Saturday, December 8, 2018

Why you need a supercomputer to build a house

When the hell did building a house become so complicated?

Don’t let the folks on HGTV fool you. The process of building a home nowadays is incredibly painful. Just applying for the necessary permits can be a soul-crushing undertaking that’ll have you running around the city, filling out useless forms, and waiting in motionless lines under fluorescent lights at City Hall wondering whether you should have just moved back in with your parents.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

And to actually get approval for those permits, your future home will have to satisfy a set of conditions that is a factorial of complex and conflicting federal, state and city building codes, separate sets of fire and energy requirements, and quasi-legal construction standards set by various independent agencies.

It wasn’t always this hard – remember when you’d hear people say “my grandparents built this house with their bare hands?” These proliferating rules have been among the main causes of the rapidly rising cost of housing in America and other developed nations. The good news is that a new generation of startups is identifying and simplifying these thickets of rules, and the future of housing may be determined as much by machine learning as woodworking.

When directions become deterrents

Photo by Bill Oxford via Getty Images

Cities once solely created the building codes that dictate the requirements for almost every aspect of a building’s design, and they structured those guidelines based on local terrain, climates and risks. Over time, townships, states, federally-recognized organizations and independent groups that sprouted from the insurance industry further created their own “model” building codes.

The complexity starts here. The federal codes and independent agency standards are optional for states, who have their own codes which are optional for cities, who have their own codes that are often inconsistent with the state’s and are optional for individual townships. Thus, local building codes are these ever-changing and constantly-swelling mutant books made up of whichever aspects of these different codes local governments choose to mix together. For instance, New York City’s building code is made up of five sections, 76 chapters and 35 appendices, alongside a separate set of 67 updates (The 2014 edition is available as a book for $155, and it makes a great gift for someone you never want to talk to again).

In short: what a shit show.

Because of the hyper-localized and overlapping nature of building codes, a home in one location can be subject to a completely different set of requirements than one elsewhere. So it’s really freaking difficult to even understand what you’re allowed to build, the conditions you need to satisfy, and how to best meet those conditions.

There are certain levels of complexity in housing codes that are hard to avoid. The structural integrity of a home is dependent on everything from walls to erosion and wind-flow. There are countless types of material and technology used in buildings, all of which are constantly evolving.

Thus, each thousand-page codebook from the various federal, state, city, township and independent agencies – all dictating interconnecting, location and structure-dependent needs – lead to an incredibly expansive decision tree that requires an endless set of simulations to fully understand all the options you have to reach compliance, and their respective cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

So homebuilders are often forced to turn to costly consultants or settle on designs that satisfy code but aren’t cost-efficient. And if construction issues cause you to fall short of the outcomes you expected, you could face hefty fines, delays or gigantic cost overruns from redesigns and rebuilds. All these costs flow through the lifecycle of a building, ultimately impacting affordability and access for homeowners and renters.

Startups are helping people crack the code

Photo by Caiaimage/Rafal Rodzoch via Getty Images

Strap on your hard hat – there may be hope for your dream home after all.

The friction, inefficiencies, and pure agony caused by our increasingly convoluted building codes have given rise to a growing set of companies that are helping people make sense of the home-building process by incorporating regulations directly into their software.

Using machine learning, their platforms run advanced scenario-analysis around interweaving building codes and inter-dependent structural variables, allowing users to create compliant designs and regulatory-informed decisions without having to ever encounter the regulations themselves.

For example, the prefab housing startup Cover is helping people figure out what kind of backyard homes they can design and build on their properties based on local zoning and permitting regulations.

Some startups are trying to provide similar services to developers of larger scale buildings as well. Just this past week, I covered the seed round for a startup called Cove.Tool, which analyzes local building energy codes – based on location and project-level characteristics specified by the developer – and spits out the most cost-effective and energy-efficient resource mix that can be built to hit local energy requirements.

And startups aren’t just simplifying the regulatory pains of the housing process through building codes. Envelope is helping developers make sense of our equally tortuous zoning codes, while Cover and companies like Camino are helping steer home and business-owners through arduous and analog permitting processes.

Look, I’m not saying codes are bad. In fact, I think building codes are good and necessary – no one wants to live in a home that might cave in on itself the next time it snows. But I still can’t help but ask myself why the hell does it take AI to figure out how to build a house? Why do we have building codes that take a supercomputer to figure out?

Ultimately, it would probably help to have more standardized building codes that we actually clean-up from time-to-time. More regional standardization would greatly reduce the number of conditional branches that exist. And if there was one set of accepted overarching codes that could still set precise requirements for all components of a building, there would still only be one path of regulations to follow, greatly reducing the knowledge and analysis necessary to efficiently build a home.

But housing’s inherent ties to geography make standardization unlikely. Each region has different land conditions, climates, priorities and political motivations that cause governments to want their own set of rules.

Instead, governments seem to be fine with sidestepping the issues caused by hyper-regional building codes and leaving it up to startups to help people wade through the ridiculousness that paves the home-building process, in the same way Concur aids employee with infuriating corporate expensing policies.

