Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Three million dollars. That’s the largest amount of money I’ve ever walked away from in terms of a customer contract that I decided we shouldn’t take. 

It sucked. It was, at the time, more than half of the total amount of funds we had raised and it also represented just a shade more than the previous year’s revenue. It was a Fortune 500 company and the market leader in their industry. This was pocket money to them — which was part of the problem.

Good entrepreneurs spend a lot of time worrying about customers. We worry about the customers we have, the ones we don’t have, the ones we lost, and the ones we’re in danger of losing. We worry so much about where the next customer is going to come from that we never think twice about whether we should take on, or keep, a customer that’s more trouble than they’re worth.

The customer is king

As entrepreneurs, we need to be unflinchingly customer-first. We are the drivers, but the customers are holding the map. We should spend copious amounts of time listening, usually through data, to figure out our next move. We should know the risks when we go off-road, not only the setbacks that come with making the wrong choice, but the fact that we’ll hear about it from all sides until we right the ship.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Pinterest sets IPO range at $15-17, valuing it at $10.6B vs previous valuation of $12.3B

Social media platform Pinterest filed an updated S-1, where it set the price range at $15-17 per share, which would value the company between $10 billion and $11.3 billion.

That’s a tough (or, you might argue, conservative) picture, valuing the company at around $2 billion less than its valuation as a private startup when it last raised funding in 2017.

2. To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself

Evan Spiegel has finally found a way to fight back against Mark Zuckerberg’s army of clones. His plan is to let other apps embed the best parts of Snapchat, rather than building their own half-rate copies.

3. Grab plans to raise $2B more this year to fund an acquisition spree in Southeast Asia

Fresh from closing a near-$1.5 billion raise from SoftBank’s Vision Fund as part of a huge, multi-billion Series H deal, Grab said today that it plans to extend the round to $6.5 billion to amp up its battle with Go-Jek.

Photo: KTSDESIGN/Getty Images

4. Sinemia faces consumer pushback and a class action suit over a battery of complaints

Earlier this week, we spoke to CEO Rifat Oguz about the service’s ongoing issues. He told us, “As CEO, I can say, we’re still learning.”

5. Gizmodo Media Group acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners

Gizmodo Media Group started as part of Gawker Media, and was acquired by Univision following Gawker’s legal defeat (in a lawsuit brought by Terry Bollea) and subsequent bankruptcy.

6. Klaviyo raises $150M Series B after building company the old-fashioned way

Co-founder Andrew Bialecki wrote in a blog post that the founders decided to bootstrap for the first several years because they felt it was the right way to build a business — that, and they had no idea how to raise money.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The Equity team has thoughts on Lyft’s plummeting stock price, while Original Content reviews the Theranos documentary, “The Inventor.”

Kids gaming platform Roblox, most recently valued at over $2.5 billion, has reached a new milestone of 90 million monthly active users, the company said on Sunday. That’s up from the 70 million monthly actives it claimed at its last funding round – a $150 million Series F, announced last fall. The sizable increase in users is credited to Roblox’s international expansion efforts, and particularly its more recent support for the French and German languages.

The top 150 games that run on the Roblox platform are now available in both languages, along with community moderation, customer support, and parental resources.

The gaming company has also been steadily growing as more kids join after hearing about it from friends or seeing its games played on YouTube, for example. Like Fortnite, it has become a place that kids go to “hang out” online even when not actively playing.

The games themselves are built by third-party creators, while Roblox gets a share of the revenue the games generate from the sale of virtual goods. In 2017, Roblox paid out $30 million to its creator community, and later said that number would more than double in 2018. It says that players and creators now spend over a billion hours per month on its platform.

Roblox’s growth has not been without its challenges, however. Bad actors last year subverted the game’s protections to assault a child’s in-game avatar – a serious problem for a game aimed at kids, and a PR crisis, as well. But the company addressed the problem by quickly securing its platform to prevent future hacks of this kind, apologized to parents, banned the hackers, and soon after launched a “digital civility initiative” as part of its broader push for online safety.

Months later, Roblox was still surging.

