Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Comcast is in talks about selling its 30 percent stake in Hulu to Disney, according to a report from CNBC this morning. The discussions are still in early stages. Comcast is considering whether the timing is right for the sale, as Hulu’s valuation could still increase over time. But if Comcast is less certain about Hulu’s future, it may want to unload its minority stake now, then use the cash to pay down its other debt — like that from its $39 billion acquisition of Sky, for example.

The report weighs the broader set of pro’s and con’s associated the potential deal, noting that retaining the stake could give Comcast a bargaining chip with Disney further down the road, among other advantages. But it’s also unclear how much Hulu aligns with Comcast’s long-term strategic plans — especially considering it has plans for its own streaming service in 2020. 

In addition, Hulu is expected to generate losses, and won’t turn profitable until 2024, Disney has said. It also plans to expand Hulu outside the U.S., which is an added cost.

Disney today has majority ownership of Hulu, following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox’s 30 percent stake and this month’s deal with AT&T. The latter saw Disney picking up AT&T’s 9.5 percent stake for $1.43 billion. The AT&T deal valued Hulu at $15 billion.

Up until recently, Comcast was not looking to sell its ownership in Hulu. A Variety report from February said that Comcast didn’t want to exit the joint venture at this time, even though Disney was itching to buy them out. It’s natural that Disney and Comcast would still be having an ongoing dialog about this, given Disney’s ambitions. But the new report today seems to indicate these talks are now of a more serious nature — perhaps because Disney is upping what it’s willing to pay.

Comcast today provides 17 percent of Hulu’s content, and it doesn’t plan to remove that content any time soon, including after the launch of the NBC streaming service, CNBC said.

The latest damning assessment of Facebook’s trampling of user privacy comes from the Canadian and Columbia privacy commissioners — which have just published the results of an investigation kicked off in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal last year.

They found the social network company committed serious contraventions of local laws and failed generally to take responsibility for protecting the personal information of Canadians.

Facebook has disputed the findings and refused to implement the watchdogs’ recommendations — including refusing to voluntarily submit to audits of its privacy policies and practices over the next five years.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it therefore plans to take Facebook to Federal Court to seek an order to force it the company to correct its deficient privacy practices.

Both watchdogs have also called for local privacy laws to be beefed up so that regulators have stronger sanctioning powers to protect the public’s interest.

“Facebook’s refusal to act responsibly is deeply troubling given the vast amount of sensitive personal information users have entrusted to this company,” said Daniel Therrien, privacy commissioner of Canada, in a statement. “Their privacy framework was empty, and their vague terms were so elastic that they were not meaningful for privacy protection.

“The stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified – or even acknowledge that it broke the law – is extremely concerning.”

“Facebook has spent more than a decade expressing contrition for its actions and avowing its commitment to people’s privacy. But when it comes to taking concrete actions needed to fix transgressions they demonstrate disregard,” added B.C. information and privacy commissioner, Michael McEvoy, in another supporting statement. “The ability to levy meaningful fines would be an important starting point.”

“It is untenable that organizations are allowed to reject my office’s legal findings as mere opinions,” added Therrien.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

The privacy watchdogs combined their efforts to investigate Facebook and Cambridge Analytica-linked data company Aggregate IQ last year — setting out to determine whether the companies had complied with local privacy laws.

More than 600,000 Canadians had their data extracted from Facebook via an app whose developer was working with Cambridge Analytica to try to build profiles of U.S. voters.

Among the privacy-related deficiencies the two watchdogs are attaching to Facebook’s business are what they dub “superficial and ineffective safeguards” of user data that enabled unauthorized access by third party apps on its platform; a failure to obtain meaningful consent for the use of users’ friends’ data; a lack of proper oversight of the privacy practices of apps using Facebook’s platform, with a reliance on contractual terms and “wholly inadequate” monitoring of compliance.

All familiar stuff if you were following the twists and turns of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse saga last year. (Aleksandr Kogan, the third party app developer at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal also accused Facebook of not having a valid developer policy.)

The full report can be found here.

“A basic principle of privacy laws is that organizations are responsible for the personal information under their control. Instead, Facebook attempted to shift responsibility for protecting personal information to the apps on its platform, as well as to users themselves,” the watchdogs write, further accusing Facebook of an overall lack of responsibility for the personal data of users.

