Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Google today announced that Google Fit, the company’s fitness tracking app that launched on Android back in 2014, is now available on iOS.

It definitely took Google a while to bring the app to iOS. Until today, the only way to get your Fit data on your iPhone was in a special section of the Wear OS app on the iPhone. Without a Wear OS device, though, that section would’ve been empty.

If you’ve seen the Fit app on Android, then the iOS version will look very familiar. It features the same focus on Move Minutes and Heart Point, as well as the ability to pick up different activities based on your movement. You can also connect the app with apps connected to Apple Health like Sleep Cycle, Nike Run Club or Headspace can also sync with Google Fit.

Indeed, as a Google spokesperson told me, all of the movement data in the app also comes from Apple’s Health app — or from a Wear OS smartwatch, though few iOS users have opted to cross streams and use a Wear OS watch with their iPhones.

Since Apple Health already tracks your movement data, I’m not sure all that many iOS users will make the switch to Google Fit. It’s still good to see Google bring its service to this competing platform for those who maybe use multiple devices

A new report out this morning from Pew Research Center offers insight into the U.S. adult Twitter population. The firm’s research indicates the Twitterverse tends to skew younger and more Democratic than the general public. It also notes that the activity on Twitter is dominated by a small percentage — most users rarely tweet, while the most prolific 10 percent are responsible for 80 percent of tweets from U.S. adults.

Pew says only around 22 percent of American adults today use Twitter, and they are representative of the broader population in some ways, but not in others.

For starters, Twitter’s U.S. adult users tend to be younger.

The study found the median age of Twitter users is 40, compared with the median age of U.S. adults, which is 47. Though less pronounced than the age differences, Twitter users also tend to have higher levels of household income and educational attainment, compared with the general population.

42 percent of adult Twitter users in the U.S. have at least a bachelor’s degree, which is 11 percentage points higher than the share of the public with this level of education (31%). Likely related to this is a higher income level. 41 percent of Twitter users have a household income above $75,000, which is 9 points higher than the same figure in the general population (32%).

A major difference — and a notable one, given yesterday’s sit-down between Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and President Trump — is Pew’s discovery that 36 percent of Twitter U.S. adult users identify with the Democratic Party, versus 30 percent of U.S. adults (the latter, as per a November 2018 survey). Meanwhile, 21 percent of Twitter users identify as Republicans, versus 26 percent of U.S. adults. Political independents make up 29 percent of Twitter users, and a similar 27 percent of the general population.

Despite these differences, there are areas where Twitter users are more like the general U.S. adult population — specifically, in terms of the gender and racial makeup, Pew says.

In addition to the makeup of the adult population on Twitter, Pew also researched the activity on the platform, and found that the median user only tweets twice per month.

That means the conversation on Twitter is dominated by extremely active (or, in their parlance, “extremely online“) users. That means a large majority of Twitter’s content is created by a small number — 10 percent of users are responsible for 80 percent of all tweets from U.S. adults on Twitter.

The median user in this top 10 percent creates 138 tweets per month, favorites 70 posts per month, follows 456 accounts and has 387 followers. They tend to be women (65% are), and tend to tweet about politics (69% say they do.) They also more often use automated methods to tweet (25% do).

Meanwhile, the median users in the bottom 90 percent creates 2 tweets per month, favorites 1 post per month, follows 74 accounts, and has 19 followers. 48 percent are women, and 39 percent tweet about politics. Only 13 percent say they tweeted about politics in the last 30 days, compared with 42 percent of the top 10 percent of users. They are also less likely to use automated methods of tweeting, as only 15 percent do.

These differences lead to other ways where how the Twitterverse feels about key issues — like equality or immigration — differs from the general public, with viewpoints that lean more Democratic.

It’s worth noting, too, how the small amount of activity from a large group of Twitter users also speaks to Twitter’s inability to grow its monthly active user base (MAUs).

This week, Twitter reported its first quarter earnings and noted that its MAUs were 330 million in Q1, down by 6 million users from a year ago. Twitter now prefers to report on its monetizable daily active users — a metric that favors the app’s heavier users.

Pew’s research was conducted Nov. 21, 2018 through Dec. 17, 2018, among 2,791 U.S. adult Twitter users. The full report is available from Pew’s website.

Managed By Q, the office management platform recently acquired by WeWork, has today announced the launch of Task Management.

