Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Over the course of the last year, Adobe has quietly continued to expand its tools for helping developers use PDFs in their applications. In April, the company launched a couple of SDKs, for example, which are now known as the PDF Embed API and PDF Tools API, and with that update, the company also launched its Adobe Documents Services platform. The idea here is to provide developers with easy-to-use tools to build PDFs into their applications and workflows. Today, the company is announcing a new partnership with Microsoft that brings Document Services to Power Automate, Microsoft’s low-code workflow automation platform.

“We had this vision about a year and a half back where we said, ‘how about bringing the best of what we provide in our own apps to third-party apps as well?’ ” Vibhor Kapoor, Adobe’s SVP for its Document Cloud business, told me. “That’s kind of the simple mindset where we said: let’s decompose the capabilities of Acrobat as microservices [and] as APIs and give it to developers and publishers because frankly, a PDF for developers and publishers has been a pain for lack of a better word. So we brought these services to life.”

The team worked to make embedding PDFs into web experiences better, for example (and Kapoor frankly noted that previously, the developer experience had always been “very suboptimal” and that the user experience, too, was not always intuitive). Now, with Document Services and the Embed API, it’s just a matter of a few lines of JavaScript to embed a PDF.

Image Credits: Adobe

Kapoor acknowledged that exposing these features in SDKs and APIs was a bit of a challenge, simply because the teams didn’t originally have to worry about this use case. But on top of the technical challenges, this was also a question of changing the overall mindset. “We never had a very developer-oriented offering in the past and that means that we need to build a team that understands developers, and figure out how we package these APIs and make them available,” he noted.

The new Power Automate integration brings over 20 new PDF-centric actions from the PDF Tools API to Microsoft’s platform. These will allow users to do things like create PDFs from documents in a OneDrive folder, for example, covert images to PDFs or apply optical character recognition to PDFs.

Since Adobe launched the platforms, about 6,000 developers have now started using it and Kapoor tells me that he is seeing “significant growth” in terms of the number of API calls that are being made. From a business perspective, adding Power Automate will also likely function as a new funnel for getting new developers on board.

It’s only a matter of time now before drones become a key component of everyday logistics infrastructure, but there are still significant barriers between where we are today and that future – particularly when it comes to regulation. Iris Automation is developing computer vision products that can help simplify the regulatory challenges involved in setting standards for pilotless flight, thanks to its detect-and-avoid technology that can run using a wide range of camera hardware. The company has raised a $13 million Series B funding round to improve and extend its tech, and to help provide demonstrations of its efficacy in partnership with regulators.

I spoke to Iris Automation CEO Jon Damush, and Iris Automation investor Tess Hatch, VP at Bessemer Venture Partners, about the round and the startup’s progress and goals. Damush, who took over as CEO earlier this year, talked about his experience at Boeing, his personal experience as a pilot, and the impact on aviation of the advent of small, cheap and readily accessible electric motors, batteries and powerful computing modules, which have set the stage for an explosion in the commercial UAV industry.

“You’ve now shattered some of the barriers that have been in aerospace for the past 50 years, because you’re starting to really democratize the tools of production that allow people to make things that fly much easier than they could before,” Damush told me. “So with that, and the ability to take a human out of the cockpit, comes some interesting challenges – none more so than the regulatory environment.”

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and most airspace regulators around the world, essentially break regulations around commercial flight down into two spheres, Damush explains. The first is around operations – what are you going to do while in flight, and are you doing that the right way. The second, however, is about the pilot, and that’s a much trickier thing to adapt to pilotless aircraft.

“One of the biggest challenges is the part of the regulations called 91.113b, and what that part of the regs states is that given weather conditions that permit, it’s the pilot on the airplane that has the ultimate responsibility to see and avoid other aircraft,”  That’s not a separation standard that says you’ve got to be three miles away, or five miles away or a mile away – that is a last line of defense, that is a safety net, so that when all the other mitigations that lead to a safe flight from A to B fail, the pilot is there to make sure you don’t collide into somebody.”

