blogger better: 2018-10-28

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Facebook reorganizes Oculus for AR/VR’s long-haul

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook reorganizes Oculus for AR/VR’s long-haul https://ift.tt/2F3jlhI https://ift.tt/2F0MEBf November 03, 2018 at 07:48PM

Facebook is again looking to whip Oculus into shape for its 10-year journey towards making virtual reality mainstream. According to two sources, Facebook reorganized its AR and VR team this week from a divisional structure focused around products to a functional structure focused around technology areas of expertise. While no one was laid off, the change could eliminate redundancies by uniting specialists so they can iterate towards long-term progress rather than being separated into groups dedicated to particular gadgets.

Facebook confirmed the reorg to TechCrunch, with a spokesperson providing this statement: “We made some changes to the AR/VR organization earlier this week. These were internal changes and won’t impact consumers or our partners in the developer community.” Oculus CTO John Carmack and Oculus co-founder/newly-promoted Head of PC VR Nate Mitchell will remain in their leadership positions within VP of AR/VR Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth’s hardware wing of the company.

The shift obviously communicates that Facebook believes Oculus could be running more effectively. Organizing the company around areas of expertise rather than broader divisions is probably more appropriate for a moonshot effort that can’t afford redundancies, on the other hand, keeping expertise siloed could isolate new approaches and advancements from reaching other teams. As the company builds out its first full lineup of headsets, there seems to be significant overlap in the tech problems and products bring tackled by those working on mobile and PC products.

TechCrunch reported earlier this week that the company is planning to release a new Rift headset as early as 2019, possibly called the Rift S, which will featured upgraded displays and an inside-out tracking system. The company’s “Rift 2” project, codenamed Caspar, was left behind in the reorganization, a source tells us. We can’t confirm whether any other products or concepts have been shelved.

After canceling ‘Rift 2’ overhaul, Oculus plans a modest update to flagship VR headset

While an immersive virtual world that users can hang out and communicate in certainly seems to fit Facebook’s broader mission, the company has spent the better part of the past few years deciding how a costly, ambitious venture like Oculus fits into its corporate structure.

First, things went smoothly. The company and its empowered co-founders were building out a developer network and prepping for the launch of their Rift headset after creating a successful partnership with Samsung for the Gear VR. Then, the company’s good fortune turned as the Rift headset was racked by expensive delays and Oculus failed to ship the company’s Touch motion controllers at launch losing some initial ground to HTC.

By the end of 2016, it was announced that co-founder Brendan Iribe was out as CEO and that the company would be reorganizing around divisions focused on things like PC VR, mobile and content with Xiaomi exec Hugo Barra coming aboard as VP of VR to lead the new effort working directly beneath CEO Mark Zuckerberg. An additional layer of oversight has been built in since then, with Bosworth was put in charge of the company’s consumer hardware ambitions with Oculus as a central pillar. His title is now VP of AR/VR.

The absorption of Oculus deeper into Facebook’s corporate structure was a trend that soon replicated itself as the company looked to rein in the independent teams under a more cohesive vision. The culmination of this was a major executive reshuffle earlier this year that changed the landscape for how divisions within the company were managed.

Now, they’re changing things up even more.

Oculus Go

The new structure sounds like it could coordinate efforts around more general lines like hardware and software allowing insights to flow more intuitively across Facebook’s planned devices.

Given the slow adoption of VR and engineering challenges of AR headsets, which at TechCrunch’s LA conference last month Facebook’s head of AR Ficus Kirkpatrick confirmed it was building, this structure could help Oculus iterate its way to long-term success rather than just getting the next product out the door.

Facebook confirms it’s building augmented reality glasses

If Facebook is going to beat companies solely focused on AR like Magic Leap, and potential incumbent invaders like Apple if it so chooses, it needs to maximize efficiency. And if it’s going to get both developers and users excited about these next-generation computing platforms, it will have to produce products that make cutting-edge technologies feel unified and accessible. That’s a lot easier when everyone’s not stepping on each other’s virtual shoes.

Facebook reorganizes Oculus for AR/VR’s long-haul

After canceling ‘Rift 2’ overhaul, Oculus plans a modest update to flagship VR headset

Now, they’re changing things up even more.

Oculus Go

The new structure sounds like it could coordinate efforts around more general lines like hardware and software allowing insights to flow more intuitively across Facebook’s planned devices.

Facebook confirms it’s building augmented reality glasses

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2F0MEBf Facebook reorganizes Oculus for AR/VR’s long-haul Lucas Matney https://ift.tt/2F3jlhI
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The iPhone is reportedly getting 5G in 2020

{rss:content:encoded} The iPhone is reportedly getting 5G in 2020 https://ift.tt/2CZdvuQ https://ift.tt/2CYFWt0 November 03, 2018 at 04:32PM

The first 5G phones are set to start arriving next year. Motorola plans to bring next-gen connectivity via a Mod for the Z3, and companies like LG and OnePlus have promised to deliver the tech baked into handsets at some point in 2019. iPhone users, on the other hand, may have to wait a bit longer.

The technology is, of course, an inevitability for Apple (along with everyone else, really), so it’s just a question of when. A new report from Fast Company (via the Verge) puts the timing around a year and half out.

The “source with knowledge of Apple’s plans” put the 5G iPhone’s arrival at some point in 2020, with Intel supplying the tech this time out. Apparently Apple and Intel are going through a bit of a rough patch of late, courtesy of heat/battery issues with the 8060 5G modem. Of course, things aren’t rough enough for the company to hit up Qualcomm again.

Given the on-going battle between the two companies, that’s probably a bridge too far. Instead, Apple’s holding out for Intel’s 8161 chip. 5G presents a solid opportunity for Intel to regain some of the substantial ground it ceded to Qualcomm in the mobile market the last time out.

Twitter removes thousands of accounts that tried to dissuade Democrats from voting

Twitter has deleted thousands of automated accounts posting messages that tried to discourage and dissuade voters from casting their ballot in the upcoming election next week.

Some 10,000 accounts were removed across late September and early October after they were first flagged by staff at the Democratic Party, the company has confirmed.

“We removed a series of accounts for engaging in attempts to share disinformation in an automated fashion – a violation of our policies,” said a Twitter spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch. “We stopped this quickly and at its source.” But the company did not provide examples of the kinds of accounts it removed, or say who or what might have been behind the activity.

