Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Xiaomi is back with another teaser of the foldable concept device it first showed off in January.

This time around, in a video posted to its Weibo account, the Chinese company showed off the device working in tablet mode and, after folding, regular phone mode to illustrate how seamlessly it can be tucked up and put away… in this case atop of a cup of noodles.

Video: hat tip The Verge

Xiaomi has said it is developing a device — the previous video included a call-out for ideas and feedback — so the project isn’t likely as advanced as soon-to-launch products from Samsung, Huawei or lesser known Chinese brand Royole.

Unlike those three, Xiaomi’s offers two foldable edges instead of just one. That would appear to present a much tougher challenge in terms of design and logistics, but this new teaser (and there’s no doubt Xiaomi chose it carefully) seems to show impressive results. The phone folds nicely in terms of hardware and software, but you’d imagine those edges will make it thicker than others.

It’s all ifs and buts for now, though, since Xiaomi isn’t giving up details of what this product might become… or even whether it will become one at all. But Xiaomi being Xiaomi, you’d imagine that when it does drop, it won’t just be the two folds that set it apart from the rest. The Chinese firm is massively price-sensitive, so you can expect that it’ll price any foldable phone it releases much lower than the $2,000 or so that Samsung and Huawei are asking for their gen-one efforts.

Spotify just started selling a new subscription in Ireland called Premium Duo, as The Verge spotted. You guessed it, this subscription tier is designed for couples, roommates and all combinations of two persons who live under the same roof. It is a bit more expensive than a Premium account and a bit less expensive than a Family account.

If you have three or four persons in your family, a Premium for Family account makes sense. For $14.99 per month (or €14.99, £14.99), you can upgrade up to six different accounts to Premium.

But what if you’re just two persons? Many people choose to share a single account because it only costs $9.99 per month (or €9.99, £9.99).

There are some drawbacks and it is against the terms and conditions of the service. For instance, you can only play music on one device at a time, so you might pause music on your friend’s device when you start playing music.

With Spotify Duo, the company would introduce a new price point at €12.49 per month — it would likely cost $12.49 in the U.S. and £12.49 in the U.K., but it’s only available in Ireland for now. The only requirement is that you need to live at the same address.

Based on Spotify’s website, the system works just like Premium for Family. Every user creates a separate Spotify account, the person who pays the bill can send an invitation link so that other can join your group. You can unlink your accounts whenever you want.

It’s clear that the company targets people who share the same account. “And because you’re now on separate accounts, music recommendations are tailored to your individual tastes,” Spotify says on its website.

That’s why the company is also adding a new feature called Duo Mix. This is a shared playlist between the two members of the Premium Duo account. It features songs that you have both liked. You can choose between a chill mix and an upbeat mix. You can also filter out explicit content.

Let’s see if Spotify manages to increase the subscriber base with this new option. In its latest earnings release, Spotify said that the average revenue per premium user was €4.89. Family plans seem to be incredibly popular already.

Government services, for many, epitomize the worst of bureaucracy: they are, at their low point, large, lumbering organizations working under strained budgets, staffed by lifer employees who don’t get much say in improving things, and lots of paperwork. But as ageing public information infrastructure grinds to a halt and public services start making the switch to digital, that image is slowly starting to change, and the tech companies helping this along are reaping some of the rewards.

Today one them, PayIt — which has designed a platform to take payments and produce related documentation for public services through web and mobile interfaces — announced that it has raised a hefty funding round of over $100 million to tap that opportunity.

PayIt’s platform is currently operational in the US and covers a variety of applications that fall under the general category of public services that require government organizations and agencies to take money from us, and issue us with certificates and other documents confirming we have done something official. They include Courts and Citations, Environmental Services, Health and Human Services, Motor Vehicle, Parks and Wildlife Services, Professional Licensing, Public Safety, Taxes, Turnpike and Tolling, and Utilities.

The plan for PayIt will be to expand that list to cover more use cases, to win more business in the US, and to also begin the process of breaking into more international markets.

The funding is coming from a single investor, Insight Partners (which used to go by Insight Venture Partners), and it is also notable because of some of the funding context.

