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1. GitHub confirms it has blocked developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea

U.S. trade restrictions are trickling down to the developer community: GitHub is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the code-hosting service, as confirmed by tweets from its CEO.

The Microsoft-owned code-sharing service says users in sanctioned countries will not be able to access private repositories and GitHub Marketplace, and also will be blocked from maintaining private paid organization accounts. However, public repositories will remain available to everyone.

2. Takeaway and Just Eat to merge in $10B deal to take on Deliveroo and Uber Eats in Europe

Both companies are currently publicly listed, Just Eat in London and Takeaway.com in Amsterdam, each with a market cap of around $5 billion.

3. Europe’s top court sharpens guidance for sites using leaky social plug-ins

The ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU states that sites embedding the Facebook Like button are jointly responsible for the initial data processing — and must either obtain informed consent from site visitors before transferring the data to Facebook, or be able to demonstrate a legal basis for processing this data.

4. SoftBank pumps $2B into Indonesia through Grab investment, putting it head to head with Gojek

This announcement specifies how Grab will be using some of the $7 billion that it has raised to date, earmarking $2 billion for Indonesian operations over the next five years.

5. Is space truly within reach for startups and VC?

We talk to founders and investors about the current state of the space startup ecosystem. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Emergence’s Jason Green joins TC Sessions: Enterprise this September

Jason Green founded Emergence in 2003 with the aim of “looking around the corner, identifying themes and aiming to win big in the long run.”

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest episode of Equity looks at Robinhood’s latest funding round (which came at a $7.6 billion valuation). Meanwhile, over at Original Content, we reviewed the latest season of Netflix’s “Queer Eye.”

YouTube TV has landed another network partner: PBS. The public broadcaster’s member stations will be able to stream live and o-demand to YouTube TV subscribers beginning later this year, PBS and YouTube announced today.

This is the first digital TV provider partnership for PBS, and the broadcaster is intent upon providing local livestreams to “as many Americans as possible” with the move. The partnership will also include PBS KIDS, providing educational and entertainment content for children via the platform. All content will be available through YouTube TV video-on-demand, and recordable via its DVR service without limits on how much content users can store, too.

YouTube has had its own share of criticism for the kind of content kids may be able to access from its platform, and its said to be considering a number of options for addressing misuse of the platform when it comes to children-focused videos. YouTube TV is distinct from its primary streaming video business, however, and is much more like a traditional over-the-top cable or satellite subscription, however, with a number of broadcast networks and premium channels signed on to provide U.S. viewers access for $49.99 per month.

San Francisco and Lagos based fintech startup Flutterwave has partnered with Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba to offer digital payments between Alipay and African merchants.

Flutterwave is a Nigerian founded B2B payments service (primarily) for companies in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad.

Alipay is Alibaba’s digital wallet and payments platform. In 2013, Alipay surpassed PayPal in payments volume and currently claims a global network of over 1 billion active users, per Alibaba’s latest earnings report.

A large portion of Alipay’s network is in China, which makes the Flutterwave integration significant to capturing payments activity around the estimated $200 billion in China-Africa trade.

“This means that all our merchants can accept or install Alipay as a payment type to accept payments from its billion users,” Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola — aka GB — told TechCrunch.

“There’s a lot of trade between Africa and China and this integration makes it easier for African merchants to accept Chinese customer payments.”

A Flutterwave company release added, “We’ve managed to connect African countries…to each other so it was about time we connected Africa to the world. We started with the U.S…but you can’t connect Africa to the world without China.”

An Alipay spokesperson confirmed the Flutterwave collaboration with TechCrunch. Flutterwave will earn revenue from the partnership by charging its standard 2.8 percent on international transactions. The company currently has over 60,000 merchants on its platform, according to Agboola.

The Flutterwave-Alipay alliance developed out of Agboola’s  acceptance in Alibaba’s Africa eFounders Fellowship.

“Because of that I was in China to do meetings with Jack Ma and the only ask I had from that trip is ‘I want to be the Africa payment infrastructure that plugs directly into Alipay,'” Agboola said.