International expansion was part of the plan when Roblox chose to raise additional funding, despite already being cash-flow positive.

As CEO David Baszucki explained last fall, the idea was to create “a war chest, to have a buffer, to have the opportunity to do acquisitions,” and “to have a strong balance sheet as we grow internationally.”

The company soon made good on its to-do list, making its first acquisition in October 2018 when it picked up the app performance startup, PacketZoom. It also followed Minecraft’s footsteps into the education market, and has since been working to make its service available to a global base of users.

On that front, Roblox says Europe has played a key role, with millions of users and hundreds of thousands of game creators – like those behind the Roblox games “Ski Resort” (Germany), “Crash Course” (France), and “Heists 2 (U.K.).

In addition to French and German, Roblox is also available in English, Portuguese and Spanish, and plans to support more languages in the coming months, it says.

But the company doesn’t want to face another incident or PR crisis as it moves into new countries.

On that front, Roblox is working with digital safety leaders in both France and Germany, as part of its Digital Civility Initiative. In France, it’s working with e-Enfance; and in Germany, it’s working with Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle (USK). Roblox also added USK’s Managing Director, Elisabeth Secker, to the company’s Trust & Safety Advisory Board.

“We are excited to welcome Roblox as a new member to the USK and I’m honored to join the company’s Trust & Safety Advisory Board,” said Elisabeth Secker, Managing Director of the Entertainment Software Self-Regulation Body (USK), in a statement. “We are happy to support Roblox in their efforts to make their platform not only safe, but also to empower kids, teens, and parents with the skills they need to create positive online experiences.”

Ikea and Sonos are partnering on a a new range of connected speakers that will be available in August 2019. The Symfonisk speakers will aren’t just cheap Ikea speakers with a Sonos logo. You’ll be able to control the speakers from the Sonos app just like a normal Sonos product.

Ikea and Sonos showcased two different models for now — a bookshelf speaker that will cost $99 and a table lamp speaker that will retail for $179. They will available in black and white. The idea is to hide those speakers in shelves and lamps so that you’re surrounded by speakers without even noticing them.

You can use the bookshelf speaker horizontally or vertically. But you can also mount a speaker on an Ikea Kungfors rack. It can act as a standalone shelf if you want to put a plant or some decoration on top of it.

The table lamp is quite straightforward. This object combines both light and sound. It looks like an Amazon Echo Plus or an Apple HomePod with a lamp on top. If you live in a tiny apartment, you could save some valuable space by replacing two objects with one.

The best part is that those new speakers will integrate with other Sonos speakers just like any Sonos product. For instance, you can pair two speakers to create stereo separation or pair them with a Sonos Beam to create a good sound system for your TV.

If you wanted to add a Sonos speaker in your bathroom but didn’t want to spend $200 on a Sonos One, you could also consider a bookshelf speaker to hide in a corner. It might not be as powerful as a Sonos One, but customers will benefit from more options.

The Symfonisk line connects to your Wi-Fi network. This way, you can use the normal Sonos app, control music from Spotify’s app using Spotify Connect and send music to your speakers with AirPlay 2.

Today’s new speakers don’t have any microphone. So you won’t be able to control your music with Amazon Alexa directly.

Microsoft today launched the first official version of its Edge browser with the Chromium engine for Windows 10. You can now download the first developer and canary builds here. The canary builds will get daily updates and the developer builds will see weekly updates. Over time, you’ll also be able to opt in to the beta channel and, eventually, the stable channel.

The company first announced this project last December and the news obviously created quite a stir, given that Microsoft was abandoning its own browser engine development in favor of using an open-source engine — and one that is still very much under the control of Google. With that, we’re now down to two major browser engines: Google’s Chromium and Mozilla’s Gecko.

I used the most recent builds for the last week or so. Maybe the most remarkable thing about using Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge browser is how unremarkable it feels. It’s a browser and it (with the exceptions of a few bugs you’d expect to see in a first release) works just like you’d expect it to. That’s a good thing, in that if you’re a Windows user, you could easily use the new Edge as your default browser and would be just fine. On the other hand — at least at this stage of the project — there’s also very little that differentiates Edge with Chromium from Google’s own Chrome browser.