The accounts posed as Democrats and try to convince key demographics to stay at home and not vote, likely as an attempt to sway the results in key election battlegrounds, according to Reuters, which first reported the news.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee did not return a request for comment outside its business hours.

The removals are a drop in the ocean to the wider threats that Twitter faces. Earlier this year, the social networking giant deleted 1.2 million accounts for sharing and promoting terrorist content. In May alone, the company deleted just shy of 10 million accounts each week for sending malicious, automated messages.

Twitter had 335 million monthly active users as of its latest earnings report in July.

But the company has faced criticism from lawmakers for not doing more to proactively remove content that violate its rules or spread disinformation and false news. With just days before Americans are set to vote in the U.S. midterms, this latest batch of takedowns is likely to spark further concern that Twitter did not automatically detect the malicious accounts.

Following the publication of Reuters’ report, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said in a tweet thread that public research identifying bots is often “deeply flawed” and that many are identifying bots “based on probability, not certainty,” since “nobody other than Twitter can see non-public, internal account data.”

Twitter does not have a strict policy on the spread of disinformation in the run-up to election season, unlike Facebook, which recently banned content that tried to suppress voters with false and misleading information. Instead, Twitter said last year that its “open and real-time nature” is a “powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information.” But researchers have been critical of that approach. Research published last month found that over 700,000 accounts that were active during the 2016 presidential election are still active to this day — pushing a million tweets each day.

A Twitter spokesperson added that for the election this year, the company has “established open lines of communication and direct, easy escalation paths for state election officials, Homeland Security, and campaign organizations from both major parties to help us enforce our policies vigorously and protect conversational health on our service.

Thousands of Twitter accounts that spread fake news during the 2016 election are still active today, say researchers

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter removes thousands of accounts that tried to dissuade Democrats from voting Zack Whittaker https://ift.tt/2OlYsxC
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Twitter hires God-is Rivera as global director of culture and community

Twitter has brought on its first-ever global director of culture and community, God-is Rivera. As global director of culture and community, Rivera will report to Global Head of Culture, Engagement and Experiential Nola Weinstein. Rivera previously led internal diversity and inclusion efforts at VMLY&R, a digital and creative agency.

“As a black woman who has worked in industries in which I have been underrepresented, I feel a great responsibility to amplify and support diverse communities, and they exist in full force on Twitter,” Rivera said in a statement. “The team has shown a passion to serve and spotlight their most active users and I am honored to step into this new role as a part of that commitment.”

For context, 26 percent of U.S. adults who identify as black use Twitter, while 24 percent of white-identified adults and 20 percent of Latinx-identified adults in the U.S. use Twitter, according to a March 2018 survey from Pew Research Center.

At Twitter, the plan is for Rivera to “better serve and engage communities” on Twitter through the company’s brand marketing, campaigns, events and other experiences. Internally, Rivera will be tasked with ensuring Twitter’s campaigns and programs are inclusive and “reflective of the communities we serve,” according to Twitter’s press release. Externally, Rivera will be responsible for developing relationships and programs with content creators, community leaders, brands and more — similar to the one with HBO’s Insecure.

Here’s the internal note Weinstein sent to Twitter employees earlier today:

Team,

I am so excited to welcome @GodisRivera to the team as Twitter’s new Global Director of Culture & Community. She captivated us at #OneTeam with her enlightening presentation on #BlackTwitter and we are thrilled that she will now be bringing her passion and perspective inside.

In this newly created role, God-is will help lead our efforts to better serve and engage the powerful voices and global communities who take to Twitter to share, discover and discuss what matters to them. This will come to life through Twitter’s brand efforts, campaigns, events and experiences. She will help ensure that our programs are connective, inclusive and reflective of the communities we serve. You can imagine more efforts that engage and excite our communities like #HereWeAre, #NBATwitter, thoughtful tweetups, etc.

God-is’ deep expertise in marketing and social strategy, cultural understanding and ability to elevate and connect communities makes for a rare and incredibly powerful combination. She was previously Director, Inclusion and Cultural Resonance at VMLY&R, where she led internal diversity efforts to fuse the importance of internal culture and representation to creative work outputs. In 2018, God-is was named an Ad Age “Woman to Watch” and Adweek “Disruptor” for continuing to fight for representation and equity in the advertising industry. She currently resides in New York, NY with her husband and daughter.

On a personal note, I have had the pleasure of spending time with God-is at #HereWeAre, #Influence, and #OneTeam and her energy, passion and positivity are infectious. I know her presence will make a difference and am excited by all that the culture & experiential team will create together.

God-is will start on November 12th and will be based in NYC reporting to me.

Please join me in welcoming her to the flock!

Thrilled to welcome @GodisRivera to the team as Twitter's new Global Director of Culture & Community. Her deep marketing, cultural, and social expertise makes for a rare and powerful combination that will help us to enhance our connection to the voices and communities we serve. pic.twitter.com/QrffBrnPJh

— Nola Weinstein (@NolaBeth) November 2, 2018

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter hires God-is Rivera as global director of culture and community Megan Rose Dickey https://ift.tt/2CX8Vxf
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Sequoia leads $10M round for home improvement negotiator Setter

{rss:content:encoded} Sequoia leads $10M round for home improvement negotiator Setter https://ift.tt/2PAdZyw https://ift.tt/2EXt5Kj November 02, 2018 at 09:21PM

You probably don’t know how much it should cost to get your home’s windows washed, yard landscaped, or countertops replaced. But Setter does. The startup pairs you with a home improvement concierge familiar with all the vendors, prices, and common screwups that plague these jobs. Setter finds the best contractors across handiwork, plumbing, electrical, carpentry, and more. It researches options, negotiates a bulk rate, and with its added markup you pay a competitive price with none of the hassle.

One of the most reliable startup investing strategies is looking at where people spend a ton of money but hate the experience. That makes home improvement a prime target for disruption, and attracted a $10 million Series A round for Setter co-led by Sequoia Capital and NFX. “The main issue is that contractors and homeowners speak different languages” Setter co-founder and CEO Guillaume Laliberté tells me, “which results in unclear scopes of work, frustrated homeowners who don’t know enough to set up the contractors for success, and frustrated contractors who have to come back multiple times.”