Iris comes in here, with an optical camera-based obstacle avoidance system that uses computer vision to effectively replace this last line of defence when there isn’t a pilot to do so. And what this unlocks is a key limiting factor in today’s commercial drone regulatory environment: The ability to fly aircraft beyond visual line of sight. All that means is that drones can operate without having to guarantee that an operator has eyes on them at all times. When you first hear that, you imagine that this factors in mostly to long-distance flight, but Damush points out that it’s actually more about volume – removing the constraints of having to keep a drone within visual line of sight at all times means you can go from having one operator per drone, to one operator managing a fleet of drones, which is when the economies of scale of commercial drone transportation really start to make sense.

Iris has made progress towards making this a reality, working with the FAA this year as part of its integrated pilot program to demonstrate the system in two different use cases. It also released the second version of its Casia system, which can handle significantly longer range object detection. Hatch pointed out that these were key reasons why Bessemer upped its stake with this follow-on investment, and when I asked if COVID-19 has had any impact on industry appetite or confidence in the commercial drone market, she said that has been a significant factor, and it’s also changing the nature of the industry.

“The two largest industries [right now] are agriculture and public safety enforcement,” Hatch told me. “And public safety enforcement was not one of those last year, it was agriculture, construction and energy. That’s definitely become a really important vertical for the drone industry – one could imagine someone having a heart attack or an allergic reaction, an ambulance takes on average 14 minutes to get to that person, when a drone can be dispatched and deliver an AED or an epi pen within minutes, saving that person’s life. So I really hope that tailwind continues post COVID.”

This Series B round includes investment from Bee Partners, OCA Ventures, and new strategic investors Sony Innovation Fund and Verizon Ventures (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media Group, though we have no involvement, direct or otherwise, with their venture arm). Damush pointed out that Sony provides great potential strategic value because it develops so much of the imaging sensor stack used in the drone industry, and Sony also develops drones itself. For its part, Verizon offers key partner potential on the connectivity front, which is invaluable for managing large-scale drone operations.

Rocket Lab has completed its 17th mission, putting a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite on orbit for client Synspective, a Tokyo-based space startup that has raised over $100 million in funding to date. Syspective aims to operate a 30-satellite constellation that can provide global imaging coverage of Earth, with SAR’s benefits of being able to see through clouds and inclement weather, as well as in all lighting conditions.

This is Synspective’s first satellite on orbit, and it took off from Rocket Lab’s launch facility on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand. It will operate in a sun synchronous orbit approximately 300,000 miles from Earth, and will act a a demonstrator of the startup’s technology to pave the way for the full constellation, which will provide commercially available SAR data avails both raw, and processed via the company’s in-development AI technology to provide analytics and insights.

For Rocket Lab, this marks the conclusion of a successful year in launch operations, which also saw the company take its key first steps towards making its Electron launch system partially reusable. The company did have one significant setback as well, with a mission that failed to deliver its payloads to orbit in July, but the company quickly bounced back from that failure with improvements to prevent a similar incident in future.

In 2021, Rocket Lab will aim to launch its first mission from the U.S., using its new launch facility at Wallops Island, in Virginia. That initial U.S. flight was supposed to happen in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a NASA certification process for one of its systems, pushed the launch to next year.

TikTok this morning announced a new set of Community Guidelines that aim to strengthen its existing policies in areas like harassment, dangerous acts, self-harm and violence, alongside the introduction of four new features similarly focused on the community’s well-being. These include updated resources for those struggling with self-harm or suicide, opt-in viewing screens that hide distressing content, a text-to-voice feature to make TikTok more accessible and an expanded set of COVID-19-related resources.

While many of the topics were already covered by TikTok’s Community Guidelines ahead of today’s changes, the company said the updates add more specifics to each of the areas based on what behavior it’s seen on the platform, heard through community feedback and received via input from experts such as academics, civil society organizations and TikTok’s own Content Advisory Council.

