Dozens of tech companies sign ‘Tech for Good Call’ following French initiative

A couple of years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron initiated the Tech for Good Summit by inviting 50 tech CEOs to discuss the challenges in the tech industry and make some announcements.

Usually, tech CEOs meet ahead of Viva Technology, a tech event in Paris. This year, Viva Technology had to be canceled, which means that tech CEOs couldn’t get together, take a group photo and say that they want to make the world a better place.

In the meantime, dozens of tech CEOs have chosen to sign a common pledge. Despite the positive impact of some technological breakthroughs, they collectively recognize that everything is not perfect with the tech industry.

“Recognizing that such progress may be hindered by negative externalities, including unfair competition such as abuse of dominant or systemic position, and fragmentation of the internet; that, without appropriate safeguards, technology can also be used to threaten fundamental freedoms and human rights or weaken democracy; that, unless we implement appropriate measures to combat it, some individuals and organizations inevitably use it for criminal purposes, including in the context of conflicts,” the pledge says.

Among other things, companies that sign the pledge agree to cooperate when it comes to fighting toxic content, such as child sexual abuse material and terrorist content. They promise to “responsibly address hate speech, disinformation and opinion manipulation.”

Interestingly, they also agree that they should “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where [they] operate.” This has been an ongoing issue between the French government and the U.S. government. The OECD and the European Union have also discussed implementing a tax on tech giants so that they report to tax authorities in each country where they operate.

France starts collecting tax on tech giants

Other commitments mention privacy, social inclusiveness, diversity and equity, fighting all sorts of discriminations and more. As the name suggests, the pledge revolves around using technology for good things.

Now let’s talk about who signed the pledge. There are some well-known names, such as Sundar Pichai from Alphabet (Google), Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Brad Smith from Microsoft, Evan Spiegel from Snap and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square. Other companies include Cisco, Deliveroo, Doctolib, IBM, OpenClassrooms, Uber, etc.

Some nonprofit organizations also signed the pledge, such as the Mozilla Foundation, Simplon, Tech for Good France, etc.

But it’s more interesting to see who’s not on the list. Amazon and Apple have chosen not to sign the pledge. There have been discussions with Apple but the company eventually chose not to participate.

“Amazon didn’t want to sign it and I invite you to ask them directly,” a source close to the French president said. The French government is clearly finger-pointing in Amazon’s case.

This is an odd move as it’s a non-binding pledge. You can say that you want to “contribute fairly to taxes” and then argue that you’re paying everything that you owe — tax optimization is not tax evasion, after all. Worse, you can say that you’re building products with “privacy by design” in mind while you’re actually building entire companies based on personalized ads and micro-targeting.

In other words, the Tech for Good summit was created for photo opportunities (like this photo from 2018 below). Tech CEOs want to be treated like heads of state, while Macron wants to position himself as a tech-savvy president. It’s a win-win for them, and a waste of time for everyone else.

Some nonprofit organizations and governance groups are actually working hard to build digital commons. But big tech companies are using the same lexicon with these greenwashing-style campaigns.

In 2018, hundreds of organizations signed the Paris Call. In 2019, the biggest social media companies signed the Christchurch Call. And now, we have the Tech for Good Call. Those calls can’t replace proper regulation.

Image Credits: Charles Platiau / AFP / Getty Images

https://ift.tt/33trUfr Dozens of tech companies sign ‘Tech for Good Call’ following French initiative https://ift.tt/3lo8miK

Read More

Materialize scores $40 million investment for SQL streaming database

Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Ventures.

While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year that had been led by Lightspeed, bringing the total raised to $40 million.

These firms see a solid founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Dataflow project on which the company is based.

Narayan says that the company believes fundamentally that every company needs to be a real-time company and it will take a streaming database to make that happen. Further, he says the company is built using SQL because of its ubiquity, and the founders wanted to make sure that customers could access and make use of that data quickly without learning a new query language.

“Our goal is really to help any business to understand streaming data and build intelligent applications without using or needing any specialized skills. Fundamentally what that means is that you’re going to have to go to businesses using the technologies and tools that they understand, which is standard SQL,” Narayan explained.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round sees this standard querying ability as a key part of the technology. “As more businesses integrate streaming data into their decision making pipelines, the inability to ask questions of this data with ease is becoming a non-starter. Materialize’s unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves this problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform,” he said.

They would naturally get compared to Confluent, a streaming database built on top of the Apache Kafka open source streaming database project, but Narayan says his company uses straight SQL for querying, while Confluent uses its own flavor.

The company still is working out the commercial side of the house and currently provides a typical service offering for paying customers with support and a service agreement (SLA). The startup is working on a SaaS version of the product, which it expects to release some time next year.

Cockroach Labs scores $86.6M Series D as scalable database resonates

They currently have 20 employees with plans to double that number by the end of next year as they continue to build out the product. As they grow, Narayan says the company is definitely thinking about how to build a diverse organization.

He says he’s found that hiring in general has been challenging during the pandemic, and he hopes that changes in 2021, but he says that he and his co-founders are looking at the top of the hiring funnel because otherwise, as he points out, it’s easy to get complacent and rely on the same network of people you have been working with before, which tends to be less diverse.

