Free money for startups? It’s possible with MainStreet’s platform for economic development incentives

Startups need money. State and local governments need startups and the employment growth they offer. It should be obvious that the two groups can work together and make each other happy. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Each year, governments spend tens of billions of dollars on economic development incentives designed to attract employers and jobs to their communities. There are a huge number of challenges, however, for startups and individual contributors trying to apply for these programs.

First, economic development leaders typically focus on massive, flagship projects that are splashy and will drive the news cycle and bring good media attention to their elected official bosses. So, for example, you get a massive, $10 billion Foxconn plant in Wisconsin tied to hundreds of millions of incentives, only to see the project sputter into the ground.

Then there is the paperwork. As you’d expect with any government application process, it can be arduous to find the right incentive programs, apply for credits at the right time, and max out the opportunities available.

That’s where MainStreet comes in.

It’s CEO and founder Doug Ludlow’s third company. He previously founded Hipster, which sold to AOL, and The Happy Home Company, which sold to Google. After that transaction, Ludlow went on to become chief of staff for SMB ads at the tech giant, where he saw firsthand the challenges that startups and all small companies face in growing outside of major urban hubs like San Francisco.

When he and his co-founders Dan Lindquist and Daniel Griffin first started, they were focused on what Ludlow described as “a network of remote work hubs.” As they were experimenting, last November they tried paying people to leave the Bay Area, offering them $10,000 if they moved to other cities. The offer caused a sensation, with outlets like CNN covering the news.

While the interest from customers was great, what ignited Ludlow and his co-founders’ passions was that “literally dozens of cities, states and counties reached out, letting us know that they had an incentive program.” As the team explored further, they realized there was a huge untapped opportunity to connect startups to these pre-existing programs.

MainStreet was born, and it’s an idea that has also attracted the attention of investors. The company announced today that it raised a $2.3 million round from Gradient Ventures, Weekend Fund, and others.

Startups apply for economic incentives through MainStreet’s platform, and then MainStreet takes a 20% cut of any successful application. Notably, that cut is only taken when the incentive is actually disbursed (there’s no upfront cost), and there is also no on-going subscription fee to use the platform. “If you identify the credit that you’re able to use six months from now, we will charge you six months from now, when you’re actually getting that credit. It seems to be a business model that is aligned well with with founders,” Ludlow said.

Right now, he says that the average MainStreet client saves $51,000, and that MainStreet has crossed the $1 million ARR run rate threshold.

Right now, the company’s core clientele are startups applying for payroll credits and research and development credits, but Ludlow says that MainStreet is working to expand beyond its tech roots to all small businesses such as restaurants. The company also wants to expand the number of economic development programs that startups can apply for. Given the myriad of governments and programs, there are hundreds if not thousands of more programs to onboard onto the platform.

MainStreet’s team. Photo via MainStreet

While MainStreet is helping startups and small businesses, it also wants to help governments improve their operations around economic development. With MainStreet, “we can report back to cities and states showing exactly what their tax dollars or tax credits are being utilized for,” Ludlow said. “So the accountability is orders of magnitude greater than they had before. So already, there’s this better system for tracking the success of incentives.”

The big question for MainStreet this year is navigating the crisis around the global pandemic of COVID-19. While more small businesses than ever need help navigating credits, state and local governments have suffered huge shortfalls in revenues as taxes have dried up and Washington continues to debate over what if any aid to offer. There’s no money for economic development, yet, economic development has never been more important than right now.

Ultimately, MainStreet is pushing the vanguard of economic development thinking forward away from massive checks designed to underwrite industrial factories to a more flexible and dynamic model of incentivizing knowledge workers to move to cities outside the major global cities. It’s an interesting bet, and one that at the very least, will help many startups get the economic incentives they rightly have access to.

Outside of Gradient and Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, SV Angel, Remote First Capital, Basement Fund, Basecamp Ventures, Backend Capital and a host of angels participated in the round.

https://ift.tt/2Y1lyS5 Free money for startups? It’s possible with MainStreet’s platform for economic development incentives https://ift.tt/3hrssb0

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Rewarding civic pride and boosting the local economy? Akron, Ohio is trying out a startup for that

Akron, Ohio, the hometown of LeBron James; the seat of the U.S. tire industry; the 127 largest city in the U.S.; and the home of America’s first toy company, is now the latest site of a global experiment in whether cities can use behavioral economics to help foster good citizenship.