The Alipay partnership follows those between Flutterwave and Visa earlier this year to launch a consumer payment product for Africa called GetBarter.

Founded in 2016, Flutterwave allows clients to tap its APIs and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications. Existing customers include Uber,  Facebook,  Booking.com and e-commerce unicorn Jumia.com. Flutterwave has processed 100 million transactions worth $2.6 billion since inception, according to company data.

In a recent Extra Crunch feature, TechCrunch tracked Flutterwave as one of several Africa focused fintech companies that have established headquarters in San Francisco and operations in Africa to tap the best of both worlds in VC, developers, clients, and digital finance.

Flutterwave’s Alipay collaboration also tracks a trend of increased presence of Chinese companies in African tech.

China’s engagement with African startups has been light compared to the country’s deal-making on infrastructure and commodities. That looks to be shifting.

Alibaba founder Jack Ma has made several trips to the continent and this March announced the $1 million Africa Netrpreneur Prize for African startups and founders. Chinese company Transsion—a top-seller of smartphones in Africa under its Tecno brand—operates an assembly facility in Ethiopia and announced its IPO this year.

And this month Chinese owned Opera announced $55 million in venture spending to support its growing West African digital commercial network, that includes browser, payments and ride-hail services. 

 

 

 

Dark has been keeping its startup in the dark for the last couple of years while it has built a unique kind of platform, it calls “deployless” software development. If you build your application in Dark’s language inside of Dark’s editor, the reward is you can deploy it automatically on Dark infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform without worrying about all of the typical underlying deployment tasks.

The company emerged from stealth today and announced $3.5 million in seed funding, which it actually received back in 2017. The founders have spent the last couple of years building this rather complex platform.

Ellen Chisa, CEO and co-founder at the company, admits that the Dark approach requires learning to use her company’s toolset, but she says the trade-off is worth it because everything has been carefully designed to work in tandem.

“I think the biggest downside of Dark is definitely that you’re learning a new language, and using a different editor when you might be used to something else, but we think you get a lot more benefit out of having the three parts working together,” she told TechCrunch.

She added, “In Dark, you’re getting the benefit of your editor knowing how the language works. So you get really great autocomplete, and your infrastructure is set up for you as soon as you’ve written any code because we know exactly what is required.”

It’s certainly an intriguing proposition, but Chisa acknowledges that it will require evangelizing the methodology to programmers, who may be used to using a particular set of tools to write their programs. She said the biggest selling point is that it removes so much of the complexity around deployment by bringing an integrated level of automation to the process.

She says that there are three main benefits to Dark’s approach. In addition to providing automated infrastructure, which is itself a major plus, developers using Dark don’t have to worry about a deployment pipeline. “As soon as you write any piece of backend code in Dark, it is already hosted for you,”  she explained. The last piece is that tracing is built right in as you code, “Because you’re using our infrastructure, you have traces available in your editor as soon as you’ve written any code,” she said.

Chisa’s co-founder and company CTO is Paul Biggar, who knows a thing or two about deployment having helped found CircleCI, the CI/CD pioneering company.

As for that $3.5 million seed round, it was led by Cervin Ventures with participation from Boldstart, Data Collective, Harrison Metal, Xfactor (Erica Brescia), Backstage, Nextview, Promus, Correlation, 122 West and Yubari.

Google’s Pixel 4 is coming out later this year, and it’s getting the long reveal treatment thanks to a decision this year from Google to go ahead and spill some of the beans early, rather than saving everything for one big final unveiling closer to availability. A new video posted by Google today about the forthcoming Pixel 4 (which likely won’t actually be available until fall) shows off some features new to this generation: Motion control and face unlock.

The new “Motion Sense” feature in the Pixel 4 will detect waves of your hand and translate them into software control, including skipping songs, snoozing alarms and quieting incoming phone call alerts, with more planned features to come, according to Google. It’s based on Soli, a radar-based fine motion detection technology that Google first revealed at its I/O annual developer conference in 2016. Soli can detect very fine movements, including fingers pinched together to mimic a watch-winding motion, and it got approval from the FCC in January, hinting it would finally be arriving in production devices this year.