That will change over time, though, with more integrations into the Windows ecosystem. For now, this is very much a first preview and meant to give web and extensions developers a platform for testing their sites and tools.

There are a few points of integration with Microsoft’s other services available already, though. Right now, when you install the Edge preview builds, you get the option to choose your new tab layout. The choices are a very simple new tab layout that only presents a search bar and a few bookmarks and a variation with a pretty picture in the background, similar to what you’d see on Bing. There is, however, also another option that highlights recent news from Microsoft News, with the option to personalize what you see on that page.

Microsoft also says that it plans to improve tab management and other UI features as it looks at how it can differentiate its browser from the rest.

In this first preview, some of the syncing features are also already in place, but there are a few holes here. So while bookmarks sync, extensions, your browsing history, settings, open tabs, addresses and passwords do not. That’ll come in some of the next builds, though.

Right now, the only search engine that’s available is Bing. That, too, will obviously change in upcoming builds.

Microsoft tells me that it prioritized getting a full end-to-end browser code base to users and setting up the engineering systems that will allow it to both push regular updates outside of the Windows update cycle and to pull in telemetry data from its users.

Most of the bugs I encountered where minor. Netflix, though, regularly gave me trouble. While all other video services I tried worked just fine, the Netflix homepage often stuttered and became unresponsive for a few seconds.

That was the exception, though. In using the new Edge as my default browser for almost a week, I rarely ran into similar issues and a lot of things ‘just work’ already. You can read PDFs in the browser, just like you’d expect. Two-factor authentication with a Yubikey to get into Gmail works without an issue. Even complex web apps run quickly and without any issues. The extensions I regularly use, including LastPass, worked seamlessly, no matter whether I installed them from the Google store or Microsoft’s library.

I also ran a few benchmarks and unsurprisingly, Edge and the latest version of Chrome tend to score virtually the same results. It’s a bit too early in the development process to really focus on benchmarks, but the results are encouraging.

With this release, we’re also getting our first official look at using extensions in the new Edge. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft will offer its own extension store, but with the flip of a switch in the settings, you’ll also be able to install and use extensions from third-party marketplaces, meaning the Chrome Web Store. Extension developers who want to add their tools to the Microsoft marketplace can basically take their existing Chrome extensions and use those

Microsoft’s promise, of course, is that it will also bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and Windows 8, as well as the Mac. For now, though, this first version is only available on 64-bit versions of Windows 10. Those are in the works, but Microsoft says they simply aren’t quite as far along as the Windows 10 edition. This first release is also English-only, with localized versions coming soon, though.

While anybody can obviously download this release and give it a try, Microsoft stressed that if you’re not a tech enthusiast, it really isn’t for you. This first release is very much meant for a technical audience. In a few months, though, Microsoft will surely start launching more fully-featured beta versions and by that time, the browser will likely be ready for a wider audience. Still, though, if you want to give it a try, nobody is stopping you today, no matter your technical expertise.

As more universities turn to offering online degrees to expand their student bodies by way of cyberspace, one of the pioneers in enabling that trend has made an acquisition to expand into new territory around skills training and continuing education. 2U, which helps build online degree programs for a number of top universities, is paying $750 million to acquire Trilogy Education, which creates online and in-person “boot camps” — continuing education programs — in collaboration with universities to train those already in the workforce with tech skills in areas like coding, data analytics, UX/UI, and cybersecurity.

The deal, which is expected to close in the next 60 days, is coming in a combination of cash and shares — $400 million in cash and $350 million in newly issued shares of 2U common stock — the company said. It’s a decent exit for Trilogy, which was valued at $545 million (according to Pitchbook) when it raised $50 million in June 2018. Its investors include Highland Capital, Macquarie and Exceed, among others.

2U, meanwhile, has a market cap of $3.85 billion an is publicly traded on Nasdaq.

The acquisition helps 2U consolidate its university footprint, which will get bumped up to 68 from its previous 36. And it presents an obvious opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell: those who are already jumping into building degree programs can diversify into more skills training, while those who have yet to build full degree services but have created skills training programs now might consider how to parlay that experience into degrees — all from one provider, 2U. This also opens more generally a bigger window for 2U to expand into the continuing education market, which it estimates is worth some $366 billion.