Thanks to the work of the city’s deputy mayor for integrated development, James Hardy, Akron is the first city to roll out services from an Israeli-based company called Colu. A startup backed by just over $20 million in financing from American and Israeli investors, the company has developed an app-based rewards service that cities can roll out to provide perks to users.

In Akron’s case, the initiative rewards points for shopping at local businesses that can be redeemed for discounts at those stores. The initial effort, which includes a platform for businesses to market directly to the app’s users, focuses on businesses owned by women and minorities (a response to the movement for racial justice that has sprung up in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis).

Akron is the first city of what Colu founder Amos Meiri expects to be a nationwide rollout throughout the U.S. The company already has managed to ink another agreement with the city of Chula Vista, Calif.

Colu, which has raised its capital from investors associated with blockchain technologies like Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group; the Boston-based venture capital firm, Spark Capital; New York’s Box Group and the Israeli corporate conglomerate, IDB Group, has deep ties to the cryptocurrency world of alternative financial instruments through Meiri.

One of the original architects of the Ethereum protocol, Meiri’s work with Colu is in some ways an extension of that effort to create new kinds of economies powered by alternative financial mechanisms.

Meiri said cities typically pay for Colu out of their marketing budgets as a new way to communicate and attempt to influence civic behavior.

For Akron’s government officials, the company’s services are a way to boost locally owned businesses that have been hit hard by the state’s attempts to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

“Our locally owned small businesses are facing enormous challenges and we need out-of-the-box ideas that safely connect them to consumers and turn local spending into a source of pride for residents,” said Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan, in a statement. “Our partnership with Colu will enable the city to reward customers for shopping local, improving revenues for our small businesses while helping folks stretch their dollars.”

Earlier work with the municipal government in Tel Aviv promoted sustainable business practice and encouraged businesses to do more to manage their waste and carbon footprint by introducing a “green label.” Businesses that followed the city’s guidelines were given the label and shoppers were encouraged to frequent those merchants.

Colu envisions itself as more than just a marketing and rewards platform for businesses. The company hopes it can draw users into a kind of social networking platform for civic engagement where users can share their own stories about city-life and their interactions with local business owners and the community.

In some ways, it’s a kinder, gentler version of China’s social credit scoring system, which is also designed to influence civic behavior. In this formulation, there’s a rewards system, but no mechanisms to punish citizens for bad behavior.

“Akron has a long history of innovation within our economy — this initiative draws on that legacy,” said Deputy Mayor Hardy, in a statement. “By putting the future of Akron’s locally owned small businesses in the palm of our citizens’ hands, we hope to make it easy for consumers to keep their money local and continue to strengthen our incredible community.”

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Rocket startup Skyrora achieves a successful sub-orbital launch from Scottish island

This past weekend was a busy one for rocket launches, including for new launch companies hoping to join the ranks of SpaceX and Rocket Lab as private, operational space launch providers. Edinburgh-based Skyrora achieved a significant milestone for its program, successfully launching its Skylark Nano rocket from an island off the coast of Scotland on Saturday.

Skyrora has been developing its launch system with a goal of devouring affordable transportation for small payloads. The company has flown its Skylark Nano twice previously, including a first launch back in 2018, but this is the first time it has taken off from Shetland, a Scottish site that is among three proposed commercial spaceports to be located in Scotland.

Skylark Nano is a development spacecraft that Skyrora created while it works on its Skylark-L and Skyrora XL orbital commercial launch vehicles. Nano doesn’t reach space — it flies to a height of around 6KM (roughly 20,000 feet) but it does help the company demonstrate its propulsion technologies, and also gather crucial information that helps it in developing its Skylark L suborbital commercial launch craft, as well as Skyrora XL, which will aim to serve customers with orbital payload needs.

Skylark L is currently in development, and Skyrora recently achieved a successful full static test fire of that rocket. The goal is to begin launching commercially from a U.K.-based spaceport as early as 2022.