Pixel 4 is the first shipping device to include Soli, and Google says it’ll be available in “select Pixel countries” at launch (probably due to similar approvals requirements wherever it rolls out to consumers).

Google also teased “Face unlock,” something it has supported in Android previously – but Google is doing it very differently than it has been handled on Android in the past with the Pixel 4. Once again, Soli is part of its implementation, turning on the face unlock sensors in the device as it detects your hand reaching to pick up the device. Google says this should mean that the phone will be unlocked by the time you’re ready to use it, since it does this all on the fly, and works from pretty much any authentication.

Face unlock will be supported for authorizing payments and logging into Android apps, as well, and all of the facial recognition processing done for face unlock will occur on the device – a privacy-oriented feature that’s similar to how Apple handles its own Face ID. In fact, Google will also be storing all the facial recognition data securely in its own dedicated on-device Titan M security chip, another move similar to Apple’s own approach.

Google made the Pixel 4 official and tweeted photos (or maybe photorealistic renders) of the new smartphone back in June, bucking the trend of keeping things unconfirmed until an official reveal closer to release. Based on this update, it seems likely we can expect to learn more about the new smartphone ahead of its availability, which is probably going to happen sometime around October based on past behavior.

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired BlueTalon, a data privacy and governance service that helps enterprises set policies for how their employees can access their data. The service then enforces those policies across most popular data environments and provides tools for auditing policies and access, too.

Microsoft acquires data privacy and governance service BlueTalon

Neither Microsoft nor BlueTalon disclosed the financial details of the transaction. Ahead of today’s acquisition, BlueTalon had raised about $27.4 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Bloomberg Beta, Maverick Ventures, Signia Venture Partners and Standford’s StartX fund.

“The IP and talent acquired through BlueTalon brings a unique expertise at the apex of big data, security and governance,” writes Rohan Kumar, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Data. “This acquisition will enhance our ability to empower enterprises across industries to digitally transform while ensuring right use of data with centralized data governance at scale through Azure.”

Unsurprisingly, the BlueTalon team will become part of the Azure Data Governance group, where the team will work on enhancing Microsoft’s capabilities around data privacy and governance. Microsoft already offers access and governance control tools for Azure, of course. As virtually all businesses become more data-centric, though, the need for centralized access controls that work across systems is only going to increase and new data privacy laws aren’t making this process easier.

“As we began exploring partnership opportunities with various hyperscale cloud providers to better serve our customers, Microsoft deeply impressed us,” BlueTalon CEO Eric Tilenius, who has clearly read his share of ‘our incredible journey‘ blog posts, explains in today’s announcement. “The Azure Data team was uniquely thoughtful and visionary when it came to data governance. We found them to be the perfect fit for us in both mission and culture. So when Microsoft asked us to join forces, we jumped at the opportunity.”

Before Tableau was the $15.7 billion key to Salesforce’s problems, it was a couple of founders arguing with a couple of venture capitalists over lunch about why its Series A valuation should be higher than $12 million pre-money.

Salesforce has generally been one to signify corporate strategy shifts through their acquisitions, so you can understand why the entire tech industry took notice when the cloud CRM giant announced its priciest acquisition ever last month.

The deal to acquire the Seattle-based data visualization powerhouse Tableau was substantial enough that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff publicly announced it was turning Seattle into its second HQ. Tableau’s acquisition doesn’t just mean big things for Salesforce. With the deal taking place just days after Google announced it was paying $2.6 billion for Looker, the acquisition showcases just how intense the cloud wars are getting for the enterprise tech companies out to win it all.

The Exit is a new series at TechCrunch. It’s an exit interview of sorts with a VC who was in the right place at the right time but made the right call on an investment that paid off. [Have feedback? Shoot me an email at lucas@techcrunch.com]

Scott Sandell, a general partner at NEA (New Enterprise Associates) who has now been at the firm for 25 years, was one of those investors arguing with two of Tableau’s co-founders, Chris Stolte and Christian Chabot. Desperate to close the 2004 deal over their lunch meeting, he went on to agree to the Tableau founders’ demands of a higher $20 million valuation, though Sandell tells me it still feels like he got a pretty good deal.

