Daily Crunch: Uber will deactivate low-rated riders
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1. Uber will start deactivating riders with low ratings
Uber drivers have been able to rate their passengers before this, but those passengers were never really at risk of deactivation — until now. In a blog post, Uber’s Kate Parker said that while only “a small number of riders” should be affected, “it’s the right thing to do.”
The company isn’t announcing a specific rating cutoff. Instead, it says it will deactivate users who fall significantly below a city’s average, after “several notifications and opportunities to improve his or her rating.”
2. Huawei files motion to challenge sweeping US ban, calling it ‘not normal’
The Chinese hardware giant has filed a motion for summary judgement that questions the constitutionality of the section of the National Defense Authorization Act that the Trump administration used to halt imports.
3. Flipboard hacks prompt password resets for millions of users
Hackers stole usernames, email addresses, passwords and account tokens for third-party services. According to Flipboard, “not all” users’ account data were involved in the breaches, but the company declined to say how many users were affected.
4. Amazon just launched a $90, 5.5-inch Echo Show
The Echo Show 5 (that’s “five” for inches) doesn’t replace any existing Amazon smart screen, even though the price point will no doubt make many think twice about the $130 Spot.
5. Talkspace picks up $50 million Series D
Talkspace launched back in 2012 with a mission to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible. The platform allows users to pay a subscription fee for unlimited messaging with one of the company’s 5,000 healthcare professionals.
6. NYC subway riders will be able to swipe in with Apple Pay starting Friday
Apple Pay is hitting select subway stations this Friday, May 31. New Yorkers will then be able to swipe their iPhones or Apple Watches to catch a ride.
7. Q&A with J Crowley, Head of Product at Airbnb Lux, on what makes a great PM
Crowley has run product at three big-name companies: Foursquare/Swarm, Blue Apron and now Airbnb. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
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Delane Parnell’s plan to conquer amateur esports
Most of the buzz about esports focuses on high-profile professional teams and audiences watching live streams of those professionals.
What gets ignored is the entire base of amateurs wanting to compete in esports below the professional tier. This is like talking about the NBA and the value of its sponsorships and broadcast rights as if that is the entirety of the basketball market in the US.
Los Angeles-based PlayVS (pronounced “play versus”) wants to become the dominant platform for amateur esports, starting at the high school level. The company raised $46 million last year—its first year operating—with the vision that owning the infrastructure for competitions and expanding it to encompass other social elements of gaming can make it the largest gaming company in the world.
I recently sat down with Founder & CEO Delane Parnell to talk about his company’s formation and growth strategy. Below is the transcript of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Founding PlayVS
Eric P: You have a fascinating background as a serial entrepreneur while you were a teenager.
Delane P.: I grew up on the west side of Detroit and started working at the cell phone store of a family friend when I was 13. When I turned 16 or so, I joined two guys in opening our own Metro PCS franchise. And then two additional franchises. And I was on the founding team of a car rental company called Executive Rental Car.
Eric P: And this segued into tech startups after meeting Jon Triest from Ludlow Ventures?
Delane P: He got me a ticket to the Launch conference in SF, and that experience inspired me to start a Fireside Chat series in Detroit that brought in people like Brian Wong from Kiip and Alexis Ohanian from Reddit to speak. Starting at 21, I worked at a venture capital firm called IncWell based in Birmingham, Michigan then joined a startup called Rocket Fiber.
We were focused on internet infrastructure – this is 2015-ish – and I was appointed to lead our strategy in esports. So I met with many of the publishers, ancillary startups, tournament organizers, and OG players and team owners. Through the process, I became passionate about esports and ended up leaving Rocket Fiber to start a Call of Duty team that I quickly sold to TSM.
Eric P: What then drove you to found PlayVS? Did it seem like an obvious opportunity or did it take you a while to figure it out?
Delane P.: What esports means is playing video games competitively bound to governance and a competitive ruleset. As a player, what that experience means is you play on a team, in a position, with a coach, in a season that culminates in some sort of championship.
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Eyeing an entry into China, Roblox enters strategic partnership with Tencent
Kids gaming platform Roblox has its sights set on China with today’s news that it has entered into a strategic relationship with Chinese tech giant Tencent. The companies announced a strategic partnership that will initially focus on education — specifically, coding fundamentals, game design, digital citizenship and entrepreneurial skills.
The joint venture — still unnamed — will be based in Shenzhen, Roblox says. And its eventual goal is to bring Roblox to China. This is something Roblox has been steadily working toward ahead of today, most recently by adding support for Chinese languages and making its coding curriculum available for free in Chinese.