Skyrora’s approach is also unique because it employs both additive manufacturing (3D printing) in construction of its vehicles and uses a kerosene fuel developed from discarded plastic waste that the company claims produces fewer emissions than traditional rocket fuel.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Rocket startup Skyrora achieves a successful sub-orbital launch from Scottish island https://ift.tt/2C3LvYB

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Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: WhatsApp launches payments https://ift.tt/2N2tg89 https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu June 15, 2020 at 06:28PM

WhatsApp is adding support for in-app payments, Apple is upgrading the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro desktop and we argue about the future of startup hubs.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 15, 2020.

1. WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil

After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments. Users in Brazil will be the first to be able to send and receive money through the messaging app, using Facebook Pay.

WhatsApp says that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use, but comes with a 3.99% processing fee for businesses receiving payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.

2. Apple adds new MacBook Pro graphics option and Mac Pro SSD upgrade kit

A week before kicking off WWDC, Apple introduced a pair of upgrades to its pro-level hardware lines. Both the 16-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro desktop are getting select internal upgrades, starting today.

3. 3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs

Three TechCrunch writers address one of the big questions about the future: Will tech continue to centralize in hubs like San Francisco and New York City, or will remote work and all the other second-order effects lead to a more decentralized startup ecosystem? (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Interstellar Technologies’ privately developed MOMO-5 rocket falls short of reaching space

The company first launched a vehicle in 2017, but the launch didn’t go exactly as planned and failed to reach space. In 2019, its MOMO-3 sounding rocket did break the Karman line, though just barely, and unfortunately its MOMO-5 sounding rocket launched over the weekend did not make space, as planned.

5. Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets

The Exchange is Alex Wilhelm’s regular dive into the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies. These themes might sound familiar to Daily Crunch readers, since we’ve linked to plenty of Alex’s pieces, but now it’s an official column with an official name.

6. Tesla’s US-made Model 3 vehicles now come equipped with wireless charging and USB-C ports

Tesla Model 3 vehicles produced at its Fremont, Calif. factory will reportedly come standard with a wireless charging pad and USB-C ports, upgrades that were first spotted by Drive Tesla Canada.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses Facebook’s new startup venture fund, while the Monday news roundup covers the latest problems at Quibi. Over at Original Content, we review the latest season of “Queer Eye.”

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

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VESoft raises $8M to meet China’s growing need for graph databases

Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors, like Neo4j and TigerGraph, had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their relationships, such as those used for social media analysis, e-commerce recommendations and financial risk management.

VESoft is ready for further growth after closing an $8 million funding round led by Redpoint China Ventures, an investment firm launched by Silicon Valley-based Redpoint Ventures in 2005. Existing investor Matrix Partners China also participated in the Series pre-A round. The new capital will allow the startup to develop products and expand to markets in North America, Europe and other parts of Asia.

The 30-people team is comprised of former employees from Alibaba, Facebook, Huawei and IBM. It’s based in Hangzhou, a scenic city known for its rich history and housing Alibaba and its financial affiliate Ant Financial, where Ye previously worked as a senior engineer after his four-year stint with Facebook in California. From 2017 to 2018, the entrepreneur noticed that Ant Financial’s customers were increasingly interested in adopting graph databases as an alternative to relational databases, a model that had been popular since the 80s and normally organizes data into tables.

“While relational databases are capable of achieving many functions carried out by graph databases… they deteriorate in performance as the quantity of data grows,” Ye told TechCrunch during an interview. “We didn’t use to have so much data.”

Information explosion is one reason why Chinese companies are turning to graph databases, which can handle millions of transactions to discover patterns within scattered data. The technology’s rise is also a response to new forms of online businesses that depend more on relationships.

“Take recommendations for example. The old model recommends content based purely on user profiles, but the problem of relying on personal browsing history is it fails to recommend new things. That was fine for a long time as the Chinese [internet] market was big enough to accommodate many players. But as the industry becomes saturated and crowded… companies need to ponder how to retain existing users, lengthen their time spent, and win users from rivals.”

The key lies in serving people content and products they find appealing. Graph databases come in handy, suggested Ye, when services try to predict users’ interest or behavior as the model uncovers what their friends or people within their social circles like. “That’s a lot more effective than feeding them what’s trending.”