The feature comes to Managed By Q by way of Hivy, a startup acquired by MBQ back in 2017, that focuses on connecting a company’s employees to the office manager that handles their requests.

Pre-Hivy, collecting requests and tracking projects across a large number of employees was a tedious, fragmented process. Hivy created a dashboard that organizes all those requests in a single place.

Since the acquisition, Managed By Q and Hivy have been working to integrate their respective platforms. Where Managed By Q connects office managers to the right vendor or MBQ operator to handle the job, the new Task Management system will connect office managers with the employees making the requests in the first place, essentially putting the entire pipeline in a single place.

Obviously, the path to full integration was a long one.

“What I think matters most,” said Hivy cofounder Pauline Tordeur, speaking about the process of intertwining two separate products, “is that we knew why we were doing this and what the future would look like when we integrate. Having this vision and outlook from the very beginning is important.”

The timing is interesting in that this is the first product announcement Managed By Q has made since it was acquired by WeWork.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling,” said Managed By Q cofounder and CEO Dan Teran of being acquired by The We Company. “There is a perception of WeWork from the outside, but since I’ve been spending a lot of time getting to learn the business firsthand, I think there is just so much potential.”

He noted that Managed By Q is indeed setting out to do with WeWork what it just completed with Hivy.

“We set out to build the operating system for space, and one of the biggest things we missed is the space itself,” said Teran. “That’s actually the hardest part for most people. So now that becomes another ingredient we can deliver to our customers.”

SoftBank is making a huge investment into one of the providers of the kind of digital commerce infrastructure that underpins many of the companies that it backs. Today, Wirecard — a digital payments provider based out of Germany — announced that SoftBank Group is investing around €900 million ($1 billion) as part of a broader digital payments partnership, to help Wirecard expand into Japan and South Korea, as well as build and provide financial services to SoftBank’s extensive list of portfolio companies, which includes the likes of Uber, OpenDoor Labs, WeWork, Grab, DoorDash, Alibaba and more.

“Under the [Memorandum of Understanding], SoftBank Group will seek to support Wirecard’s geographic expansion into Japan and South Korea, as well as providing collaboration opportunities within SoftBank Group’s global portfolio in digital payments, data-analytics/AI and other innovative digital financial services,” Wirecard noted in a statement. Wirecard added that the deal is also likely to include a “joint exploration of new product and service offers in digital lending in order to leverage from high quality customer portfolios, strong liquidity and other innovative financing solutions.”

Wirecard is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of €17.18 billion (around $19 billion). It competes with the likes of Adyen, FirstData, WorldPay, Stripe and more. Having had its start as far back as 1999 in working with online gambling sites, today it also works with challenger banks and other new fintech startups like Number26 and TransferWise.

But the investment to expand in Asia comes at a somewhat thorny time for Wirecard. The company has been facing an inquiry in Singapore over fraud allegations both in Asia and its home market of Germany. It has denied the allegations.

“As global innovators, we focus heavily on expanding our networks and creating opportunities for companies with groundbreaking ideas,” Wirecard CEO Markus Braun, said in a statement. “In SoftBank we have found a partner that shares both our passion for new technologies and drive to spearhead the latest innovations, all on a global scale. In addition, through this potential partnership, we will expand our reach and products to the East Asian markets, thereby further strengthening our position in Asia.”

Wirecard said that as part of the deal, it will issue convertible bonds with a term of five years exclusively to SoftBank, convertible to 6,923,076 ordinary Wirecard shares (currently corresponding to approximately 5.6% of common stock) at €130 per Wirecard share. The deal is subject to the approval of Wirecard’s Annual Shareholders meeting, which will be held on 18 June 2019.

Wirecard offers end-to-end services covering all aspects of payments, with a particular emphasis on digital transactions. It also provides card issuing, risk management, data analytics and related services.

SoftBank has become one of the world’s most influential investors with its $100 billion Vision Fund. It’s not clear which division of SoftBank is leading this particular transaction — the news announcement specifies only that “an affiliate of SoftBank” is making the investment — but despite the Vision Fund being located in London, it’s made relatively few fintech investments in Europe out of the Vision Fund. For that reason, this stake in Wirecard, based out of Munich, is also notable.