For now, we can count on startups that are unlocking value and making housing more accessible, simpler and cheaper just by making the rules easier to understand. And maybe one day my grandkids can tell their friends how their grandpa built his house with his own supercomputer.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future – PublicAffairs, Samuel I. Schwartz
The Yellow Vests and Why There Are So Many Street Protests in France – The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik
Congress Needs to Tighten Up AV Legislation – GovTech Future Structure, San Jose Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Board
Uber Doesn’t Have to Follow Pan Am’s Tragic Arc – Bloomberg Opinion, Gillian Morris & Christina Heggie
What Venice Can Teach American Cities – The Atlantic, James H. S. McGregor
Blockchain Technology in the Energy Sector: A Systematic Review of Challenges and Opportunities – Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Merlinda Andoni, Valentin Robu, David Flynn, Simone Abram, Dale Geach, David Jenkins, Peter McCallum, Andrew Peacock

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Here’s what caused yesterday’s O2 and SoftBank outages

{rss:content:encoded} Here’s what caused yesterday’s O2 and SoftBank outages https://ift.tt/2Gfw7tM https://ift.tt/2zQxCJk December 07, 2018 at 08:26PM

It appears that most mobile carriers, including O2 and SoftBank, have recovered from yesterday’s cell phone network outage that was triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment running on their networks. That shut down appears to have been triggered by expired software certificates on the equipment itself.

While Ericsson acknowledged in their press release yesterday that expired certificates were at the root of the problem, you may be wondering why this would cause a a shutdown. It turns out that it’s likely due to a fail-safe system in place, says Tim Callan, senior fellow at Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA), a U.S. certificate issuing authority. Callan has 15 years of experience in the industry.

He indicated that while he didn’t have specific information on this outage, it would be consistent with industry best practices to shut down the system when encountering expired certificates “We don’t have specific visibility into the Ericsson systems in question, but a typical application would require valid certificates to be in place in order to keep operating. That is to protect against breach by some kind of agent that is maliciously inserted into the network,” Callan told TechCrunch.

In fact, Callan said that in 2009 a breach at Heartland Payments was directly related to such a problem. “2009’s massive data breach of Heartland Payment Systems occurred because the network in question did NOT have such a requirement. Today it’s common practice to use certificates to avoid that same vulnerability,” he explained.

Ericsson would not get into specifics about what caused the problem.”Ericsson takes full responsibility for this technical failure. The problem has been identified and resolved. After a complete analysis Ericsson will take measures to prevent such a failure from happening again.”

Among those affected yesterday were millions of O2 customers in Great Britain and SoftBank customers in Japan. SoftBank issued an apology in the form of a press release on the company website. “We deeply apologize to our customers for all inconveniences it caused. We will strive to take all measures to prevent the same network outage.”

As for O2, they also apologized this morning after restoring service, tweeting:

Our 4G network was restored earlier this morning. Our technical teams will continue to monitor service performance closely and we’re starting the full review to understand what happened. We are really sorry for the issues yesterday.

— O2 in the UK (@O2) December 7, 2018

Nigerian logistics startup Kobo360 raises $6M, expands in Africa

Jake Bright Contributor

Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa.

Netflix just had a record-breaking November on mobile

{rss:content:encoded} Netflix just had a record-breaking November on mobile https://ift.tt/2PnRxV2 https://ift.tt/2QiS3Jq December 07, 2018 at 07:06PM

Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with TechCrunch. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined – a figure that’s 77 percent higher than the $49 million it generated last November. That’s a new record.

Before, the biggest month Netflix had to date was July 2018, when it grossed an estimated $84.7 million. At the time, that was the most it had made on mobile since it began monetizing on mobile in September 2015.

To date, Netflix has grossed over $1.58 million on mobile.

The firm didn’t speculate as to what, specifically, drove Netflix to break records again in November, but there are probably a few factors at play, including the trend towards cord cutting and shift towards streaming services for traditional “TV” viewing.

But most notably, is the increasing revenue coming to Netflix from its international markets.

Sensor Tower did point out that Netflix’s U.S. app revenue grew 43 percent year-over-year in November, but other countries contributing more than $1 million in gross revenue were higher. For example, Germany grew 48 percent, Brazil was 49 percent, South Korea was 52 percent, and Japan was 64 percent.

However, the U.S. still accounts for the majority of Netflix’s in-app subscription revenue, at 57 percent in November. But with Netflix’s international expansion, its share is declining. When Netflix first began offering subscriptions in fall 2015, the U.S. then accounted for 71 percent of its revenue.

Netflix in recent weeks, has been doubling down on mobile. The company is now testing a mobile-only subscription aimed at making its service more affordable in Asia and other emerging markets.

In Q3, the company gained nearly 7 million new subscribers, with 5.87 million of those coming from international markets.

Image credit: Sensor Tower

2 Milly files a lawsuit against Fortnite maker Epic Games over dance move

Rapper 2 Milly is suing Epic Games over Fortnite’s use of his dance move, the Milly Rock.

The lawsuit claims direct infringement of copyright, contributory infringement of copyright, violation of the Right of Publicity under California Common Law, among other things.