Since its founding in 2013, PayIt had only raised $11 million, John Thomson — the CEO who co-founded and runs the company with Michael Plunkett (COO) in Kansas City — told me in an interview.

And in case you are wondering, Thomson added that the reason they’re not disclosing a more exact funding figure — or PayIt’s valuation — is because the company doesn’t want the financial aspects to be the focus: both because he wants this to be about expansion, and because he doesn’t want to give too much information to competitors.

Indeed, while the market is massive — in the US alone, Thomson estimates that some $2 trillion flows between public services and constituents annually — it is also crowded with payment companies that want to tap some of that for themselves.

Competitors include other payment platforms that work with government services such as Aliant, other payment providers like Stripe and PayPal, companies like Visa, and sometimes even the governments itself. Thomson does not what PayIt’s own share of the pie is except to note that it is handling a “small but rapidly growing percentage of the market.”

As citizens, we all know some of the pain points of older systems: they might require in-person visits or snail mail to make payments and procure various official documents. (DMV appointments, for one, can take months to sort out.) As Thomson describes it, what’s going on under the hood is equally as inefficient and slow moving.

“To do business with the government — whether its US, state or local — the entire burden in many cases is placed on constituents,” Thomson said. Behind the scenes, it’s also bad. There can be “as many as six or seven systems in use to handle a request, a payment and more.”

The idea is that PayIt has built a platform that can integrate all of that into a single process, behind a single front end. “Payments happen in the form of a wallet,” he said, adding that PayIt handles sensitive information in the cloud and doesn’t require users to re-enter too many details, or for too many organizations to have to hand off information between each other to complete a payment subsequent document order. “Consumers love it because it’s like interacting with a business in the private sector,” he said.

PayIt’s notable for straddling two big areas — fintech and govtech. While the former has seen a ton of innovation that has mirrored the growth of the internet overall, tech companies (and governments) have really only started to scratch the surface with the latter. It will be interesting to see how this develops both in terms of innovation, but also where people will potentially draw a line on too much centralised and digitised information. Recent moves in India around Aadhar — which is now the world’s largest biometric ID system — have been more than a little controversial.

For now, however, there are a lot of incremental processes to fix and make efficient, and that is where PayIt sits for now.

Insight Partners is an interesting investor for PayIt in that regard. The VC has a track record for backing startups that are using tech to disrupt and rethink legacy infrastructure, with previous investments including WordPress’s Automattic, BlaBlaCar and N26 in Europe, Docusign and many more.

“What excited us most about the PayIt platform is its ability to scale and make a true impact on a broad base of stakeholders,” said Ryan Hinkle, Managing Director at Insight Partners, in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

“We’ve all dreaded having to wait in line for a new driver’s license, or jump through hoops to pay for a parking ticket. It’s clear that with PayIt, that doesn’t have to be the reality. PayIt seeks to dissolve those stressful interactions making processes seamless and simple for constituents and governments, allowing issues to be resolved and revenue to be collected efficiently. At Insight Partners, we’re looking forward to helping John and the team scale the best-in-class platform they’ve already built, and reach new constituents and governments with these solutions.”

Kong, the open core API management and lifecycle management company previously known as Mashape, today announced that it has raised a $43 million Series C round led by Index Ventures. Previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Charles River Ventures (CRV), as well as new investors GGV Capital and World Innovation Lab also participated. With this round, Kong has now raised a total of $71 million.

The company’s CEO and co-founder Augusto Marietti tells me that the company plans to use the funds to build out its service control platform. He likened this service to the “nervous system for an organization’s software architecture.”

Right now, Kong is just offering the first pieces of this, though. One area the company plans to especially focus on is security, in addition to its existing management tools, where Kong plans to add more machine learning capabilities over time, too. “It’s obviously a 10-year journey but those two things — immunity with security and machine learning with [Kong] Brain are really a 10-year journey of building an intelligent platform that can manage all the traffic in and out of an organization,” he said.

In addition, the company also plans to invest heavily in its expansion in both Europe and the Asia Pacific market. This also explains the addition of World Innovation Lab as an investor. The firm, after all, focuses heavily on connecting companies in the US with partners in Asia — and especially Japan. As Marietti told me, the company is seeing a lot of demand in Japan and China right now, so it makes sense to capitalize on this, especially as the Chinese market is about to become more easily accessible for foreign companies.