The first involved leading a $440 million round for OakNorth Holdings, a digital banking startup. It is also reportedly a partner in a new Abu Dhabi $400 million European investment fund.

If you’ve ever had a parking ticket, there’s a good chance you know what “chalking” is.

A federal appeals court ruled this week that the practice of marking a car tires unconstitutional, a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted searches and seizures.

For years traffic enforcement officers have marked car tires with chalk to see when they check back if a car has moved. It’s often used in places where parking meters aren’t available. Parking violations often serve as a key source of revenue for local municipalities.

That struck a nerve with one local resident of Saginaw, Michigan. Local resident Alison Taylor took the city to court after receiving more than a dozen citations in a year, alleging a local parking enforcement officer, Tabitha Hoskins, named defendant alongside the city in the case, was violating her constitutional rights.

The city initially won but the U.S. Sixth Circuit Appeals Court reversed the decision, said that chalking is a form of trespass that requires a warrant, similar to attaching a tracker to a car to monitor its real-time location, according to the court’s ruling.

While the Fourth Amendment generally protects Americans from law enforcement searching your house or devices without a court-approved warrant to obtain evidence of a crime, Taylor argued that those protections equally apply to obtaining information about whether her car was moved or not.

According to the court, the parking enforcement officer — a local government employee — trespassed on Taylor’s car “because the City made intentional physical contact with Taylor’s vehicle.” The court found that the chalking was an “attempt to find something or to obtain information” from the car — albeit in a low-tech way — specifically to determine if the vehicle has “been parked in the same location for a certain period of time.”

What may seem like a victory to anyone who’s ever wanted to fight a parking ticket, some are worried that the legal precedent could lead to the adoption of more privacy-invasive technologies instead.

“As cities begin to comply with the Sixth Circuit’s decision, it is crucial that they avoid adopting even more problematic practices,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project.

“Any attempt to enforce parking rules by building pervasive databases of vehicle location data or similar information would raise grave privacy concerns and run up against the Fourth Amendment,” he said.

Other cities are already using more advanced technologies like automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems to scan plates to see if a vehicle has moved from one place to another. ALPR remains controversial but arguably still legal at the federal level — even if these plate scanners have faced challenges at the local level.

Rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warn that creating databases of scanned license plate is “invasive” for residents’ privacy. Police don’t currently need a warrant to search through these vast databases. The EFF is campaigning to require a warrant to search ALPR databases.

Meanwhile, there are tech-ready and privacy-minded solutions to the parking enforcement problem, experts say.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said in a tweet that it “seems easy enough these days for parking enforcers to just take a photo of the car, or even just a close-up photo of the tire.”

Saginaw hasn’t yet responded to the ruling. City manager Tim Morales was unavailable for comment when reached Tuesday.

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup that launched at TC Disrupt back in 2011, is making moves to become a global car rental service. Today, the Softbank-backed startup announced its acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.

“We were obviously looking at what our European strategy was and how we would expand out of the U.S. and into other parts of the world,” Getaround CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch. “When we started looking at Europe, it became clear Drivy was the market leader. They also shared the same vision.”

This marks Getaround’s first expansion out of the U.S.  As part of the deal, Drivy founder and CEO Paulin Dementhon will run the company’s operations in Europe as CEO for the continent.

“Getaround is an ideal partner for us because our companies are aligned in so many ways while being complimentary on key aspects of our business, like geography or fleet acquisition,” Dementhon said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”

Combined with Drivy, Getaround now has more than five million users. Moving forward, Getaround has its eyes set on becoming a truly global company.

“The objective here is to build the iconic brand for consumers in car share and next-generation mobility, and be one of those companies with a global footprint,” Zaid said. “Servicing people living in their home cities but also when they travel to other cities across the world.”

This acquisition and plans for expansion are undoubtedly fueled by the $300 million Series D round Getaround raised in August from SoftBank.

Alexa devices just got a new use case: live customer service help. This morning, Amazon’s e-book company Audible announced the first live customer service experience on Alexa devices, activated through voice commands. Instead of dialing a phone number or writing an email, Audible customers can ask Alexa to reach Audible on their behalf. They’re then connected to a customer service expert who can help them with their account, resolve technical problems, answer questions, and even make book recommendations.

To use the option, Alexa device owners just have to say “Alexa, call Audible,” to get started.

