There’s a tennis game hidden in Google right now; here’s how to find it
Google loves a good Easter egg. From cutesie Douglas Adams references to the search results for “askew” being just a liiiiittle bit crooked, there’s all sorts of stuff hiding in the search engine if you know the right thing to type or the right buttons to push.
The latest addition — a fun little tennis game hidden within certain search results pages — is in honor of the Wimbledon tennis tournament. With Wimbledon wrapping up this weekend, though, this egg might not be around for long.
It’s not too hard to find, but it’s just tucked away enough that most people probably won’t stumble upon it accidentally.
Here’s how to find it:
- Do a Google search for “wimbledon scores.”
- See that purple box that pops up? See the nav bar that says “Men’s Singles,” “Women’s Singles,” etc.? Grab that and drag it all the way to the left to scroll to the end.
- At the very end is a little tennis ball icon. Tap that, and the game should fire right up.
Once you’ve got it up, it’s pretty much Pong minus the paddles. Move to serve, then try to get your player in front of the ball to rally it back and forth. I’m not sure if it’s possible to actually get the ball past the computer player — I haven’t seen it happen. But just successfully returning the ball will get you a point. Once you miss a return, it’s game over.
It’ll work on both mobile or desktop, but I’ve found it’s a helluva lot easier to play on the latter.
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Attend TC Sessions: Enterprise and score a free pass to Disrupt SF 2019
We can’t wait to dig into the competitive, high-stakes world of enterprise software at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re channeling the excitement into creating extra ROI for you. How’s that work? Read on.
It starts with the $100 you’ll save when you buy your early-bird ticket. Here comes the extra part. For every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Who doesn’t like free?
We expect more than 1,000 attendees — including some of the top minds, makers and investors in enterprise software — for a day-long intensive event focused on the promises and challenges of this massive $500 billion market. You can expect onstage interviews, exhibiting startups, breakout sessions, receptions and more. TechCrunch editors Frederic Lardinois, Ron Miller and Connie Loizos will interview founders from both established and emerging companies about crucial topics, like intelligent marketing automation, AI and the inevitability of the cloud.
Case in point. You can’t talk about enterprise software or its shift to the cloud without talking about the Kubernetes container management system. That’s why we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Aparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes; Tim Hockin, who currently works on Kubernetes and the Google Container Engine; Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie; and Microsoft’s Brendan Burns — the lead engineer for Kubernetes during his time at Google.
These four heavy hitters will discuss the history of Kubernetes, why Google went open source with it and the five-year-old project’s rapid growth. It promises to be a fascinating look at the past, present and future of containers in the enterprise.
That’s just one presentation in a jam-packed day dedicated to all things enterprise. Check out the speakers we have on tap so far. And by all means, if there’s someone you want to hear on the stage, send us your speaker submissions.
TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place September 5. Early-bird tickets cost $249, and student tickets sell for $75. Buy 4+ tickets to get the group rate and save another 20%. And remember, you’ll receive a free Expo-only pass to Disrupt SF 2019 with every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket.
Get your early-bird tickets now, and we’ll see you in September!
Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.
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Microsoft says Teams now has 13M daily active users
Teams, Microsoft’s two-year-old Slack competitor, is the company’s fastest-growing application in its history. That’s something Microsoft has said in the past, but for the first time, Microsoft today also announced actual user numbers for the service ahead of its Inspire partner conference next week. Teams now has 13 million active daily users, Microsoft said, and 19 million weekly active users. Microsoft also today said that Teams is now in use by 91 of the Fortune 100 companies.
The company isn’t afraid of putting those numbers up against Slack, which IPOed only a few weeks ago. Jared Spataro, Microsoft Corporate VP for Microsoft 365, doesn’t mention Slack by name in his blog post, but the company put together a little graphic that clearly shows why it is now willing to share these numbers.
The last official number from Slack is that it had 10 million daily active users in January. Without update numbers from Slack, it’s hard to say if Teams now has more users, but unless Slack’s growth accelerated in recent months, that’s probably the case.
In addition to disclosing these numbers, Microsoft also announced a number of updates to Teams that range from features like priority notifications, which take the annoyance of chat notifications to a new level by pinging you every two minutes until you respond, to read receipts, new moderation and cross-posting options for Teams channels and a time clock feature that lets employees clock in and out of work shifts right from the Teams mobile apps.