One update is to the guidelines related to suicide and self-harm, which have now incorporated feedback and language used by mental health experts to avoid normalizing self-injury behaviors. Specifically, TikTok’s policy on eating disorder content has added considerations aimed at prohibiting the normalization of or the glorification of dangerous weight loss behaviors.

Image Credits: TikTok

Stronger policies on bullying and harassment now further detail the types of content and behaviors that aren’t welcome on TikTok, including doxxing, cyberstalking and a more extensive policy on sexual harassment. This one is particularly interesting, given that there have been some cases of TikTok users figuring out where anti-masker nurses worked — and at least one incident led to the nurse being put on leave. It’s unclear how TikTok will approach this sort of “doxxing” behavior, however, as it didn’t involve publishing a home address — only alerting an employer.

Another update expanded the guidelines around TikTok’s dangerous acts policy to more explicitly limit, label or remove content depicting dangerous acts and challenges. Through a new “harmful activities” section to the minor safety policy, TikTok reiterates that content promoting dangerous dares, games and other acts that may jeopardize the safety of youth is prohibited.

TikTok also updated its policy around dangerous individuals and organizations to focus on the issue of violent extremism. The new guidelines now describe in greater detail what’s considered a threat or incitement to violence, as well as the content that will be prohibited. This one is timely, too, as many Trump supporters have been pushing for a new civil war or other violence as a result of Trump losing the U.S. presidential election.

In terms of new features, TikTok worked with behavioral psychologists and suicide prevention experts — including Providence, Samaritans of Singapore and members of its U.S. Content Advisory Council — to create new resources that include evidence-based actions users can take for searches related to self-harm. These new resources will appear when users search for terms like “selfharm” or “hatemyself.” Access to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Crisis Text Line will continue to be available for emergency support, as before.

TikTok will also introduce new opt-in viewing screens that will appear on top of videos of content some may find graphic or distressing. These videos are already ineligible for the For You feed, but may not be prohibited. For example, the screens might cover violence or fighting that’s not being removed due to documentary reasons; animals in nature doing something some find upsetting — like hunting and killing their prey; or otherwise scary stuff, like horror clips.

When TikTok becomes aware of this disturbing content through user flagging, it will apply the screens to the videos to reduce unwanted viewing. Users who then come across the video can either tap the button at the bottom of the screen to “skip video” or the other to “watch anyway.”

In addition, a new text-to-voice feature, aimed at accessibility, allows people to convert their typed text to a voice that plays over it in a video. This follows TikTok’s recent launch of a feature to support people with photosensitive epilepsy.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok is also adding questions and answers about COVID-19 vaccines to its in-app coronavirus resource hub. These will be provided by public health experts, like the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), for example, and will be linked to from the Discover page, search results and via banners on COVID-19 and vaccine-related videos. The company says its COVID-19 hub has already been viewed more than 2 billion times in the last six months. TikTok is partnering with Team Halo as well, so scientists all over the world can share the progress being made on the vaccine through video updates.

TikTok has been fairly aggressive about moderating content on its platform. If you scroll through the feed long enough, you’ll find users lamenting about videos of theirs that were taken down for policy violations. You’ll also come across videos where users have reuploaded another person’s deleted video in order to respond to it. It even quickly addressed much of the election misinformation that was being spread in November by blocking top hashtags, like #RiggedElection and #SharpieGate.

Its new policies out today also include changes that address what’s been more recent user behavior, like the calls for violence following the election.

“Keeping our community safe is a commitment with no finish line,” said TikTok, in its announcement today about its updates. “We recognize the responsibility we have to our users to be nimble in our detection and response when new kinds of content and behaviors emerge. To that end, we’ll keep advancing our policies, developing technology to automatically detect violative content, building features that help people manage their TikTok presence and content choices, and empowering our community to help us foster a trustworthy environment. Ultimately, we hope these updates enable people to have a positive and meaningful TikTok experience,” the company said.

Amazon today is launching a way for customers to create custom clothing with a new service called Made for You, which lets shoppers create a custom T-shirt to their exact measurements. But unlike some companies that use mobile technology to scan and measure your body from an app, Amazon Fashion’s Made for You service requires users to provide the company with their height, weight, body style, and two photos of themselves to get measured for their custom fit.