It also helps it better compete with other companies that have already built a dual-track approach to online education, building degrees as well as short courses, like Coursera (Udacity and Udemy are among those that have focused on further education).

“[Trilogy Education] is a natural strategic fit and growth driver for 2U that will extend our reach across the career curriculum continuum, deepen our relationships with new and existing partners, drive marketing efficiencies, and open a more direct corporate training and enterprise sales channel for the company. We expect the addition of Trilogy to accelerate our path to $1 billion in revenue by one year from 2022 to 2021,” 2U Co-Founder and CEO Christopher “Chip” Paucek said in a statement. ​“Increasingly, universities are attempting to add practical, technical skills to their degrees. We simply future-proof the degree by adding this type of technical competency.”

The presence of commercial companies building educational courses for non-profit universities, and taking a cut in the process, has seen more than a little controversy. The business spin that is put on education through these programs not only calls into question how and what schools (and their partners) prioritise in the curriculum, but they raise issues around how higher education is priced, and who profits from these degrees — which sometimes can still cost over $60,000, despite no physical time in classrooms. (There is an excellent dive into the issue here in the Huffington Post, featuring an interview with the co-founder of 2U, John Katzman, who also founded the Princeton Review.)

To be fair, some of the issues around higher education — such as the exorbitantly high cost in some countries, and the fact that it still feels like a largely elitist endeavor with the odds of students gaining acceptance and achieving in top universities still in favor of too-small a privileged subset of families — cannot be completely tied to the development of online learning courses powered by for-profit companies.

And you could also argue that this was bound to be the next step, given how technology has evolved across all of education, and the fact that ed tech is not a core competency for many institutions.

One of the potential positives that comes out of online degree programs is that it gives opportunities to a much wider group of would-be students, and mass market is something that Trilogy knows: it has to date already provided courses for 20,000 people and 1,200 instructors across 120 programs, it says, with an emphasis on practical skills to bring up local workforces, and working with universities to build these courses and connecting with big companies — customers include Google, Microsoft, and Bank of America — to deliver them.

“By joining forces with 2U, Trilogy Education can empower universities to reach more students, in more places, throughout more of their lives, while driving positive economic ​impact in their local regions,” Trilogy Education CEO and Founder Dan Sommer said in a statement. “Trilogy and 2U share a belief that universities are critical to lifelong learning and to meeting the workforce development needs of local economies both domestically and internationally, and we’re proud to further our mission and continue this important work as part of the 2U family.

After a couple of few rocky years, 2020 will mark a rebound for phone shipments, according to new projections from Gartner. But device makers aren’t out of the woods just yet. 2021’s number find things dipping yet again.

The analyst firm sees the category experiencing a 0.5 percent decline for 2019. That comports with recent numbers, which have the space experiencing negative growth over the past couple of years for the first time since firms started keeping tracking of these things.

Next year’s expected growth to  marks a potential bright spot, owing to upgrade cycles, but device makers should be bracing for slowed growth overall for the next couple of years. In 2021, things are said to drop down even further.

Premium costs, slowed economic growth in places like China and less incentive to upgrade are are driving the stagnation here. Gartner believes the average lifetime of a premium handset will increase from 2.6 to 2.8 years by 2023. It seems like a rounding error, but it’s enough to make an impact.

I’d anticipate that the coming push to 5G will help drive some growth along the way. Gartner, on the other hand, seems understandably more cautious about foldables, despite the form factor being all the rage at MWC last month.

“We expect that users will use a foldable phone as they do their regular smartphone, picking it up hundreds of times a day, unfolding it sporadically and typing on its plastic screen, which may scratch quickly depending on the way it folds,” Gartner research director Roberta Cozza says in a release tied to the study. “Through the next five years, we expect foldable phones to remain a niche product due to several manufacturing challenges. In addition to the surface of the screen, the price is a barrier despite we expect to decline with time. Currently priced at $2,000, foldable phones present too many trade-offs, even for many early technology adopters.”