“The KPIs and the metrics we really want to use to ensure that we really are putting in the extra effort to ensure a diverse sourcing in your hiring pipeline and then following that through all the way through the funnel. That’s I think the most important way to ensure that you have a diverse [employee base], and I think this is true for every company,” he said.

While he is working remotely now, he sees having multiple offices with a headquarters in NYC when the pandemic finally ends. Some employees will continue to work remotely, but the majority coming into one of the offices.

Confluent lands another big round with $250M Series E on $4.5B valuation

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Materialize scores $40 million investment for SQL streaming database https://ift.tt/37i6vqM

Read More

Equity Monday: HungryPanda raises $70M, trade tensions, and cross-border VC

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 weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Thursday’s edtech deep dive from our own Natasha Mascarenhas.

Right, now through the first of America’s national Q4 feast days, it’s time to get back to business. Namely, the business of VC and startups. Here’s what we got into this morning:

• It’s Cyber Monday, which means that the Internet is going to be annoying today, but the fake-holiday is boosting ecommerce players like Etsy. That should be good news for payments processors incumbent and startup, as well as other ecommerce businesses, again large, small, and even platform-focused.
• Zappos founder Tony Hsieh passed away this weekend. It was a surprise. He was loved.
• The UK is banning China’s Huawei 5G gear next year as Australia condemns China over a different matter. So if you are keeping tally of countries where Chinese tech may no longer be welcome, the list is certainly longer than merely India, which has banned all popular China-built apps from its mobile phones.
• These broader tensions are changing where VCs are investing their money, notably.
• Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A
• HungryPanda raises $70M for a food delivery app aimed at overseas Chinese consumers
• Firstminute Capital launches second $111M fund, featuring a who’s-who of founders as LPs
• And finally, we are heading into a deluge of IPOs over the next few weeks. So strap in, it’s going to be messy and fun.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity Monday: HungryPanda raises $70M, trade tensions, and cross-border VC https://ift.tt/37p8t8y

Read More

The road to smart city infrastructure starts with research

{rss:content:encoded} The road to smart city infrastructure starts with research https://ift.tt/39uejbw https://ift.tt/3o7rS4K November 30, 2020 at 04:33PM

Dominik Schiener Contributor

Dominik Schiener is co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. He has been in the blockchain space since 2011, with several startups in Switzerland, UK and Germany. His primary focus is how to improve physical infrastructure with digital infrastructure such as DLT and AI.

Mathew Yarger Contributor

Mathew is Head of Mobility and Automotive at the IOTA Foundation, where he develops strategy and solutions around the use of data with distributed ledger technology-based innovations. These solutions focus on enabling flexible and privacy-centric data and value transfer within the public sector for use in smart cities, critical infrastructure, environmental and energy systems, and mobility-focused data industries.

In the United States, critical city, state and federal infrastructure is falling behind. While heavy investment, planning and development have gone into the U.S. infrastructure system, much of it is not keeping up with the pace of new technology, and some of it hasn’t had a proper update in decades, instead just adding new systems onto old systems. This can be allotted to a combination of liability structures in the U.S., difficulty in enabling interconnection between infrastructure in different jurisdictions, worry over introducing large-scale security risks and an attempt to mitigate that risk.

There is interest in upgrading city systems to be more efficient, to be more in line with real-time demand and to move into the 21st century, but it’s going to take work. It’s also going to take new technology.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT), when applied correctly, can do for a city’s infrastructure what existing technologies cannot. Where existing technologies are heavy, requiring expensive servers and a larger energy draw, distributed ledger technology is light and can be implemented on individual nodes (code environments) and directly onto things like traffic light sensors. It also allows for more oversight from a privacy perspective. The ability to bring distributed ledger technology into lightweight frameworks allows for more security and upgrades to critical infrastructure.

Benefits of smart infrastructure

The biggest impact of smart infrastructure is that it enables local governments to focus on the reason they’re there in the first place; to increase the quality of life of the local residents, bring stability and culture to local businesses, and create a welcoming and frictionless environment for tourists or visitors. Governments can create stability, streamline sources of revenue, and integrate a frictionless operational environment for people and organizations in their jurisdiction.

Consider transportation infrastructure. A lot of revenue in cities and states comes from things like tolls and roadside parking, and of course taxes. States control the highways, interstates, and tolling infrastructure commonly through collaboration with service providers. Cities control the local roadside and passthrough streets and the revenue accrued through parking solutions. With the pandemic, these resources have dried up due to people staying at home, social distancing, using less public transit and working remotely.

This now offers an opportunity for an expanded example of the desire to understand the transportation flow. If cities had more real time insights into this, they’d be able to understand the demand and have a more fluidly flowing traffic condition. This can be done through new technologies such as what are seen deployed in Singapore like green link determinings systems, parking guidance systems, and expressway monitoring systems allowing for enhanced traffic awareness and guidance.

There are also keen ways to incentivize traffic guidance while bringing stability to local small and medium businesses throughout cities such as using parking guidance systems to enable local businesses to offer discounts for parking nearby.