From the filing:

Defendants capitalized on the Milly Rock’s popularity, particularly with its younger fans, by selling the Milly Rock dance as an in-game purchase in Fortnite under the name “Swipe It,” which players can buy to customize their avatars for use in the game. This dance was immediately recognized by players and media worldwide as the Milly Rock. Although identical to the dance created, popularized, and demonstrated by Ferguson, Epic did not credit Ferguson nor seek his consent to use, display, reproduce, sell, or create a derivative work based upon Ferguson’s Milly Rock dance or likeness.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve seen the Milly Rock. Rock dwellers can check it out below:

On Fortnite, the dance is called The Swipe It, and it looks like this:

Back in July, around the time that Fortnite unveiled the Swipe It dance, Chance the Rapper pointed out that Epic Games tends to use dance moves popularized by famous artists in the game. These emotes cost money, and heavily contribute to the hundreds of millions in revenue that Epic Games pulls in on a monthly basis via its free-to-play game.

Fortnite should put the actual rap songs behind the dances that make so much money as Emotes. Black creatives created and popularized these dances but never monetized them. Imagine the money people are spending on these Emotes being shared with the artists that made them

— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) July 13, 2018

Moreover, the default emote on Fortnite is the relatively famous little routine from actor Donald Faison on the show Scrubs.

Dear fortnite… I’m flattered? Though part of me thinks I should talk to a lawyer…

— Donald Faison (@donald_faison) April 1, 2018

This lawsuit is particularly complicated considering that it’s over a dance move, which is difficult to lock down with copyright. The Verge reported that this lawsuit is the first of its kind, in that it challenges the gaming industry’s use of pop culture as for-profit virtual items. NPR reports that the U.S. Copyright Office “can’t register short dance routines consisting of only a few movements or steps with minor linear or spatial variations, even if a routine is novel or distinctive.”

That doesn’t mean there is no way to protect choreographic works. Those works, however, must be defined as “a series of dance movements or patterns organized into an integrated, coherent, and expressive compositional whole,” according to NPR.

Concluding the 22-page filing is a request for injunctive relief, which would bar Epic Games from using 2 Milly’s likeness in the game, as well as financial compensation for the use of the Milly Rock dance.

We reached out to Epic Games and will update the story if/when we hear back.

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MoviePass announces new pricing plans for 2019

{rss:content:encoded} MoviePass announces new pricing plans for 2019 https://ift.tt/2Pq7NVA https://ift.tt/2EhyURx December 06, 2018 at 11:11PM

It’s been a rocky year for MoviePass, something that CEO Mitch Lowe acknowledged in an interview this week with Variety.

“We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees, and our partners. We believe we’re doing everything that we possibly can to deliver a great service and we’re in the process of fixing all the things that went wrong.”

To that end, the company is launching a new pricing structure that will take effect in January. If you like paying $9.95, don’t worry: You’ll still be able to do that (at least in some geographies). If, on the other hand, you’re willing to pay a little more, you’ll no longer be limited by the ever-changing list of movies that MoviePass is supporting on a given day.

So there are now three tiers, each of them offering three movie tickets each month. There’s Select, which will cost between $9.95 and $14.95 per month (depending on geography), and will only allow viewers to watch certain movies on certain days; All Access, which costs between $14.95 and $19.95 and allows you to go to any standard screening; and Red Carpet, which costs between $19.95 and $24.95 and includes one IMAX, 3D or other large-format screening each month.

The company says that this new structure will allow it to break even on the tickets it’s selling — a key step to making the business model work.

MoviePass fans will likely remember that the company appeared to be running out of money over the summer, leading it to announce a price increase, only to back away from the price hike in favor of adding limitations on how many movies and which movies subscribers could see.

Meanwhile, the New York attorney general’s office said it was investigating MoviePass for possible securities fraud, and parent company Helios and Matheson said it would spin off MoviePass into a separate company. (TechCrunch’s parent company has a stake in MoviePass.)

The competition is growing. And app store intelligence company Sensor Tower says MoviePass only added 12,000 new users to its mobile app last month, down 97 percent from the growth it was seeing at its high point in January.

In addition to rethinking its pricing, MoviePass is also making organizational changes. The company told The New York Times that although Lowe will remain CEO, he’ll be handing over responsibility for day-to-day operations to Executive Vice President Khalid Itum.

MoviePass parent company to spin off MoviePass

Let’s meet in Poland this month

I’ll be heading back to Europe in December to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

The Wrocwal event, called In-Ference, is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen to pitch. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th. You can sign up to pitch pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen to pitch and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. It’s always fun to get back to the stary kraj.

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Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.

It’s only been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formeraly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”

The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”

In its early days, Contentful also focuses only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.

Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80% of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.

Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.

What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.

Contentful, a Stripe for content management, raises $28M led by General Catalyst

https://ift.tt/2AWDvo6 Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform https://ift.tt/2RGdfpe

Ericsson software problem causing widespread cell phone outages

{rss:content:encoded} Ericsson software problem causing widespread cell phone outages https://ift.tt/2QjQPxx https://ift.tt/2PlQzbS December 06, 2018 at 07:01PM

A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world including O2 users in Great Britain and Softbank users in Japan, according to a report in the Financial Times earlier today.

Ericsson took blame for the outage in a press release. It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment used on the affected company’s mobile networks. While Ericsson indicated it involved multiple countries, it appeared to try to minimize the impact by stating it was “network disturbances for a limited number of customers.” The FT report indicated that it was actually affecting millions of mobile customers worldwide.

Regardless, the company said that an initial analysis attributed the problem to an expired software certificate on the affected equipment. Börje Ekholm, Ericsson president and CEO, said they were working to restore the service as soon as possible, which probably isn’t soon enough for people who don’t have a working cell phone at the moment.