After users provide their data, they can then choose from a selection of eight different colorways, as well as preferred sleeve and shirt lengths, necklines and fabrics.

To get started with Made for You, users choose between the two types of fabrics to customize the design. This includes either the Medium-weight 100% Pima Cotton shirt or the Lightweight 56% Pima Cotton, 38% Modal, and 6% Elastane tri-blend options. They can then choose other aspects of their shirt — like either a slim, classic or relaxed fit, a crew or V-neck, and short or long sleeve length, for example.

The shirts can even include your name printed on the label, as a small perk.

When finished, customers can view the product they customized on a virtual body double before placing the order. The experience works both on web and inside the Amazon app.

The custom shirts cost $25 are available to all Amazon customers in the U.S., not just Prime members.

At launch, influencers including Blake Scott (650K followers on Instagram), Caralyn Mirand (253K Instagram followers), and Sai de Silva (330K Instagram followers) are touting the new feature on Amazon’s behalf and are featured in its marketing.

Custom clothing is often seen as a luxury and this process does make it more affordable. That can be helpful for those who struggle with fit due to measurements that fall outside of traditional sizing. But the service also seems to be a pretty transparent attempt to grab customer data for the Amazon Fashion business.

Amazon, however, characterizes Made for You as part of its ongoing efforts to eliminate online shopping challenges — this time, size and fit. Over time, the company says it wants to expand Made for You with more styles and selection, based on customer feedback.

Image Credits: Amazon

The retailer has been focused on its fashion business for years, having experimented in the past with its Echo Look camera that would help users rate their styling choices. Today, Amazon uses data from its social feature, #FoundItOnAmazon to feed images to “Style by Alexa” for fashion inspiration and to drive sales. And with Prime Wardrobe and its optional styling service, Amazon attempts to learn what its customers like to wear and then automate the shopping process by curating items to try on at home in batches.

Though Amazon didn’t explain how it may put the collected data to use to aid its Amazon Fashion business beyond custom clothing, it did say the data was securely stored and customers could delete their data at any time by tapping the profile icon at the top left of the Made for You home page. Amazon also says the uploaded photos aren’t stored and are deleted immediately after being used to create the virtual body double and determine measurements.

With Amazon’s goal with all these efforts is to improve online apparel shopping, it could potentially extend to other areas — for example, by helping Amazon build out its dozens of private labels in apparel. And with the added data on real-world customer sizing, the retailer could learn how to better cut its clothing for the best fit. It could even be working on systems that could later help customers select their right size just from a photo, perhaps.

Made for You is launching today in the U.S. across web and mobile.

Less than a year after it raised a $15 million Series B, Public, a social-focused free stock trading service, has raised a $65 million Series C.

The startup is not the only company to raise successive rounds this year. Welcome has managed the feat, along with Skyflow and others. Public’s Series C, therefore, fits into the trend of investors doubling down into startups that they think have potential.

After an initial freeze during the early pandemic months, venture capitalists and other investors accelerated the pace at which they deploy late-stage checks to upstart companies. Public’s Series C typifies the tendency, representing just over 72% of its total fundraising to date.

The Public round also exemplifies another developing venture trend, namely that of existing investors preempting portfolio companies’ proximate rounds. In this case Accel led the new investment. It also led Public’s Series A and B rounds.

But trends alone are not enough to pull any round together. So, TechCrunch got on the phone with Public co-founders Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham to better understand what investors see in the fintech upstart.

Growth

Public grew quickly in 2020, expanding its user base by a multiple of 10 since the start of the year.

According to Abraham, the company’s growth has been consistent instead of lumpy, expanding at around 30% each month. The co-founder also stressed that most of Public’s users find its service organically, implying that the startup’s marketing costs have not been extreme, nor its growth artificially boosted.

That user growth explains why Public was able to raise more. But why did it want to?

