained by an app developer (which was the subject of the December 2015 Guardian article and of Facebook representatives’ evidence),” she writes, suggesting a ‘sketchy’ data modeling company with deep Facebook platform penetration looked like ‘business as usual’ for Facebook management back in 2015. 

As we’ve reported before, it has emerged this year — via submissions to other US legal proceedings against Facebook — that staff working for its political advertising division raised internal concerns about what Cambridge Analytica was up to in September 2015, months prior to The Guardian article which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has claimed is the point when he personally learned what Cambridge Analytica was doing on his platform.

These Facebook staff described Cambridge Analytica as a “sketchy (to say the least) data modeling company that has penetrated our market deeply” — months before the newspaper published its scoop on the story, per an SEC complaint which netted Facebook a $100M fine, in addition to the FTC’s $5BN privacy penalty.

Nonetheless, Facebook is once claiming there’s nothing but ‘rumors’ to see here.

The DCMS committee also queried Facebook’s flat denial to the Washington, DC Attorney General that the company knew of any other apps misusing user data; failed to take proper measures to secure user data by failing to enforce its own platform policy; and failed to disclose to users when their data was misused — pointing out that Facebook reps told it on multiple occasions that Facebook knew of other apps violating its policies and had taken action against them.

Again, Facebook denies any contradiction whatsoever here.

“The particular allegation you cite asserts that Facebook knew of third party applications that violated its policies and failed to take reasonable measures to enforce against them,” writes Stimson. “As we have consistently stated to the Committee and elsewhere, we regularly take action against apps and developers who violate our policies. We therefore appropriately, and consistently with what we told the Committee, denied the allegation.”

So, turns out, Facebook was only flat denying some of the allegations in para 43 of the Washington, DC Attorney General’s complaint. But the company doesn’t see bundling responses to multiple allegations under one blanket denial as in any way misleading…

In a tweet responding to Facebook’s latest denial, DCMS committee chair Damian Collins dubbed the company’s response “typically disingenuous” — before pointing out: “They didn’t previously disclose to us concerns about Cambridge Analytica prior to Dec 2015, or say what they did about it & haven’t shared results of investigations into other Apps.”

On the app audit issue, Stimson’s letter justifies Facebook’s failure to provide the DCMS committee with the requested information on other ‘sketchy’ apps it’s investigating, writing this is because the investigation — which CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook blog post on March 21, 2018; saying then that it would “investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information”; “conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity”; “ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit”; and ban any developers found to have misused user data; and “tell everyone affected by those apps” — is, er, “ongoing”.

More than a year ago Facebook did reveal that it had suspended around 200 suspicious apps out of “thousands” reviewed. However updates on Zuckerberg’s great app audit have been thin on the ground since then, to say the least.

“We will update the Committee as we publicly share additional information about that extensive effort,” says Stimson now.

Digital payments startup QFPay announced today that it has raised $20 million in new funding led by returning investors Sequoia Capital China and Matrix Partners. MDI Ventures, the investment arm of state-owned Indonesian telecom Telkom Indonesia, Rakuten Capital and VentureSouq also participated as new strategic investors.

According to Crunchbase, this brings QFPay’s total raised so far to $36.5 million. The funding will be used to develop new digital payment products.

QFPay is the largest global partner of WeChat Pay and Alipay, enabling them to process payments to merchants around the world. Founded in 2012, QFPay first launched in China and is known for its QR code-based technology. Its products include end-to-end online and offline mobile payment solutions and add-on services like food ordering and customer loyalty programs. The company claims that it has served over 1.2 million merchants and processed over 1 billion transactions.

QFPay is currently present in 13 markets: Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and United Arab Emirates.

In a statement, co-founder and CEO Tim Lee said “We have built our track record, know-how and expertise in this industry since we launched in China, which is dubbed as the birthplace of digital payment. We are excited to leverage what we have learned in the past seven years to help lead the cashless movement in the rest of Asia as demand for digital payment, particularly QR-code payment method, heats up.”

Zhihu, the largest question and answer platform in China, has raised a $434 million Series F. This is not only the company’s biggest round since it launched in 2011, but also one of the largest secured over the past two years by a Chinese Internet culture and entertainment company, said China Renaissance, which served as the funding’s financial advisor.

The Series F was led by Beijing Kuaishou, the video and live-streaming app, with participation from Baidu . Existing investors Tencent and CapitalToday also returned for the round, which Zhihu will use for technology and product development. Baidu told Bloomberg that it will add 100 million Zhihu posts to its main app.

While Zhihu has downplayed reports that it is planning an IPO, it embarked on plans to hire a CFO and restructure last year.