An open transportation grid (in the sense of data points gathered for streamlining and managing) can create smoother traffic patterns in cities with smaller road grids. Transportation centers could communicate with delivery services, understanding their routes and setting up parking reservation windows. Traffic flow could be managed so that delivery services are able to get in and out without causing back-ups on tight, busy roads.

Another offering of smart infrastructure can be seen with cross border connections for transportation of goods and services. The ownership of infrastructure in the U.S. is highly fragmented; with cities owning local and neighborhood roadsides, and states owning highways and interstates. This also means that the infrastructure supporting this is highly distributed, because each entity has to have it’s own systems in place to support their infrastructure, typically using different solutions, services and data structures.

Read More

DoorDash aims to add $11 billion to its valuation during public offering

This morning, DoorDash filed a new S-1 document, this time updating the market about the price it expects to command during its public offering. The food-delivery giant gave a range of $75 to $85 per share, which would revalue the company sharply higher than its final private price, set during a June Series H that valued DoorDash at $16 billion.

The company intends to sell 33 million shares, raising between $2.475 billion and $2.805 billion in the process. Notably, there are no shares set aside for its underwriting banks to buy at its IPO price.

---

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

---

After the public offering, DoorDash expects to have 317,656,521 shares outstanding across various classes, giving it a valuation of between $23.8 billion and $27 billion at the two extremes of its IPO range, not counting shares that have not yet vested or are set aside for future employee compensation. CNBC calculates that the company could be worth up to $30 billion on a fully-diluted basis.

How COVID-19 accelerated DoorDash’s business

What matters more than the raw dollar amounts, however, is what we can learn from them. Let’s get into the guts of the valuation range and find out if it’s bullish or if we should anticipate DoorDash to raise its range before it goes public.

Valuations, ranges

The new DoorDash S-1/A filing, it doesn’t appear to contain new financial information, so we can keep our prior notes on the company’s health and performance in mind. Recall that we were generally impressed by DoorDash’s growth and its improving profitability.

Other on-demand food services are doing well: HungryPanda just raised $70 million, and on the back of Uber Eats’ growth — and optimism that its ride-hailing business will return with the market-readiness of strong COVID-19 vaccines — shares of Uber are at all-time highs.

So you can taste the optimism that DoorDash is riding as it looks to list. Given our take, you would be forgiven for presuming that DoorDash is targeting an aggressive price.

Is it?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J DoorDash aims to add $11 billion to its valuation during public offering https://ift.tt/3fMWiq4

Read More

Nikola shares drop as GM pulls plug on investment deal

GM is backing away from an agreement to take a stake in electric automaker Nikola Corp, marking the collapse of a deal that has been problematic since it was announced just two months ago.

Shares of Nikola plummeted more than 20% in pre-market trading Monday morning.

GM has instead signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to supply Nikola with its Hydrotec fuel cell system. This supplier agreement replaces its previous transaction announcement made on Sept. 8, 2020 to take a 11% stake in Nikola and produce a fuel cell pickup for the company by the end 2022. The investment was valued at $2 billion at the time.

Speculation that GM would pull the plug on the deal has been rampant almost from the start. Just days after GM announced the investment, a noted short-seller Hindenburg Research accused the Nikola of fraud. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened up an inquiry in the matter and within two weeks Nikola’s founder Trveor Milton had stepped down as executive chairman.

Stephen Girsky, a former General Motors executive who was already on the company’s board and who introduced Nikola to GM, took over as executive chairman.

Nikola’s troubles aren’t over. GM’s wording in its announcement suggests as much. GM describes the non-binding MoU as a “potential agreement.” If it goes through, GM would engineer its Hydrotec fuel cell system to the specifications mutually agreed upon by both companies. It is expected that the potential arrangement would be “cost plus,” meaning that Nikola would pay upfront for the capital investment for the capacity. The companies are also discussing the potential of a supply agreement for GM’s Ultium battery system for Nikola’s Class 7 and Class 8 trucks.

Doug Parks, GM executive vice president of global product development, purchasing and supply chain said supplying the Hydrotec fuel cell systems to heavy-duty class of commercial vehicles is an important part GM’s growth strategy and reinforces the company’s commitment toward an all-electric, zero-emissions future.”

GM’s Hydrotec fuel cell system will be engineered at its Michigan technical facilities in Pontiac and Warren and manufactured at its Brownstown Charter Township battery assembly plant, the company said.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Nikola shares drop as GM pulls plug on investment deal https://ift.tt/2HQXgoA

Read More

Apple on the hook for €10M in Italy, accused of misleading users about iPhone water resistance

{rss:content:encoded} Apple on the hook for €10M in Italy, accused of misleading users about iPhone water resistance https://ift.tt/2VhPcjP https://ift.tt/39zUnUu November 30, 2020 at 01:12PM

Apple’s marketing of iPhones as ‘water resistant’ without clarifying the limits of the feature and also having a warranty that excludes cover for damage by liquids has got the company into hot water in Italy.

The Italian competition authority (AGCM) has informed the tech giant of an intent to fine it €10 million for commercial practices related to the marketing and warranty of a number of iPhone models since October 2017, starting with the iPhone 8 through to the iPhone 11, following an investigation into consumer complaints related to its promotion of water resistance and subsequent refusal to cover the cost of repairs caused by water damage.