Fair enough. Things do look better for the category long term, with foldable numbers up to 30 million units (around five percent of the market) by 2023.

Gizmodo Media Group and The Onion have a new owner — private equity firm Great Hill Partners.

As part of the deal, digital media executive Jim Spanfeller is becoming CEO of (and an investor in) the renamed G/O Media. Spanfeller previously led Forbes.com as CEO and also founded Spanfeller Media Group, the company behind the Daily Meal.

“This opportunity comes at a time when the entire digital media category is beginning to be recognized again for its unique ability to meet the diverse content and delivery needs of consumers and advertisers,” Spanfeller said in a statement. “As the largest player in our space, G/O Media is in an ideal position to capitalize on this dynamic, and I am excited to collaborate with a great team that boasts an incredible track record to further expand our reach, add value to our advertisers and enrich our visitors’ lives.”

According to the announcement, G/O Media Group sites reach around 100 million unique visitors each month. The Gizmodo Media Group includes Deadspin, Jezebel, Kotaku, Lifehacker and others, as well as Gizmodo itself. They started out as part of Gawker Media, and were acquired by Univision following Gawker’s legal defeat in a lawsuit by Terry Bollea (a.k.a. Hulk Hogan), and its subsequent bankruptcy.

The acquisition was part of a larger effort by Univision to a reach an English-language audience — it also acquired its initial stake in The Onion at around the same time. Since then, however, Univision took a write-down on its English-language assets and was reportedly looking to sell them.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported that Great Hill was in talks to acquire the Gizmodo portfolio, now says the firm is expected to pay “much less” than the $135 million that Univision paid in 2016. Great Hill previously worked with Vivek Shah to acquire publisher Ziff Davis, which was then sold to j2 Global.

Meanwhile, the Gawker website was acquired separately by Bustle owner Bryan Goldberg. It’s struggled to get off the ground, however, with its writing staff resigning earlier this year.

Security researchers have discovered a powerful surveillance app first designed for Android devices can now target victims with iPhones.

The spy app, found by researchers at mobile security firm Lookout, said its developer abused their Apple-issued enterprise certificates to bypass the tech giant’s app store to infect unsuspecting victims.

The disguised carrier assistance app once installed can silently grab a victim’s contacts, audio recordings, photos, videos, and other device information — including their real-time location data. It can be remotely triggered to listen in on people’s conversations, the researchers found. Although there was no data to show who might have been targeted, the researchers noted that the malicious app was served from fake sites purporting to be cell carriers in Italy and Turkmenistan.

The app is one of several under the so-called “stalkerware” umbrella, apps that can be surreptitiously installed on a victim’s phone to spy on their activity, location and messages in real-time.

Researchers linked the app to the makers of a previously discovered Android app, developed by the same Italian surveillance app maker Connexxa.

The Android app, dubbed Exodus, ensnared hundreds of victims — either by installing it or having it installed. Exodus had a larger feature set and expanded spying capabilities by downloading an additional exploit designed to gain root access to the device, giving the app near complete access to a device’s data, including emails, cellular data, Wi-Fi passwords and more, according to Security Without Borders.

Screenshots of the ordinary-looking iPhone app, which was silently uploading a victim’s private data and real-time location to the spyware company’s servers. (Image: supplied)

Both of the apps use the same backend infrastructure, while the iOS app used several techniques — like certificate pinning — to make it difficult to analyze the network traffic, Adam Bauer, Lookout’s senior staff security intelligence engineer, told TechCrunch.

“This is one of the indicators that a professional group was responsible for the software,” he said.

Although the Android version was downloadable directly from the Google’s app store, the iOS version was not widely distributed. Instead, Connexxa signed the app with an enterprise certificate issued by Apple to the developer, said Bauer, allowing the surveillance app maker to bypass Apple’s strict app store checks.

Apple says that’s a violation of its rules, which prohibits these certificates designed to be used strictly for internal apps to be pushed to consumers.