Kong notes that it doubled its headcount in 2018 and now has over 100 enterprise customers, including Yahoo! Japan, Ferrari, SoulCycle and WeWork.

It’s worth noting that while this is officially a Series C investment, Marietti is thinking of it more like a Series B round given that the company went through a major pivot when it moved from being Mashape to its focus on Kong, which was already its most popular open source tool.

“Modern software is now built in the cloud, with applications consuming other applications, service to service,” said Martin Casado, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz . “We’re at the tipping point of enterprise adoption of microservices architectures, and companies are turning to new open source-based developer tools and platforms to fuel their next wave of innovation. Kong is uniquely suited to help enterprises as they make this shift by supporting an organization’s entire service architecture, from centralized or decentralized, monolith or microservices.”

Microsoft today announced a major expansion of its Azure IP Advantage program, which provides its Azure users with protection against patent trolls. This program now also provides customers who are building IoT solutions that connect to Azure with access to 10,000 patents to defend themselves against intellectual property lawsuits.

What’s maybe most interesting here, though, is that Microsoft is also donating 500 patents to startups in the LOT Network. This organization, which counts companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, SAP, Epic Games, Ford, GM, Lyft and Uber among its well over 150 members, is designed to protect companies against patent trolls by giving them access to a wide library of patents from its member companies and other sources.

“The LOT Network is really committed to helping address the proliferation of intellectual property losses, especially ones that are brought by non-practicing entities, or so-called trolls,” Microsoft  CVP and Deputy General Counsel Erich Andersen told me. 

This new program goes well beyond basic protection from patent trolls, though. Qualified startups who join the LOT Network can acquire Microsoft patents as part of their free membership and as Andresen stressed, the startups will own them outright. The LOT network will be able to provide its startup members with up to three patents from this collection.

There’s one additional requirement here, though: to qualify for getting the patents, these startups also have to meet a $1,000 per month Azure spend. As Andersen told me, though, they don’t have to make any kind of forward pledge. The company will simply look at a startup’s last three monthly Azure bills.

“We want to help the LOT Network grow its network of startups,” Andersen said. “To provide an incentive, we are going to provide these patents to them.” He noted that startups are obviously interested in getting access to patents as a foundation of their companies, but also to raise capital and to defend themselves against trolls.

The patents we’re talking about here cover a wide range of technologies as well as geographies. Andersen noted that we’re talking about U.S. patents as well as European and Chinese patents, for example.

“The idea is that these startups come from a diverse set of industry sectors,” he said. “The hope we have is that when they approach LOT, they’ll find patents among those 500 that are going to be interesting to basically almost any company that might want a foundational set of patents for their business.”

As for the extended Azure IP Advantage program, it’s worth noting that every Azure customer who spends more than $1,000 per month over the past three months and hasn’t filed a patent infringement lawsuit against another Azure customers in the last two years can automatically pick one of the patents in the program’s portfolio to protect itself against frivolous patent lawsuits from trolls (and that’s a different library of patents from the one Microsoft is donating to the LOT Network as part of the startup program).

As Andresen noted, the team looked at how it could enhance the IP program by focusing on a number of specific areas. Microsoft is obviously investing a lot into IoT, so extending the program to this area makes sense. “What we’re basically saying is that if the customer is using IoT technology — regardless of whether it’s Microsoft technology or not — and it’s connected to Azure, then we’re going to provide this patent pick right to help customers defend themselves against patent suits,” Andersen said.

In addition, for those who do choose to use Microsoft IoT technology across the board, Microsoft will provide indemnification, too.

Patent trolls have lately started acquiring IoT patents, so chances are they are getting ready to making use of them and that we’ll see quite a bit of patent litigation in this space in the future. “The early signs we’re seeing indicate that this is something that customers are going to care about in the future,” said Andersen.

The Dakar Network Angels network launched this month, making its first investment in francophone Africa to cleantech venture Coliba. The Ivorian startup—that uses a mobile app to coordinate waste recycling—will receive mentorship and a minimum of $25K in seed funds.