In a document setting out the AGCM’s decision dated towards the end of October — which was made public today (via Reuters) — the regulator concludes Apple violated the country’s consumer code twice because of what it characterizes as “misleading” and “aggressive” commercial practices.

Italian consumer watchdog hands down €15M in fines to Apple and Samsung for slowing devices

Its investigation found Apple’s iPhone marketing tricked consumers into believing the devices were impermeable to water, rather than merely water resistant — with the limitations of the feature not given enough prominence in ads. While a disclaimer stating that Apple’s warranty excludes damage by liquids was deemed an aggressive attempt to circumvent consumer rights obligations — given its heavy promotion of the devices as water resistant.

Apple places a liquid contact indicator inside iPhones, which changes from white or silver to red on contact with liquid, and checking the indicator is a standard step undertaken by its repair staff.

The AGCM report cites examples of consumers who’s iPhone had taken a “short dive” in the sea being refused cover. Another complainant had been washing their device under the tap — which Apple deemed improper use.

A third reported that their one-month old iPhone XR stopped working after coming into contact with water. Apple told them they must buy a new device — albeit at a subsidized price.

While an iPhone XS user, with a one-year old handset who reported it had never come into contact with water was refused coverage by Apple support who said it had, complained to the regulator there’s no way for a consumer to prove their device was not immersed in water for more than the length of time and depth to which Apple’s small print specifies it has water resistance.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the AGCM’s findings.

The tech giant has 60 days from the date it was notified of the regulator’s intent to fine to appeal the decision.

The size of the penalty is well under half of the operating profit the regulator says Apple’s Italian operation made in the year September 2018 to September 2019, when it note it recorded revenues on its sales and services of €58,652,628; and an operating profit of €26,918,658.

Two years ago Italy’s competition watchdog also fined Apple and Samsung around $15M for forcing updates on consumers that may slow or break their devices. While, this February, France fined Apple $27 million for capping the OS performance of iPhones with older batteries.

Apple has also faced much larger penalties from competition authorities elsewhere in Europe — including being notified of a $1.2BN fine by France’s competition authority in March this year, which accused the tech giant of operating a reseller cartel along with two wholesale distribution partners, Ingram Micro and Tech Data.

Apple also had to stump up as much as €500M in back taxes demanded by French authorities last year.

While some $15BN from Apple’s European HQ is sitting in an escrow account to cover a 2016 European Commission ‘State Aid’ charge that it illegally benefited from corporate tax arrangements in Ireland between 2003 and 2014.

In July Apple and Ireland won the first round of an appeal against the charge. But the Commission filed an appeal in September — meaning the case will go up to the CJEU, likely adding years more of legal wrangling.

EU lawmakers are continuing to work on pushing for global reform of digital taxation, while some Member States push on with their own digital taxes.

France starts collecting tax on tech giants

Read More

UK shrinks timetable for telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Huawei

{rss:content:encoded} UK shrinks timetable for telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Huawei https://ift.tt/37jsa1N https://ift.tt/3fNfOCK November 30, 2020 at 10:47AM

The UK government has squeezed the timetable for domestic telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Chinese suppliers, per the BBC, which reports that the deadline for installation of kit from so-called ‘high risk’ vendors is now September.

It had already announced a ban on telcos buying kit from Huawei et al by the end of this year — acting on national security concerns attached to companies that fall under the jurisdiction of Chinese state surveillance laws. But, according to the BBC, ministers are concerned carriers could stockpile kit for near-term installation to create an optional buffer for themselves since it has allowed until 2027 for them to remove such kit from existing 5G networks. Maintaining already installed equipment will also still be allowed up til then.

UK U-turns on Huawei and 5G, giving operators until 2027 to rip out existing kit

A Telecommunications Security Bill which will allow the government to identify kit as a national security risk and ban its use in domestic networks is slated to be introduced to parliament tomorrow.

Digital secretary Oliver Dowden told the BBC he’s pushing for the “complete removal of high-risk vendors”.

In July the government said changes to the US sanction regime meant it could no longer manage the security risk attached to Chinese kit makers.

The move represented a major U-turn from the policy position announced in January — when the UK said it would allowed Chinese vendors to play a limited role in supplying domestic networks. However the plan faced vocal opposition from the government’s own back benches, as well as high profile pressure from the US — which has pushed allies to expel Huawei entirely.

Alongside policies to restrict the use of high risk 5G vendors the UK has said it will take steps to encourage newcomers to enter the market to tackle concerns that the resulting lack of suppliers introduces another security risk.

Publishing a supply chain diversification strategy for 5G today, Dowden warns that barring “high risk” vendors leaves the country “overly reliant on too few suppliers”.

“This 5G Diversification Strategy is a clear and ambitious plan to grow our telecoms supply chain while ensuring it is resilient to future trends and threats,” he writes. “It has three core strands: supporting incumbent suppliers; attracting new suppliers into the UK market; and accelerating the development and deployment of open-interface solutions.”

The government is putting an initial £250 million behind the 5G diversification plan to try to build momentum for increasing competition and interoperability.