They also point out that their findings are of particular concern given an earlier 2009 investigation of Facebook by the federal commissioner’s office — which found similar contraventions with respect to Facebook seeking overly broad, uninformed consent for disclosures of personal information to third-party apps, as well as inadequate monitoring to protect against unauthorized data access by apps.

“If Facebook had implemented the 2009 investigation’s recommendations meaningfully, the risk of unauthorized access and use of Canadians’ personal information by third party apps could have been avoided or significantly mitigated,” they add.

(Oh hai, deja vu… )

The commissioners are calling for not only the power to levy financial penalties on companies that break privacy laws — as equivalent watchdogs in Europe already can — but also broader authority to inspect the practices of organizations to independently confirm privacy laws are being respected.

“This measure would be in alignment with the powers that exist in the U.K. and several other countries,” they note.

“Giving the federal Commissioner order-making powers would also ensure that his findings and remedial measures are binding on organizations that refuse to comply with the law,” they add.

The UK’s data protection watchdog levied the maximum possible fine on Facebook last year — although it’s ‘just’ £500,000 (and Facebook is appealing, claiming there’s no evidence that UK users’ data was misused).

But an updated pan-EU privacy framework, GDPR, which came into force after the Cambridge Analytica-related data misuse occurred, has massively upgraded the maximum possible fines that European data watchdogs can hand down for privacy violations. (And the Irish DPC, the lead privacy regulator for Facebook’s European business, has a very long list of open probes against Facebook and Facebook-owned platforms. So watch that space.)

Earlier this year a U.K. parliamentary committee which spend multiple months last year investigating Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, as part of a wider inquiry into online disinformation, called for Facebook’s use of user data to be investigated by the privacy watchdog.

The committee also urged the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority to undertake an antitrust probe Facebook’s business practices, and recommended that the social media ad market face a comprehensive audit to address concerns about its lack of transparency.

Long before there was an autonomous vehicle industry, there was Project Chauffeur — a secret endeavor staffed by about a dozen engineers and housed under Google’s moonshot factory X.

That venture, popularly known as the Google self-driving car project, would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016 — along the way helping launch an entire industry and numerous careers.

And Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering Dmitri Dolgov has been there for the entire ride.

We’re excited to announce that Dolgov will participate in TechCrunch’s inaugural TC Sessions: Mobility, a one-day event on July 10, 2019 in San Jose, Calif., that is centered around the future of mobility and transportation.

We’ll talk to Dolgov about those early days, how the company has evolved and where it’s headed next as well as dig into the tech behind self-driving cars.

TC Sessions: Mobility will present a day of programming with the best and brightest founders, investors and technologists who are determined to invent a future Henry Ford might never have imagined. In case you missed it some of our recently announced speakers include, Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson, Scoot SVP of Product Katie DeWitt, Co-founder and CEO of Voyage Oliver Cameron and co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye Amnon Shashua — who also is a senior vice president at Intel. And there are more.

TC Sessions: Mobility aims to do more than highlight the next new thing. We’ll dig into the how and why, the cost and impact to cities, people and companies, as well as the numerous challenges that lie along the way, from technological and regulatory to capital and consumer pressures.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.

Long before there was an autonomous vehicle industry, there was Project Chauffeur — a secret endeavor staffed by about a dozen engineers and housed under Google’s moonshot factory X.

That venture, popularly known as the Google self-driving car project, would eventually graduate from its project status to become a standalone company called Waymo in 2016 — along the way helping launch an entire industry and numerous careers.

And Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering Dmitri Dolgov has been there for the entire ride.

We’re excited to announce that Dolgov will participate in TechCrunch’s inaugural TC Sessions: Mobility, a one-day event on July 10, 2019 in San Jose, Calif., that is centered around the future of mobility and transportation.

We’ll talk to Dolgov about those early days, how the company has evolved and where it’s headed next as well as dig into the tech behind self-driving cars.

TC Sessions: Mobility will present a day of programming with the best and brightest founders, investors and technologists who are determined to invent a future Henry Ford might never have imagined. In case you missed it some of our recently announced speakers include, Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson, Scoot SVP of Product Katie DeWitt, Co-founder and CEO of Voyage Oliver Cameron and co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye Amnon Shashua — who also is a senior vice president at Intel. And there are more.

TC Sessions: Mobility aims to do more than highlight the next new thing. We’ll dig into the how and why, the cost and impact to cities, people and companies, as well as the numerous challenges that lie along the way, from technological and regulatory to capital and consumer pressures.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.