The founding duo told TechCrunch that they had plenty of cash in the bank from their preceding round, but saw the raise as a way to double-down on their model.

While competing services to Public also sport zero-cost trading, Public’s model hinges on a social focus (TechCrunch covered an element of Public’s social platform here, for example). And in the eyes of its founders, Public gets better as more people use it.

So, the startup intends to use its new capital to continue investing into product work, keeping its flywheel alive.

That self-reinforcing dynamic works something like this: Public offers a place where investors can discuss and execute trades for free. Those same investors tell their friends about Public, who later show up and take part in the conversation. Those conversations are enriched by the new participants — as Public deals with securities, it only has users who have registered as themselves, limiting trolling — and the process repeats.

So far it has worked. How much longer Public and Robinhood and M1 and Wealthfront and others can continue to accrete net-new investors to their platforms is an open question, however.

Revenue?

Astute readers will note that we discussed Public’s growth in the above paragraphs only from a user perspective. What about revenue?

Like other companies that offer free stock trades, Public makes money from what’s called payment for order flow. It’s the routing of trades to different market makers. Robinhood generates oceans of income from the practice, for example.

Before chatting with Public, I dug into its trading partner Apex’s filings to learn about its payment for order flow results from its recent filings. The resulting sums are somewhat modest for Apex’s collected clients. This means that Public’s revenue metrics, a portion of the aggregate sums, are even more unassuming.

Naturally, we were curious if the company had changed up its business model and thus had revenues heading into its new investment that we could not spot from external documentation. The founding team told TechCrunch that it had not changed its model, and that their company is more focused on user growth than near-term revenue targets.

This makes some sense. Public emphasized to TechCrunch that most of its users are long-term holders. The longer a user holds securities, the less they likely trade. That limits trading incomes like payment for order flow. So, trading likely won’t make a lot of money for the company.

The company’s monetization plans remain opaque. This means that the company’s new check will not only fund its product work in terms of its social experience, but also, we presume, its future revenue generation.

You can look around the fintech market and find examples of ways that Public could further monetize its user base.

This is not to say that revenue at Public has not grown. It has. I asked the company if trading volume generally scales with user growth. It’s correlated, the founders said. So, we can infer that the company’s growing user base has executed more trades over time, as a whole.

Let’s see what Public builds next, and how soon we get a taste for its future plans for generating ample top line from its users.

This is not a review of the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E Sport SUV.

A few weeks back, I spent two short hours in Ford’s upcoming EV. I don’t feel comfortable declaring a conclusion with just a couple of hours behind the wheel. I need more time with the Mach-E, and after Ford reads this article, I’ll probably be last in line for long-term tests.

During my short time with the Mach-E, one thing became clear: The Mach-E should not be called a Mustang, and it should not be called an SUV.

By calling the Mach-E a Mustang SUV, Ford is selling buyers an experience not found in the Mach-E. This isn’t a fight over semantics. The Mach-E isn’t a sporty SUV in a traditional manner. For that, look at the Audi E-Tron Sportback or Tesla Model X. Those offer several key characteristics missing from the Mach-E SUV. They’re sturdy, stout and powerful, whereas the Mach-E feels small, loose and sloppy.

There are several areas of concern. I found the vehicle dynamics questionable. The throttle is nauseating, and the rear end has a hard time keeping traction. The range is poor compared to competitors; the AWD version gets 50 miles less than a comparable Tesla. And what’s more important in an electric vehicle than driving characteristics and electric range?

[gallery ids="2079337,2079341,2079330,2079339,2079338,2079336,2079335,2079332,2079334,2079340"]

Early impressions

A few weeks back I took a 2021 Mustang Mach-E AWD around a familiar route in lower Michigan. Every auto journalist knows this area by Hell, Michigan. Despite the name, it’s a lovely area with old-growth hardwoods lining gentle winding roads where cars can breathe. And for fun, turn off the main road for a bit of dipping and diving on gravel roads. This area was not kind to the Mach-E.

The test was short, but I was still left with several impressions.