Because Inspire is an event for Microsoft partners, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft is also launching a few new Teams features that involve its resellers and other partners. These include the ability to integrate teams with compliance recording partners like ASC, NICE and Verint Verba, as well as a contact center solution in partnership with Five9, Nice InContact and others. The most important of these announcements, though, is surely the fact that Microsoft is launching a new partner-led Teams trial (PDF) that will enable Microsoft 365 partners to offer a free six-month trial of Teams to customers on the Exchange-only or Office 365 Business plan. This will surely bolster Microsoft’s user numbers for Teams in the coming months, too.
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How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company
There are successful companies that grow fast and garner tons of press. Then there’s Roblox, a company which took at least a decade to hit its stride and has, relative to its current level of success, barely gotten any recognition or attention.
Why has Roblox’s story gone mostly untold? One reason is that it emerged from a whole generation of gaming portals and platforms. Some, like King.com, got lucky or pivoted their business. Others by and large failed.
Once companies like Facebook, Apple and Google got to the gaming scene, it just looked like a bad idea to try to build your own platform — and thus not worth talking about. Added to that, founder and CEO Dave Baszucki seems uninterested in press.
But overall, the problem has been that Roblox just seemed like an insignificant story for many, many years. The company had millions of users, sure. So did any number of popular games. In its early days, Roblox even looked like Minecraft, a game that was released long after Roblox went live, but that grew much, much faster.
Yet here we are today: Roblox now claims that half of all American children aged 9-12 are on its platform. It has jumped to 90 million monthly unique users and is poised to go international, potentially multiplying that number. And it’s unique. Essentially all other distribution services offering games through a portal have eventually fizzled, aside from some distant cousins like Steam.
This is the story of how Roblox not only survived, but built a thriving platform.
Seeds of an idea
(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Before Roblox, there was Knowledge Revolution, a company that made teaching software. While designed to allow students to simulate physics experiments, perhaps predictably, they also treated it like a game.
“The fun seemed to be in building your own experiment,” says Baszucki. “When people were playing it and we went into schools and labs, they were all making car crashes and buildings fall down, making really funny stuff.” Provided with a sandbox, kids didn’t just make dry experiments about mass or velocity — they made games, or experiences they could show off to friends for a laugh.
Knowledge Revolution was founded in 1989, by Dave Baszucki and his brother Greg (who didn’t later co-found Roblox, but is now on its board). Nearly a decade later, it was acquired for $20 million by MSC Software, which made professional simulation tools. Dave continued there for another four years before leaving to become an angel investor.
Baszucki put money into Friendster, a company that pre-dated Facebook and MySpace in the social networking category. That investment seeded another piece of the idea for Roblox. Taken together, the legacy of Knowledge Revolution and Friendster were the two key components undergirding Roblox: a physics sandbox with strong creation tools, and a social graph.
Baszucki himself is a third piece of the puzzle. Part of an older set of entrepreneurs, which might be called the Steve Jobs generation, Baszucki’s archetype seems closer to Mr. Rogers than Jobs himself: unfailingly polite and enthusiastic, never claiming superior insight, and preferring to pass credit for his accomplishments on to others. In conversation, he shows interests both central and tangential to Roblox, like virtual environments, games, education, digital identity and the future of tech. Somewhere in this heady mix, the idea of Roblox came about.
The first release
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Andrew Ng to talk about how AI will transform business at TC Sessions: Enterprise
When it comes to applying AI to the world around us, Andrew Ng has few if any peers. We are delighted to announce that the renowned founder, investor, AI expert and Stanford professor will join us onstage at the TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise show on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.
AI promises to transform the $500 billion enterprise world like nothing since the cloud and SaaS. Hundreds of startups are already seizing the AI moment in areas like recruiting, marketing and communications and customer experience. The oceans of data required to power AI are becoming dramatically more valuable, which in turn is fueling the rise of new data platforms, another big topic of the show.
Last year, Ng launched the $175 million AI Fund, backed by big names like Sequoia, NEA, Greylock and SoftBank. The fund’s goal is to develop new AI businesses in a studio model and spin them out when they are ready for prime time. The first of that fund’s cohort is Landing AI, which also launched last year and aims to “empower companies to jumpstart AI and realize practical value.” It’s a wave businesses will want to catch if Ng is anywhere near right in his conviction that AI will generate $13 trillion in GDP growth globally in the next 20 years. You heard that right.
At TC Sessions: Enterprise, TechCrunch’s editors will ask Ng to detail how he believes AI will unfold in the enterprise world and bring big productivity gains to business.