This is not the first time Amazon (or in this case, a subsidiary) has tried to connect users to live help through a hardware device. In previous years, Amazon offered a service called Mayday on its Fire tablets that could put people immediately in touch with Amazon’s own customer service agents. However, that service shut down last June. 

With Alexa devices, however, the process of reaching out to customer service may feel more natural than on tablets, because Echo owners already know how to use their devices to call friends, drop-in on family members, and otherwise. Echo devices have supported Alexa calling since 2017, for example, and the ability to call businesses following select voice commands since December.

Similarly, the new Audible voice command is able to trigger a call to the e-book company’s customer service department, as Alexa apps are assigned a phone number to facilitate these sorts of outbound calls.

“At Audible, we are always looking to further personalize the listening experience on behalf of the millions of customers we serve,” said Abhinav Mathur, Audible’s Senior Vice President of Global Customer Care, in a statement. “Audible isn’t just a destination, it’s a lifestyle that keeps people entertained and inspired while going about their daily routines, so we’re thrilled to offer listeners hands-free customer support from a live person while they cook, craft, or relax at home. Enjoying Audible on Alexa has never been so easy and convenient, and we hope this innovation ushers in a new era of customer service,” he added.

Audible already supported several other Alexa commands before today, including “Alexa, play my book,” “Alexa, read faster,” Alexa, next chapter,” “Alexa, what’s free on Audible?” and others.

The new customer service voice command is currently available to Alexa device owners in the U.S., 24/7.

Twitter is adding a dedicated report option that enables users to tell it about misleading tweets related to voting — starting with elections taking place in India and the European Union .

From tomorrow users in India can report tweets they believe are trying to mislead voters — such as disinformation related to the date or location of polling stations; or fake claims about identity requirements for being able to vote — by tapping on the arrow menu of the suspicious tweet and selecting the ‘report tweet’ option and then choosing: ‘It’s misleading about voting’.

Twitter says the tool will go live for the Indian Lok Sabha elections from tomorrow, and will launch in all European Union member states on April 29 — ahead of elections for the EU parliament next month.

The ‘misleading about voting’ option will persist in the list of available choices for reporting tweets for seven days after each election ends, Twitter said in a blog post announcing the feature.

It also said it intends to the vote-focused feature to be rolled out to “other elections globally throughout the rest of the year”, without providing further detail on which elections and markets it will prioritize for getting the tool.

“Our teams have been trained and we recently enhanced our appeals process in the event that we make the wrong call,” Twitter added.

In recent months the European Commission has been ramping up pressure on tech platforms to scrub disinformation ahead of elections to the EU parliament — issuing monthly reports on progress, or, well, the lack of it.

This follows a Commission initiative last year which saw major tech and ad platforms — including Facebook, Google and Twitter — sign up to a voluntary Code of Practice on disinformation, committing themselves to take some non-prescribed actions to disrupt the ad revenues of disinformation agents and make political ads more transparent on their platforms.

Another strand of the Code looks to have contributed to the development of Twitter’s new ‘misleading about voting’ report option — with signatories committing to:

• Empower consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;

In the latest progress report on the Code, which was published by the Commission yesterday but covers steps taken by the platforms in March 2019, it noted some progress made — but said it’s still not enough.

“Further technical improvements as well as sharing of methodology and data sets for fake accounts are necessary to allow third-party experts, fact-checkers and researchers to carry out independent evaluation,” EC commissioners warned in a joint statement.

In the case of Twitter the company was commended for having made political ad libraries publicly accessible but criticized (along with Google) for not doing more to improve transparency around issue-based advertising.

“It is regrettable that Google and Twitter have not yet reported further progress regarding transparency of issue-based advertising, meaning issues that are sources of important debate during elections,” the Commission said. 

It also reported that Twitter had provided figures on actions undertaken against spam and fake accounts but had failed to explain how these actions relate to activity in the EU.

“Twitter did not report on any actions to improve the scrutiny of ad placements or provide any metrics with respect to its commitments in this area,” it also noted.

The EC says it will assess the Code’s initial 12-month period by the end of 2019 — and take a view on whether it needs to step in and propose regulation to control online disinformation. (Something which some individual EU Member States are already doing.)

Rivian today announced a major investment from Ford. The 115-year old automaker is investing $500 million into the Michigan-based EV startup. Along with the cash, Ford announced plans to build a vehicle on Rivian’s electric vehicle platform.