Setter is now available in Toronto and San Francisco, with seven-plus jobs booked per customer per year costing an average of over $500 each, with 70% repeat customers. With the fresh cash, it can grow into a household name in those cities, expand to new markets, and hire up to build new products for clients and contractors.

I asked Laliberté why he cared to start Setter, and he told me “because human lives are made better when you can make essential human activities invisible.” Growing up, his mom wouldn’t let him buy video games or watch TV so he taught himself to code his own games and build his own toys. “I’d saved money to fix consoles and resell them, make beautiful foam swords for real live action games, buy and resell headphones — anything that people around me wanted really!” he recalls, teaching him the value of taking the work out of other people’s lives.

Meanwhile his co-founder David Steckel was building high-end homes for the wealthy when he discovered they often had ‘home managers’ that everyone would want but couldn’t afford. What if a startup let multiple homeowners share a manager? Laliberté says Steckely describes it as “I kid you not, the clouds parted, rays of sunlight began to shine through and angels started to sing.” Four days after getting the pitch from Steckel, Laliberté was moving to Toronto to co-found Setter.

Users fire up the app, browse a list of common services, get connected to a concierge over chat, and tell them about their home maintenance needs while sending photos if necessary. The concierge then scours the best vendors and communicates the job in detail so things get done right the first time, on time. They come back in a few minutes with either a full price quote, or a diagnostic quote that gets refined after an in-home visit. Customers can schedule visits through the app, and stay in touch with their concierge to make sure everything is completed to their specifications.

The follow-through is what sets Setter apart from directory-style services like Yelp or Thumbtack. “Other companies either take your request and assign it to the next available contractor or simply share a list of available contractors and you need to complete everything yourself” a Setter spokesperson tells me. They might start the job quicker, but you don’t always get exactly what you want. Everyone in the space will have to compete to source the best pros.

Though potentially less scalable than Thumbtack’s leaner approach, Setter is hoping for better retention as customers shift off of the Yellow Pages and random web searches. Thumbtack rocketed to a $1.2 billion valuation and had raised $273 million by 2015, some from Sequoia (presenting a curious potential conflict of interest). That same ascent may have lined up the investors behind Setter’s $2 million seed round from Sequoia, Hustle Fund and Avichal Garg last year. Today’s $10 million Series A also included Hustle Fund and Maple VC.

The toughest challenge for Setter will be changing the status quo for how people shop for home improvement away from ruthless bargain hunting. It will have to educate users about the pitfalls and potential long-term costs of getting slapdash service. If Laliberté wants to fulfill his childhood mission, he’ll have to figure out how to make homeowners value satisfaction over the lowest sticker price.

Sequoia leads $10M round for home improvement negotiator Setter

https://ift.tt/2EXt5Kj Sequoia leads $10M round for home improvement negotiator Setter https://ift.tt/2PAdZyw

The Minte raises $2.25 million in seed funding to bring hotel-style housekeeping to luxury residences

As an MBA student at the University of Chicago’s Booth school, Kathleen Wilson was struck with an idea while looking at businesses that provided daily housekeeping in one of her classes. Given the density and physical structure of many apartment buildings, she wondered why a housekeeper couldn’t similarly push a cart down the hall and spend an hour or less in each unit.

To test out her theory, Wilson and a classmate started cleaning the apartments of friends, spending 30 minutes to an hour at a time and trying to establish a reasonable price point for the work. Armed with enough data, Wilson then landed at a local real estate tech accelerator, formed her company, and locked down her first property management company client, Waterton — and her efforts have been gaining momentum since.

In fact, her 20-month-old startup, The Minte, which now employs roughly 60 people, is today announcing that it has raised $2.25 million in a round that brings the company’s total seed funding to $4.7 million. Dundee Venture Capital led this newest round; other investors in the company include MATH Venture Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Firebrand Ventures, Blue Note Ventures and numerous angel investors. We had a quick chat with Wilson earlier this week to learn more.

TC: Can you tell us a bit more about your customers? Are they all property management companies like Waterton?

KW: We only provide service to apartments and condos, so our clients are currently property management companies such as Greystar, Bozzuto, Lincoln Property Company and CA Ventures. We have just under 70 properties in Chicago, another 20 in D.C. and we’ve been launching six to 10 new properties in each market each month.

TC: The Minte promises to make a housekeeper available to a property full-time, correct?

KW: Yes. A housekeeper is located on site for residents to book cleaning services with them, so that residents are provided with consistency and trust. To be clear, our housekeepers are full-time Minte employees with health benefits and paid time off. We keep our housekeeping cart and supplies at each property, and there’s a place for housekeepers to go if they have a bit of downtime, although that’s rare.

We do have some housekeepers who split their time between properties, either if the property is smaller or if we’re still in the first couple months of service and still building demand.

TC: What makes the company think people would prefer to work with The Minte versus housekeepers they know? These are trust-heavy relationships, a feature that other housecleaning startups have overlooked to their detriment.

KW: Exactly. We bring the personal trust by having the same housekeeper assigned to the property, which allows the housekeeper to get to know the residents, and we bring the corporate side of trust by having insurance, QA by managers and the ability to send a backup housekeeper if someone is out sick. We also have top-notch, live customer service if there is ever an issue.

TC: What does your quality assurance process involve?

KW: It’s a multi-tier process. First, we’ve implemented an eight-day training program for all new housekeepers. Second, housekeepers and housekeeping managers with whom we work almost always have hotel backgrounds, having worked at the Waldorf Astoria, The Conrad and Sofitel, to name a few. Third, housekeeping managers do random spot checks of service. And fourth, users can rate and comment on every service, which we review in real time. It’s company policy to reach out to the resident any time something is less than four stars.

Also worth mentioning: our products are eco-friendly, P&G products, so there’s no compromise on the quality of our supplies.

TC: How do clients pay, and how much do they pay? Is this a subscription model?

KW: They can pay à la carte — paying $30 for a hotel-style service, $90 for a deep clean for a one-bedroom apartment, for example — but over half of our cleans are residents who are on a recurring package. For customers on a package, they can customize how many deep cleans and/or hotel-style cleans they have every four weeks, including which days those cleans occur.