The Mach-E bumbles around like an economy crossover. There’s nothing confident or reassuring about the ride or handling. Even with the Mustang name, the Mach-E doesn’t drive like a Mustang (hold your jokes; the latest Mustangs are fantastic). The Mach-E isn’t a car that can be thrown into a corner and expect to emerge safely. The body rolls, rear tires break loose and you lose respect for the Mustang name.

The throttle is touchy and over-expressive. Tap the peddle and Mach-E leaps forward. Combined with aggressive regenerative braking, the Mach-E takes some getting used to. I found the powertrain nauseating. Electric vehicles are an exercise in finesse. The electric motors need to provide power in a smooth, predictable fashion that’s exciting and confident without being overbearing. It’s a hard formula and something that few automakers have gotten right the first time.

I was immediately taken aback by the AWD Mach-E’s poor handling. Most modern EVs drive so well they’re boring. Not the Mach-E. The rear end is too lively for a pedestrian-vehicle, and not in a sporty manner. This is just sloppy and nauseating. The tires easily break free on everyday turns. Press down on the accelerator, turn the wheel and the vehicle often has to engage traction control to keep the rear wheels from spinning.

By insisting on marketing the Mach-E as sporty, Ford set the expectations on the capability outside of its technical ability. Things get loose when the driver leans into the performance aspects of the Mach-E. During my time with the Mach-E, there were several times I was rounding a normal corner and the back tires became unpredictable or took the car too wide. This is exaggerated with additional speed. I’m curious how the AWD system handles snow and ice. Several times during my test drive it struggled on gravel.

I later asked a Ford engineer about the tremendous amount of oversteer, and he replied, “Yeah, only if you drive it that way.” That stuck with me because I don’t think it was my fault. I don’t think I was driving the Mach-E around Ann Arbor, Michigan in an aggressive fashion, but even still, the roads were dry, and the traction control kicked on several times during my short drive. That shouldn’t happen.

The Mach-E performs better in a straight line. The acceleration is quick. With the go-pedal mashed to the floor, the Mach-E rears on its back legs and jumps forward with enthusiasm. Is it quicker than a Tesla? No, but it’s still quicker than most vehicles in its price range and plenty fast enough to speed away from a stop light.

The Mach-E has three driving modes. In the standard and economy mode, the throttle delivers power in a more refined method than the performance mode, which seems messy and crude. All three modes offer one-peddle driving through aggressive regenerative braking.

The electric range is another factor to consider with the Mach-E. The AWD version tops out at an EPA-estimated 270 miles compared to the 326 miles found in Tesla’s AWD Model Y. The RWD-only version of the Mach-E tops out at 300 miles per charge.

With such a short test, I’m unable to dive deep into the real-world battery range of the Mach-E. I need to live with the car and use it for a variety of tasks, both around town and long distance. All I can report is the results from my 2 hour drive: I average 2.7 miles to kilowatt-hour, I returned it with 112 miles remaining on the battery, which the vehicle says is 56%. I was driving the AWD model with the extended range battery. The EPA and Ford says this version is good for 270 miles per charge.

The Mach-E’s pricing is competitive with a starting price of $42,895. The AWD, extended-range version starts at $54,700 and heads north depending on options. Most U.S. buyers are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit. The Tesla Model 3 starts at $37,990. The long-range, AWD Model 3 that starts at $46,990; the Model Y crossover costs $49,990.

[gallery ids="2086643,2086642,2086640,2086638,2086634"]

The Mach-E’s interior is fantastic, and that was not a surprise. Ford builds some of the nicest interiors in its class, and the inside of the Mach-E is lovely.

Like most EVs, Ford took great steps to replace traditional automotive components with modern equivalents. Instead of a gauge cluster, a small, narrow LCD screen sits in front of the driver. It’s classy and efficient. A large LCD screen sits in the center stack for media playback and climate controls. A rotating knob is glued onto the screen at the bottom and provides physical volume control. I really like the volume knob.

The seats seem fine. I was only in them for two hours.