Neo4j compares relational and graph databases (Link)

The company has made its software open source, which the founder believed can help cultivate a community of graph database users and educate the market in China. It will also allow VESoft to reach more engineers in the English-speaking world who are well-acquainted with the open-source culture.

“There is no such thing as being ‘international’ or ‘domestic’ for a technology-driven company. There are no boundaries between countries in the open-source world,” reckoned Ye.

When it comes to generating income, the startup plans to launch a paid version for enterprises, which will come with customized plug-ins and host services.

The Nebula Graph, the brand of VESoft’s database product, is now serving 20 enterprise clients from areas across social media, e-commerce and finance, including big names like food delivery giant Meituan, popular social commerce app Xiaohongshu and e-commerce leader JD.com. A number of overseas companies are also trialing Nebula.

The time is ripe for enterprise-facing startups with a technological moat in China as the market for consumers has been divided by incumbents like Tencent and Alibaba. This makes fundraising relatively easy for VESoft. The founder is confident that Chinese companies are rapidly catching up with their Western counterparts in the space, for the gargantuan amount of data and the myriad of ways data is used in the country “will propel the technology forward.”

https://ift.tt/3d6IljE VESoft raises $8M to meet China’s growing need for graph databases https://ift.tt/30KCr5k

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Tonik raises $21 million to launch digital bank in the Philippines

A wave of digital banks, or neo-banks, has flourished in recent years in Western nations as people begin to flee megabanks.

While most of these startups are yet to prove they can turn a profit, entrepreneurs are beginning to replicate similar ideas in South Asian markets, where most people don’t have accounts with traditional banks at all. And for now, venture capitalists are backing this attempt.

Tonik Financial, a two-year-old startup in the Philippines, said on Monday it has raised $21 million in a new financing round to launch its digital bank aimed at the Southeast Asian market by September this year.

Sequoia Capital India and Point72 Ventures led Tonik’s Series A round, while existing investors Insignia and Credence participated in it, the startup said, which has raised $27 million to date.

Tonik, which recently received the license to operate a digital bank in the Philippines, said it will commercially launch the digital bank in the third quarter of this year.

Greg Krasnov, the founder and chief executive of Tonik, said according to his estimates, the retail savings market in the Philippines is worth $140 billion and the Southeast Asian nation also presents a $100 billion opportunity in unsecured consumer lending. TechCrunch could not independently corroborate these market estimations.

Krasnov, who has previously incubated four financial services startups in Asia, said the coronavirus pandemic has prompted people to double down on their savings and has made it apparent that the vast majority of people in the Philippines need access to a digital bank.

“In the Philippines, where over 70% of the population remains unbanked, we are observing a rapid jump in consumer demand for digital banking and digital transfers since the start of the year,” he said.

“We are preparing to bring a highly differentiated experience to the Filipino consumer to address these needs and are honored to be supported in this by the regulators who have encouraged innovation and welcomed technology solutions to bolster financial inclusion,” he added.

In several South Asian markets, where, like the Philippines, much of the population remains unbanked, startups are racing to fill the void. But interestingly, most of them are serving startups and other small and medium businesses — and not individuals.

In India, for instance, Bangalore-based NiYo Solutions and Open are two of the heavily-backed startups that have amassed over a million businesses on their platforms.

RazorPay, another Bangalore-based startup, last year launched a range of features, such as corporate credit cards, and a single dashboard to help businesses manage transactions and provided them with the ability to automate recurring payouts. Some of these features are currently not offered by a traditional bank.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Tonik raises $21 million to launch digital bank in the Philippines https://ift.tt/37ubDrv

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Sinch to buy India’s ACL Mobile for $70 million

{rss:content:encoded} Sinch to buy India’s ACL Mobile for $70 million https://ift.tt/2Y2WOZR https://ift.tt/3e51KTj June 15, 2020 at 09:33AM

Sinch said on Monday it has agreed to buy Indian firm ACL Mobile for £56 million (roughly $70 million) in what is the fourth acquisition deal the Swedish mobile voice and messaging firm has entered into at the height of a global pandemic.