“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” Ekholm said in a statement.

While the press release went onto say they are working to restore the service throughout the day, as of publishing this article, the O2 outage maps still showed problems in the London area.

The AT&T and Verizon outage pages are also currently showing outages in the US. We reached out to Ericsson by phone and email to confirm if this was part of their software problems, but had not heard back by the time we published. If we do, we will update this story.

(Note that Verizon owns this publication.)

FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping

{rss:content:encoded} FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping https://ift.tt/2EhDxv2 https://ift.tt/2SrtHJO December 06, 2018 at 06:35PM

Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app.

Facebook confirms the new shopping feature is currently in testing with a limited set of Pages in Thailand, which has been a testbed for shopping features. The option was first spotted by social media and reputation manager Jeff Higgins, and re-shared by Matt Navarra and Social Media Today. But now Facebook is confirming the test’s existence and providing additional details.

The company tells me it had heard feedback from the community in Thailand that Live video helped sellers demonstrate how items could be used or worn, and provided richer understanding than just using photos. Users also told Facebook that Live’s interactivity let customers instantly ask questions and get answers about product specifications and details. Facebook has looked to Thailand to test new commerce experiences like home rentals in Marketplace, as the country’s citizens were quick to prove how Facebook Groups could be used for peer-to-peer shopping. “Thailand is one of our most active Marketplace communities” says Mayank Yadav, Facebook Product Manager for Marketplace.

Now it’s running the Live shopping test, which allows Pages to notify fans that they’re going broadcasting to “showcase products and connect with your customers”. Merchants can take reservations and request payments through Messenger. Facebook tells me it doesn’t currently have plans to add new partners or expand the feature. But some sellers without access are being invited to join a waitlist for the feature. It also says it’s working closely with its test partners to gather feedback and iterate on the live video shopping experience, which would seem to indicate it’s interested in opening the feature more widely if it performs well.

Facebook doesn’t take a cut of payments through Messenger, but the feature could still help earn the company money at a time when it’s seeking revenue streams beyond News Feed ads as it runs out of space their, Stories take over as the top media form, and user growth plateaus. Hooking people on video viewing helps Facebook show lucrative video ads. The more that Facebook can train users to buy and sell things on its app, the better the conversion rates will be for businesses, and the more they’ll be willing to spend on ads. Facebook could also convince sellers who broadcast Live to buy its new Marketplace ad units to promote their wares. And Facebook is happy to snatch any use case from the rest of the internet, whether it’s long-form video viewing or job applications or shopping to boost time on site and subsequent ad views.

Increasingly, Facebook is setting its sights on Craigslist, Etsy, and eBay. Those commerce platforms have failed to keep up with new technologies like video and lack the trust generated by Facebook’s real name policy and social graph. A few years ago, selling something online meant typing up a generic description and maybe uploading a photo. Soon it could mean starring in your own infomercial.

[Postcript: And a Facebook home shopping network could work perfectly on its new countertop smart display Portal.]

FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping

[Postcript: And a Facebook home shopping network could work perfectly on its new countertop smart display Portal.]

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Rideshare advertising startup Firefly launches with $21.5M in funding

Firefly, a startup that allows rideshare drivers to make money through digital advertising, is officially launching today. It’s also announced that it has raised $21.5 million in seed funding.

The idea of sticking advertising on a cab isn’t new, but Firefly offers drivers what it calls a “digital smart screen,” allowing advertisers to run targeted, geofenced campaigns. The company has apparently run more than 50 ad campaigns already, during a beta testing period in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with hundreds of cars on the road.

“Being the first at building out the IP is going to be the main differentiator,” said co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay. “Over half our team are engineers, and we have been extremely focused on developing core IP to make sure it’s scalable.”

In addition, Gunay said that thanks to the combination of Firefly’s targeting capabilities with its “strict” advertising policies (it won’t accept ads for strip clubs, tobacco and cannabis companies, among others), “We’re working with a lot of advertisers who might not even have advertised outdoors before. We believe we are expanding the market.”

One of the main goals is to allow drivers for Uber, Lyft and other ridehailing services to make more money. In fact, Firefly says the average driver in its network makes an additional $300 per month.

Firefly

Gunay explained that if the driver meets a certain threshold for hours on the road, the company will pay them a flat fee to carry its advertising — but he also said the company is exploring different ways to “maximize the revenue that we share with the drivers and give the maximum benefit to the drivers.”

It’s an issue on regulators’ minds as well, with New York recently approving new rules around driver compensation.

Earlier this year, Uber partnered with a startup called Cargo to allow drivers to make additional income by selling goods like gum, snacks and phone chargers. Firefly doesn’t have an official relationship with the ridehailing companies, but Gunay said, “In our conversations with these large companies … they’ve said the drivers are free to do what they want to do. This is why it’s a win for everyone.”

Gunay also said these displays will become the foundation for a “smart city data network.” In other words, they will collect data that Firefly plans to share with local governments and nonprofit groups. For example, he said the company has already been sharing air quality data with the Coalition for Clean Air, and it’s also looking to include temperature sensors and accelerometers.

Apparently, Gunay doesn’t plan to make money from this side of the business. He told me, “We want to be able to add value to how cities operate … We’re not planning to monetize that.”