The first initiative from the new JV will be a scholarship fund that sponsors 15 young developers, who will fly to the U.S. to attend a week-long creator camp at Stanford University. The camp, taught by iD Tech, will teach the students game design, including how to create 3D worlds, along with programming fundamentals using Roblox’s developer tools and Lua code.
Roblox and Tencent, together with the China Association for Educational Technology (CAET), are calling for applications from creators ages 10 through 15. Teachers will be encouraged to nominate their students, who can apply online on Roblox’s website. The submissions close on June 14, and scholarship recipients will be notified on June 28.
The first camp will run the week of July 23, and a second session will run the week of August 18. During camp, students will work, eat and stay at Stanford.
“I’m extremely excited to partner with Roblox,” said Steven Ma, senior vice president of Tencent, in a statement. “We believe technological advancement will help Chinese students learn by fueling their creativity and imagination. Our partnership with Roblox provides an engaging way to reach children of all ages across China to develop skills like coding, design, and entrepreneurship.”
“Tencent is the perfect partner for Roblox in China,” added Roblox founder and CEO Dave Baszucki. “They have a deep understanding of the Chinese market and share our belief of the power of digital creation and our vision to bring the world together through play.”
The multi-year JV will continue to invest in educational initiatives, including local coding camps, training programs for instructors to build custom courses and more.
Unlike other gaming companies, Roblox has to do more than just finding a way into China with the help of a local partner — it also has to create an active community of game creators in the region. That’s because Roblox is a gaming platform, not a game maker itself. Instead, third-party creators build their own games on Roblox for others to play.
Roblox gets a share of the revenue the games make through sales of virtual goods.
In 2017, Roblox said it paid out $30 million to its creator community, and noted that number would more than double in 2018. In April, Roblox noted that game players and creators now spend more than a billion hours per month on its platform. Now valued at more than $2.5 billion, Roblox claims more than 90 million monthly active users — a number that could dramatically increase if Roblox launched in China.
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UK’s first 5G network taster goes live in six cities tomorrow
The UK’s first 5G consumer mobile network is launching tomorrow in six cities.
Mobile network operator EE will switch on the next-gen cellular connectivity in select locations in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester — promising “increased speeds, reliability and connectivity”. Though of course consumers will also need to have a 5G handset and 5G price plan, as well as being in the right location, to see any of the touted benefits.
EE says it expects customers to experience an increase in speeds of around 100-150Mbps when using the 5G network — “even in the busiest areas” where network coverage extends.
“Some customers will break the one gigabit-per-second milestone on their 5G smartphones,” it adds.
Ten other UK cities are set to get a taste of EE’s 5G later by the end of this year, also in select, busier parts — namely Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Leeds, Hull, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Coventry and Bristol — with more cities planned to come on stream in 2020.
While rival mobile operator Vodafone has said it will began its own rollout of a 5G network in July.
Among the advantages for 5G that EE is pushing on its website to try to persuade users to upgrade are better connections in busy places (such as festivals or stadiums); faster download speeds to support movie downloads and higher quality video streaming; and a gamer-friendly lack of lag — which it bills as “almost instant Internet connection”.
Whether those additions will convince masses of mobile users to shell out for an EE 5G device plan — which start at £53 per month — remains to be seen.
Earlier this month the network operator, which is owned by BT, launched its first 5G Sim-only handset plans, and began ranging 5G handsets — from the likes of Samsung, LG, OnePlus and Oppo.
Though not from Huawei. Last week it told the BBC it would pause on offering any 5G smartphones made by Chinese device maker Huawei — saying it wanted to “make sure we can carry out the right level of testing and quality assurance” for its customers.
Huawei remains subject to a US executive order intended to dissuade US companies from doing business with it on national security grounds. And Google has been reported to have taken a decision to withdrawn some Android-related services from Huawei — raising question-marks about the future quality of its smartphones. (The Chinese company’s involvement in building out core UK 5G networks is also subject to restriction, with the government reportedly intending to impose limits.)
EE says the 5G network it’s launching tomorrow is an additional layer on top of its existing 4G network — dubbing it “phase 1”. So this switch on is really a toe in the water. Or, well, a marketing opportunity to claim a 5G first.
It describes it as a “non-standalone” deployment, saying it’s combining 4G and 5G to “give customers the fastest, most reliable mobile broadband experience they’ve ever had” — saying it’s planning to upgrade more than 100 cell sites to 5G per month, as it builds out 5G coverage.
It will also expand its 4G coverage into rural areas and add more capacity to 4G sites — as 4G will remain the fall-back option for years to come (if not indefinitely).