A couple of weeks ago, when Pinterest filed its S-1, its AWS bills raised eyebrows and questions about cheaper alternatives for startups. Render is a small startup with a big idea to provide infrastructure services for developers, who might be looking for a cheaper and easier alternative to bigger more familiar names. The company launched today with broad ambition and $2.25 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and the South Park Common Fund.

As developers work with increasingly complex sets of technologies, it often requires teams of people to launch an application and keep it running.”What we’re doing at Render is making it incredibly easy and quick for application developers to deploy their applications online without knowledge of servers, and without having a DevOps person with them,” Anurag Goel, founder and CEO told TechCrunch.

Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst and former CTO at VMware, knows a thing or two about infrastructure and he sees a company that could provide a viable alternative to the established players in this space. “Render is building the logical next step to cloud infrastructure — making it disappear. Application developers clearly want to focus on the functionality and usability of their work, and not on server setup, deployment and scaling. Render is enabling exactly this focus and that’s why early developer users love it so much,” he said in a statement.

The company is going after companies like Salesforce Heroku on the platform side and AWS, Azure, GCP and even DigitalOcean on the infrastructure side. It is not an easy market to ease your way into, but Goel believes he has come up with a solution that is cost-effective and easy to use, and that could help separate him from these established brands.

The complexity of today’s application environment requires teams of highly trained engineers to implement. While a company like Harness is trying to reduce that complexity by providing Continuous Delivery as a Service, Render is going at it from a different angle by providing a platform and infrastructure to launch and manage applications more easily.

“We’re focused, first and foremost, on developer experience and ease of use. And we’ve seen over and over again, that when you look at AWS and Azure and GCP, they force you to build out these large DevOps teams that take care of all the infrastructure needs,” he said. He believes part of the problem with the larger company approaches is that they put this expensive engineering layer between the developer and the application they created, and Render brings the developer closer to the process.

The company got the funding last year, but is announcing now because it wasn’t really ready to launch at that point, and didn’t want to announce the funding before it had a viable product.

Goel got his start as an early employee at Stripe, a company that made it simple for developers to add payment infrastructure to an application. He is hoping to bring that same level of simplicity to application hosting.

New Enterprise Associates, the 42-year-old venture capital firm, has invested in the $23 million Series B round for Mejuri, a startup capturing millennial women’s penchant for affordable and treat yo’ self type of jewelry rather than diamonds and precious stones for special occasions.

It’s the latest instance of startups drawing investor interest with their direct-to-customer retail model. Based in Toronto and Buenos Aires, four-year-old Mejuri designs, makes and sells jewelry directly to women online and through offline showrooms, bypassing middle-person costs. Besides striving for reasonable prices, Mejuri also wants to upend an entrenched practice in its industry.

Traditional jewelry, the startup points out, targets men for gifting and makes higher markups acceptable. With its D2C play, Mejuri believes it’s putting the purchasing decision back to women; indeed, it found out 75 percent of its customers are buying for themselves. Its team of 120 employees is constantly on the watch for trends and consumer feedback, a strategy made possible by its online presence of over 422,000 Instagram followers. Instead of releasing large batches of seasonal pieces, Mejuri adapts the so-called “drop” model that introduces only a small quantity of products each week, which allows it to timely translates customer sentiments into designs.

Another enabling factor is the company’s female-led team: 80 percent of the staff are women, headed by founder Noura Sakkijha, a third-generation jeweler and a former industrial engineer who scored the company’s latest capital when she was seven months pregnant with two twins.

“Mejuri’s mission really hits home for me,” said NEA partner Vanessa Larco in a statement. “I noticed a shift in trends when none of my friends wanted to go to any of the traditional fine jewelry companies to purchase jewelry anymore, and I realized a lot of those big brands were in trouble.”

Natalie Massenet, founder of Net-a-Porter and partner at Imaginary, another venture fund that participated in Mejuri’s Series B, said the startup is set to “disrupt” the jewelry industry through supply chain standards that modern consumers demand, “like sourcing from conflict-free and socially responsible diamond suppliers and maintaining affordable prices to serve a consumer who is buying for herself and her friends.”

The user-centric focus has brought customer loyalty to Mejuri. The startup claims that 30 percent of its monthly transactions come from returning shoppers, and 70,000 customers are on the waitlist for its products. It’s accumulated a total of 20 million visitors to its website and released 1,500 designs since launch. Revenues have quadrupled year-over-year for the fourth consecutive year, and the company, one of TechCrunch’s favorite picks from 500 Startups’ Batch 15 Demo Day three years ago, said it’s on track to achieve the same level of traction in 2019.