The Swedish firm said acquiring ACL Mobile will enable it to leverage the Indian firm’s connections with local mobile operators in the world’s second largest internet market, as well as in Malaysia and UAE, to expand its end-to-end connectivity without working with a third-party firm.

Twenty-year-old ACL Mobile, which has headquarters in Delhi, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, enables businesses to interact with their customers through SMS, email, WhatsApp and other channels. In a press statement, the Indian firm said it serves more than 500 enterprise customers, including Flipkart, OLX, MakeMyTrip, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.

“With ACL we gain critical scale in the world’s second-largest mobile market. We gain customers, expertise and technology and we further strengthen our global messaging product for discerning businesses with global needs,” said Sinch chief executive Oscar Werner.

The Indian firm, which employs 288 people, reported gross profits of $14.2 million on sales of about $65 million in the financial year that ended in March. During the same period, ACL Mobile claims it delivered 47 billion messages on behalf of its enterprise customers.

“Although the long-term growth outlook is favorable, lower commercial activity in India due to the COVID-19 pandemic means that the near-term growth outlook is less predictable,” Sinch said of ACL Mobile’s future outlook.

ACL Mobile is the fourth acquisition Sinch has unveiled since March this year. Last month the company said it was buying SAP’s Digital Interconnect for $250 million. In March, it announced deals to buy Wavy and Chatlayer.

Sinch, founded in 2008, employs more than 700 people in over 40 locations worldwide and is increasingly expanding to more markets. Last month it said acquiring SAP’s Digital Interconnect will help it expand in the U.S. market. The company says it is profitable.

“Together with Sinch we are scaling up to become one of the leading global players in our industry. I’m excited about this next chapter and the many new opportunities that we can pursue together,” said Sanjay K Goyal, founder and chief executive of ACL Mobile.

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Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets

When 2020 began, the year seemed set to include another year of record-setting venture capital investment and, perhaps, some long-awaited IPOs. All that quickly faded when COVID-19 spread globally, shutting economies, undercutting swaths of the business world and rearranging the working life in countries around the globe.

Here at TechCrunch we’re navigating the changing landscape, talking to the founders and venture capitalists that make up the startup realm that we cover, hoping to decipher the new normal.

One way that we’ve done that this year is through a daily look at the private markets. This regular effort (you can read the full archive here) has been an attempt to understand the financial side of the startup world, and how the public markets exert gravity (or lift) on private companies, especially during tumultuous economic times.

The project kicked off with a look at companies that have reached the $100 million ARR mark (a series that is still ongoing), and has touched on all sorts of things since, including the growing popularity of venture debt, China’s VC slowdown, lots of coverage of VC-backed companies trying to go public and, recently, why API startups are so hot right now.

Today I’m happy to announce that we’re giving the daily post a name and a lovely set of art. Previously called nothing at all, the series is now called “The Exchange.”

As a writer, this is an exciting moment. I’ve written a daily column focused on the markets since mid-2016 for various publications, but I’ve never had one that was as put together as The Exchange can now claim to be. A big thanks to Eric and Walter and Henry and Bryce and Holden and Natasha for their help and encouragement.

Looking ahead, we’re seeing more mega rounds than I would have anticipated, more market demand for tech IPOs than I think anyone anticipated, record highs for tech stocks until about 48 minutes ago and lots of new rounds worth digging into from a trends perspective. So, there’s a lot to do and I’m excited to talk about it all with you each and every weekday morning on The Exchange.

That’s it for now. The Exchange comes out Monday through Friday morning on TechCrunch for Extra Crunch subscribers. Use the code “EXCHANGE” for a discount if you’d like one.

A huge thanks to everyone who already reads this series, and a hug for everyone who’s signed up so that they can access it. Here’s to another hundred entries. And then one hundred more.

https://ift.tt/37CXSXp Introducing The Exchange, your daily dive into the private markets https://ift.tt/2AtdpNy

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Equity Monday: Quibi, two Boston rounds, and a shift to pessimism

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our short-form week-starter in which we go over the weekend, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds, and dig into what is stuck on our minds.