NEA went on to invest further in subsequent rounds and went on to hold over 38% of the company at the time of its IPO in 2013 according to public financial docs.

I had a long chat with Sandell, who also invested in Salesforce, about the importance of the Tableau deal, his rise from associate to general partner at NEA, who he sees as the biggest challenger to Salesforce, and why he thinks scooter companies are “the worst business in the known universe.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Lucas Matney: You’ve been at this investing thing for quite a while, but taking a trip down memory lane, how did you get into VC in the first place? 

Scott Sandell: The way I got into venture capital is a little bit of a circuitous route. I had an opportunity to get into venture capital coming out of Stanford Business School in 1992, but it wasn’t quite the right fit. And so I had an interest, but I didn’t have the right opportunity.

There is surely no shortage of data in the modern enterprise, and data is the fuel for AI. Yet packaging that data in machine learning models remains a huge challenge for large companies. Without that capability, automating processes with AI underpinnings remains elusive for many companies.

RealityEngines wants to change that by creating research-driven cloud services that can reduce some of the inherent complexity of working with AI tools. We are excited to be including Bindu Reddy, co-founder and CEO at RealityEngines at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise, taking place in San Francisco on September 5.

Reddy will be joining investor Jocelyn Goldfein, a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners and others. They will be discussing the growing role of AI in the enterprise with TechCrunch editors, as companies try to take advantage of the capabilities machines have over humans to process large amounts of information quickly.

She knows from whence she speaks. Before joining founding Reality Engines, Reddy helped launch AI Verticals at AWS where she served as General Manager. She was responsible for bringing Amazon Personalize and Amazon Forecast to market, two tools that help organizations create machine learning models.

Before that, she was CEO and co-founder at yet another AI startup called Post Intelligence, a company that purported to help social media influencers write AI-driven Tweets. She later sold that company to Uber. If that isn’t enough for you, she served as Head of Products for Google Apps, where she was in charge of Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites and Blogger.

Early Bird tickets to see Bindu and our lineup of enterprise influencers at TC Sessions: Enterprise are on sale for just $249 when you book here; but hurry, prices go up by $100 soon! Students, grab your discounted tickets for just $75 here.

Adobe’s Customer Experience Platform provides a place to process all of the data that will eventually drive customer experience applications in the Adobe Experience Cloud. This involves bringing in vast amounts of transactional and interactional data being created across commerce platforms. This process is complex and involves IT, applications developers and data scientists.

Last Fall, the company introduced a couple of tools in Beta for the last group. Data scientists need familiar kinds of tools to work with the data as it streams into the platform in order to create meaningful models for the application developers to build upon. Today, it made two of those tools generally available — Query Service and Data Science Workspaces — which should go a long way towards helping data scientists feel comfortable working with data on this platform.

Ronell Hugh, group manager at Adobe Experience Platform, says these tools are about helping data scientists move beyond pure data management and getting into deriving more meaningful insights from it. “Data scientists were just bringing data in and trying to manage and organize it, and now we see that with Experience Platform, they are able to do that in a more seamless way, and can spend more time doing what they really want to do, which is deriving insights from the data to be actionable in the organization,” Hugh told TechCrunch.

Part of that is being able to do queries across the data sets they have brought into the platform. The newly released Query Service will enable data scientists and analysts to write queries to understand the data better and get specific answers based on the data faster.

“With Query Service in Adobe Experience Platform, analysts and data scientists can now poll all of their datasets stored in Experience Platform to answer specific cross-channel and cross-platform questions, faster than ever before. This includes behavioral data, as well as point-of-sale (POS), customer relationship management (CRM) and more,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new tool.

In addition, the company made the Data Science Workspace generally available. As the name implies, it provides a place for data scientists to work with the data and build models derived from it. The idea behind this tool is to use artificial intelligence to help automate some of the more mundane aspects of the data science job.

“Data scientists can take advantage of this new AI that fuels deeper data discovery by using Adobe Sensei pre-built models, bringing their existing models or creating custom models from scratch in Experience Platform,” the company wrote in the announcement blog post.