“Achieving this long term vision depends on removing the barriers that prevent new market entrants from joining the supply chain, investing in R&D to support the accelerated development and deployment of interoperable deployment models, and international collaboration and policy coordination between national governments and industry,” it writes.

In the short to medium term the government says it will proritize support for existing suppliers — so the likely near term beneficiary of the strategy is Finland’s Nokia.

Though the government also says it will “seek to attract new suppliers to the UK market in order to start the process of diversification as soon as possible”.

“As part of our approach we will prioritise opportunities to build UK capability in key areas of the supply chain,” it writes, adding: “As we progress this activity we look forward to working with network operators in the UK, telecoms suppliers and international governments to achieve our shared goals of a more competitive and vibrant telecoms supply market.”

We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment on the new deadline for UK carriers to stop installing its 5G kit.

The company has continued to reject security concerns attached to its business.

UK report blasts Huawei for network security incompetence

Read More

Gartner: Q3 smartphone sales down 5.7% to 366M, slicing Covid-19 declines in Q1, Q2

{rss:content:encoded} Gartner: Q3 smartphone sales down 5.7% to 366M, slicing Covid-19 declines in Q1, Q2 https://ift.tt/33qyaok https://ift.tt/33pjRQI November 30, 2020 at 08:59AM

We are now into the all-important holiday sales period, and new numbers from Gartner point to some recovery underway for the smartphone market as vendors roll out a raft of new 5G handsets.

Q3 smartphone figures from the analysts published today showed that smartphone unit sales were 366 million units, a decline of 5.7% globally compared to the same period last year. Yes, it’s a drop; but it is still a clear improvement on the first half of this year, when sales slumped by 20% in each quarter, due largely to the effects of Covid-19 on spending and consumer confidence overall.

That confidence is being further bolstered by some other signals. We are coming out of a relatively strong string of sales days over the Thanksgiving weekend, traditionally the “opening” of the holiday sales cycle. While sales on Thursday and Black Friday were at the lower end of predicted estimates, they still set records over previous years. With a lot of tech like smartphones often bought online, this could point to stronger numbers for smartphone sales as well.

On top of that, last week IDC — which also tracks and analyses smartphones sales — published a report predicting that sales would grow 2.4% in Q4 compared to 2019’s Q4. Its take is that while 5G smartphones will drive buying, prices still need to come down on these newer generation handsets to really see them hit with wider audiences. The average selling price for a 5G-enabled smartphone in 2020 is $611, said IDC, but it thinkgs that by 2024 that will come down to $453, likely driven by Android-powered handsets, which have collectively dominated smartphone sales for years.

Indeed, in terms of brands, Samsung, with its Android devices, continued to lead the pack in terms of overall units, with 80.8 million units, and a 22% market share. In fact, the Korean handset maker and China’s Xiaomi were the only two in the top five to see growth in their sales in the quarter, respectively at 2.2% and 34.9%. Xiaomi’s numbers were strong enough to see it overtake Apple for the quarter to become the number-three slot in terms of overall sales rankings. Huawei just about held on to number two. See the full chart further down in this story with more detail.

Also worth noting: overall mobile sales — a figure that includes both smartphones and feature phones — were down 8.7% 401 million units. That underscores not just how few feature phones are selling at the moment (smartphones can often even be cheaper to buy, depending on the brands involved or the carrier bundles), but also that those less sophisticated devices are seeing even more sales pressure than more advanced models.

Smartphone slump: it’s not just Covid-19

It’s worth remembering that even before the global health pandemic, smartphone sales were facing slowing growth. The reasons: after a period of huge enthusiasm from consumers to pick up devices, many countries reached market penetration. And then, the latest features were too incremental to spur people to sell up and pay a premium on newer models.

In that context, the big hope from the industry has been 5G, which has been marketed by both carriers and handset makers as having more data efficiency and speed than older technologies. Yet when you look at the wider roadmap for 5G, rollout has remained patchy, and consumers by and large are still not fully convinced they need it.

Notably, in this past quarter, there is still some evidence that emerging/developing markets continue to have an impact on growth — in contrast to new features being drivers in penetrated markets.

“Early signs of recovery can be seen in a few markets, including parts of mature Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Near normal conditions in China improved smartphone production to fill in the supply gap in the third quarter which benefited sales to some extent,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner, in a statement. “For the first time this year, smartphone sales to end users in three of the top five markets i.e., India, Indonesia and Brazil increased, growing 9.3%, 8.5% and 3.3%, respectively.”

The more positive Q3 figures coincide with a period this summer that saw new Covid-19 cases slowing down in many places and the relaxation of many restrictions, so now all eyes are on this coming holiday period, at a time when Covid-19 cases have picked up with a vengeance, and with no rollout (yet) of large-scale vaccination or therapeutic programs. That is having an inevitable drag on the economy.

“Consumers are limiting their discretionary spend even as some lockdown conditions have started to improve,” said Gupta of the Q3 numbers. “Global smartphone sales experienced moderate growth from the second quarter of 2020 to the third quarter. This was due to pent-up demand from previous quarters.”

Digging into the numbers, Samsung has held on to its top spot, although its growth was significantly less strong in the quarter. Even with that slump, Samsung is still a long way ahead.

That is in part because number-two Huawei, with 51.8 million units sold, was down by more than 21% since last year. It has been having a hard time in the wake of a public relations crisis after sanctions in the US and UK, due to accusations that its equipment is used by China for spying. (Those UK sanctions, indeed, have been brought up in timing, just as of last night.)

That also led Huawei earlier this month to confirm the long-rumored plan to sell off its Honor smartphone division. That deal will involve selling the division, reportedly valued at around $15 billion, to a consortium of companies.

It will be interesting to see how Apple’s small decline of 0.6% to 40.6 million units to Xiaomi’s 44.4 million, will shift in the next quarter, on the back of the company launching a new raft of iPhone 12 devices.

“Apple sold 40.5 million units in the third quarter of 2020, a decline of 0.6% as compared to 2019,” said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “The slight decrease was mainly due to Apple’s delayed shipment start of its new 2020 iPhone generation, which in previous years would always start mid/end September. This year, the launch event and shipment start began 4 weeks later than usual.”

Oppo, which is still not available through carriers or retail partners in the US, rounded out the top five sellers with just under 30 million phones sold. The fact that it and Xiaomi do so well despite not really having a phone presence in the US is an interesting testament to what kind of role the US plays in the global smartphone market: huge in terms of perception, but perhaps less so when the chips are down.

“Others” — that category that can take in the long tail of players who make phones, continues to be a huge force, accounting for more sales than any one of the top five. That underscores the fragmentation in the Android-based smartphone industry, but all the same, its collective numbers were in decline, a sign that consumers are indeed slowly continuing to consolidate around a smaller group of trusted brands.

 

Vendor	3Q20 Units	3Q20 Market Share (%)	3Q19 Units	3Q19 Market Share (%)	3Q20-3Q19 Growth (%)
Samsung	80,816.0	22.0	79,056.7	20.3	2.2
Huawei	51,830.9	14.1	65,822.0	16.9	-21.3
Xiaomi	44,405.4	12.1	32,927.9	8.5	34.9
Apple	40,598.4	11.1	40,833.0	10.5	-0.6
OPPO	29,890.4	8.2	30,581.4	7.9	-2.3
Others	119,117.4	32.5	139,586.7	35.9	-14.7
Total	366,658.6	100.0	388,807.7	100.0	-5.7

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

 

 

Read More

Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A

Primer, the U.K. fintech that wants to help merchants consolidate their payments stack and easily support new payment methods in the future, has raised £14 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Accel, who I understand were quite proactive in persuading Primer to take the VC firm’s money.

The young company wasn’t actively fund-raising, having quietly raised £3.8 million in funding announced in May. Instead, the team was heads down building out the product and wooing potential customers by holding technical workshops and in-depth interviews over Zoom with 100 merchants — activity that didn’t go unnoticed.

Also participating in the Series A are existing investors: Balderton, SpeedInvest and Seedcamp, who were joined in the round by new backer RTP Global. Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel, will join Primer’s board.

Founded by ex-PayPal employees – via PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree — Primer wants to offer one payments API to (hopefully) rule them all, with the explicit aim of bringing greater transparency to a merchant’s payment stack.

The thinking is that larger merchants, especially those that operate in more than one geography, have to support an array of payment methods, which brings with it significant technical overhead, a poor user experience, and lack of transparency.

Primer, now described as a “low code” platform, carries out a lot of that heavy-lifting on behalf of merchants and while remaining steadfastly payment method agnostic. By doing so, the idea is to reduce friction when adopting new payment methods as they come to market, and be able to provide better insights into things like how well each checkout option is performing.

As well as payment-service-providers (PSPs), the platform has connectors for fraud providers, chargeback services, subscription billing engines, BI tools, loyalty and rewards platforms. Both payments and non-payments services can be “seamlessly connected to the checkout experience and payments flow via workflows, enabling merchants to unify their fraud migration efforts, build sophisticated transaction routing, and solve complex flows – all with no code,” explains Primer.

Primer says the additional funding will be used for international business development and scaling its team. Billed as a remote-first company, Primer has 23 employees across six countries, and says it has already picked up traction across mid-market and large enterprise e-commerce merchants across Europe.

Comments Paul Anthony, Primer’s co-founder and head of product and engineering: “During our time at PayPal, we saw first-hand the technical burden online merchants face trying to offer the best payments experiences to their customers globally. Our low-code approach enables merchants’ payments teams to manage and expand their payments ecosystems, and maintain sophisticated payments logic with a familiar workflow UI”.

Meanwhile, the new investment brings Primer’s total funding to £17.8 million, and comes only a few weeks after the initial launch of the company’s platform.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A https://ift.tt/3fPMvzG

Read More

This Week in Apps: Snapchat clones TikTok, India bans 43 Chinese apps, more data on App Store commission changes

{rss:content:encoded} This Week in Apps: Snapchat clones TikTok, India bans 43 Chinese apps, more data on App Store commission changes https://ift.tt/3fKNsce https://ift.tt/2KIjXMM November 29, 2020 at 03:00PM

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications, and the overall app economy.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People now spend three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

This week, we’re digging into more data about how the App Store commission changes will impact developers, as well as other top stories, like Snapchat’s new Spotlight feed and India’s move to ban more Chinese apps from the country, among other things.

We also have our weekly round-up of news about platforms, services, privacy, trends, and other headlines.

Top Stories

More on App Store Commissions

Last week, App Annie confirmed to TechCrunch around 98% of all iOS developers in 2019 (meaning, unique publisher accounts) fell under the $1 million annual consumer spend threshold that will now move App Store commissions from a reduced 15% to the standard 30%. The firm also found that only 0.5% of developers were making between $800K and $1M; only 1% were in $500K-$800K range; and 87.7% made less than $100K.

This week, Appfigures has compiled its own data on how Apple’s changes to App Store commissions will impact the app developer community.

According to its findings, of the 2M published apps on the App Store, 376K apps are a paid download, have in-app purchases, or monetize with subscriptions. Those 376K apps are operated by a smaller group of 124.5K developers. Of those developers, only a little under 2% earned more than $1M in 2019. This confirms App Annie’s estimate that 98% of all developers earned under the $1M threshold.

Image Credits: Appfigures

The firm also took a look at companies above the $1M mark, and found that around 53% were games, led by King (of the Candy Crush titles). After a large gap, the next largest categories in 2019 were Health & Fitness, Social Networking, Entertainment, then Photo & Video.

 

Of the developers making over $1M, the largest percentage — 39% — made between $1M and $2.5M in 2019.

Image Credits: Appfigures

The smallest group (1.5%) of developers making more than $1M is the group making more than $150M. These accounted for 29% of the “over $1M” crowd’s total revenue. And those making between $50M and $150M accounted for 24% of the revenue.

Image Credits: Appfigures

AppFigures also found that of those making less than $1M, most (>97%) fell into the sub $250K category. Some developes were worried about the way Apple’s commission change system was implemented — that is, it immediately upon hitting $1M and only annual reassessments. But there are so few developers operating in the “danger zone” (being near the threshold), this doesn’t seem like a significant problem. Read More.

Snapchat takes on TikTok

After taking on TikTok  with music-powered features last month, Snapchat this week launched a dedicated place within its app where users can watch short, entertaining videos in a vertically scrollable, TikTok-like feed. This new feature, called Spotlight, will showcase the community’s creative efforts, including the videos now backed by music, as well as other Snaps users may find interesting. Snapchat says its algorithms will work to surface the most engaging Snaps to display to each user on a personalized basis. Read More. 

India bans more Chinese apps

India, which has already banned at least 220 apps with links to China in recent months, said on Tuesday it was banning an additional 43 Chinese apps, again citing cybersecurity concerns. Newly banned apps include short video service Snack Video, e-commerce app AliExpress, delivery app Lalamove, shopping app Taobao Live, business card reader CamCard, and others. There are now no Chinese apps in the top 500 most-used apps in India, as a result. Read More.

Weekly News

Platforms

• Apple’s App Store Connect will now require an Apple ID with 2-step verification enabled.
• Apple announces holiday schedule for App Store Connect. New apps and app updates won’t be accepted Dec. 23-27 (Pacific Time).
• SKAdNetwork 2.0 adds Source App ID and Conversion Value. The former lets networks identify which app initiated a download from the App Store and the latter lets them know whether users who installed an app through a campaign performed an action in the app, like signing up for a trial or completing a purchase.
• Apple rounded up developer praise for its App Store commission change. Lending their names to Apple’s list: Little 10 Robot (Tots Letters and Numbers), Broadstreet (Brief), Foundermark (Friended), Shine, Lifesum, Med ART Studios (Sprout Fertility Tracker), RevenueCat, OK Play, SignEasy, Jump Rope, Wine Spectator, Apollo for Reddit, SwingVision Tennis, Cinémoi.

Services

• Fortnite adds a $12/mo subscription offering a full season battle pass, 1,000 monthly bucks and a Crew Pack featuring an exclusive outfit bundle. More money for Apple to miss out on, I guess.
• 14 U.S. states plus Washington D.C. have now adopted COVID-19 contact tracing apps. CA and other states may release apps soon. Few in the U.S. have downloaded the apps, however, which limits their usefulness. 
• Samsung’s TV Plus streaming TV service comes to more Galaxy phones

Security & Privacy

• Apple’s senior director of global privacy, Jane Horvath, in a letter to the Ranking Digital Rights organization, confirms App Tracking Transparency feature will arrive in 2021. The feature will allow users to disable tracking between apps. The letter also slams Facebook for collecting “as much data as possible” on users.
• Baidu’s apps banned from Google Play, Baidu Maps and the Baidu App, were leaking sensitive user data, researchers said. The apps had 6M U.S. users and millions more worldwide.

Apps in the News

• Robinhood’s co-founder Baiju Bhatt steps down as co-CEO ahead of IPO.
• TikTok’s deadline for a sale gets another extension, this time to Dec. 4th.
• Google launches an AR app for “The Mandalorian“
• Google launches Task Mate in India which pays users for taking pictures of storefronts or recording short voice clips, the latter which is likely being used to train speech recognition systems.
• Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp adds AR features.
• Microsoft’s Translator app for Android can now automatically translate speech in one-on-one conversations.
• TikTok adds a feature that allows users to avoid videos that could trigger epileptic seizures.
• Parler users haven’t actually left Twitter, it seems.
• Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides can now edit Microsoft Office files on iOS. The feature already worked on Android and the web.
• Roblox hosts a Ready Player Two treasure hunt in its app.
• Spotify is still testing Stories.

Trends

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

• U.S. Brick-and-mortar retail apps saw 27% growth in first three quarters of 2020, or nearly double the growth of online retailer apps (14%), as measured by new installs. Top apps included Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, Nike, Walgreens, and The Home Depot.
• App Annie forecast estimates shoppers will spend over 110M hours in (Android) mobile shopping apps this holiday season.
• PayPal and Square’s Cash app have scored 100% of the newly-issued supply of bitcoins, report says.
• All social media companies now look alike, Axois argues, citing Twitter’s Fleets and Snap’s TikTok-like feature as recent examples.

Funding and M&A

• CoStar Group, a provider of commercial real estate info and analytics, acquires Homesnap’s platform and app for $250M to move into the residential real estate market.
• Remote work app Friday raises $2.1M seed led by Bessemer Venture Partners
• Stories-style Q&A app F3 raises $3.9M. The team previously founded Ask.fm.
• Edtech company Kahoot acquires Drops, a startup whose apps help people learn languages using games, for $50M.
• Mobile banking app Current raises $131M Series C, led by Tiger Global Management.
• Square buys Credit Karma’s tax unit, Credit Karma Tax, for $50M in cash.

Read More

What to make of Stripe’s possible $100B valuation

This is The TechCrunch Exchange, a newsletter that goes out on Saturdays, based on the column of the same name. You can sign up for the email here.

Welcome to a special Thanksgiving edition of The Exchange. Today we will be brief. But not silent, as there is much to talk about.

Up top, The Exchange noodled on the Slack-Salesforce deal here, so please catch up if you missed that while eating pie for breakfast yesterday. And, sadly, I have no idea why Palantir is seeing its value skyrocket. Normally we’d discuss it, asking ourselves what its gains could mean for the lower tiers of private SaaS companies. But as its public market movement appears to be an artificial bump in value, we’ll just wait.

Here’s what I want to talk about this fine Saturday: Bloomberg reporting that Stripe is in the market for more money, at a price that could value the company at “more than $70 billion or significantly higher, at as much as $100 billion.”

Hot damn. Stripe would become the first or second most valuable startup in the world at those prices, depending on how you count. Startup is a weird word to use for a company worth that much, but as Stripe is still clinging to the private markets like some sort of liferaft, keeps raising external funds, and is presumably more focused on growth than profitability, it retains the hallmark qualities of a tech startup, so, sure, we can call it one.

Which is odd, because Stripe is a huge concern that could be worth twelve-figures, provided that gets that $100 billion price tag. It’s hard to come up with a good reason for why it’s still private, other than the fact that it can get away with it.

Anyhoo, are those reported, possible prices bonkers? Maybe. But there is some logic to them. Recall that Square and PayPal earnings pointed to strong payments volume in recent quarters, which bodes well for Stripe’s own recent growth. Also note that 14 months ago or so, Stripe was already processing “hundreds of billions of dollars of transactions a year.”

You can do fun math at this juncture. Let’s say Stripe’s processing volume was $200 billion last September, and $400 billion today, thinking of the number as an annualized metric. Stripe charges 2.9% plus $0.30 for a transaction, so let’s call it 3% for the sake of simplicity and being conservative. That math shakes out to a run rate of $12 billion.

Now, the company’s actual numbers could be closer to $100 billion, $150 billion and $4.5 billion, right? And Stripe won’t have the same gross margins as Slack.

But you can start to see why Stripe’s new rumored prices aren’t 100% wild. You can make the multiples work if you are a believer in the company’s growth story. And helping the argument are its public comps. Square’s stock has more than tripled this year. PayPal’s value has more than doubled. Adyen’s shares have almost doubled. That’s the sort of public market pull that can really help a super-late-stage startup looking to raise new capital and secure an aggressive price.

To wrap, Stripe’s possible new valuation could make some sense. The fact that it is still a private company does not.

Market Notes

• Mental health-focused startup Sesh raised money this week from Polaris Partners. The Exchange spent a bit of time on the topic recently, so the funding event caught our eye.
• Here are three more $100 million ARR companies, and a call for startups reaching $50 million ARR.
• Man, what is up at Coinbase?
• Tiger’s investment into Unacadamey also stood out. Why? Mostly because edtech is hotter than the surface of the sun in 2020. Which is wild for a startup genre that previously was a bit more akin to the far apsis of Pluto as recently as last year.

Various and Sundry

And speaking of edtech, Equity’s Natasha Mascarenhas and our intrepid producer Chris Gates put together a special ep on the education technology market. You can listen to it here. It’s good.

Hugs and let’s both go do some cardio,

Alex

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J What to make of Stripe’s possible $100B valuation https://ift.tt/33q98po

Read More