As the former chief scientist at Baidu and the founding lead of Google Brain, Ng led the AI transformation of two of the world’s leading technology companies. Dr. Ng is the co-founder of Coursera, an online learning platform, and founder of deeplearning.ai, an AI education platform. Dr. Ng is also an adjunct professor at Stanford University’s Computer Science Department and holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.
Early Bird tickets to see Andrew at TC Sessions: Enterprise are on sale for just $249 when you book here; but hurry, prices go up by $100 soon! Students, grab your discounted tickets for just $75 here.
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Swit, a collaboration suite that offers ‘freedom from integrations,’ raises $6 million in seed funding
A marketplace dominated by Slack and Microsoft Teams, along with a host of other smaller workplace communication apps, might seem to leave little room for a new entrant, but Swit wants to prove that wrong. The app combines messaging with a roster of productivity tools, like task management, calendars and Gantt charts, to give teams “freedom from integrations.” Originally founded in Seoul and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Swit announced today that it has raised a $6 million seed round led by Korea Investment Partners, with participation from Hyundai Venture Investment Corporation and Mirae Asset Venture Investment.
Along with an investment from Kakao Ventures last year, this brings Swit’s total seed funding to about $7 million. Swit’s desktop and mobile apps were released in March and since then more than 450 companies have adopted it, with 40,000 individual registered users. The startup was launched last year by CEO Josh Lee and Max Lim, who previously co-founded auction.co.kr, a Korean e-commerce site acquired by eBay in 2001.
While Slack, which recently went public, has become so synonymous with the space that “Slack me” is now part of workplace parlance at many companies, Lee says Swit isn’t playing catch-up. Instead, he believes Swit benefits from “last mover advantage,” solving the shortfalls of other workplace messaging, collaboration and productivity apps by integrating many of their functions into one hub.
“We know the market is heavily saturated with great unicorns, but many companies need multiple collaboration apps and there is nothing that seamlessly combines them, so users don’t have to go back and forth between two platforms,” Lee tells TechCrunch. Many employees rely on Slack or Microsoft Teams to chat with one another, on top of several project management apps, like Asana, Jira, Monday and Confluence, and email to communicate with people at other companies (Lee points to a M.io report that found most businesses use at least two messaging apps and four to seven collaboration tools).
Lee says he used Slack for more than five years and during that time, his teammates added integrations from Asana, Monday, GSuite and Office365, but were unsatisfied with how they worked.
“All we could do with the integrations was receive mostly text-based notifications and there were also too many overlapping features,” he says. “We realized that working with multiple environments reduced team productivity and increased communication overhead.” In very large organizations, teams or departments sometimes use different messaging and collaboration apps, creating yet more friction.
Swit’s goal is to cover all those needs in one app. It comes with integrated Kanban task management, calendars and Gantt charts, and at the end of this year about 20 to 30 bots and apps will be available in its marketplace. Swit’s pricing tier currently has free and standard tiers, with a premium tier for enterprise customers planned for fall. The premium version will have full integration with Office365 and GSuite, allowing users to drag-and-drop emails into panels or convert them into trackable tasks.
While being a late-mover gives Swit certain advantages, it also means it must convince users to switch from their current apps, which is always a challenge when it comes to attracting enterprise clients. But Lee is optimistic. After seeing a demo, he says 91% of potential users registered on Swit, with more than 75% continuing to use it every day. Many of them used Asana or Monday before, but switched to Swit because they wanted to more easily communicate with teammates while planning tasks. Some are also gradually transitioning over from Slack to Swit for all their messaging (Swit recently released a Slack migration tool that enables teams to move over channels, workspaces and attachments. Migration tools for Asana, Trello and Jira are also planned).
In addition to “freedom from integrations,” Lee says Swit’s competitive advantages include being developed from the start for small businesses as well as large enterprises that still frequently rely on email to communicate across different departments or locations. Another differentiator is that all of Swit’s functions work on both desktop and mobile, which not all integrations in other collaboration apps can.
“That means if people integrate multiple apps into a desktop app or web browser, they might not be able to use them on mobile. So if they are looking for data, they have to search app by app, channel by channel, product by product, so data and information is scattered everywhere, hair on fire,” Lee says. “We provide one centralized command center for team collaboration without losing context and that is one of our biggest sources of customer satisfaction.”