The new proceeds bring Mejuri’s total funds raised to over $29 million to date. Others in the new funding round include follow-on backers Felix Capital, BDC Capital, Incite Ventures and Dash Ventures. The company plans to spend its latest financial injection on offline expansion, overseas growth and investment in branding and customer experience.

The Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator is today presenting yet another batch of startups to the world at its Demo Day in NYC. ERA has already launched a total of 180 startups which have raised more than $300 million and are collectively valued at more than $2 billion.

This sixteenth class is comprised of 13 companies across a variety of sectors, all of whom have received $100K in investment from the accelerator.

So without any further ado, here’s a look at the startups launching out of ERA today:

Apteo is a platform that helps financial institutions &mash; analysts, equity researchers, asset managers, etc. — make sense of all the data at their fingertips without actually hiring a data scientist. The key features of the product include continuously updated data (on the interval of your choice), automatically cleaned and normalized data, and easy-to-use access to troves of publicly available datasets.

CareSwitch matches home care agencies with qualified professionals. The platform gives agencies a reliable and steady stream of candidates to match supply with demand, and gives home care professionals the chance to work more flexibly across multiple agencies. The platform also manages payroll, benefits and employee records.

Cloudonix is a CRM platform that facilitates and aggregates conversations between businesses and their consumers via voice, text, and video over IP.

Confetti is a product that helps companies with their various events. Event planners can specify the requirements around their event and then be matched with vendors. Confetti also generates proposals for the various vendors and handles the logistics for customers.

Riding the wave of investment in eco-friendly food, HoneyFlower Foods is offering plant-based, grab-and-go meals that are sold both through physical retailers or sold wholesale to offices.

Iterate Labs is a hardware company that has developed the Delta-1 wearable focused on improving workplace safety. The wrist-worn wearable tracks repetitive wrist and arm movement and lets managers track the safety of their employees from the moment they walk out on the floor for the first time.

Maverick Retirement offers customers a special bank account, either as an alternative or a compliment to an existing IRA, that allows those customers to choose their investments in assets such as real estate, technology startups, etc.

Moon is a new payments platform that allows online retailers to accept cryptocurrency for purchases. The Moon browser extension gives users the chance to attach their Coinbase account or other wallet to make transactions in crypto. For now, Moon is only operational on Amazon.com, but the company says it will soon roll out to “any of your favorite ecommerce websites.”

Pawlicy Advisor, a pet insurance broker, allows pet parents to select a plan that makes the most sense for their specific breed of animal and its respective health risks.

Piecewise is looking to make a different in the student debt crisis. The payment platform lets universities and financial institutions lower student loan default rates and manage their loan portfolios. Borrowers can save toward their loan payments via round-ups and auto-save features, as well as refinance their loans.

Scopio is looking to take on Shutterstock with its own platform of high-quality commercial images taken by social media users. The platform looks to offer a steady stream of fresh new images to clients at a fraction of the cost while allowing anyone to submit their own photos and make some extra cash.

Soundmind is a system that lets senior care providers manage and customize voice assistants to better serve their customers. The platform gives seniors the ability to simply ask about their daily schedule, what’s on the menu at dinner, or make a request from the staff. These queries are centralized for the organization’s staff so they can spend less time organizing and more time serving their clients.

Yogi is a tool that helps businesses aggregate and understand all the feedback that comes back about its product. This includes product reviews, customer interviews and survey results, usability tests and more. This information is pulled from all its various sources and translated into actionable insights.

Adobe today used the OFFF festival in Barcelona to show off an experimental feature for its Illustrator vector drawing application. The basic idea here is to allow Illustrator users to easily experiment with color palettes based on photos and other images. That makes it incredibly easy to create new variations of an existing drawing, based on real-life color palettes from an image.

For now, though, this is only what Adobe likes to call a ‘sneak,’ that is, an experimental feature that the company plans to bring to its applications but that hasn’t quite reached the production stage yet.

Some of these feature eventually become part of their respective Creative Cloud app, some don’t. This experiment, however, seems pretty straightforward, so I would be surprised if it didn’t end up in one of the next versions of Illustrator. Extracting a color palette isn’t all that hard, after all. Indeed, with Adobe Color, the company already offers a stand-alone tool that can do just this. The trick then is to match those palettes to the existing drawing. It’s hard to tell how well that currently works, but at least in Adobe’s demos, it’s a pretty seamless experience.