The inside is a bit cramped, but it’s acceptable for a small crossover. The driver sits in a commanding position, which could be the reason for the SUV designation. Two adults can sit in the back for a cross-town jaunt, but I wouldn’t want to sit back there for an extended amount of time, as legroom is lacking.

I’m frustrated about the vehicle’s dynamics, which overshadow fun features found within the Mach-E. Owners can use their smartphone as a key and preprogram navigation routes through a robust road-trip app. The doors are operated by a button, allowing for a cleaner exterior. Ford is even adding hands-free driving through an over-the-air-update, too. But these items hardly matters. Who cares if the cake’s pretty if it tastes like sadness?

TL;DR

My first impressions of the Mach-E are poor, and I went into this short test with excited optimism. For me, this Ford Mach-E was supposed to bring the joy of electric vehicles to the masses through a familiar nameplate and legacy manufacturer. I’m a Ford guy who lives in Michigan and looks at the Mach-E development with local pride. I’m disappointed.

Right now, based on first impressions, I can only recommend shoppers try competitors before buying the Ford Mustang Mach-E. I don’t think this vehicle is good enough to buy over a Tesla.

A startup hailing form far-flung Iceland is emerging as one of the key players in the race to distribute one of the key Coronavirus vaccines around the world. Controlant — which has a unique real-time supply chain monitoring technology based on GSM networks and is specifically geared to areas like pharmaceuticals and life sciences — has confirmed it is providing its monitoring services to Pfizer as it delivers the mRNA-based Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine globally. The Controlant platform involves screen-based IoT tags which-link to GSM networks and then feed into web and mobile apps.

Last week the Governor of New York last week held up a box containing the vaccine, with an unidentified tag that looked like a Controlant GSM tracking device. TechCrunch contacted Controllant and the company confirmed that it was indeed their technology.

Controlant Cold Chain as a Service Solution

In September Controlant secured $15 million in Series B funding to drive the market expansion of its real-time ‘Cold Chain as a Service’ platform. It has largely Iceland-based investors including Sjova and VIS. Frumtak, a VC firm in Iceland, first invested in Controlant in 2011. The recent financing brought Controlant’s total funding to date to $50 million. Frumtak recently sold 11% of its stake in Controlant (a transaction handled by Arion Bank) for close to $14 million, but will continue to hold a 13% stake through its Frumtak II fund.

In addition to the visibility and monitoring solutions that Controlant is providing to Pfizer, it’s also working directly with the U.S. Government, the CDC, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and stakeholders in ‘Operation Warp Speed’. The platform is being used throughout the entirety of the U.S. supply chain journey of the vaccines.

Gisli Herjolfsson, Controlant CEO and Co-founder

Gisli Herjolfsson (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Controlant, said in a statement: “Controlant has amassed a depth of expertise in vaccine supply chain operations and we are happy to have the opportunity to apply our solutions to the entirety of the mRNA-based Pfizer- BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine supply chain, through our direct work with Pfizer and government stakeholders.”

Controlant IoT devices, packed with the vaccines, capture environmental information, including time, temperature, and light events, and send the information, in real-time, to Controlant’s proprietary platform.

Below is a video of Governor Andrew Cuomo showing the typical packaging which Controlant devices are attached to:

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has issued Twitter with a fine of €450,000 (~$547k) for failing to promptly declare and properly document a data breach under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The decision is noteworthy as it’s the first such cross-border GDPR decision by the Irish watchdog, which is the lead EU privacy supervisor for a number of tech giants — having a backlog of some 20+ ongoing cases at this point, including active probes of Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, Apple and LinkedIn, to name a few.

“The DPC’s investigation commenced in January, 2019 following receipt of a breach notification from Twitter and the DPC has found that Twitter infringed Article 33(1) and 33(5) of the GDPR in terms of a failure to notify the breach on time to the DPC and a failure to adequately document the breach. The DPC has imposed an administrative fine of €450,000 on Twitter as an effective, proportionate and dissuasive measure,” the regulator writes in a press release.