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OneTrust raises $200M at a $1.3B valuation to help organizations navigate online privacy rules
GDPR, and the newer California Consumer Privacy Act, have given a legal bite to ongoing developments in online privacy and data protection: it’s always good practice for companies with an online presence to take measures to safeguard people’s data, but now failing to do so can land them in some serious hot water.
Now — to underscore the urgency and demand in the market — one of the bigger companies helping organizations navigate those rules is announcing a huge round of funding. OneTrust, which builds tools to help companies navigate data protection and privacy policies both internally and with its customers, has raised $200 million in a Series A led by Insight that values the company at $1.3 billion.
It’s an outsized round for a Series A, being made at an equally outsized valuation — especially considering that the company is only three years old — but that’s because of the wide-ranging nature of the issue, according to CEO Kabir Barday, and OneTrust’s early moves and subsequent pole position in tackling it.
“We’re talking about an operational overhaul in a company’s practices,” Barday said in an interview. “That requires the right technology and reach to be able to deliver that at a low cost.” Notably, he said that OneTrust wasn’t actually in search of funding — it’s already generating revenue and could have grown off its own balance sheet — although he noted that having the capitalization and backing sends a signal to the market and in particular to larger organizations of its stability and staying power.
Currently, OneTrust has around 3,000 customers across 100 countries (and 1,000 employees), and the plan will be to continue to expand its reach geographically and to more businesses. Funding will also go toward the company’s technology: it already has 50 patents filed and another 50 applications in progress, securing its own IP in the area of privacy protection.
OneTrust offers technology and services covering three different aspects of data protection and privacy management.
Its Privacy Management Software helps an organization manage how it collects data, and it generates compliance reports in line with how a site is working relative to different jurisdictions. Then there is the famous (or infamous) service that lets internet users set their preferences for how they want their data to be handled on different sites. The third is a larger database and risk management platform that assesses how various third-party services (for example advertising providers) work on a site and where they might pose data protection risks.
These are all provided either as a cloud-based software as a service, or an on-premises solution, depending on the customer in question.
The startup also has an interesting backstory that sheds some light on how it was founded and how it identified the gap in the market relatively early.
Alan Dabbiere, who is the co-chairman of OneTrust, had been the chairman of Airwatch — the mobile device management company acquired by VMware in 2014 (Airwatch’s CEO and founder, John Marshall, is OneTrust’s other co-chairman). In an interview, he told me that it was when they were at Airwatch — where Barday had worked across consulting, integration, engineering and product management — that they began to see just how a smartphone “could be a quagmire of privacy issues.”
“We could capture apps that an employee was using so that we could show them to IT to mitigate security risks,” he said, “but that actually presented a big privacy issue. If [the employee] has dyslexia [and uses a special app for it] or if the employee used a dating app, you’ve now shown things to IT that you shouldn’t have.”
He admitted that in the first version of the software, “we weren’t even thinking about whether that was inappropriate, but then we quickly realised that we needed to be thinking about privacy.”
Dabbiere said that it was Barday who first brought that sensibility to light, and “that is something that we have evolved from.” After that, and after the VMware sale, it seemed a no-brainer that he and Marshall would come on to help the new startup grow.
Airwatch made a relatively quick exit, I pointed out. His response: the plan is to stay the course at OneTrust, with a lot more room for expansion in this market. He describes the issues of data protection and privacy as “death by 1,000 cuts.” I guess when you think about it from an enterprising point of view, that essentially presents 1,000 business opportunities.
Indeed, there is obvious growth potential to expand not just its funnel of customers, but to add more services, such as proactive detection of malware that might leak customers’ data (which calls to mind the recently fined breach at British Airways), as well as tools to help stop that once identified.
While there are a million other companies also looking to fix those problems today, what’s interesting is the point from which OneTrust is starting: by providing tools to organizations simply to help them operate in the current regulatory climate as good citizens of the online world.
This is what caught Insight’s eye with this investment.
“OneTrust has truly established themselves as leaders in this space in a very short time frame, and are quickly becoming for privacy professionals what Salesforce became for salespeople,” said Richard Wells of Insight. “They offer such a vast range of modules and tools to help customers keep their businesses compliant with varying regulatory laws, and the tailwinds around GDPR and the upcoming CCPA make this an opportune time for growth. Their leadership team is unparalleled in their ambition and has proven their ability to convert those ambitions into reality.”
Wells added that while this is a big round for a Series A it’s because it is something of an outlier — not a mark of how Series A rounds will go soon.