TC: The home services model is more prone to leakage, meaning people form relationships and stop using the platform. Is this a concern?

KW: Our employees are full-time, so this is essentially a non-issue for us. With our housekeepers on our schedule throughout the entire week, it’s not feasible for someone to poach them.

Potentially a resident could do this on a weekend, but in our experience, people want housekeepers to come when they are not home. Furthermore, the property manager would tell us if our housekeeper was getting keys outside of their Minte schedule.

TC: And how are you marketing the company?

KW: Through our partnership with the property managers, primarily.

TC: How will you use your new funding?

KW: We’ll continue to enhance our tech. Our app is out this week, and we’re rolling out our smart home integration in the coming months. We’re making our button — which is physical hardware that goes on the wall inside each unit — more readily available. We’ll also expand more into condos and corporate housing and target our third city in early 2019.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J The Minte raises $2.25 million in seed funding to bring hotel-style housekeeping to luxury residences https://ift.tt/2P7ykeS

Dynamic Yield, which builds Amazon-like personalisation for the rest of us, raises $38M

Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, has transformed the face of commerce in part because it has managed at once to be “The Everything Store” but still with a route into its sea of products that, for most users, surfaces what they might most want to see (and importantly buy or consume). That kind of personalisation has become a goal not just for e-commerce companies, but for any organization running a digital business: users are constantly distracted, and when their attention is caught, they do not want to spend time figuring out what they most want.

Not every business is Amazon, though, so we are seeing a crop of startups emerging that are working on ways to help the rest of the digital world be just as optimised and personalised as Amazon. Now one of them, an Israeli startup called Dynamic Yield, has raised more money as it continues to expand its business, both to more platforms and to more geographies.

The startup’s Series D has now closed off at $38 million, with the inclusion of a $5 million strategic investment from Naver, Korea’s “Google” (it’s the country’s top search portal) that is also behind messaging apps Line and Snow. The plan is for Naver to help bring Dynamic Yield to Korea and Japan, by incorporating its tech into its own services and those of others that work with Naver.

(Personalisation and aggregators are strong magnets for users in Asia and thus big magnets for funding: ByteDance, which provides news aggregation among other services, was recently valued at $75 billion.)

Naver is not the only search engine that has caught sight of Dynamic Yield over the years. Previous investors include Baidu (“the Google of China”), and we’ve heard that when the startup was younger — it was founded in 2011 — Google had tried to acquire it (Dynamic Yield rejected the offer, and it’s been approached for acquisitions numerous times since then).

Other strategic investors include The New York Times and Deutsche Telekom, alongside other backers like Innovation Endeavors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker Capital and more.

Dynamic Yield has raised $85 million to date and is now valued at “hundreds of millions of dollars,” but less than $500 million, a source at the company said, after seeing a strong expansion of its services.

Dynamic Yield says it works with more than 220 global brands, and its tech reaches 600 million unique users each month, across 10 billion page views and 600 billion “events” on those pages. It claims its AI-based personalisation technology can lift revenues (or other engagement metrics) by 10-15 percent.

“It makes us an effective tool for surviving in a market where customer acquisition cost keeps getting more expensive,” co-founder and CEO Liad Agmon said in an interview.

Dynamic Yield doesn’t talk about many of its customers on the record — most don’t like to reveal to rivals who they work with, Agmon said.

But they include a number of big brands across e-commerce, travel, finance, media and other segments that use its tech not just to show more targeted products to prospective shoppers, but to help power advertising, recommend content and position the same information to different people in different ways depending on who is viewing it (for example with different headlines).

There are a lot of personalisation and A/B analytics companies in the market today — others include Adobe, Marketo (which is becoming a part of Adobe), Optimizely and many more. Indeed, I’d be very surprised if Amazon is not working on ways of productising its own personalisation tech in a way that is not intrinsically linked to its own marketplace (because some will never want to sell there, and because personalisation can be used for so much more than just e-commerce).

Dynamic Yield, however, claims that it has an edge over these because of how it works.

Agmon says that the tech sits on top of whichever CMS or other backend server that a site is using and is activated by way of a small amount of code. It uses machine learning to both “read” what is in a site, and matches that up against specific visitors and its own trove of experience.

Agmon added that when a business already has information about that visitor, that is the primary data that is used; otherwise it also incorporates other data sources like Acxiom and others — much the way that other marketing tech does — to form a stronger picture of your tastes.

It then runs this data through its own machine learning algorithms both to recommend content and to help a marketing manager figure out better customer segmentation overall. There is an “autopilot” version of the product where everything is automated based on Dynamic Yield’s algorithms; or options to use the data sources to set up specific marketing campaigns; or (as is common) a combination of the two.

Going forward, Agmon said the plan is to work across an increasing number of interfaces where customers are going today to discover and buy goods and services. Indeed, we’ve described how some of the newest e-commerce startups have eschewed any website or app of their own and work exclusively in third-party messaging apps to acquire customers and sell goods.

But it’s not just these new digital platforms that are becoming targets for personalisation startups like Dynamic Yield.

Agmon said that his company is also working with a major retailer that is using its tech at its in-person payment points. When — for example — a customer comes to order a latte, instead of generic upselling to the latest seasonal flavour, the person taking the order will now know if the customer ever orders a sweet injection, or if she/he is more of a savoury snack sort of person. The cashier will then know what to recommend to eat with that drink that is more likely to be purchased.

The mom-and-pop shop with its reputation for knowing the regulars and what they like might have found its dystopian (but useful) heir.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Dynamic Yield, which builds Amazon-like personalisation for the rest of us, raises $38M https://ift.tt/2yMmoFr

Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over

{rss:content:encoded} Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over https://ift.tt/2P4oDhA https://ift.tt/2CY6vyz November 02, 2018 at 05:12PM

Bumble and Match’s ongoing legal battles are continuing today. According to a statement released by Match Group this morning, Bumble is dropping its $400 million lawsuit against Match, which had claimed Match fraudulently obtained trade secrets during acquisition talks. However, Bumble is preparing to refile its suit at the state level, we’re hearing.