So, by section then:

The Weekend:

• The market narrative seems to have changed from optimism to pessimism, impacting stock prices and possibly closing the IPO window some, after it had unexpectedly opened.
• Quibi news is out that isn’t great: The mobile-first launch that came during a lockdown hasn’t helped the hugely-funded service that had to convince the world that its content format was great. We calculate its effective cost-per-subscriber number and it isn’t super great.

The Week Ahead:

• Earnings from Groupon and Oracle. The former could tell us a little bit about the health of the consumer perhaps? And Oracle is a player in the cloud space, so its earnings might help us understand what’s up in that world. See, not everything cloud-related comes from Seattle.
• And we note the grip of tech conferences that were put on hold due to COVID-19, wondering what they might look like next year; do we ever go back to the way that things used to be?

Funding Rounds:

• Duck Creed raises $230 million, which Bloomberg notes as a pre-IPO round.
• Appfire, also from Boston, raises a $49 million round. We want to read this S-1, badly.
• Tonik raises $21 million to launch a Southeast Asian digital bank.

What’s On Our Minds:

• The Exchange launches today, which you can learn more about over on TechCrunch.com. We’ll add a link here in a bit, but check this archive to find the post!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity Monday: Quibi, two Boston rounds, and a shift to pessimism https://ift.tt/3e4Lwd6

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WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil

After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp has finally pulled the trigger on payments in its app. Today the Facebook-owned messaging service announced that users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of its messaging app, using Facebook Pay, the payments service WhatsApp owner Facebook launched last year.

WhatsApp says in its blog post that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use (that is, no commission fee taken) but businesses pay a processing fee to receive payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.

You use it by linking up your WhatsApp account to your credit or debit card, with initial local partners including Banco do Brasil, Nubank, and Sicredi. Cielo, a payments processor, is also working with WhatsApp to complete transactions. “We have built an open model to welcome more partners in the future,” it noted.

The news comes a little bit as a surprise: the company has been testing this payments service among users in India for months, so many assumed that the world’s second largest internet market would be the debut region for the service. But Facebook remains stuck in a regulatory maze in India that has prevented it from expanding the payments service in what is otherwise its biggest market. (And indeed, it would have an interesting position there because of that: while there are a number of other digital payments services, including Google Pay and PayTM’s service, there are no clear, large and popular competitors offering payments within a messaging app in the country.)

WhatsApp had been adopted informally for commercial purposes almost from the very start: small business owners have used WhatsApp to exchange messages with users around the sale of goods, what is in stock and so on. But under the wing of Facebook — which acquired the company in 2014 for $19 billion — the company started in earnest the big task of bringing in a more formal set of business services.

That’s included the launch of WhatsApp Business, which lets SMBs post catalogues and stock links within the app; advertisers on Facebook also can create links through to their WhatsApp accounts.

But now with payments, WhatsApp, which has amassed over 2 billion users, is finally taking a more comprehensive commercial plunge, giving people not just a place to chat about a product, or even send payment details, but now to actually transact.

And that, in turn, gives WhatsApp and Facebook another shot at building a revenue stream based on its vast scale, one which does not turn the app over to monetising its users through ads and the data that is amassed around them.

“Payments on WhatsApp are beginning to roll out to people across Brazil beginning today and we look forward to bringing it to everyone as we go forward,” the company said.

Users in Brazil will be able to use the payments service on WhatsApp to make purchases from local businesses without leaving their chat, the Facebook-owned service said.

“The over 10 million small and micro businesses are the heartbeat of Brazil’s communities. It’s become second nature to send a zap to a business to get questions answered. Now in addition to viewing a store’s catalog, customers will be able to send payments for products as well,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Although WhatsApp has in theory been working on payments for years, from what we understand there were a lot of delays in part due to how Facebook wanted WhatsApp to implement it. Now that it’s launching with Facebook Pay, it seems that we know how that struggle landed.

As for subsequent regions for launching the service, we’ve reached out to Facebook and WhatsApp to ask for more specific details. Given the link with Facebook Pay, one obvious guess might be that we’ll see it rolled out in markets where that service is now live, which include the US and UK.