“Investors will always be interested in and keen to partner with companies that are providing real solutions, are already established and are led by a strong group of entrepreneurs,” he said in an interview. “This is a company that has the expertise to help solve for what could be one of the greatest challenges of the next decade. That’s the company investors want to partner with and grow, regardless of fund timing.”
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N26 launches its challenger bank in the US
European fintech startup N26 is now accepting customers in the U.S. The company is launching a bank account with a debit card that should provide a better experience compared to traditional retail banks.
If you’re familiar with N26, the product that is going live today won’t surprise you much. Customers in the U.S. can download a mobile app and create a bank account from their phone in just a few minutes. It’s a true bank account with ACH payments, routing and account numbers.
A few days later, you receive a debit card that you can control from the mobile app. Every time you make a transaction, you instantly receive a push notification telling you how much money you just paid. You can set up your PIN code, customize limits, turn on and off online payments, and make ATM withdrawals or payments abroad.
And that’s about all there is to know. But what about fees? Basic N26 accounts are free. There’s no monthly fee and no minimum balance. There’s no fee on transactions in a foreign currency and you get two free ATM withdrawals per month.
N26 is going to progressively roll out signups over the summer as a sort of beta program. If you’ve signed up to the waitlist, you’ll get an invitation over the coming hours, days and weeks. There are currently 100,000 people on the waitlist. N26 will then open signups to everyone later this summer.
When N26 rolls out its final product in a couple of months, the company says that it plans to automatically find and reimburse fees the ATM operators are charging. N26 cards in the U.S. work on the Visa network instead of Mastercard.
Just like Chime, N26 will also try to let you get paid up to two days early if you get paid via direct deposit. Instead of waiting a couple of days to clear those transactions, N26 will go ahead and top up your account.
White label
Behind the scenes, there are a few differences between N26 in Europe and N26 in the U.S. While N26 has a full-fledged banking license in Europe, the company has partnered with Axos Bank, which is acting as a white-label partner in the U.S.
Axos Bank essentially manages your money for you, and N26 acts as the interface between customers and their bank accounts. As a result, you get an FDIC-insured account.
N26 first partnered with a third-party company in Europe, as well. But it was a costly deal that wasn’t meant to stick around. The startup got a banking license in Germany that was good for Europe at large. In the U.S., it’s a different story, as the market is not as unified as in Europe — it’s complicated to get a license to operate in all 50 states.
“We looked at 30 players, we did some due diligence and we’re happy to partner with Axos Bank. The deals that you get in the U.S. for white-label banks are much more favorable than in Europe,” N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “It’s a setup for the longer term. It’s good for a couple million customers,” Stalf added later in the conversation.
Just a start
N26 is already planning more features for the U.S. The company plans to roll out two premium plans — N26 Metal and then N26 Black.
And it sounds like there will be some changes when it comes to perks for premium users. “We took that to a separate level,” Stalf said.
And shared Spaces are finally arriving in the coming months. Spaces are sub-accounts designed to put money aside. You can swipe money from one Space to another or you can set up automated rules.
Eventually, you’ll be able to share a Space with other people so that you can save money and spend money together. It’ll work “like a WhatsApp group,” Stalf said.
N26 currently has 3.5 million customers in Europe and has raised more than $500 million in total so far. There are now a thousand people working for N26 in Berlin, 60 employees in New York, 80 people in Barcelona and a small team of five to 10 people starting soon in Vienna.
“It went from being a small company to being an international company,” Stalf said.
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Signavio raises $177M at a $400M valuation for its business process automation solutions
Robotic Process Automation has been the name of the game in enterprise software lately — with organizations using advances in machine learning algorithms and other kinds of AI alongside big-data analytics to speed up everything from performing mundane tasks to more complex business decisions.
To underscore the opportunity and growth in the market, today a startup in the wider segment of process automation is announcing a significant fundraise. Signavio, a company founded out of Berlin that provides tools for business process management — “providing the ‘P’ in RPA,” as the company describes it — has picked up an investment of $177 million at what we understand is a valuation of $400 million.
This round is large on its own, but even more so considering that before this the company — founded in 2009 — had only raised around $50 million, according to data from PitchBook. This latest capital injection is being led by Apax Digital (the growth equity team of Apax Partners), with DTCP. It notes that existing investor Summit Partners is also keeping a stake in the business with this deal.