If you haven’t been following, the two companies have been doing battle in the court system for some time after Match Group failed to acquire Bumble twice — once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble claimed Match then filed a lawsuit against it to make Bumble appear less attractive to other potential acquirers. Match’s suit claims Bumble infringed on patents around things like its use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in and its swiped-based gestures — things Tinder had popularized in dating apps.

Bumble subsequently filed its own lawsuit in March 2018, this one claiming that Match used acquisition talks to fraudulently obtaining trade secrets. It says this is not a countersuit, but its own separate suit. (This is the one being discussed today by the companies.)

Match says it wasn’t served papers for Bumble’s suit. But Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe had said they delayed serving papers to give Match a chance to settle.

After a failure to settle, Bumble announced on September 24, 2018 that it would be serving Match, and shared news of its IPO plans. The $400 million suit claims Match had asked for “confidential and trade secret information” in order to make a higher acquisition offer for Bumble, but that no subsequent offer came as result.

Match says Bumble asked the courts to drop its lawsuit just a few weeks after this announcement, and believes the whole thing is just a PR stunt around Bumble’s IPO.

Match today says it’s not opposed to the lawsuit being dropped. But it is now seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums, it says.

It points out that Bumble had filed its state petition in Dallas County, rather than respond with counterclaims to Match’s suit in the Western District of Texas — “less than 100 miles from Bumble’s Austin headquarters.”

It asked the case to be transferred to federal courts in the Western District, where its IP case is pending.

Now, Match says that Bumble is asking the courts to drop its claims against Tinder’s parent company.

“We’re not opposing their request to dismiss their own claims, but we’re seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums,” says a Match spokesperson. “As we say in section 132 of the amended counterclaim: ‘Match will not simply wait until Bumble decides whether or not it wants to pursue these claims – likely in connection with Bumble’s next media blitz. Match intends to litigate these baseless allegations now, and Match intends to conclusively disprove them.'”

Bumble responded this morning by saying it plans to continue to defend its business against Match.

“Match’s latest litigation filings are part of its ongoing campaign to slow down Bumble’s momentum in the market. Having tried and failed to acquire Bumble, Match now seems bent on trying to impair the very business it was so desperate to buy,” a Bumble spokesperson says. “Bumble is not intimidated and will continue to defend its business and users against Match’s misguided claims.”

It declined to comment on how, but we understand that the change from a state court system to federal courts is in play here. Bumble wanted to litigate at the state level, which means it has to dismiss its claims in the federal courts. Match could then accurately say Bumble’s lawsuit is being dropped, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Bumble’s plans have changed.

We understand that Bumble is now preparing to refile its case in the state court system, but it hasn’t done so yet.

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Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over

If you haven’t been following, the two companies have been doing battle in the court system for some time after Match Group failed to acquire Bumble twice – once in a deal that would have valued it at over $1 billion.

Bumble claimed Match then filed a lawsuit against it to make Bumble appear less attractive to other potential acquirers. Match’s suit claims Bumble infringed on patents around things like its use of a stack of profile cards, mutual opt-in, and its swiped-based gestures – things Tinder had popularized in dating apps.

Match says it wasn’t served papers for Bumble’s suit. But Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe had said they delayed serving papers to give Match a chance to settle.

Match says Bumble asked the courts to drop its lawsuit just a few weeks after this announcement, and believes the whole thing is just a PR stunt around Bumble’s IPO.

Match today says it’s not opposed to the lawsuit being dropped. But it is now seeking declaratory judgements that will force these issues to be litigated in the right forums, it says.

It points out that Bumble had filed its state petition in Dallas County, rather than respond with counterclaims to Match’s suit in the Western District of Texas – “less than 100 miles from Bumble’s Austin headquarters.”

It asked the case to be transferred to federal courts in the Western District, where its IP case is pending.

Now, Match says that Bumble is asking the courts to drop its claims against Tinder’s parent company.

Bumble responded this morning, by saying it plans to continue to defend its business against Match.

We understand that Bumble is now preparing to refile its case in the state court system, but it hasn’t done so yet.

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from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Match says Bumble is dropping its $400M lawsuit, but this battle isn’t over Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/2P4oDhA
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MyPart finds that next def jam

Picture it: you have the perfect song for Kelly Clarkson. It’s a mix of genres and styles best described as “Since U Been Gone” meets “911 Is A Joke.” How do you get it in front of Kelly so she can add it to her next album (imagine her singing “My heart is on fire when you’re not there/But the Austin fire department doesn’t care”)? You talk to MyPart.

MyPart lets aspiring creators and musicians submit stuff to their favorite artists. A vetting system separates the hits from the chaff and, by ensuring the artist doesn’t see unsolicited content, reduces lawsuits. MyPart, founded in 2016, has added a number of interesting features to its platform thanks to AI and machine learning.

“MyPart has recently finalized our seed round with $1M, and were named a MassChallenge 2018 top 10 startup award finalist,” said co-founder Matan Kollnescher. “This followed a $150k pre-seed round that enabled us to achieve an MVP, strategic industry partnerships and legal validation.”

Kollnescher was a former member of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and the other co-founder, Ariel Toli Gadilov, spent time inside Intel as a finance and legal advisor. Both are skilled musicians. They’ve also hired Evan Bogart, writer of Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Rihanna’s “SOS.”

The team soft-launched and have 2,030 users and hundreds of uploads. The platform is designed to ensure that good music floats to the top and not so good music doesn’t create false positives. In fact, say the founders, MyPart can even “read” a piece of music to see if it is stylistically relevant.

“Crowdsourcing art by conducting competitions is a problematic approach due to the multiple losers (since everyone are competing over the same project) and the need for active involvement and initiative defining exact projects,” said Kollnescher. “The publishing industry barely utilizes technology at all and most conservative competitors don’t have not will be able to easily develop differentiating technology to solve quality, quantity, and relevance issues – thus continuing to have immense scaling issues.”

The platform lets good musicians get discovered, a product that could truly be useful in today’s saturated media market.