Phase 2 of EE’s 5G rollout, from 2022, will introduce the “full next generation 5G core network, enhanced device chipset capabilities, and increased availability of 5G-ready spectrum”.
“Higher bandwidth and lower latency, coupled with expansive and growing 5G coverage, will enable a more responsive network, enabling truly immersive mobile augmented reality, real-time health monitoring, and mobile cloud gaming,” EE adds.
A third phase of the 5G rollout, from 2023, is slated to bring Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications, Network Slicing and multi-gigabit-per-second speeds.
“This phase of 5G will enable critical applications like real-time traffic management of fleets of autonomous vehicles, massive sensor networks with millions of devices measuring air quality across the entire country, and the ‘tactile internet’, where a sense of touch can be added to remote real-time interactions,” EE suggests.
As we’ve said before, there’s little call for consumers to rush to upgrade to a 5G handset, with network coverage the exception not the rule, even as building out the touted benefits of so-called ‘intelligent connectivity’ will be a work of years.
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Talkspace picks up $50 million Series D
Talkspace, the platform that lets patients and therapists communicate online, has today announced the close of a $50 million financing round led by Revolution Growth. Existing investors, such as Norwest Venture Partners, Omura Capital, Spark Capital and Compound Ventures, are also participating in the round.
As part of the deal, Revolution Growth’s Patrick Conroy will join the Talkspace board of directors.
Talkspace launched back in 2012 with a mission to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible. The platform allows users to pay a subscription fee for unlimited messaging with one of the company’s 5,000 healthcare professionals. Since launch, Talkspace has rolled out products specific to certain users, such as teenagers or couples.
The company also partners with insurance providers and employers to offer Talkspace services to their members/employees as part of a commercial business. Today, Talkspace has announced a partnership with Optum Health. This expands Talkspace’s commercial reach to 5 million people.
According to the release, Talkspace will use the funding to accelerate the growth of its commercial business.
Here’s what Talkspace CEO and co-founder Oren Frank had to say in a prepared statement:
Our advanced capabilities in data science enable us to not only open access to therapy, but also identify the attributes of successful therapeutic relationships and apply that knowledge throughout the predictive products we build, to the therapists that use our platform, and in the content we provide.
This brings Talkspace’s total funding to $110 million.
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Following FTC complaint, Google rolls out new policies around kids’ apps on Google Play
Google announced this morning a new set of developer policies aimed at providing additional protections for children and families seeking kid-friendly apps on Google Play. The new policies require that developers ensure their apps are meeting all the necessary policy and regulatory requirements for apps that target children in terms of their content, ads and how they handle personally identifiable information.
For starters, developers are being asked to consider whether children are a part of their target audience — and, if they’re not, developers must ensure their app doesn’t unintentionally appeal to them. Google says it will now also double-check an app’s marketing to confirm this is the case and ask for changes, as needed.
Apps that do target children have to meet the policy requirements concerning content and handling of personally identifiable information. This shouldn’t be news to developers playing by the rules, as Google has had policies around “kid-safe” apps for years as part of its “Designed for Families” program, and countries have their own regulations to follow when it comes to collecting children’s data.
In addition, developers whose apps are targeting children must only serve ads from an ads network that has certified compliance with Google’s families policies.
To enforce these policies at scale, Google is now requiring all developers to complete the new target audience and content section of the Google Play Console. Here, they will have to specify more details about their app. If they say that children are targeted, they’ll be directed to the appropriate policies.
Google will use this information, alongside its review of the app’s marketing materials, in order to categorize apps and apply policies across three target groups: children, children and older users, and older users. (And because the definition of “children” may vary by country, developers will need to determine what age-based restrictions apply in the countries where their app is listed.)
Developers must comply with the process of filling out the information on Google Play and come into compliance with the updated policies by September 1, 2019.
The company says it’s committed to providing “a safe, positive environment” for kids and families, which is why it’s announcing these changes.
However, the changes are more likely inspired by an FTC complaint filed in December, in which a coalition of 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), asked for an investigation of kids’ apps on Google Play.
The organizations claimed that Google was not verifying apps and games featured in the Family section of Google Play for compliance with U.S. children’s privacy law COPPA.
They also said many so-called “kids” apps exhibited bad behaviors — like showing ads that are difficult to exit or showing those that require viewing in order to continue the current game. Some apps pressured kids into making in-app purchases, and others were found serving ads for alcohol and gambling. And others, still, were found to model harmful behavior or contain graphic, sexualized images, the groups warned regulators.