The deal is part of Dakar Network Angels’ mission of convening experts and capital to bridge the resource gap for startups in French speaking Africa—or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.

The group—which goes by DNA for short—will offer seed fund investments of between $25K to $100K to early stage ventures with high growth potential. These rounds will come with the entrepreneurial guidance of DNA’s angel network.

Launched in Senegal, the organization’s founder is Marieme Diop, a VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Diop underscored VC disparities between francophone and non-francophone Africa as the primary driver for launching DNA. She pointed to funding data by Partech indicating that 76 percent of investment to African startups goes to three English speaking countries—Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa.

Of the $1.1 billion in equity funding to African tech ventures in 2019, only $54 million—or .05 percent—went to startups in French speaking countries, per Partech’s latest report.

“With DNA we want to develop first an ecosystem of resources…for the francophone Africa region…that entrepreneurs can tap into for scaling. We also want to position DNA as the first investment academy that will educate…on…methods for investing, mentoring, conducting due diligence, and creating more value across that ecosystem,” said Diop, who was a judge at last year’s Startup Battlefield Africa.

To gain consideration for DNA investment, startups must gain referral by a member. DNA will take a minority stake (less than 10 percent) in ventures that receive seed funds and provide program mentorship until exits, according to Diop.

To become an angel, members must commit to investing a minimum of $10K a year (for those coming on as individuals), $20K (for corporates), and be on hand to support the portfolio startups, according to DNA’s Corporate Membership Charter.

The investor network is registered as commercial non-profit in Senegal and held its first meeting in Dakar this month. The inaugural 31 members include Facebook Network Investor Lead Ibrahim Ba, former AfriLabs head Tayo Akinyemi, and Timbuktu Capital Management investor Ousmane Diagne. Moustapha Ndiaye and Ibrahima Niang co-founded DNA with Diop. 

DNA aims to expand in investment size and scope in coming years. After building the angel network and its experience, DNA will look to invest in more mature companies. On a future fund size, “We’ve discussed $5 million as our first target,” said Diop.

Over the last decade, Africa’s tech ecosystem has seen a doubling and tripling of Africa focused VCs and investment to a growing cadre of startups across sectors spanning fintech, blockchain, agtech, and logistics.

This month e-commerce unicorn Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock exchange, Africa’s first startup listing on a major exchange. The Pan-African e-commerce company operates multiple internet service verticals in 24 African countries, including 7 that are French speaking. Orange, the parent of Orange Digital Ventures (where DNA founder Marieme Diop is an associate), is an investor in Jumia.

Per its charter goals, acquisitions and IPOs are listed among the performance events Dakar Angels Network looks create around African startups in French speaking countries.

Rela (热拉), a popular dating app for gay and queer women, has exposed millions of user profiles and private data because a server wasn’t protected with a password.

Rela disappeared from app stores in May 2017 after it was reportedly shut down by Chinese regulators, though the government never confirmed it took action. But the app returned a year later, according to its app store listing, on a different cloud provider. LGBTQ+ rights in China remain highly limited, even though it was decriminalized in 1997. Many in the community still fight discrimination and attitudes have been slow to change.

Victor Gevers, a security researcher at the GDI Foundation, found the exposed database this week, he told TechCrunch, containing more than 5.3 million app users.

It’s believed the database had been exposed since June 2018, a month after the app returned, Gevers said.

Each record included their nicknames, dates of birth, height and weight, ethnicity, and sexual preferences and interests. Records also, where users allowed, included their precise geolocation. The database also contained over 20 million “moments,” or status updates — including private data.

“The privacy of five-plus million LGBTQ+ people face a lot of social challenges in China because their are no laws protecting them from discrimination,” said Gevers. “This data leak that has been open for years make it even more damaging for the people involved who were exposed.”

In a brief response, a company spokesperson confirmed the database had been secured.

Gay dating apps remain big business — even for companies in China, despite the legal complexities that’s seen several major apps shut down. Zank, a popular app used mostly by gay and bisexual men, was shut down in April 2017 citing the government’s rules for broadcasting pornographic content.

Yet, more established apps like Blued remain popular in the country.