“MyPart’s A.I. approach to the industry is the first of its kind; our platform sifts through thousands of data points and looks into the ‘soul’ of a song to then sort by relevance to the famous performing artist of our user’s choice,” he said. Luckily, Kelly Clarkson loves songs about reducing state budgets due to the inability of the Austin Police Department to get these squirrels out of my back yard.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J MyPart finds that next def jam https://ift.tt/2CYT3uo

Apple News will launch a real-time election results hub on November 6

{rss:content:encoded} Apple News will launch a real-time election results hub on November 6 https://ift.tt/2CZhKa6 https://ift.tt/2DjmXue November 02, 2018 at 03:00PM

Apple is preparing to launch a new way for its customers to track election results. The company, on 8 PM ET on November 6, will swap out the existing Midterm Elections section in the Apple News app, and replace it with a new Election Night section instead. This section will also replace Apple News’ Digest tab at the bottom-center of the app, in order to lead users directly to the special section where they’ll be able to track the live results, updates on key races, latest developments and more.

The company is partnering with the Associated Press for its real-time election results, as do many news organizations thanks to AP’s history and experience with verifying results.

Here, Apple will use that AP data to inform a number of dynamic infographics as well as offer a complete list of federal election results in every state, including House and Senate seats.

These results will update every minute, or you can just “refresh” the page manually to force the update at any time.

If the balance of power in either the House or the Senate is determined by way of the incoming results, Apple News will publish a special alert at the top of the feed and a pop up notification, as well.

The Key Races section, meanwhile, offers another set of live updating infographics, showing the live results from the most interesting House, Senate or Gubernatorial races.

Another section will focus on the latest developments – meaning breaking news headlines and stories related to election night coverage. This will feature news from a variety of sources including Axios, Politico, The Washington Post, Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, CBS, and others.

CBS News, CNN, and Fox News will also contribute video clips to the Election Night hub, while ABC will offer a live video feed. Another live video feed from NBC News will appear in a widget alongside the Live Results infographic.

Apple says users won’t have to authenticate with their TV provider on election night to watch the videos in the hub.

A diversity of news sources was important to Apple, which wanted to have a range of options for people to read, as well as a way to present the news so people could see how it’s being processed across the ideological spectrum.

More importantly, all the news coverage in the hub isn’t being driven by algorithms. For Apple News’ team, Election Night is an all-hands-on-deck type of situation involving real human editors. In fact, human editorial oversight is a key difference between Apple’s approach to news aggregation and curation, compared with competitors like Google, Twitter and Facebook – all of which have come under fire for their outsized roles in the spread of information, and, at times, disinformation.

Apple has been taking the opposite approach, by staffing up an editorial team of former journalists, insteading of leaving news curation to technology.

Apple News is available across iPhone, iPad, and as of this year, Mac devices.

Edo raises $12M from Breyer Capital to measure TV ad effectiveness

Edo, an ad analytics startup founded by Daniel Nadler and actor Edward Norton, announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

Nadler and Norton have both had startup success before — Nadler co-founded and led Kensho, which S&P Global acquired for $550 million. Norton invested in Kensho and co-founded CrowdRise, which was acquired by GoFundMe.

Even so, ad analytics might seem like an arcane industry for an actor/filmmaker to want to tackle. However, Norton said he was actually the one to convince Nadler that it was worth starting the company, and he argued that this is an important topic to both of them as creators. (Nadler’s a poet.)

“Movie studios and publishers, they take risks on talent, on creative people like us,” Norton said. “We want them to do well … The better they do with the dollars they spend, the less risk adverse they become.”

Nadler and Norton recruited Kevin Krim, the former head of digital at CNBC, to serve as Edo’s CEO.

Krim explained that while linear TV advertising still accounts for the majority of ad budgets, the effectiveness of those ads is still measured using old-fashioned “survey-based methodologies.” There are other measurement companies looking online, Norton said they’re focused on social media sentiment and other “weak proxies” for consumer behavior.

Edo screenshot

In contrast, Edo pulls data from sources like search engines and content sites where people are doing research before making a purchase. By applying data science, Krim said, “We basically can measure the change in consumer engagement, the behaviors that are indicative of intent. We can measure the change in consumer behavior for every ad.”

In fact, Edo says that since its founding in 2015, it has created a database of 47 million ad airings, so advertisers can see not just their own ad performance, but also that of their competitors. This allows advertisers to adjust their campaigns based on consumer engagement — Krim said that in some cases, advertisers will receive the overnight data and then adjust their ad rotation for that very night.

As for the Series A, it was led by Breyer Capital. (Jim Breyer has backed everything from Facebook to Etsy to Marvel.) Vista Equity co-founders Robert Smith and Brian Sheth participated in the round, as did WGI Group.

“For more than a decade I’ve watched the data science talent arbitrage transform industries from finance to defense, from transportation to commerce,” Breyer said in the funding announcement. “We needed someone to bring these capabilities to bear on the systemic inefficiencies and methodological shortcomings of measurement and analytics in media and advertising.”

On the customer side, Edo is already working with ESPN, Turner, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. I wondered whether some of the TV networks might have been worried about what Edo would reveal about their ads, but Norton said the opposite was true.

“I don’t sense that they in any way have trepidation that we’re going to pull their pants down — quite the opposite,” he said. “They are absolutely thrilled with our ability to help burnish and validate their assertions about the strength of what they’re offering.”

https://ift.tt/2qvPS61 Edo raises $12M from Breyer Capital to measure TV ad effectiveness https://ift.tt/2QettFm

Instagram’s next cash cow: instant Promote ads for Stories

{rss:content:encoded} Instagram’s next cash cow: instant Promote ads for Stories https://ift.tt/2CX1Sov https://ift.tt/2Pyy201 November 01, 2018 at 09:03PM

Instagram hopes dollars from long-tail of small businesses and social media stars can help it pull its weight in the Facebook family. A new ad type called “Promote” for Stories allows Instagram business pages to show their ephemeral slideshows to more users without doing much work. Admins can choose to auto-target users similar to their followers, people in a certain location, or use all of Instagram’s targeting parameters to inject their Story into the Stories queue of more users as an ad that can also link to business’ Instagram profile or website.

Facebook confirms to TechCrunch that Promote for Stories works similarly to Facebook’s Boost option that lets them pay to instantly show their feed posts to more users. “I can confirm that we are testing this feature globally. We don’t have an immediate timeline for 100% rollout, but will keep you posted” an Instagram spokesperson told me. Screenshots of Promote were first shared by social consultant Matt Navarra.