The company was founded by a team of alums from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, who used research they did there for creating the world’s first web modeler for business process management and analytics as the template for Signavio’s own Process Manager. (The name “Signavio” seems to be a portmanteau of “navigating through signals,” which essentially explains the basics of what BPM aims to do to help a business with its decision making.)
Partly because it’s raised so little money, Signavio has been somewhat under the radar, but it has seen a huge amount of growth. It says that revenues in the last 12 months have grown by more than 70%, and its software is used by more than one million users across 1,300 customers — with clients including SAP, DHL, Liberty Mutual, Deloitte, Comcast and Puma. It counts Silicon Valley as its second HQ these days; that trajectory will be followed further with this latest funding: Signavio says the funding in part will be going to international expansion of the business.
“10 years ago, we set out on a journey to tackle the time-consuming practices that limit business productivity,” said Dr. Gero Decker, CEO and co-founder of Signavio, in a statement. “This significant new investment further validates our approach to solve business problems faster and more efficiently, unleashing the power of process through our unique Business Transformation Suite. We are thrilled to welcome Apax Digital as our new lead partner, and look forward to building upon our success to date by leveraging our partners’ operating capabilities and global platforms for our international expansion.”
The other area of investment will be the company’s technology suite. While BPM has been around for years as a concept — and indeed there are a number of other companies that provide tools that are compared sometimes to Signavio’s, such as from biggies like IBM and Microsoft through to Kissflow and others — what’s interesting is how it’s had a surge of interest more recently as organizations increasingly start to add more automation into their IT infrastructure, in part to reduce the human labor needed for more mundane back-office tasks, and in part to reduce costs and speed up processes.
Robotic process automation companies like UiPath and Blue Prism bring some of the same processing tools to the table as Signavio, although the argument is that the latter — which says it helps to “mine, model, monitor, manage and maintain” customers’ data — provides a more sophisticated level of data crunching that can be used for RPA, or for other ends. (It also works with several of the big RPA players, mainly Blue Prism but also UiPath and Automation Anywhere.)
“As businesses have become more global, and workforces more distributed, business processes have proliferated, and become more complex,” noted Daniel O’Keefe, managing partner, and Mark Beith, managing director, of Apax Digital, in a joint statement. “Signavio’s cloud-native suite allows employees across an enterprise to collaborate and transform their businesses by digitizing, optimizing and ultimately automating their processes. We are tremendously excited to partner with the Signavio team and to support their vision.” The two will also be joining Signavio’s board with this round.
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Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to vulnerability that could allow iPhone eavesdropping
Apple has disabled the Apple Watch Walkie Talkie app due to an unspecified vulnerability that could allow a person to listen to another customer’s iPhone without consent, the company told TechCrunch this evening.
Apple has apologized for the bug and for the inconvenience of being unable to use the feature while a fix is made.
The Walkie Talkie app on Apple Watch allows two users who have accepted an invite from each other to receive audio chats via a “push to talk” interface reminiscent of the PTT buttons on older cell phones.
A statement from Apple reads:
We were just made aware of a vulnerability related to the Walkie-Talkie app on the Apple Watch and have disabled the function as we quickly fix the issue. We apologize to our customers for the inconvenience and will restore the functionality as soon as possible. Although we are not aware of any use of the vulnerability against a customer and specific conditions and sequences of events are required to exploit it, we take the security and privacy of our customers extremely seriously. We concluded that disabling the app was the right course of action as this bug could allow someone to listen through another customer’s iPhone without consent. We apologize again for this issue and the inconvenience.
Apple was alerted to the bug via its report a vulnerability portal directly and says there is no current evidence that it was exploited in the wild.
The company is temporarily disabling the feature entirely until a fix can be made and rolled out to devices. The Walkie Talkie App will remain installed on devices, but will not function until it has been updated with the fix.
Earlier this year a bug was discovered in the group calling feature of FaceTime that allowed people to listen in before a call was accepted. It turned out that the teen who discovered the bug, Grant Thompson, had attempted to contact Apple about the issue but was unable to get a response. Apple fixed the bug and eventually rewarded Thompson a bug bounty. This time around, Apple appears to be listening more closely to the reports that come in via its vulnerability tips line and has disabled the feature.
Earlier today, Apple quietly pushed a Mac update to remove a feature of the Zoom conference app that allowed it to work around Mac restrictions to provide a smoother call initiation experience — but that also allowed emails and websites to add a user to an active video call without their permission.
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