Chinese gaming giant bought a 60 percent stake in U.S.-based gay dating app Grindr in 2017 and later acquired the entire company, but is reportedly up for sale amid concerns that the company poses a risk to U.S. national security.

Read more:

• Data management giant Rubrik leaked a massive database of client data
• Dozens of companies leaked sensitive data thanks to misconfigured Box accounts
• At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees
• Millions of bank loan and mortgage documents have leaked online
• Popular avatar app Boomoji exposed millions of users’ contact lists and location data

Palantir just landed a landmark contract with the U.S. Army worth north of $800 million. The Washington Posts reports that the Silicon Valley data analytics company was tapped over traditional defense contractor Raytheon on the project, which tasks Palantir with delivering a comprehensive combat intelligence hardware and software suite to replace the Army’s outdated system, known as DCGS-A.

A year ago, the Army named Palantir and Raytheon as finalists to compete for the contract, which will totally overhaul the Army’s “system-of-systems” that provides comprehensive data to “to assist the commander’s visualization and understanding of the threat and other relevant aspects of the operational environment.”

While the DCGS-A contract marks Palantir’s only deal with the military big enough to have its own line item with Congress, the company does have existing military ties. The largest contract that Palantir has previously entered into with the Army was for $22,401,901, starting in 2015. The company also picked up a number of contracts with the Navy over the years, though none approaching the scale of the new potentially $800 million project. Palantir’s largest Navy contracts were for $23,750,000 and $35,804,181 in 2014 and 2017, respectively. The company’s largest previous military contract to date was $216,872,321 for software services for U.S. Special Operations Command. That contract was awarded in 2016 and is set to run through next year.

Palantir has seen massive recent success with the Department of Defense, but as BuzzFeed reported in 2017, the company has experienced some friction within its CIA and FBI relationships. In 2016, Palantir successfully won an unusual lawsuit against the Army for the right to bid on the massive DCGS replacement contract with its own commercial software. The lawsuit opened the doors for Palantir to vie to provide the government an off-the-shelf product to replace its bespoke $3 billion-plus intelligence system, which took a decade to build.

Apple’s latest-generation Apple Watch doesn’t just have a curved display and a new industrial design, one of the major features of the Watch when it launched last year were its advanced health-tracking capabilities, particularly in regards to heart health and AFib detection.

Those features arrived in the US in December, but users abroad have had to wait. Today, Apple announced that the electro-cardiogram feature and irregular rhythm detection functionality is coming to 19 European countries and Hong Kong in the Watch’s latest update. These users will also gain access to the irregular rhythm detection features available on Watch models Series 1 and later.

Supported countries include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, the U.K and Switzerland.

Irregular rhythm detection is available on Apple Watch Series 1 and later. The ECG app is only available on the Apple Watch Series 4, but if you’re a European or Hong Kong-based user and curious of the new capabilities, update your Watch to 5.2 then open the Health app on your updated iPhone and go through the on-boarding process.

Apple’s continued to improve the MacBook line’s butterfly switch keyboards. In fact, the technology is on its third generation, which added a rubberized membrane designed to fix on-going issues and reduce that loud clacking sound.

But even the most devoted Apple fans have continued to have gripes, from stuck keys to random misfires. True story: one time at an Amazon event in Seattle I sent an employee on a mad dash for some compressed air inside the Spheres. I can’t remember which consonant I lost, but it seemed pretty vital to the delivery of breaking news at the time. I think maybe it was “M.”

More recently, I had to take laptop into IT after it was firing off random spaces and period. I might have screamed at my desk a few times over that one. Then there was this, wic onestly couldn’t ave appened at a worse time.

Apple’s acknowledged issues in the past, suggesting free repairs. And now it’s offered The Wall Street Journal a bit of an apology for the on-going woes.

“We are aware that a small number of users are having issues with their third-generation butterfly keyboard and for that we are sorry,” the company writes. “The vast majority of Mac notebook customers are having a positive experience with the new keyboard.”

It goes on to suggest users contact AppleCare over any issues that might arise. I will say that the latest keyboards are a step in the right direction for the company, but enough of the original problems continue to persist that Apple really ought to go back to the drawing board on this one.