Getting back to the funding, $21.5 million is a huge seed round, but Gunay said the company’s success thus far was able to”justify a larger raise and a higher valuation.” The round was led by NfX, Pelion Venture Partners, Decent Capital (founded by Tencent’s Jason Zeng) and Jeffrey Housenbold of SoftBank Vision Fund (yes, that SoftBank Vision Fund).

New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission approves minimum wage rules for app-based drivers

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Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project goes live for all

{rss:content:encoded} Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project goes live for all https://ift.tt/2SrnZrm https://ift.tt/2AUWAqN December 06, 2018 at 05:50PM

Last month, Pandora announced it would soon be bringing its “Genome” technology to a new space outside of music: it would leverage a similar classification system to make podcast recommendations, too. Initially, the feature was only available to select users on mobile devices, ahead of a broader public launch. Today, Pandora says its Podcast Genome Project has gone live for all users.

Like Pandora’s Music Genome – its music information database capable of classifying songs across 450 different attributes — Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project is a cataloging system designed to evaluate content. But its focus is on audio programs instead of music.

The Podcast Genome Project can currently evaluate content across over 1,500 attributes, including MPAA ratings, production style, content type, host profile, and more, alongside other listener signals, like thumbs, skips, replays and others. It uses a combination of machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and collaborative filtering methods to help determine listener preferences, the company says.

Pandora then combines this data with human curation to make its podcast recommendations.

These recommendations are live now in the Pandora app’s “Browse” section, under the banner “Recommended Podcasts For You.” Podcasts will also be discoverable throughout the app in the Now Playing screen, search bar, in the podcast backstage passes, and in the episode backstage passes.

At launch, the app is aggregating over 100,000 podcast episodes in genres like News, True Crime, Sports, Comedy, Music, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Kids, Health and Science, the company adds.

Podcasters can also now ask to be included in Pandora’s app by filling out a form here.

Longer-term, a better recommendation system for podcasts could help Pandora as it becomes more integrated with its acquirer SiriusXM. The deal will likely bring SiriusXM’s exclusive programming to Pandora’s subscribers, which would greatly increase the number of audio programs available on its service. Putting the right programs in front of the most interested customers could then drive more people to upgrade to a paid subscription, impacting Pandora’s bottom line.

Putting the band back together, ExactTarget execs reunite to launch MetaCX

Scott McCorkle has spent most of his professional career thinking about business to business software and how to improve it for a company’s customers.

The former president of ExactTarget and later chief executive of Salesforce Marketing Cloud has made billions of dollars building products to help support customer service, and now he’s back at it again with his latest venture MetaCX.

Alongside Jake Miller, the former chief engineering lead at Salesforce Marketing Cloud and chief technology officer at ExactTarget, and David Duke, the chief customer officer and another ExactTarget alumnus, McCorkle has raised $14 million to build a white-labeled service that offers a toolkit for monitoring, managing and supporting customers as they use new software tools.

“MetaCX sits above any digital product,” McCorkle says. And its software monitors and manages the full spectrum of the customer relationship with that product. “It is API embeddable and we have a full user experience layer.”

For the company’s customers, MetaCX provides a dashboard that includes outcomes, the collaboration, metrics tracked as part of the relationship and all the metrics around that are part of that engagement layer,” says McCorkle.

The first offerings will be launching in the beginning of 2019, but the company has dozens of customers already using its pilot, McCorkle said.

The Indianapolis-based company is one of the latest spin-outs from High Alpha Studio, an accelerator and venture capital studio formed by Scott Dorsey, the former chief executive officer of ExactTarget. As one of a crop of venture investment firms and studios cropping up in the Midwest, High Alpha is something of a bellwether for the viability of the venture model in emerging ecosystems. And, from that respect, the success of the MetaCX round speaks volumes. Especially since the round was led by the Los Angeles-based venture firm Upfront Ventures.

Midwest rising

“Our founding team includes world-class engineers, designers and architects who have been building billion-dollar SaaS products for two decades,” said McCorkle, in a statement. “We understand that enterprises often struggle to achieve the business outcomes they expect from SaaS, and the renewal process for SaaS suppliers is often an ambiguous guessing game. Our industry is shifting from a subscription economy to a performance economy, where suppliers and buyers of digital products need to transparently collaborate to achieve outcomes.”

As a result of the investment, Upfront partner Kobie Fuller will be taking a seat on the MetaCX board of directors alongside McCorkle and Dorsey.

“The MetaCX team is building a truly disruptive platform that will inject data-driven transparency, commitment and accountability against promised outcomes between SaaS buyers and vendors,” said Fuller, in a statement. “Having been on the journey with much of this team while shaping the martech industry with ExactTarget, I’m incredibly excited to partner again in building another category-defining business with Scott and his team in Indianapolis.”

https://ift.tt/2AUqzzf Putting the band back together, ExactTarget execs reunite to launch MetaCX https://ift.tt/2SvzQVv

Mobile payment co. Boku acquires Danal for up to $68M to add user authentication

{rss:content:encoded} Mobile payment co. Boku acquires Danal for up to $68M to add user authentication https://ift.tt/2G0wqc8 https://ift.tt/2AW7MU7 December 06, 2018 at 03:24PM

After going public in the U.K. last year, Boku has made an acquisition to expand its carrier billing services, which let users bill to their mobile bills mobile content purchases from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Spotify and 152 other app and other content purveyors. Today, Boku announced the acquisition of Danal, Inc., a specialist in mobile identity and authentication services, so that it can offer more sophisticated transaction services and also to move into new areas.