It follows a similar pattern to several app makers, as discovered by TechCrunch earlier this year, which abused their enterprise certificates to develop mobile apps that evaded the scrutiny of Apple’s app store. Every app served through an app store has to be certified by Apple or they won’t run. But several companies, like Facebook and Google, used their enterprise-only certificates to sign apps given to consumers. Apple said this violated its rules and banned the apps by revoking enterprise certificates used by Facebook and Google, knocking both of their illicit apps offline, but also every other internal app signed with the same certificate.

Facebook was unable to operate at full capacity for an entire working day until Apple issued a new certificate.

The certificate Apple issued to Connexa. (Image: supplied)

But Facebook and Google weren’t the only companies abusing their enterprise certificates. TechCrunch found dozens of porn and gambling apps — not permitted on Apple’s app store — signed with an enterprise certificate, circumventing the tech giant’s rules.

After they researchers disclosed their findings, Apple revoked the app maker’s enterprise certificate, knocking every installed app offline and unable to run.

The researchers said they did not know how many Apple users were affected.

Connexxa did not respond to a request for comment. Apple did not comment.

Security researchers have discovered a powerful surveillance app first designed for Android devices can now target victims with iPhones.

The spy app, found by researchers at mobile security firm Lookout, said its developer abused their Apple-issued enterprise certificates to bypass the tech giant’s app store to infect unsuspecting victims.

The disguised carrier assistance app once installed can silently grab a victim’s contacts, audio recordings, photos, videos, and other device information — including their real-time location data. It can be remotely triggered to listen in on people’s conversations, the researchers found. Although there was no data to show who might have been targeted, the researchers noted that the malicious app was served from fake sites purporting to be cell carriers in Italy and Turkmenistan.

The app is one of several under the so-called “stalkerware” umbrella, apps that can be surreptitiously installed on a victim’s phone to spy on their activity, location and messages in real-time.

Researchers linked the app to the makers of a previously discovered Android app, developed by the same Italian surveillance app maker Connexxa.

The Android app, dubbed Exodus, ensnared hundreds of victims — either by installing it or having it installed. Exodus had a larger feature set and expanded spying capabilities by downloading an additional exploit designed to gain root access to the device, giving the app near complete access to a device’s data, including emails, cellular data, Wi-Fi passwords and more, according to Security Without Borders.

Screenshots of the ordinary-looking iPhone app, which was silently uploading a victim’s private data and real-time location to the spyware company’s servers. (Image: supplied)

Both of the apps use the same backend infrastructure, while the iOS app used several techniques — like certificate pinning — to make it difficult to analyze the network traffic, Adam Bauer, Lookout’s senior staff security intelligence engineer, told TechCrunch.

“This is one of the indicators that a professional group was responsible for the software,” he said.

Although the Android version was downloadable directly from the Google’s app store, the iOS version was not widely distributed. Instead, Connexxa signed the app with an enterprise certificate issued by Apple to the developer, said Bauer, allowing the surveillance app maker to bypass Apple’s strict app store checks.

Apple says that’s a violation of its rules, which prohibits these certificates designed to be used strictly for internal apps to be pushed to consumers.

It follows a similar pattern to several app makers, as discovered by TechCrunch earlier this year, which abused their enterprise certificates to develop mobile apps that evaded the scrutiny of Apple’s app store. Every app served through an app store has to be certified by Apple or they won’t run. But several companies, like Facebook and Google, used their enterprise-only certificates to sign apps given to consumers. Apple said this violated its rules and banned the apps by revoking enterprise certificates used by Facebook and Google, knocking both of their illicit apps offline, but also every other internal app signed with the same certificate.

Facebook was unable to operate at full capacity for an entire working day until Apple issued a new certificate.

The certificate Apple issued to Connexa. (Image: supplied)

But Facebook and Google weren’t the only companies abusing their enterprise certificates. TechCrunch found dozens of porn and gambling apps — not permitted on Apple’s app store — signed with an enterprise certificate, circumventing the tech giant’s rules.

After they researchers disclosed their findings, Apple revoked the app maker’s enterprise certificate, knocking every installed app offline and unable to run.

The researchers said they did not know how many Apple users were affected.

Connexxa did not respond to a request for comment. Apple did not comment.