Instagram tests new Promote Stories ads. Image Credit: Matt Navarra

Instagram already has 2 million active advertisers, compared to Facebook’s 6 million. But designing and targeting ads, especially full-screen video Stories ads can be daunting to small businesses and public figures. Promote offers an easy way to turn their existing Stories into ads.

The feature could unlock more spend at crucial time when Facebook’s revenue growth is in massive decline. It dropped from 59 percent year-over-years revenue growth in Q3 2016 to 49 percent in Q3 2017 to 33 percent in Q3 2018 as it hits saturation in lucrative developed countries and runs out of News Feed space. Facebook warned Wall Street about revenue deceleration as sharing shifts from feeds to Stories and advertisers have to adapt, but turning local merchants and influencers into paying customers could smooth that transition.

Instagram Analytics Launches In Beta

In other Instagram business news, today it launched Instagram Analytics in beta as part of Facebook Analytics. The tool goes beyond Instagram’s existing Insights tool that just counted different types of engagement with an account and its content, such as new followers, website clicks, post impressions, and Story exits. With Instagram Analytics, business accounts can track life time value and retention rates for people who do or don’t interact with their content, and create audience segments to see if people who commented on a particular post generate more value for them. They can also analyze how their Instagram audeince overlaps with people who visit their site, download their app, or Like their Facebook Page.

The more Instagram analytics businesses have access to, the better they’ll be able to prove that their investment in the platform is paying off. Being able to see exactly how followers move through a conversion funnel will result in higher confidence in campaigns and translate into more ad and content spend.

IGTV Hopes For Virality With Stories Previews

And there’s one final piece of Instagram news for the day. IGTV hasn’t quite blown up like Instagram Stories since launching in June, but a combination could bring some much needed attention to the app’s longer form video hub. Instagram today launched the ability to share preview image of an IGTV video to your Instagram Story. Friends can tap through to actually watch the full video on IGTV.

Now you can share your favorite IGTV videos to your story. Tap the paper airplane at the bottom of the video you want to share. When friends see your story, they can tap the preview to watch the whole video in IGTV. pic.twitter.com/oaatUoOqZY

— Instagram (@instagram) November 1, 2018

The IGTV previews don’t actually play, they’re just a static sticker. Shazam launched its own Instagram Stories integration today works similarly to the IGTV previews as well as SoundCloud and Pandora’s partnerships. Shazam lets you share a preview image of a song to your Instagram Story, but to actually hear any music you have to click through to Shazam. That makes these integrations inferior to Instagram’s own native music sharing feature that actually lets you add a soundtrack to your Stories that friends can hear as they watch.

Shazam now can share song preview images to Instagram Stories, but you have to tap through to hear anything

IGTV has also recently added a History tab that shows what you’ve recently watched. This could be helpful for getting back to your favorite clips or jumping to a new episode of a show you’re hooked on.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday’s earnings call that “People really want to watch a lot of video”, and the company plans to invest more in premium Facebook Watch content. But so far, it’s niether publicly announced any deals to pay for IGTV content, nor has opened any direct monetization options to creators. With viewership taking time to grow, there just aren’t enough incentives for creators to invest to producing polished, longer-form vertical video when there’s nowhere else to put it but IGTV. Virality through these previews could convince them there’s big fan base growth opportunities available if they stick with IGTV.

Combined, these updates show that the departure of Instagram’s co-founders hasn’t slowed down the company’s innovation. Former Facebook News Feed VP Adam Mosseri kept up a brisk pace of product launches, and now with Instagram he seems determined to keep users, creators, and businesses glued to what’s quickly becoming the social giant’s premier property.

GoPro shares are tanking after disastrous Q3

GoPro stock is currently down 15% in after-hours trading and is falling after reporting its third quarter earnings. The company saw revenues dive 13%.3 percent.

Overall GoPro reported a net loss of $27.1 million, or 19 cents per share, in the quarter that ended on Sept. 30. Is compared with a profit of $14.7 million, or 10 cents per share, from the previous year. Likewise, GoPro saw revenue fell to $285.9 million from $329.8 million.

Developing…

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J GoPro shares are tanking after disastrous Q3 https://ift.tt/2DhRZ5Q

Instagram’s next cash cow: instant Promote ads for Stories

Instagram tests new Promote Stories ads. Image Credit: Matt Navarra

Instagram Analytics Launches In Beta

IGTV Hopes For Virality With Stories Previews

Now you can share your favorite IGTV videos to your story. Tap the paper airplane at the bottom of the video you want to share. When friends see your story, they can tap the preview to watch the whole video in IGTV. pic.twitter.com/oaatUoOqZY

— Instagram (@instagram) November 1, 2018

Shazam now can share song preview images to Instagram Stories, but you have to tap through to hear anything

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Pyy201 Instagram’s next cash cow: instant Promote ads for Stories Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2CX1Sov
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Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service

An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores.

Its vanishing was flagged to us earlier today, by Twitter user Sarah Parks, who noticed that, when loaded, the Campaigner app now displays a message informing users the supplier is “no longer supporting clients based in Europe”.

“So we’re taking this opportunity to refresh our campaigning app,” it adds. “We will be back with a new and improved app early next year – well in time for the local elections.”

(Bad luck, then, should there end up being another very snap, Brexit-induced UK General Election in the meanwhile, as some have suggested may yet come to pass. But I digress… )

The supplier of the Conservative Campaigner app is — or was — a US-based add developer called uCampaign, which had also built branded apps for Trump-Pence 2016; the Republican National Committee; and the UK’s Vote Leave Brexit campaign, to name a few of the political campaigns it has counted as customers.

Here’s a few more: The (pro-gun) National Rife Association and the (anti-abortion) SBA List.

We know the name of the Conservative Campaigner app’s supplier because this summer we raised privacy concerns about the app — on account of its use of uCampaign’s boilerplate privacy policy, if you clicked to read the app’s privacy policy earlier this year.

The wording of uCampaign’s privacy policy suggested the Conservative Campaigner app could be harvesting users’ mobile phone contacts — if they chose to sync their contacts book with it.

The privacy policy for the app was subsequently changed to point to the Conservative Party’s own privacy policy — with the change of privacy policy taking place just before a tough new EU-wide data protection framework, GDPR, came into force on May 25 this year.