Boku will pay up to $68 million for Danal, the company said. Specifically, the financial terms are described by Boku as a “reverse triangular merger” and include 26.7 million Boku common shares of $0.0001 each (“Common Shares”), $3 million of Boku warrants exercisable at 141p each and $1 million in cash, along with a deferred consideration of up to $64 million, “satisfied in Common Shares and warrants, dependent on Danal’s future performance,” which Boku also described as “challenging performance targets for Danal, thereby allowing both parties to share the benefits of efficiencies and growth.”

Danal, Boku said, will become a part of a U.S. subsidiary of Boku.

The market is not particularly excited by the deal it seems: the company’s stock has dropped by more than 23 percent in trading today. Boku currently has a market cap of around £168 million ($216 million), and it says that total payment volume in the 10 months to October was up 124 percent to $2.8 billion (versus $1.3 billion the year before), and monthly active users were 12.2 million in October, up 83 percent on a year before.

This is not Danal’s first transaction with a carrier billing service. In 2016, it sold a portion of its business, BilltoMobile, to Bango for $3.5 million.

Boku is buying the rest of the business left behind, with a view to building a bridge between the data that carriers have about their users and services that those users might engage with either on their mobile devices or through other digital channels. This could include expanding the range of purchases that you can make through carrier billing, but it could potentially also be applied to any service that either has a risk of fraud — such as financial or government-run services — or could use a carrier data to help authenticate the identity of the user.

“Charging purchases to your phone bill has proved a great way for the world’s largest digital companies to acquire and retain users, but has had fairly limited application outside digital content,” said Jon Prideaux, CEO of Boku, in a statement. “This Acquisition allows us to offer services that go further and to improve user quality for our customers while at the same time improving the mobile experience for users. Mobile commerce is booming, yet many tools were developed to support PC-based commerce. Danal has shown that MNO data can also combat fraud, reduce friction in signup and ensure regulatory compliance on mobile. These problems are relevant not just to our existing digital customers but also in other sectors including e-commerce, finance, transportation and government.”

Notably, this potentially could help Boku grow revenues in developed markets alongside the emerging markets where it is currently active.

Danal, based in San Jose, already counts financial institutions, government agencies and retailers as customers, including Western Union, BNP Paribas, PayPal, Square, MoneyGram, Login.gov and USAA.

Boku said Danal generated revenue of $5.1 million and a loss before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization of $5.2 million for the full year that ended December 31, 2017. Liabilities as of that date were $10.3 million.

The bigger picture for mobile payments are that while they continue to grow, they are still just around one-third of all e-commerce transactions, according to recent figures collected over the opening weekend of holiday sales.

Within that, billing to carriers is just one part of the overall mix, and after accounting for others in the transaction chain, it makes for thin margins. This explains partly why Boku would be working on adding new revenue streams. But in emerging markets, carrier billing is a popular alternative among users who may not have bank accounts and payment cards. This latest deal for Boku should help it in that area, too.

How France wants to become a tech giant

Vive la France — that was the dominant message of the day during a tour of the French tech ecosystem. But is it time to invest in French startups?

Around 40 partners of venture capital firms as well as limited partners came to Paris to talk about tech in France, from Andreessen Horowitz to Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and more. The two-day roadshow took place at Station F, the Vision Institute, iBionext and the Elysée Palace.

I grew up in France and it always surprises me that the same clichés come up again and again. When Symphony founder and CEO David Gurle answered questions about what it’s like to build an engineering team in France, it could have been easy to predict the questions — labor law is not flexible enough, French people are lazy, they go on strike all the time…

According to Gurle, who is great at storytelling, Symphony has been looking at around 15 countries for their next office. They first selected Singapore but couldn’t put a team together.

“We went to the board and said the next step is to invest in France,” Gurle said. At first, the board was really reluctant, citing the same concerns.

Chairman of Business France and Ambassador for International Investments Pascal Cagni has been dealing with those concerns for years. For instance, when it comes to labor law, he says the regulatory framework is now predictable and limited — unlike in the U.K. or Germany for instance. You can fire people whenever you want. It means that you’ll have to pay a severance package, but everything is laid out.

Silicon Valley is overheating right now. It’s become increasingly expensive and challenging to build a company — the tech industry is getting bigger and the biggest tech companies now dominate the talent market. That’s also part of the reason why Silicon Valley veterans are looking outside of their comfort zone.

Speeding things up

The question wasn’t about whether startups in France are a thing or not. The tone of the conversation was about pace and intensity. Is it time to invest now or should we wait?

“We've noticed that we started investing more in European startups without even thinking about it — not just French startups but all over Europe,” Battery Ventures General Partner Chelsea Stoner told me.

Depending on the study, France and the U.K. are battling to be the first European country when it comes to the number of VC deals and the total amount of money raised.

When I said three and a half years ago that France would be the tech leader in Europe, nobody believed that — and it’s happening John Chambers

But even more important than hard facts, the momentum has been pretty stunning. A few years ago, I could cover every single deal over $1 million. Now there are so many startups valued at hundreds of millions of dollars that it’s hard to keep track of all funding rounds above $20 or $30 million.