Zhihu users tend to be educated with relatively high incomes and the platform has developed a reputation for hosting experts and organizations that are knowledgeable in tech, marketing and professional services like education. Like Quora and other Q&A platforms, Zhihu lets users post and answer text-based questions. But it also has other features, including discussion forums, a publishing platform and live videos for brands and companies to answer questions in real-time. Instead of making its streaming video feature, called Zhihu Live, open to all users, it is available to only to experts and organizations, differentiating it from other streaming apps like Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok (ByteDance is an investor in Zhihu but did not participate in this round).

In a post about the round on his Zhihu page, founder and CEO Victor Zhou wrote the company plans to keep up with rapid changes in China’s media and Internet landscape. “Over the past 8 years, users have gone from expecting simple entertainment to using the Internet to deal with real-life and work problems. The focus of competition has also shifted from traffic to traffic + quality.”

 

Porsche is upping its plug-in hybrid game with several new vehicles added to its lineup, including a power-packing 2020 Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid.

The plug-in version of this flagship SUV combines a 14.1-kilowatt-hour battery and 134-horsepower electric motor with a 4.0-liter twin turbocharged V8 engine found in the traditional gas-powered Cayenne Turbo. The electric motor is located between the V8 engine and its standard eight-speed transmission.

The upshot is a 670-horsepower plug-in beast that produces 663 pound-feet of torque and can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.6 seconds. Not bad for an SUV.

But it’s not all about power. Porsche also increased the energy capacity of its battery, 30% more than the one used in previous generation plug-in hybrid Cayenne models. EPA fuel economy figures have not been released yet, but if it’s like other Porsche plug-in hybrids, the range will be somewhere around 20 or so miles.

The automaker has a number of nifty standard items in the Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid (and two new plug-in variants of the Cayenne Coupé), including a 7.2 kW onboard charger and 21-inch AeroDesign Wheels. The upgraded charger enables a complete recharge of the battery in as little as 2.4 hours when using a 240-volt connection with a 50-amp circuit, according to Porsche.

The plug-in versions of Cayenne Turbo and the Cayenne Turbo Coupé also comes standard with Porsche’s ceramic composite brakes, dynamic chassis control and other bonuses like 18-way adaptive sports seats.

All of this has a price, of course. The base price of the 2020 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid is $161,900.

Porsche also took the wraps off of two other plug-in variants of its new Cayenne Coupé, a smaller, flashier version of the Cayenne. Both Cayenne Coupé variants feature a fixed spoiler above the rear window with a new adaptive rear spoiler below it that’s designed to enhance aerodynamic stability.

The Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid Coupé has a base price of pricier $164,400, slightly more expensive than its Cayenne Turbo S E-Hybrid counterpart due to a few additional extras such as 20-inch alloy wheels and a glass panoramic roof.

But the two high-end vehicles share many of the same standard items and stats. Both vehicles can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.6 seconds and reach a top speed of 183 miles per hour, which is electronically limited.

Porsche also unveiled a less powerful and cheaper 455-horsepower Cayenne E-Hybrid Coupé that has a V6 engine and a base price of $86,400. This coupé version, which has the same powertrain as the Cayenne E-Hybrid, has a top speed of 157 mph and can travel from 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds.

Tumblr has been an millstone around the neck of its owners, first Yahoo and later Oath and Verizon Media, pretty much since it was acquired in 2013. They never found an answer to the question that new owner Automattic is presumably about to take a crack at: how to make this unruly erstwhile porn factory turn a profit.

Amazingly, the secret technique that Tumblr may have been waiting for was good old-fashioned business sense: make something people want, then charge them a good price for it. Tumblr may fit into the WordPress model and do just this — quite a change from the indirect monetization attempts of the past decade.

The Yahoo acquisition under the stewardship of Marissa Mayer seems to have been made with the assumption, naive in retrospect but incredibly common in that era, that you could buy an audience, plunk some ads in the product, then sit back and let the money roll in.

But beyond doing that, Yahoo never really did anything with Tumblr apart from adding a few features and expanding ads. And for a while growth was good and the network flourished, even rivaling Instagram on some metrics.

But over time Tumblr, and “microblogging” in general, declined as more focused social experiences like Instagram took over, and it prospered in other, less savory ways. Porn grew to become a huge proportion of the content of the site, a large majority by some estimates — but to guess at the amount of porn on Tumblr is like trying to count the waves in the ocean.

After a run-in with Apple last year over allegations of child porn on the platform and its subsequent removal from the App Store, management somewhere in or above Tumblr — founder David Karp had long since left — decided at the end of 2018 to kill off all porn on the platform. The resulting exodus of users, and generally speaking the removal of the internet’s most popular form of content, must have practically decimated the site’s numbers. I don’t think it ever made a dime, but now it was losing money and users.