“This strategic partnership marks another key milestone in our drive to accelerate the transition to sustainable mobility,” said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO, said in a released statement. “Ford has a long-standing commitment to sustainability, with Bill Ford being one of the industry’s earliest advocates, and we are excited to use our technology to get more electric vehicles on the road.”

This investment comes two months after Rivian netted $700 million from a funding round that was lead by Amazon.

Rivian was founded in 2009 by RJ Scaringe but operated in stealth until late 2018 when it unveiled its stunning electric pickup and SUV. Today, the company has more than 750 employees split between four development locations in the U.S. and an office in the U.K. The bulk of its employees are in Michigan to be close to an expansive automotive supply chain.

Today’s announcement stopped short about detailing the vehicle Ford intends on building on Rivian’s platform. It’s likely whatever Ford produces will have similar capabilities of the two products Rivian announced last year. Rivian’s five-passenger R1T pickup and seven-passenger R1S SUV both feature over 400 miles of range and the startup previously stated they would be available in late 2020.

Ford already has several electric vehicles in production and in the works. Along with small electric vehicles, Ford is developing an electric version of its best-selling model, the F-150 pickup.

With this investment, Rivian will stay an independent company. Following regulatory approval, Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of Automotive, will join Rivian’s board.

Docker and Arm today announced a major new partnership that will see the two companies collaborate in bringing improved support for the Arm platform to Docker’s tools.

The main idea here is to make it easy for Docker developers to build their applications for the Arm platform right from their x86 desktops and then deploy them to the cloud (including the Arm-based AWS EC2 A1 instances), edge and IoT devices. Developers will be able to build their containers for Arm just like they do today, without the need for any cross-compliation.

This new capability, which will work for applications written in Javascript/Node.js, Python, Java, C++, Ruby, .NET core, Go, Rust and PHP, will become available as a tech preview next week, when Docker hosts its annual North American developer conference in San Francisco.

Typically, developers would have to build the containers they want to run on the Arm platform on an Arm-based server. With this system, which is the first result of this new partnership, Docker essentially emulates an Arm chip on the PC for building these images.

“Overnight, the 2 million Docker developers that are out there can use the Docker commands they already know and become Arm developers,” Docker EVP of Business Development David Messina told me. “Docker, just like we’ve done many times over, has simplified and streamlined processes and made them simpler and accessible to developers. And in this case, we’re making x86 developers on their laptops Arm developers overnight.”

Given that cloud-based Arm servers like Amazon’s A1 instances are often signficantly cheaper than x86 machines, users can achieve some immediate cost benefits by using this new system and running their containers on Arm.

For Docker, this partnership opens up new opportunities, especially in areas where Arm chips are already strong, including edge and IoT scenarios. Arm, similarly, is interested in strengthening its developer ecosystem by making it easier to develop for its platform. The easier it is to build apps for the platform, the more likely developers are to then run them on servers that feature chips from Arm’s partners.

“Arm’s perspective on the infrastructure really spans all the way from the endpoint, all the way through the edge to the cloud data center, because we are one of the few companies that have a presence all the way through that entire path,” Mohamed Awad, Arm’s VP of Marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, said. “It’s that perspective that drove us to make sure that we engage Docker in a meaningful way and have a meaningful relationship with them. We are seeing compute and the infrastructure sort of transforming itself right now from the old model of centralized compute, general purpose architecture, to a more distributed and more heterogeneous compute system.”

Developers, however, Awad rightly noted, don’t want to have to deal with this complexity, yet they also increasingly need to ensure that their applications run on a wide variety of platform and that they can move them around as needed. “For us, this is about enabling developers and freeing them from lock-in on any particular area and allowing them to choose the right compute for the right job that is the most efficient for them,” Awad said.

Mesina noted that the promise of Docker has long been to remove the dependence of applications from the infrastructure they run on. Adding Arm support simply extends this promise to an additional platform. He also stressed that the work on this was driven by the company’s enterprise customers. These are the users who have already set up their systems for cloud-native development with Docker’s tools — at least for their x86 development. Those customers are now looking at developing for their edge devices, too, and that often means developing for Arm-based devices.

Awad and Messina both stressed that developers really don’t have to learn anything new to make this work. All of the usual Docker commands will just work.