France has some of the best engineering schools in the world. And now, most students want to work for a startup. So if France has a lot of capital and a big pool of talent, what’s missing? Should French startups get more support from the French government?

“Five or six years ago, I would have said keep the government as far away as possible and I was wrong,” former Cisco CEO John Chambers told me. Chambers is now ambassador for La French Tech and doesn’t invest in French startups in order to avoid conflicts of interest. “When I said three and a half years ago that France would be the tech leader in Europe, nobody believed that — and it’s happening,” he said.

OpenClassrooms co-founder and CEO Pierre Dubuc said during a panel that one piece of regulation that has helped his startup quite a lot is the French Tech Visa. Thanks to this program, the company can get visas for future employees in just a matter of weeks.

Chambers says that it works both ways. American employees apply to the French Tech Visa, work for French startups for a while and then come back to the U.S. It moves the needle when it comes to changing mindsets in the U.S.

The French tech ecosystem also needs time. While there are a ton of good engineers, multiple people told me sales people and marketing talent are nowhere near the level of American tech companies.

Some employees will need to go through 3 or 4 different companies and experience many different situations to become better. At this point, they can reinvest back their knowledge into startups.

Big, late stage VC funds can also help speed things up. “Many people misunderstand the value of venture capital,” Chambers told me. Well-established funds have strong processes and know how to hire top management. That’s why bringing those VCs and LPs to Paris could help change things.

Macron’s macroeconomics

Without turning this article into a political piece, it’s hard to talk about foreign investors coming to Paris without mentioning the yellow vests movement.

LVMH Chief Digital Officer Ian Rogers had a nuanced take on the changes in the tech ecosystem. “It's clear that they are [changing the mindset] and it's clear that there's opposition,” he said. "This is an exciting moment, it's also probably a bubble. Let's see what's on the other side.”

In other words, tech can be a destructive industry. Nobody wanted to state that so directly, but everybody had that in mind.

Ron Conway even told me that Airbnb could be the solution to address inequalities. “This whole yellow coats issue, that’s about income inequality,” he told me. There are 500,000 hosts in France generating $3 billion in revenue — and there should be more according to him. But I don’t think startups can solve everything, unfortunately.

“There are going to be a few setbacks along the way and we’re seeing that with the social movement, but we shouldn’t lose the end goal,” Chambers told me.

Of course, seeing France implode is in no one’s interest. VC firms are also looking at different opportunities because Donald Trump and Brexit make the future unpredictable.

But it’s unclear if minimizing social movements is wishful thinking or long-term thinking.

Moving as a group

What was interesting about today’s visit is that some people are already investing quite a lot in French startups while others are completely new to the French tech ecosystem. When you hear Tony Fadell say that he’s invested in French startups with Xavier Niel for a few years, it creates a fear of missing out.

“You see how the valley goes, it moves as a group,” Chambers told me.

Bringing dozens of investors to Paris created some form of emulation. Nobody wants to be the first one to invest in something new, but nobody wants to be the last one either.

List of investors:

Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners

Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz

Bernard Liautaud, Balderton

Chelsea Stoner, Battery Ventures

Philippe Lafont, Coatue

Matt Turck, FirstMark Capital

Hany Nada, GGV Capital

Dana Settle, Greycroft

Sarah Guo, Greylock Partners

Irena Goldenberg, Highland Europe

Erel Margalit, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP)

Samir Kaul, Khosla Ventures

Philipp Freise, KKR

Klaus Hommels, Lakestar

Scott Sandell, New Enterprise Associates

Isaac Hillel, Pitango Venture Capital

Boaz Dinte, Qumra

Ron Conway, SV Angel

Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures

Talbot Heppenstall, UPMC

Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Jessica Livingston, Y Combinator

+ 17 limited partners

https://ift.tt/2zUWSyr How France wants to become a tech giant https://ift.tt/2PniKHe

The trust dilemma of continuous background checks

First, background checks at startups, then Huawei’s finance chief is arrested, SoftBank’s IPO is subscribed, and I am about to record our next edition of TechCrunch Equity. It’s Thursday, December 6, 2018.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

The dilemma of continuous background checks

My colleague John Biggs covered the Series A round for Israel-based Intelligo, a startup that provides “Ongoing Monitoring” — essentially a continuous background check that can detect if (when?) an employee has suddenly become a criminal or other deviant. That’s a slight pivot from the company’s previous focus of using AI/ML to conduct background checks more efficiently.

Background checks are a huge business. San Francisco-based Checkr, perhaps the most well-known startup in the space, has raised $149 million according to Crunchbase, driven early on by the need to on-board thousands of contingent workers at companies like Uber. Checkr launched what it calls “Continuous Check” which also actively monitors all employees for potential problems, back in July.

Now consider a piece written a few weeks ago by Olivia Carville at Bloomberg that explored the rise of “algorithmic auditors” that actively monitor employee expenses and flags ones it feels are likely to be fraudulent:

U.S. companies, fearing damage to their reputations, are loath to acknowledge publicly how much money they lose each year on fraudulent expenses. But in a report released in April, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners said it had analyzed 2,700 fraud cases from January 2016 to October 2017 that resulted in losses of $7 billion.

Here’s a question that bugs me though: we have continuous criminal monitoring and expense monitoring. Most corporations monitor web traffic and email/Slack/communications. Everything we do at work is poked and prodded to make sure it meets “policy.”