The time when violations like these can slip through the cracks is long past, thanks to increased regulatory oversight across the online industry by way of laws like the EU’s GDPR, which focuses on data protection and privacy. The FTC is also more keen to act, as needed — it even recently doled out a record fine for TikTok for violating COPPA.
The target audience and content section are live today in the Google Play Console, along with documentation on the new policies, a developer guide and online training. In addition, Google says it has increased its staffing and improved its communications for the Google Play app review and appeals processes in order to help developers get timely decisions and understand any changes they’re directed to make.
Update, 5/29/19, 4:30 PM ET:
Following Google’s announcement, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), which led the FTC complaint, issued a statement in response.
“It’s great that our coalition’s advocacy has awoken to Google to the massive issues with kids apps in the Play Store,” said CCFC Director Josh Golin. “Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of substance to these changes and it’s concerning that Google remains intent on outsourcing responsibility for compliance to developers rather than taking real steps to enforce its own policies.”
“Furthermore, if Google is serious about cracking down on developers that elide their legal responsibilities by pretending their apps aren’t child-directed, they should start by looking in the mirror. YouTube violates COPPA at a massive scale every day and Google’s laughable defense is that the site is only intended for 13 and up,” he added.
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Logz.io lands $52M to keep growing open source-based logging tools
Logz.io announced a $52 million Series D investment today. The round was led by General Catalyst.
Other investors participating in the round included OpenView Ventures, 83North, Giza Venture Capital, Vintage Investment Partners, Greenspring Associates and Next47. Today’s investment brings the total raised to nearly $100 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Logz.io is a company built on top of the open-source tools Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (collectively known by the acronym ELK) and Grafana. It’s taking those tools in a typical open-source business approach, packaging them up and offering them as a service. This approach enables large organizations to take advantage of these tools without having to deal with the raw open-source projects.
The company’s solutions intelligently scan logs looking for anomalies. When it finds them, it surfaces the problem and informs IT or security, depending on the scenario, using a tool like PagerDuty. This area of the market has been dominated in recent years by vendors like Splunk and Sumo Logic, but company founder and CEO Tomer Levy saw a chance to disrupt that space by packaging a set of open-source logging tools that were rapidly increasing in popularity. They believed they could build on that growing popularity, while solving a pain point the founders had actually experienced in previous positions, which is always a good starting point for a startup idea.
Screenshot: Logz.io
“We saw that the majority of the market is actually using open source. So we said, we want to solve this problem, a problem we have faced in the past and didn’t have a solution. What we’re going to do is we’re going to provide you with an easy-to-use cloud service that is offering an open-source compatible solution,” Levy explained. In other words, they wanted to build on that open-source idea, but offer it in a form that was easier to consume.
Larry Bohn, who is leading the investment for General Catalyst, says that his firm liked the idea of a company building on top of open source because it provides a built-in community of developers to drive the startup’s growth — and it appears to be working. “The numbers here were staggering in terms of how quickly people were adopting this and how quickly it was growing. It was very clear to us that the company was enjoying great success without much of a commercial orientation,” Bohn explained.
In fact, Logz.io already has 700 customers, including large names like Schneider Electric, The Economist and British Airways. The company has 175 employees today, but Levy says they expect to grow that by 250 by the end of this year, as they use this money to accelerate their overall growth.
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Equalum grabs $18M Series B to help companies ingest data faster
Equalum, an Israeli startup that helps companies gather data from a variety of enterprise sources, announced an $18 million Series B investment today.
The round was led by Planven Investments . Other participants included United Ventures and prior investors Innovation Endeavors and GE Ventures, along with a group of unnamed individuals. Today’s haul brings the total raised to $25 million, according to data provided by the company.
Equalum CEO and founder Nir Livneh says his company essentially acts as the data pipes to feed artificial intelligence, machine and more traditional business intelligence requirements. “Equalum is a real-time data ingestion platform. The idea of the platform is to be able to [gather] data coming from a bunch of enterprise system sources and be able to centralize that data and send it in real-time into analytic environments and feed those analytic environments,” Livneh explained.
He sees the money from this round as a way to continue to expand the original vision he had for the company. His approach in many ways is a classic Series B play. “I think the original thesis was validated. We have proven that we can go into Fortune 100 companies and get our solution adopted quickly,” he said. The next step is to expand beyond the original set of several dozen large customers and accelerate growth.
The company was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv, Israel. It still maintains its R&D arm there today, with sales, marketing and management in Silicon Valley. Interestingly, its first customer was GE, which was also an early investor via GE Ventures.