The GDPR requires most breaches of personal data to be notified to the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of the controller becoming aware of the breach.

The regulation also requires they document what data was involved and how they’ve responded to the security incident — in order that the relevant data supervisor can check against compliance.

In this case Twitter was found to have failed on both counts.

We’ve reached out to the social media company for comment, including asking whether it plans to accept the decision and pay up — or if it’s considering its legal options.

The DPC’s decision relates to a breach that Twitter publicly disclosed in January 2019 — when it said a bug in its ‘Protect your tweets’ feature could have meant some Android users who’d applied the setting to make their tweets non-public may have had their data exposed to the public Internet since as far back as 2014. (Though GPDR would only apply to data the bug exposed since May 2018.)

Since fessing up to the ‘Protect your tweets’ bug, Twitter has had plenty more egg on its face where security is concerned — including suffering a high profile account hijacking episode earlier this year, after crypto-scam-spreading hackers gained network access credentials using a social engineering technique.

Ireland’s DPC, meanwhile, continues to face criticism for the length of time it’s taking to reach decisions on major cross-border GDPR cases where impacts on individual rights can scale to hundreds of millions of European Internet users.

Last year commissioner Helen Dixon said its first major GDPR decisions would come “early” in 2020.

In the event the first cross-border decision has crossed the line days before the end of the year — underlining the challenges for the bloc in effectively enforcing its digital rulebook against tech giants. (GDPR technically begun being applied in May 2018, although platform giants have faced precious little enforcement to date.)

In this specific case, some half a year extra was added to the decision timeline after a draft outcome Ireland submitted to other EU DPAs for review, back in May, was not accepted by all of them — triggering a majority vote mechanism in the GDPR for settling disagreement between the bloc’s data supervisors.

The European Data Protection Board has published details of the Article 65 decision and the final decision on its website here.

The (now) final outcome on the Twitter case comes at a key time — with EU lawmakers due to set out their next major pieces of digital policy later today, as part of an ambitious push to accelerate regional digitization by rolling out a reassuring promise of European guardrails wrapping around all this tech.

Yet with GDPR enforcement proving such a tedious, friction-filled process that threatens to take the shine off the nascent Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act many months (or even years) before they can become EU law — raising questions about how the whole strategy can be expected to function in the absence of effective (i.e. fair but fast) enforcement.

The wider risk here is European citizens losing faith in the rights-based framework they’re told they enjoy, under EU law and the bloc’s patchwork of regulatory frameworks, if the animal turns out to be such a plodding house-cat when people do try to obtain relief.

So the Commission’s strategy of claiming expanded digital rules will act as a public trust booster risks falling into a trough of disillusionment at the legislative proposal stage.

Simple put: You can’t allow your regulators to move so slowly and expect your rulebook to touch tech giants whose playbook is to move fast in order to disrupt the rule of law in their own business’ interests.

The DPC’s decision in the Twitter case is thus a measure of how sizeable a gap sits between the rhetoric EU policymakers ply around the bloc’s ‘powerful’ digital rules — and the messier and more faltering reality: Nearly two years since Twitter disclosed the breach and waiting for a hammer to drop in what should be a relatively straightforward case.

A data breach is not an investigation into the lawfulness of Facebook’s business model vs GDPR, after all, nor does it delve into the intricacies of Google’s adtech — both of which are still open case files on the DPC’s desk.

The penalty itself is also a fraction (~0.1%) of Twitter’s full-year 2019 revenue; a far cry from the up to 4% of global annual turnover maximum allowed for under the GDPR (or up to 2% for the specific infringements involved in the breach case). So this first cross-border GDPR decision looks more millstone than milestone for the Commission, at the fag end of 2020.

There’s not a lot for commissioners to celebrate here, even though they suggested in the summer that the best answer to GDPR enforcement concerns would be for Ireland to get a decision out. The problem now is the black marks against the bloc’s record on digital enforcement look stubbornly set in — just as the Commission is laying out a plan to go all in on platform regulation.

The questions over enforcement are going to keep coming.

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