And yet, we see vituperative attacks on China’s social credit system, which …. monitors criminal records, looks for financial frauds, and sanctions people based on their scores. How long will we have to wait before employers give us “good employee behavior” scores and attach it to our profiles in Slack?

The conundrum of course is that no startup or company wants (or can) avoid background checks. And it probably makes sense to continually monitor your employees for changes and fraud. If Bob murders someone over the weekend, it’s probably good to know that when you meet Bob at Monday’s standup meeting.

But let’s not pretend that this continuous monitoring isn’t ruinous to something else required from employees: trust. The more heavily monitored every single activity is in the workplace, the more that employees feel that if the system allows them to get away with something, it must be approved. Without any checks, you rely on trust. With hundreds of checks, policy is essentially etched into action — if I can do it, it must meet policy.

In China, where social trust is extremely low, it likely makes sense to have some sort of scoring mechanism to substitute. But for startups and tech companies, building a culture of trust — of doing the right thing even when not monitored — seems crucial to me for success. So before signing up for one of these continuous services, I’d do a double take and consider the potentially deleterious consequences.

If I was a startup employee, I would think twice (maybe thrice?) before traveling to China

Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Last weekend, Trump and Xi agreed to delay the implementation of tariffs on Chinese goods, which led to buoyant Chinese (tech) stocks Monday in Asia time zones. I wrote about how that doesn’t make any sense, since delaying tariffs doesn’t do anything to solve the structural issues in the US/China conflict:

To me the market is deeply misjudging not only the Chinese economy, but also the American leadership as well.

And specifically, I wrote about constraints on Huawei and ZTE:

In what world do these prohibitions disappear? The U.S. national security agencies aren’t going to allow Huawei and ZTE to deploy their equipment in America. Like ever. Quite frankly, if the choice was getting rid of all of China’s non-tariff barriers and allowing Huawei back into America, I think the U.S. negotiators would walk out.

So it was nice to learn (for me, not for her) that the head of finance of Huawei was arrested last night in Canada at the United States’ request. From my colleague Kate Clark:

Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer and second-largest smartphone maker, has been arrested in Vancouver, Canada on suspicion she violated U.S. trade sanctions against Iran, as first reported by The Globe and Mail.

Huawei confirmed the news with TechCrunch, adding that Meng, the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, faces unspecified charges in the Eastern District of New York, where she had transferred flights on her way to Canada.

If you wanted to know how the Trump administration was going to continue to fight the trade war outside of tariffs, you now have your answer. This is a bold move by the administration, targeting not just one of China’s most prominent tech companies, but the daughter of the founder of the company to boot.

China has since demanded her return.

Here is how this is going to play out. China is preventing the two American children of Liu Changming from leaving the country, essentially holding them hostage until their father returns to the mainland to face a criminal justice process related to an alleged fraud case. America now has a prominent daughter of a major Chinese company executive in their hands. That’s some nice tit-for-tat.

For startup founders and tech executives migrating between the two countries, I don’t think one has to literally worry about exit visas or extradition.

But, I do think the travel security operations centers at companies that regularly have employees moving between these countries need to keep very keen and cautious eyes on these developments. It’s entirely possible that these one-off “soft hostages” could flare to much higher numbers, making it much more complicated to conduct cross-border work.

Quick Bites

SoftBank’s IPO raises a lot of dollars

KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images

Takahiko Hyuga at Bloomberg reports that SoftBank has sold its entire book of shares for its whopping $23.5 billion IPO. The shares will officially price on Monday and then will trade on December 19. This is a critical and important win for Masayoshi Son, who needs the IPO of his telecom unit to deleverage some of the risk from SoftBank’s massive debt pile (and also to continue funding his startup dreams through Vision Fund, etc.)

SoftBank Vision Fund math, part 2

Arman and I talked yesterday about the complicated math behind just how many dollars are in SoftBank’s Vision Fund. More details, as Jason Rowley pointed out at Crunchbase News:

In an annual Form D disclosure filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, SBVF disclosed that it has raised a total of approximately $98.58 billion from 14 investors since the date of first sale on May 20, 2017. The annual filing from last year said there was roughly $93.15 billion raised from 8 investors, meaning that the Vision Fund has raised $5.43 billion in the past year and added six new investors to its limited partner base.

I said yesterday that the fund size should be “$97 billion or $96.7 billion with precision, assuming this $5 billion reaches a final close.” So let’s revise this number again to $99 billion or $98.6 billion with precision, since it seems the $5 billion did indeed close.

What’s next

I am still obsessing about next-gen semiconductors. If you have thoughts there, give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

Thoughts on Articles

Hopefully more reading time tomorrow.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

Huge long list of articles on next-gen semiconductors. More to come shortly.

https://ift.tt/2G0MHhe The trust dilemma of continuous background checks https://ift.tt/2E3EqX6

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Saturday, December 8, 2018

When directions become deterrents

Startups are helping people crack the code

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

Friday, December 7, 2018

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Speeding things up

Macron’s macroeconomics

Moving as a group

The dilemma of continuous background checks

If I was a startup employee, I would think twice (maybe thrice?) before traveling to China

Quick Bites

SoftBank’s IPO raises a lot of dollars

SoftBank Vision Fund math, part 2

What’s next

Thoughts on Articles

Reading docket

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