Hence, after following a long and rather boring path, Tumblr has arrived at the doorstep of WordPress wrapped in a bow. So what now? The answer lies in Tumblr’s original strengths and brand, which years of neglect have only partly tarnished.

Tumbling ideas

In the years since Tumblr was bought, its rivals have taken its best parts and run with them.

Tumblr was a community of communities — Pinterest and Reddit took this over with savvy partnerships and sticky user recruitment.

Tumblr was a simple, visual blog — Instagram completely took over a large part of this space, simplifying and streamlining, while hosts like Imgur appeared like remorae on the social networks, sucking up viral traffic.

Tumblr was a free, customizable home for artists — artists who later left for simple storefronts combined with one of the above platforms, or one more suited to them, like DeviantArt (!).

There are plenty of other ways that Tumblr helped nudge the internet economy forward, but it never evolved itself, an evolutionary dead end that found itself outcompeted in every niche.

Automattic, which reportedly bought the whole shebang for a few million dollars, is actually in a good position here. It is not saddled with a billion-dollar valuation it needs to justify and make back in five years. Automattic is a successful company and a few million bucks — plus all the recurring expenses — likely isn’t going to significantly impact their bottom line in the short run, especially what is likely to be a rather destructive redundancy check.

Leaving aside porn, Tumblr can still arguably be said to be known for its resilient and weird niche communities and a simple, easily created and customized “home on the web.”

WordPress is well known as being a step above these things, focusing on savvier users and businesses who not only don’t mind dealing with plugins and code upkeep, but who are willing to themselves actually pay for the services they use.

And old dog, but the tricks aged well

As a “baby’s first website” Tumblr is a great option, and unlike 7 or 8 years ago, one that WordPress knows how to monetize. Not only that, but people are leaving some of the communities that appeared in Tumblr’s wake as they begin to encroach on privacy and good practices. Etsy sellers, for instance, are being squeezed by the company’s insistence on free shipping. And while Instagram is a great place to advertise, it and Facebook still haven’t figured out the buying-stuff-on-it piece to anyone’s great satisfaction.

It’s not exactly a home run, since personal websites are also very ten years ago. But the migration to larger platforms has proven unsatisfactory: Your data is sucked up and sold, there’s cross-pollination with your personal stuff, the promised capabilities don’t appear, and so on. The pendulum is swinging away from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which have exhibited little interest in fostering user communities that don’t directly contribute to their primary business cases (where they exist).

Why shouldn’t Automattic snatch up a storied personal publishing website, recently swept of porn, with a good reputation for thriving, self-organized communities? Especially if it already has a business model that works and doesn’t require compromising the basic value proposition of the personal publishing website in question.

WordPress doesn’t make its money by displaying ads on the blogs it hosts, but through ordinary services and skimming a bit here and there from others using the platform to reach customers. Isn’t that a good match for Tumblr, or at least a good enough match to give it a shot? Yahoo’s unimaginative plan didn’t play to Tumblr’s strengths, and in fact may have resulted in exacerbating its weaknesses as engagement metrics were paramount, regardless of whether they were garbage clicks or not.

Tumblr is a relic of an older web, a younger and more naive one, in both good ways and bad. It was ill suited to the economy Yahoo attempted to shoehorn it into, and failed to become anything more than what it started as. But while it was a poor fit for web platforms that attempted to leverage their users as value to third parties, it may yet be a good fit for a company that just wants to charge money for goods and services and has found success doing so.

As a junior WordPress platform that combines personal website with small communities, blogging, and marketplaces, a new Tumblr could be a great match for an increasingly decentralized web economy. Whether Automattic will be able to make good on this particular venture is difficult to say. But one thing is for sure: They have a better chance of making back their purchase price than Yahoo did, and a lot less to lose if they don’t.

Last week when Salesforce announced it was buying ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion you might not have realized it, but the law firm Shearman & Sterling was advising Salesforce throughout the deal. In fact, there are lawyers involved in every transaction of this sort from the initial call to the closing.

As you would expect, there are hundreds of tiny details involved in bringing a deal to fruition from checking the validity of the offer, checking the financial health of the target company, negotiating a price and terms and clearing it with the boards/stockholders. Even after the deal is signed and agreed upon by both companies, the lawyers often have to ease it through the regulatory process before it finally closes.

The attorneys act as project managers, work with company executives and boards of directors and guide them through the lengthy transaction process, advising them on the legal side of the equation, while working with the investment banks to make sure everything goes as smoothly as possible.

Looking for a target

A company like Salesforce doesn’t go out and buy ClickSoftware randomly. There is in fact a method to its M&A madness. As I wrote in an article describing the process in 2016: