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Huawei’s in-house OS could show up on phones this year

Huawei has almost certainly been working on a software contingency plan for some time now, prepping for a worst-case scenario. When the U.S. announced that it was blacklisting the Chinese hardware giant earlier this year, those plans were likely accelerated.

One of the things that’s still unclear, however, is what role the company’s Hongmeng OS will fill. Recent reports have suggested that the operating system was built for IoT and other industrial applications. However, the software may also be forked specifically to run on low-end mobile devices.

State-run media outlet Global Times this morning issued a report based on sources suggesting that Hongmeng could appear on a low-end phone later this year. The OS is clearly far less robust than Android in its current state, but could wind up on a new device priced at 2,000 yuan (~$290). The report adds that Huawei is set to reveal the operating system in full later this week at its Developer Conference in Dongguan, China.

At present, Hongmeng doesn’t appear purpose-built to replace Google’s operating system, but Huawei is getting ready for the possibility of a future that completely cuts the company off from access to U.S.-built hardware and software. For the time being, at least, the company seems focused on continuing to use Android for its high-end flagships, while potentially building out Hongmeng on more entry-level devices.

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Mesosphere changes name to D2IQ, shifts focus to Kubernetes, cloud native

Mesosphere was born as the commercial face of the open-source Mesos project. It was surely a clever solution to make virtual machines run much more efficiently, but times change and companies change. Today the company announced it was changing its name to Day2IQ, or D2IQ for short, and fixing its sights on Kubernetes and cloud native, which have grown quickly in the years since Mesos appeared on the scene.

D2IQ CEO Mike Fey says that the name reflects the company’s new approach. Instead of focusing entirely on the Mesos project, it wants to concentrate on helping more mature organizations adopt cloud native technologies.

“We felt like the Mesosphere name was somewhat constrictive. It made statements about the company that really allocated us to a given technology, instead of to our core mission, which is supporting successful Day Two operations, making cloud native a viable approach not just for the early adopters, but for everybody,” Fey explained.

Fey is careful to point out that the company will continue to support the Mesos-driven DC/OS solution, but the general focus of the company has shifted, and the new name is meant to illustrate that. “The Mesos product line is still doing well, and there are things that it does that nothing else can deliver on yet. So we’re not abandoning that totally, but we do see that Kubernetes is very powerful, and the community behind it is amazing, and we want to be a value-added member of that community,” he said.

He adds that this is not about jumping on the cloud-native bandwagon all of a sudden. He points out his company has had a Kubernetes product for more than a year running on top of DC/OS, and it has been a contributing member to the cloud native community.

It’s not just about a name change and refocusing the company and the brand, it also involves several new cloud-native products that the company has built to serve the type of audience, the more mature organization, that the new name was inspired by.

For starters, it’s introducing its own flavor of Kubernetes called Konvoy, which, it says, provides an “enterprise-grade Kubernetes experience.” The company will also provide a support and training layer, which it believes is a key missing piece, and one that is required by larger organizations looking to move to cloud native.

In addition, it is offering a data integration layer, which is designed to help integrate large amounts of data in a cloud-native fashion. To that end, it is introducing a beta of Kudo, an open-source cloud-native tool for building stateful operations in Kubernetes. The company has already offered to donate this tool to the Cloud Native Computing foundation, the open-source organization that houses Kubernetes and other cloud-native projects.

The company faces stiff competition in this space from some heavy hitters, like the newly combined IBM and Red Hat, but it believes by adhering to a strong open-source ethos, it can move beyond its Mesos roots to become a player in the cloud-native space. Time will tell if it made a good bet.

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News discovery app SmartNews valued at $1.1B

A $28 million financing has made SmartNews, an AI-powered news aggregation app, a unicorn.

Japan Post Capital has led the Series E round, which brings the company’s total investment to $116 million and pushes its valuation to $1.1 billion. Existing investors in SmartNews include Development Bank of Japan, SMBC Venture Capital and Japan Co-Invest L.P.

The company, founded in Tokyo in 2012, boasts 20 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Japan. Growing at a rate of 500% per year, its audience checks into the app for a mix of political, sports, global and entertainment news curated for each individual reader. To make money, the company sells inline advertising, video ads and deals with publishers to sell ads against “SmartViews,” its equivalent of Google’s AMP or Facebook’s Instant Articles

SmartNews has nearly 400 U.S. publishing partners including The Associated Press and Bloomberg. It competes with the likes of Apple, which unveiled Apple News + earlier this year, a subscription news product that offers access to more than 300 magazines and newspapers for $9.99 per month.

SmartNews says it will use the infusion of capital to expand its global footprint.

“We are very pleased with our strong progress in the United States,” SmartNews co-founder and chief executive officer Ken Suzuki said in a statement. “We will continue to share our vision of informed, balanced media consumption with our current and future users in the U.S. and all over the world.”

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Series A(ggregate)

We spend a lot of time around here covering the latest startup fundraises, and for good reason. While capital is certainly an input and not an output, there is nothing quite like the closing of a round of several million in venture capital to prove that yes, the startup I’m working on is at least interesting to someone other than me. External validation shouldn’t be your motivating principle, but it is motivating. Plus, it’s a great milestone to reach out to the press and start talking up the story.

And so week after week, we cover the latest rounds. This company raised $4.5 million in a seed round, and this company raised $16 million in a series A. These stories — and the narratives behind them — are crisp, clean, and precise. A proverbial founder walked up and down South Park in SoMa, explained their story, collected a couple of term sheets, picked one, locked in the due diligence, and is now announcing their round. The VCs are excited, the founder(s) are excited, the employees are excited (and sometimes even the customers are excited!)

The reality for founders though is far more messy and gritty than those headlines would indicate. When I get founders off the record and out for drinks, the true story starts to emerge. That $4.5 million seed fundraise took eight months of maniacal scheduling with two hundred investors just to find a lead. And that lead didn’t lead lead, but took only 20% of the round. In the meantime, they raised twelve times across convertible notes and SAFEs, each one giving the company just a bit more gas in the tank to continue.

When I wrote that a startup raised $4.5 million in one slam dunk, what I really should have written was that they raised $150k, $300k, a few more $50k investments from randos, a couple of thousand from that startup competition, wow $500k from that amazing angel, a $750k SBIR grant from the government that took nine months too long to process, some credits from Brex, and finally at some point that lead investor showed up who gets $3-3.5 million in news value credit on their wimpy $900k check.

As an editor and a writer who covers these aggregate rounds, I struggle with how to approach them. Founders regularly tell me that they would love more transparency and less bravado around fundraises. They want to read how other founders handle the messy complexity of their fundraises, if only because they can compare their own hellish experiences with those of others.

More fundamentally, our readers deserve to read the truth. A $4.5 million round led by a single venture firm writing a $3.5 million check is a very different construct than a bricolage of a random assortment of angel investors. That difference in investor and round quality does indicate something about the startup under examination, and so offering more of those details would better inform our readers as well.

All that is well and good, but no one really wants to hear about these difficulties. Certainly users and customers don’t want to hear about how the software they use or purchased is run by a company that is constantly days away from death. Some early-stage employees probably have the focus to ignore such morbid considerations while carrying out their functions, but many need their paychecks to come from a black box. Somehow, the checks always arrive, and that lowers the stress for everyone.

And even just in terms of the craft of writing, do we really want to exchange the standard funding sentence (“blah blah blah raised blah from blah with participation from blah blah blah”) with a multi-paragraph exegesis of a fundraise?

Writing is about choosing which details are salient and which to pass over. It would be exhausting every morning to read tomes of fundraise detail. Yet, our consistency in depicting fundraises as efficient and precise can create an atmosphere where if you didn’t find a lead in a few weeks and lock down the whole round, you are a failure.

That’s not really a depiction I want to support.

And so, take this as someone who talks to dozens of founders a year off the record about their fundraises, and also sat on the other side of the table as a VC for years. Fundraises are almost always really, really, tough. Very few people get commits in the first meeting, or even in the subsequent meetings. Half the investor introductions during a fundraise are often a complete waste of time if not outright damaging, psychologically or materially. There are a lot of sharks out there. It is much more common today to aggregate a bunch of mini-rounds than it was a couple of years ago.

This is not failure, but just the path of the entrepreneur today in 2019. And at the end of that whole long and windy road, after all of those hundreds of hours of coffee meetings and PowerPoint strategy sessions and skeptical investor convos, all of that work will boil down to twenty words about how the fundraise closed, X dollars were raised, and money was seemingly wired magically to your bank account.

You, me, and really everyone can and should know the truth. But perhaps just rejoice in that headline, and get back to the next slog.

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Roblox hits 100 million monthly active users

Roblox is big. Bigger than Minecraft big. The massively multiple online title has been around since 2006, but the game has been achieving a crazy amount of momentum of late. On Friday, it announced via blog post that it’s grown past 100 million monthly active users, pushing past Minecraft, which is currently in the (still impressive) low-90s.

Here’s a recent piece detailing the service’s dizzying growth since February 2016, who it was hovering around 9 million players. That’s more than 10x growth in a three and a half year span. User-Generated content is a big part of that number, and the company notes that it has around 40 million user created experiences in the game at present.

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Sources: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Roblox

“We started Roblox over a decade ago with a vision to bring people from all over the world together through play,” founder and CEO David Baszucki said of the big new round number. “Roblox began with just 100 players and a handful of creators who inspired one another, unlocking this groundswell of creativity, collaboration, and imagination that continues to grow.”

The company behind the game has also been pumping some big money into development. It paid $30 million in 2017 and $60 million in 2018. Next week, it will be hosting hundreds of attendees at its fifth Roblox Developer Conference.

Per the new numbers, around 40 percent Roblox users are female, with players spread out across 200 countries.

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E3’s organizer apologizes after revealing information for thousands of journalists

The Entertainment Software Association issued an apology of sorts after making available the contact information for more than 2,000 journalists and analysts who attended this year’s E3.

“ESA was made aware of a website vulnerability that led to the contact list of registered journalists attending E3 being made public,” the organization said via statement. “Once notified, we immediately took steps to protect that data and shut down the site, which is no longer available. We regret this this occurrence and have put measures in place to ensure it will not occur again.”

It’s not clear whether the organization attempted to reach out to those impacted by the breach.

In a kind of bungle that utterly boggles the mind in 2019, the ESA had made available on its site a full spreadsheet of contact information for thousands of attendees, including email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses. While many or most of the addresses appear to be businesses, journalists often work remotely, and the availability of a home address online can present a real safety concern.

After all, many gaming journalists are routinely targets of harassments and threats of physical violence for the simple act of writing about video games on the internet. That’s the reality of the world we currently live in. And while the information leaked could have been worse, there’s a real potential human consequence here.

That, in turn, presents a pretty compelling case that the ESA is going to have a pretty big headache on its hands under GDPR. Per the rules,

In the case of a personal data breach, the controller shall without undue delay and, where feasible, not later than 72 hours after having become aware of it, notify the personal data breach to the supervisory authority competent in accordance with Article 55, unless the personal data breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. Where the notification to the supervisory authority is not made within 72 hours, it shall be accompanied by reasons for the delay.

There is, indeed, a pretty strong argument to made that said breach could “result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons.” Failure to notify individuals in the allotted time period could, in turn, result in some hefty fines.

It’s hard to say how long the ESA knew about the information, though YouTuber Sophia Narwitz, who first brought this information to light publicly, may have also been the first to alert the organization. The ESA appears to have been reasonably responsive in pulling the spreadsheet down, but the internet is always faster, and that information is still floating around online and fairy easily found.

VentureBeat notes rightfully that spreadsheets like these are incredibly valuable to convention organizations, representing contact information some of the top journalists in any given industry. Many will no doubt think twice before sharing this kind of information again, of course.

Notably (and, yes, ironically), the Black Hat security conference experienced a similar breach this time last year. It chalked the issue up to a “legacy system.”

Natasha Lomas contributed to this report

Update: An email has since been sent to those impacted, noting,

We provide ESA members and exhibitors a media list on a password-protected exhibitor site so they can invite you to E3 press events, connect with you for interviews, and let you know what they are showcasing. For more than 20 years there has never been an issue. When we found out, we took down the E3 exhibitor portal and ensured the media list was no longer available on the E3 website.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience and have already taken steps to ensure this will not happen again.

So that’s that part taken care of, at least.

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Startups Weekly: DoorDash gets a taste of Caviar

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about SoftBank’s second Vision Fund. Before that, I noted some challenges plaguing mental health tech startups.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

What’s new?

This week DoorDash announced an agreement to acquire Caviar, an on-demand delivery business, from Square. DoorDash says it will pay $410 million for the company in a combination of cash and stock. If you’re thinking that seems like a lot of money, you are very much correct.

It’s so much money that all of us over here at TechCrunch were scratching our heads trying to understand why DoorDash would shell out that kind of cash. After all, Square paid only $90 million in stock for Caviar when it acquired the company back in 2014. However, DoorDash is VC cash-rich. The business, still privately-owned, has raised an astronomical sum of venture capital. This year alone it’s raised $1 billion, including a Series G funding of $600 million that valued it at $12.6 billion.

This is fucking insane. pic.twitter.com/tOy4gSM3qo

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) August 1, 2019

When a company raises that many huge rounds so close together, you can only assume it’s burning through a lot of cash. When it comes time for DoorDash to begin pitching Wall Street for an IPO — we’re thinking late next year — established subsidiaries like Caviar will at least help bolster its IPO-ready narrative.

With monster companies like DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats owning the food delivery space, we will no doubt see more big M&A deals and more startups die. (Remeber the insane fall of Munchery, anyone?) But will any of these efforts ever become profitable? Or will DoorDash burn through cash until there’s just no more cash left to burn?

#Equitypod

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If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Equity co-host Alex Wilhelm and I attempt to make sense of DoorDash’s acquisition of Caviar. Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast and Spotify.

Big Deals

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Little Deals

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M&A

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Venture Fundraising

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Extra Crunch

Here’s your weekly reminder that for a low price — a complete bargain really — you can learn more about the startups and venture capital ecosystem with a subscription to Extra Crunch. We offer exclusive deep dives, Q&As, newsletters, resources and recommendations, and fundamental startup how-to guides to our subscribers. Here are some of the best EC posts of the week:

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United Airlines CISO Emily Heath joins TC Sessions: Enterprise this September

In an era of massive data breaches, most recently the Capital One fiasco, the risk of a cyberattack and the costly consequences are the top existential threat to corporations big and small. At TechCrunch’s first-ever enterprise-focused event (p.s. early-bird sales end August 9), that topic will be front and center throughout the day.

That’s why we’re delighted to announce United’s chief information security officer Emily Heath will join TC Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco on September 5, where we will discuss and learn how one of the world’s largest airlines keeps its networks safe.

Joining her to talk enterprise security will be a16z partner Martin Casado and DUO / Cisco’s head of advisory CISOs Wendy Nather, among others still to be announced.

At United, Heath oversees the airline’s cybersecurity program and its IT regulatory, governance and risk management.

The U.S.-based airline has more than 90,000 employees serving 4,500 flights a day to 338 airports, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

A native of Manchester, U.K., Heath served as a former police detective in the U.K. Financial Crimes Unit where she led investigations into international investment fraud, money laundering and large scale cases of identity theft — and ran joint investigations with the FBI, SEC and London’s Serious Fraud Office.

Heath and her teams have been the recipients of CSO Magazine’s CSO50 Awards for their work in cybersecurity and risk.

At TC Sessions: Enterprise, Heath will join a panel of cybersecurity experts to discuss security on enterprise networks large and small — from preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of their network — where we’ll learn how a modern CSO moves fast without breaking things.

Join hundreds of today’s leading enterprise experts for this single-day event when you purchase a ticket to the show. The $249 early-bird sale ends Friday, August 9. Make sure to grab your tickets today and save $100 before prices go up.

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Early-bird pricing ends next week for TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

Here are five words you’ll never hear spring from the mouth of an early-stage startupper. “I don’t mind paying more.” We feel you, and that’s why we’re letting you know that the price of admission to TC Sessions Enterprise 2019, which takes place on September 5, goes up next week.

Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play until 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9. Buy your ticket now and save $100.

Now that you’ve scored the best possible price, get ready to experience a full day focused on what’s around the corner for enterprise — the biggest and richest startup category in Silicon Valley. More than 1,000 attendees, including many of the industry’s top founders, CEOs, investors and technologists, will join TechCrunch’s editors onstage for interviews covering all the big enterprise topics — AI, the cloud, Kubernetes, data and security, marketing automation and event quantum computing, to name a few.

This conference features more than 20 sessions on the main stage, plus separate Q&As with the speakers and breakout sessions. Check out the agenda here.

Just to peek at one session, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos will interview three top VCs — Jason Green (Emergence Capital), Maha Ibrahim (Canaan Partners) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures) — in a session entitled Investing with an Eye to the Future. In an ever-changing technological landscape, it’s not easy for VCs to know what’s coming next and how to place their bets. Yet, it’s the job of investors to peer around the corner and find the next big thing, whether that’s in AI, serverless, blockchain, edge computing or other emerging technologies. Our panel will look at the challenges of enterprise investing, what they look for in enterprise startups and how they decide where to put their money.

Want to boost your ROI? Take advantage of our group discount — save 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once. And remember, for every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5, but your chance to save $100 ends next week. No one enjoys paying more, so buy an early-bird ticket today, cross it off your to-do list and enjoy your savings.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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What to expect from Samsung’s Galaxy Note event

Samsung’s never been particularly good at keeping things under wraps. That’s no doubt, at least in part, by design. The company loves priming the rumor pump ahead of product announcements, and like clockwork, we’ve already seen plenty of what we expect is planned for next Wednesday’s Unpacked event in Brooklyn.

Earlier this week, Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S6, its latest shot against the iPad Pro. Doing low-key product announcements ahead of events has become a bit of a thing of late. Apple and Google both did it earlier this year. Among other things, it’s a way of letting the world know that you’ve got more stuff to announce than a single event could possibly hold.

It seems like Samsung’s got a fair amount lined up for Wednesday, but the big show at Barclays is really about one thing:

The Galaxy Note 10

Screen Shot 2019 08 02 at 1.05.42 PM

Duh, right?

If there’s one thing Samsung likes more than devices, it’s a lot of devices. Following on the heels of a bunch of new Galaxy S devices, the company is expected to release between two and three new models.

The big news here is the expected addition of a Plus or Pro model. For whatever percentage of the population that’s been holding off on buying a Note over concerns that the screen just isn’t large enough, the new model is a expected to support a 6.8-inch display compared to the standard Note’s 6.3 (both AMOLED). That’s definite tablet territory, but Samsung’s made great strides on the body-to-screen ratio front, so it may not be the size and weight of a manhole cover.

A third model, which is more wishful thinking than full-on rumor for now, has the company releasing a 5G model. It makes sense from a strategy standpoint. Samsung released an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink version of the S10 with 5G last month, and the company clearly prides itself at being one of the first to bring the tech to market — even though carriers haven’t really caught up.

Rumors point to a triple-lens camera this time out, including a 16-megapixel ultra-wide on board, while the Pro/Plus is getting a depth-sensing time of flight sensor. Internally, we expect the addition of the Snapdragon 855 Plus. The Note would be among the first to sport the newly souped-up chip announced by Qualcomm a couple of weeks back.

Charging is expected to be sped up to support the beefy 3,600mAh/4,300mAh batteries, and 8/12GB of RAM are expected on the standard and Plus models, along with 25GB of storage.

Oh yeah, and then there’s that dongle.

Galaxy Watch Active 2

Screen Shot 2019 08 02 at 1.07.25 PM

It’s been less than half a year since Samsung showed off the original Galaxy Watch Active, but the company is rumored to already be ready for part two. Available in both 40 and 44mm versions, the watches are said to bring ECG detection and fall monitoring, following recent additions for the Apple Watch. Rumors also point to the removal of the spinning physical bezel in favor of a touch version.

Etc.

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More information on the Galaxy Fold seems like a no-brainer. We got a rough time frame of September a couple of weeks back. I’d anticipate something more specific on the long-awaited and much-delayed foldable, along with some more information on those fixes.

Similarly MIA is the Galaxy Home, which was announced this time last year. We still don’t have a specific date on the company’s HomePod competitor, in spite of rumors that the company was already working on a cheaper version. Or maybe Samsung would rather sweep the Bixby delivery device under the carpet altogether?

All will be revealed on Wednesday, August 7, starting at 1PM ET/11AM PT.

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