More to follow…

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J WhatsApp finally launches payments, starting in Brazil Manish Singh https://ift.tt/3e55Bjx
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Maria Ressa, founder of Filipino independent media site Rappler, found guilty in cyber libel trial

Veteran journalist Maria Ressa, the founder of Filipino independent news site Rappler, was found guilty on Monday of cyber libel charges by a Manila court. She faces up to six years in prison. Critics of the charges, which include prominent human rights and press freedom advocates, say charges filed against Ressa and Reynaldo Santos Jr, a former Rappler researcher and editor, demonstrate how the government is cracking down on media freedom and the independent press in the Philippines.

After Ressa was arrested in February 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement that said Ressa’s treatment “appears to be the latest element in a pattern of intimidation of a media outlet that has fiercely guarded its independence and its right to conduct in-depth investigations and to criticize the authorities.”

Both Ressa and the journalists of Rappler, which was founded in 2012, have written critically about the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, conducting investigations into corruption charges.

Ressa and Santos were arrested in 2019 on cyber libel security charges related to an article published in 2012 that reported on the alleged ties between Supreme Court Justice Renato Corona, who was impeached in 2011, and wealthy businessmen including Wilfredo Keng.

Keng filed the cyber libel complaint against the two journalists in 2017. The five year gap between the article’s publication and Keng’s complaint was much longer than the one-year prescriptive period for ordinary libel in the Philippines’ penal code, and in order to charge Ressa and Santos, the Department of Justice extended that period to 12 years for cyber libel. Rappler’s legal counsel argued this could impact their constitutionally protected rights.

In today’s verdict, issued by Manila Regional Trial Court Judge Rainelda Estacio-Montesa, Rappler was found to have no liability, but Ressa and Santos were both found guilty and ordered to pay 200,000 pesos (about $3,978 U.S. dollars) in moral damages and another 200,000 pesos fine in exemplary damages. They are entitled to post-conviction bail and an appeal the verdict.

In a statement after the verdict, Amal Clooney, the head of Ressa’s legal defense team, said, “This conviction is an affront to the rule of law, a stark warning to the press, and a blow to democracy in the Philippines. I hope the appeals court will set the record straight in the case.”

Ressa said, “Freedom of the press is the foundation of every single right you hvae as a Filipino citizen. If we can’t hold power to account, we can’t do anything. Are we going to lose freedom of the press? Will it be death by a thousand cuts, or are we going to hold the line so that we protect the rights that are enshrined in our constitution?”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Maria Ressa, founder of Filipino independent media site Rappler, found guilty in cyber libel trial https://ift.tt/3hrcfTb

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ByteDance to shut down Vigo apps in India

Chinese internet giant ByteDance has announced plans to discontinue two of its apps in India, its biggest overseas market, and urged its users to move to TikTok.

Vigo Video and Vigo Lite, two apps that allow users to create and share short-form sketches and lip-syncing to Bollywood songs, posted a message early Monday (local time) to announce that they would be discontinued at the end of October this year.

In their message, titled “a farewell letter,” ByteDance said it was saddened to shut down the apps but did not offer an explanation for the decision. Indian news outlet Entrackr first spotted the letter.

Unlike TikTok, ByteDance’s most popular app, Vigo Video and Vigo Lite have struggled to make inroads in the world’s second largest internet market. While TikTok has more than 200 million users in India, Vigo Video had about 4 million monthly active users last month and Vigo Lite could only amass 1.5 million users, according to one of the top mobile insight firms — data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.

While Vigo Video gained fewer than 1 million users in a year, Vigo Lite shredded just as many during the same period, the data showed.

Both the apps counted India as their biggest market but have been available in several other markets, including neighboring nation Bangladesh, for instance. It’s unclear whether ByteDance is discontinuing the app in every market. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move, despite the apps’ poor reception in India, comes as a surprise. Recruitment posts submitted by ByteDance as late as last month described Vigo as one of the company’s biggest businesses in India.

Other posts reveal that the company is looking to hire executives to aggressively explore ways to monetize its services in the country. ByteDance’s TikTok app has been scrutinized in India in recent weeks for failing to actively remove videos that promoted violence, animal cruelty, racism, child abuse, and objectification of women.

In its message to users on Vigo apps today, ByteDance said it will help them migrate their videos to TikTok. On TikTok, “you will be able to show your talent to a larger group of friends. We are eager to see you [there]!” the message reads.

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