Prior to May 23, the privacy policy of the Conservatives’ digital campaigning app suggests it was harvesting contacts data from users — and potentially sharing non-users’ personal information with entities of uCampaign’s choosing (given, for example, the company’s privacy policy gave itself the right to “share your Personal Information with other organizations, groups, causes, campaigns, political organizations, and our clients that we believe have similar viewpoints, principles or objectives as us”).

This sort of consentless scraping of large amounts of networked personal data — by sucking up information on users’ friend groups and other personal connections — has of course had a massive spotlight thrown on it this year, as a result of the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal in which the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users was extracted from the social network via a quiz app that used a (now defunct) Facebook friends API to grab data on non-users who would not have even had the chance to agree to the app’s terms.

Safe to say, this modus operandi wasn’t cool then — and it’s certainly not cool now.

Politicians all over the globe have been shaken awake by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and are now raising all sorts of concerns about how data and digital tools are being used (and or misused and abused).

The EU parliament recently called for an independent audit of Facebook, for example.

In the UK, a committee that’s been probing the impact of social media-accelerated disinformation on democratic processes published a report this summer calling for a levy on social media to defend democracy. Its lengthy preliminary report also suggested urgent amendments to domestic electoral law to reflect the use of digital technologies for political campaigning.

Though the UK’s Conservative minority government — and the party behind the now on-pause Conservative Campaigner app — apparently disagrees on the need for speed, declining in its response last week to accept most of the committee’s laundry list of recommended changes.

The DCMS committee’s inquiry into political campaigns’ use (and misuse) of personal data continues — now at a transnational level.

An ethical pause?

Shortly after we published our privacy concerns about the Conservative Campaigner app, the UK’s data protection watchdog issued its own a lengthy report detailing extensive concerns about how UK political parties were misusing personal data — and calling for an ethical pause on the use of microtargeting for election campaigning purposes.

Which does rather beg the question whether the Conservative Campaigner app going AWOL now, until a reboot under a new supplier (presumably) next year, might not represent just such an ‘ethical pause’.

The app is, after all, only just over a year old.

We asked the Conservative Party a number of questions about the Campaigner app via email — after a press office spokeswoman declined to discuss the matter on the telephone.

Five hours later it emailed the following brief statement, attributed to a Conservative spokesperson:

We work with a number of different suppliers and all Conservative party campaigning is compliant with the relevant data protection legislation including GDPR.

The spokesperson did not engage with the substance of the vast majority of our concerns — such as those relating to the app’s handling of people’s data and the legal bases for any transfers of UK voter data to the US.

Instead the spokesperson reiterated the in-app notification which claims “the supplier” is no longer supporting clients based in Europe.

They also said the party is currently reviewing its campaigning tools, without providing any further detail.

We’ve included our full list of questions at the bottom of this post.

We’ve also reached out to the ICO to ask if it had any concerns related to how the Conservative Campaigner app was handling people’s data.

Similarly, the former deputy director & head of digital strategy for the Conservative party, Anthony Hind, declined to engage with the same data protection concerns when we raised them with him directly, back in July.

According to his LinkedIn profile he’s since moved on from the Conservatives to head up social media for the Confederation of British Industry.

For this report we also reached out to uCampaign’s founder and CEO, Thomas Peters, to ask for confirmation on the company’s situation vis-a-vis European clients.

At the time of writing Peters had not responded to our emails. We’ll update this story with any uCampaign response.

The company’s website still includes the UK Conservative Party listed as a client — though the language used on the webpage does not make it explicit whether or not the party is a current client…

Another graphic on the same page plots the UK flag on a world map depicting what uCampaign dubs its “global platform”, where it’s marked along with several other European flags — including Ireland, France, Germany and Malta, suggesting uCampaign has — or had — multiple European clients.

Here’s the full list of questions we put to the Conservatives about their campaigner app. To our eye it has answered just one of them:

Can you confirm — on the record — the reasons for the app being pulled?

Does the Conservative Party intend to continue working with uCampaign for the new campaign app that will relaunch next year? Or does the party have a new supplier?

If the latter, where is the new supplier based? In the UK or in the US?

Did the Conservative Party have any concerns at all related to using uCampaigner as a supplier? (Given, for example, concerns flagged about its data privacy practices by one of the DCMS committee’s recent reports — following an inquiry investigating digital campaigning.)

If the Conservative Party was aware of data privacy concerns pertaining to uCampaign’s practices can you confirm when the party became aware of such concerns?

Was the party aware that the privacy policy it used for the app prior to May 23, 2018 was uCampaign’s own privacy policy?

This privacy policy stated that the app could harvest data from users’ mobile phone contacts and share that data with unknown third parties of the developer’s choosing — including other political campaigns. Is the Conservative Party comfortable with having its supporters’ data shared with other political campaigns?

What due diligence did the Conservative Party carry out before it selected uCampaign as its app supplier?

After signing up the supplier, did the Conservative Party carry out a privacy impact assessment related to how the app operates?

Please confirm all the data points that the app was collecting from users, and what each of those data points was being used for

Where was app user data being processed? In the US, where uCampaign is based, or in the UK where potential voters live?

If the US, what was the legal basis for any transfer of data from UK users to the US?

Is the Conservative Party confident its use of the campaigner app did not breach UK data protection law?

Earlier this year the former Cabinet Minister Dominic Grieve suggested that the bosses of tech giants involved in the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal should be jailed for their part in abusing online data for political and financial gain. Does the Conservative Party support Grieve’s position on online data abuse?

Has anyone been sacked or sanctioned for their part in procuring uCampaign as the app supplier — and/or overseeing the operation of the Conservative Campaigner app itself?

Will the Conservative Party commit to notifying all individuals whose data was shared with uCampaign without their explicit consent?

Can the Conservative Party confirm how many individuals had their personal data shared with uCampaign?

Has the Information Commissioner’s Office raised any concerns with the Conservative Party about the Campaigner app?

Has the Conservative Party itself reported any concerns about the app/uCampaign to the ICO?

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2DfMioJ Campaign tool supplied to UK’s governing party by Trump-Pence app dev quietly taken out of service Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2JweEeS
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Instagram Analytics Launches In Beta

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Instagram Analytics Launches In Beta

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An ethical pause?

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