Livneh says that he sees lots of room to grow in this market, which he says is still dominated by legacy vendors. He believes he can swoop in and replace aging offerings by providing a more modern and streamlined approach to data collection. Time will tell if he is right.
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Under-the-radar payments app True Balance just clocked $100M in GMV in India
Away from the limelight of urban cities, where an increasingly growing number of firms are fighting for a piece of India’s digital payments market, a South Korean startup’s app is quietly helping millions of Indians pay digitally and enjoy many financial services for the first time.
The app, called True Balance, began its life as a tool to help users easily find their mobile balance, or topping up pre-pay mobile credit. But in its four-year journey, its ambition has significantly grown beyond that. Today, it serves as a digital wallet app that helps users pay their mobile and electricity bills, and it also lets users pay later.
One thing that has not changed for the parent company of True Balance, BalanceHero, which employs less than 200 people, is its consumer focus. It is strictly catering to people in tier-two and tier-three markets — often dubbed as India 2 and India 3 — who have relatively limited access to the internet, and lower financial power. And it remains operational just in India.
Even as India is already the second largest internet market with more than 500 million users, more than half of its population remains offline. In recent years, the nation has become a battleground for Silicon Valley giants and Chinese firms that are increasingly trying to win existing users and bring the rest of the population online.
And like many other companies, BalanceHero’s bet on India is beginning to pay off. The startup told TechCrunch today that it has clocked $100 million in GMV sales and has amassed about 60 million registered users. Yongsung Yoo, a spokesperson for the startup, added that BalanceHero, which has raised $42 million to date, is also nearing profitability.
The South Korean firm’s playbook is different from many other players that are racing to claim a slice of India’s burgeoning digital payments market. True Balance competes with the likes of Paytm, MobiKwik, Google, Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart, though its competitors are still largely catering to the urban parts of India.
In the last two years, many firms have begun to explore smaller cities and towns, but their services are still too out-of-the-world for local residents. Raising awareness about digital services is a big challenge in such markets, Yoo said, so the startup is relying on existing users to help others make their first transactions and in paying bills.
Yoo said the startup rewards these “digital agents” with cash back and other benefits. For these digital agents, many of whom do not have a day job, True Balance has emerged as a side project to make extra money.
Later this year, Yoo said the startup, which recently also added support for UPI in its service, will open an e-commerce store on its app and also offer insurance to users. To accelerate its growth and expansion, True Balance is in the final stages of raising between $50 million to $70 million in a new round that it expects to close in July this year, Yoo said.
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ASUS leans into dual-screen laptops with the ZenBook Pro Duo, featuring two 4K touchscreen displays
Last year during Computex, ASUS introduced the ZenBook Pro 14 and 15, with a touchscreen in place of a regular touchpad. This year in Taipei, it took the concept of a built-in second screen and went much further with it, unveiling new versions of the ZenBook with even larger second screens. Instead of just replacing the touchpad, the 14-inch second screen on the new ZenBook Pro Duo extend all the way across the device above the keyboard, acting as both an extension and companion to the main 4K OLED 15.6-inch display.
The touchpad-replacement on last year’s ZenBook Pros seemed like a novelty, with the bonus of giving you a small, extra screen for messaging apps, videos and simple utility apps like a calculator. The much larger size of the second screen on the ZenBook Pro Duo, however, enables many new possibilities. Both of its screens are touchscreens, and moving apps between the windows with your finger takes a little bit of getting used to, but it is simple and intuitive (frequently used apps can also be pinned).
During a demo, an ASUS employee showed me how it can support dual displays of maps: the larger screen giving you a bird’s-eye view of the geography, while the second screen allows you to zone in on streets and locations. But the ZenBook Pro Duo’s main draw is multitasking, enabling you to monitor your email, send messages, watch videos, keep an eye on news headlines and other tasks while you use the main screen for apps like Office 365 or video conferences.
Basically, the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 14 is designed for anyone who likes using a second monitor (or is tired of propping up their phone or tablet as an improvised second screen), but also wants a PC with more portability. At 2.5kg, the ZenBook Pro Duo is not the lightest laptop around, but is still reasonably lightweight considering its specs and two screens.
Its Intel Core i9 HK processor and Nvidia RTX 2060 ensures that both screens run smoothly, even with multiple tabs and apps open. ASUS also partnered with Harman/Kardon for its speakers, which means sound quality should be better than average. A smaller version, the ZenBook Duo, is also available, with Core i7 and a GeForce MX 250 and HD instead of 4K on both its displays.
ASUS hasn’t announced pricing and availability yet.
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