Today, it was the data scientists’ turn, but the platform is designed to help IT manage underlying infrastructure, whether in the cloud or on premises, and for application developers to take advantage of the data models and build customer experience applications on top of that. It’s a complex, yet symbiotic relationship, and Adobe is attempting to pull all of it together in a single platform.

The emergence of online hyperlocal services and e-commerce firms in India has led to the creation of about 200,000 jobs for blue-collar workers who deliver items to customers, according to industry estimates.

But it is also the kind of job that continues to see a high attrition rate. This means that companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Dunzo, Amazon India, and Flipkart have to replace a significant portion of their delivery workforce every three to four months.

“A small portion of these workers either switch jobs to go to a different delivery company, or they take up a different job,” said Madhav Krishna. “And a large chunk of them end up going back to their villages to work on their farms.”

“There is a cyclical migration phenomenon in India wherein a very large population migrates from villages to cities looking for a job. They work in cities for a few months and then return to their hometowns in time for the next crop harvesting season,” he said.

The attrition rate is so high that it has become a major challenge for companies to keep hiring new people, Krishna said. Additionally, with e-commerce and on-demand delivery space projected to grow four to five times in India by 2025, efficient supply acquisition is a major requirement for growth.

Three years ago, Krishna, who obtained his Masters in machine learning from Columbia University before moving to Bangalore, founded Vahan, a startup that is attempting to help these companies find potential blue-collar workers at scale.

Vahan operates a WhatsApp Business account where it informs potential candidates of the available jobs in the industry. Interested candidates are presented with a series of qualifying questions, screened, and are authenticated by Vahan.

Much of this process, which takes merely minutes, is automated via an AI-driven chatbot, and Vahan (Hindi for “vehicle”) directs the shortlisted candidates to its clients for a walk-in interview and on-boarding. Its clients today include food delivery firms such as Zomato and Swiggy, hyperlocal concierge service Dunzo, and logistics company Lalamove.

“There are three things that need to come together: What do people want? What are their capabilities? And the third is, what is available in the market?” Krishna said. “It’s really a matching problem that we’re trying to solve. We are using data and machine learning to solve a complex matching problem.”

Y Combinator (YC) recently selected Vahan to participate in its Summer 2019 batch. In a statement, Adora Cheung, a partner at YC, said, “High mobile penetration coupled with massive growth in data consumption has made it possible for companies such as Vahan to reach millions of Indian via digital channels.”

“Vahan is addressing a space that is severely underserved and is poised for disruption via tech. Their use of WhatsApp is a great fit for reaching the blue-collar audience and their traction proves it. We are excited to back them and see them grow!”

Vahan makes revenue from taking a cut each time its suggested candidates become part of the corporate client’s workforce. For one of the aforementioned clients, the referral cut is about 7.5%, two sources at that company said. The amount also varies based on how long those candidates stick to the platform, they added.

In the last year, Vahan has amassed over a million users and has helped over 20,000 people secure a job. Each day, around 5,000 users check Vahan to look for a job. “This is all through zero-marketing spend. Job seekers are finding us through their friends,” Krishna said.

This is why Vahan operates on WhatsApp, too. “Most of the people we’re trying to help, they are not active on any online recruitment platform. WhatsApp is one of the few apps they use heavily,” Krishna said. “We send over 50,000 messages a day on WhatsApp and 95% of them get read. In fact, 15% get read in under 10 seconds”, he added.

WhatsApp, with more than 400 million users in India, has become a daily habit for much of the internet-connected population of the country. In recent years, many companies have built their businesses on top of the platform to use it as an effective distribution channel for their businesses.

For instance, Meesho, a social commerce app, helps millions of people in the country buy and sell products on WhatsApp. It recently received an investment from Facebook, the first of its kind by the social juggernaut in the country. Dunzo, which has been backed by Google, and Sharechat, which counts Twitter as one its investors, also started on Facebook’s instant messaging app.

As for Vahan, it plans to soon offer skiling courses to its users as they navigate more job opportunities in the future. It is also working with many companies for deeper system-level integrations.

As it sees the platform receive traction, Vahan also wants to expand its offering beyond delivery jobs.