Walmart this morning unveiled a new “store of the future” and test grounds for emerging technologies, including A.I.-enabled cameras and interactive displays. The store, a working concept called the Intelligent Retail Lab — or “IRL” for short — operates out of a Walmart Neighborhood Market in Levittown, New York.

The store is open to customers and is one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market stores containing over 30,000 items, the retailer says, which allows it to test out technology in a real world environment.

Similar to Amazon Go’s convenience stores, the store has a suite of cameras mounted in the ceiling. But unlike Amazon Go, which is a grab-and-go store with smaller square footage, Walmart’s IRL spans 50,000 square feet of retail space and is staffed by over 100 employees.

Plus, in Walmart’s case, these A.I.-powered cameras are not being used to determine what items customers are buying in order to automatically charge them. It still has traditional checkout stations. Instead, the cameras will monitor inventory levels to determine, for example, if staff needs to bring out more meat from the backroom refrigerators to restock the shelves, or if some fresh items have been sitting too long on the shelf and need to be pulled.

The idea is that the A.I. will help the store associates know more precisely where and when to restock products. And this, in turn, means customers will know the produce and meat is always fresh and in stock when they arrive.

Using technology to do this is not simple, Walmart says. It means the automated system will need to be able to detect products on the shelf, recognize the exact product it sees (1 lb of ground beef vs. 2 lbs., e.g.), and then compare the quantities on the shelf to upcoming sales demand.

For store associates, the system allows them to stop constantly walking the store to replace inventory — instead, they’ll know what to bring out from the back room before the doors even open to customers that day.

The cameras and other sensors in the store pump out 1.6 TB of data per second, or the equivalent of three years’ worth of music, which necessitates a big data center on site. At the IRL store, it’s glass-encased, bathed in blue light, and on display to the public.

This could seem a little intimidating — A.I. cameras and giant servers. But Walmart says the data is only stored for less than a week.

There are also informational stations in the store where customers can learn more about the technology in use. A Welcome Center in the store is available too, for customers who want to learn more about the technical specifications and get answers to common questions.

An interactive wall lets customers have fun with A.I. — it demonstrates how an A.I. system can estimate body positioning. But really it’s meant to make all this new technology seem less intimidating.

“Technology enables us to understand so much more – in real time – about our business.” says Mike Hanrahan, CEO of IRL. “When you combine all the information we’re gathering in IRL with Walmart’s 50-plus years of expertise in running stores, you can create really powerful experiences that improve the lives of both our customers and associates.”

There’s an interest at Walmart for using A.I. for more practical purposes in retail  — and the CEO makes what is perhaps a veiled reference to Amazon Go, in a statement.

“You can’t be overly enamored with the shiny object element of AI,” Hanrahan said. “There are a lot of shiny objects out there that are doing things we think are unrealistic to scale and probably, long-term, not beneficial for the consumer.”

Instead of focusing on automated checkout solutions, the future concepts Walmart will test at IRL after meat inventory levels, are using the A.I. system to ensure that there are shopping carts available at all times and that registers are open and staffed.

The company insists that the tech isn’t replacing jobs, but instead frees up staff to interact with customers. That’s the same claim it made as it rolled out more robots to its stores. But it’s hard to see how, over time, more efficiently run stores would require as many associates as they do now.

IRL is a concept designed by Walmart’s tech incubator Store N^o 8, which runs several ventures to test new ideas in retail. Earlier this year, it launched a startup which offers VR tours to enhance the shopping experience, and in 2017 it began testing a personal shopping service called Code Eight in NYC.

For the last year or so, you could ask the Google Assistant on your Google Home device to read your kids a story. Today, just in time for National Tell a Story Day, Google is bringing this feature to Android and iOS phones, too. It’ll be available in English in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and India.

When you asked the Assistant on your phone to tell you a story before, you’d get a short inspirational quote or maybe a bad joke. Having two different experiences for the same command never really made much sense, so it’s good to see Google consolidate this.

The available stories range from tales about Blaze and the Monster Machines to more classic bedtime stories like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’

That’s in addition to other story features like ‘read along,’ which automatically plays sound effects as you read from a number of Disney Little Golden Books. That’s obviously the cooler feature overall, but the selection of supported books remains limited. For longer stories, there’s obviously audiobook support.

Or you could just sit down with your kids and read them a book. That’s also an option.