Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

Tony Haile, who previously led analytics company Chartbeat, is trying to rethink the business model for news at his new startup, Scroll. Now he’s adding aggregation and curation to the mix with the acquisition of Nuzzel.

Scroll is still an invite-only product, but Haile explained the idea succinctly: “We deliver this amazing, clean, ad-free experience, and we do it for a low monthly price.”

In other words, after you subscribe and download Scroll, anytime you load up one of its partner sites (including USA Today, BuzzFeed and Vox), you should get an ad-free experience, which should work regardless of whether you’re accessing the site directly from your desktop or mobile browser, or from social media. In exchange, the publishers share the subscription revenue.

Nuzzel, meanwhile, was founded by Jonathan Abrams (who previously founded Friendster), and its core product allows you to see the stories that are most-shared by the people you follow on social media.

Haile said that by acquiring Nuzzel, Scroll can also start experimenting with different models for news curation — which is particularly important because if “we have just two algorithms determining who gets traffic and who doesn’t, then that’s not a healthy web ecosystem.”

“It’s really hard to [build] a scalable business as an amazing curation service,” he added. With Nuzzel, he hopes to “start finding ways in which we can build in that value and drive a new model for our user experience services.”

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 01: Tony Haile speaks onstage at the Buyer Beware! panel during AWXI on October 1, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for AWXI)

That doesn’t mean existing Nuzzel users shouldn’t expect any dramatic changes to either the app or the newsletters — Haile said they will continue to operate as separate products, and his team is taking the approach of “first do not harm.”

However, Scroll does plan to remove any advertising from the newsletters, and the engineering team behind the Nuzzel Media Intelligence product will be spinning that out as a separate company.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Nuzzel had raised $5.1 million from investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Scroll, meanwhile, has raised a total of $10 million.

Haile said there won’t be anyone from the Nuzzel team joining Scroll in a full-time capacity, though some of them may remain involved as contractors. Abrams, meanwhile, told me via email that he and Nuzzel COO Kent Lindstrom are starting a new, yet-to-be-announced company.

“I think current Nuzzel users should see this as great news, since Scroll wants to make sure that Nuzzel’s services continue to operate,” Abrams said. “As you know, a lot of other news app and news aggregation startups were unfortunately shutdown between 2015 and 2018, so like I said, this is good news for Nuzzel users.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Subscription startup Scroll acquires news aggregator Nuzzel

Weeks of leaks haven’t left much to the imagination. But for those waiting for the real thing, the latest iteration of Motorola’s budget G line just became officially official as of this morning — and with a few weeks to spare ahead of Mobile World Congress. Of course, the Moto G7 line isn’t really aimed at the MWC crowd.

That show tends to be far more focused on premium flagships, while, as Motorola put it to me ahead of launch, this line is for “people who say, ‘I don’t need all this phone.’” In other words, people who don’t want to spend $1,000+ for a flagship. As such, the line starts at $199, putting it in line with earlier models.

As ever, the line will be available in three somewhat convoluted models. There’s the G7, the G7 Play, G7 Power and G7 Plus. The Plus, which brings a number of camera effects that have trickled down from the Moto Z line, won’t be available here in the States. It is, however, available today in Brazil and Mexico and will be rolling out in Europe, Australia and other parts of Latin American, packing a 16-megapixel dual camera, OIS and “auto-smile” image capture.

As for the base-level G7, that sports a 6.2-inch display, 12-megapixel dual cameras and a  3,000 mAh battery, coupled with a middling Snapdragon 632. That, too, is already available in Brazil and Mexico, priced at $299. For $249 you can get the G7 Power, which has the same screen and battery, but drops the dual cameras.

Cheapest of all is the $199 Moto G7 Play. That shrinks the screen down to 5.7 inches and pops a single 13-megapixel camera on back. The G7, G7 Play and G7 Power will be available in the States this spring. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Motorola’s G7 line arrives this spring, starting at 9

Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won’t even realize it. And they don’t need to ask for permission.

You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize your data without your knowledge. But TechCrunch has found several popular iPhone apps, from hoteliers, travel sites, airlines, cell phone carriers, banks and financiers, that don’t ask or make it clear — if at all — that they know exactly how you’re using their apps.

Worse, even though these apps are meant to mask certain fields, some inadvertently expose sensitive data.

Apps like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hotels.com and Singapore Airlines also use Glassbox, a customer experience analytics firm, one of a handful of companies that allows developers to embed “session replay” technology into their apps. These session replays let app developers record the screen and play them back to see how its users interacted with the app to figure out if something didn’t work or if there was an error. Every tap, button push and keyboard entry is recorded — effectively screenshotted — and sent back to the app developers.

Or, as Glassbox said in a recent tweet: “Imagine if your website or mobile app could see exactly what your customers do in real time, and why they did it?”

The App Analyst, a mobile expert who writes about his analyses of popular apps on his eponymous blog, recently found Air Canada’s iPhone app wasn’t properly masking the session replays when they were sent, exposing passport numbers and credit card data in each replay session. Just weeks earlier, Air Canada said its app had a data breach, exposing 20,000 profiles.

“This gives Air Canada employees — and anyone else capable of accessing the screenshot database — to see unencrypted credit card and password information,” he told TechCrunch.

In the case of Air Canada’s app, although the fields are masked, the masking didn’t always stick (Image: The App Analyst/supplied)

We asked The App Analyst to look at a sample of apps that Glassbox had listed on its website as customers. Using Charles Proxy, a man-in-the-middle tool used to intercept the data sent from the app, the researcher could examine what data was going out of the device.

Not every app was leaking masked data; none of the apps we examined said they were recording a user’s screen — let alone sending them back to each company or directly to Glassbox’s cloud.

That could be a problem if any one of Glassbox’s customers aren’t properly masking data, he said in an email. “Since this data is often sent back to Glassbox servers I wouldn’t be shocked if they have already had instances of them capturing sensitive banking information and passwords,” he said.

The App Analyst said that while Hollister and Abercrombie & Fitch sent their session replays to Glassbox, others like Expedia and Hotels.com opted to capture and send session replay data back to a server on their own domain. He said that the data was “mostly obfuscated,” but did see in some cases email addresses and postal codes. The researcher said Singapore Airlines also collected session replay data but sent it back to Glassbox’s cloud.

Without analyzing the data for each app, it’s impossible to know if an app is recording a user’s screens of how you’re using the app. We didn’t even find it in the small print of their privacy policies.

Apps that are submitted to Apple’s App Store must have a privacy policy, but none of the apps we reviewed make it clear in their policies that they record a user’s screen. Glassbox doesn’t require any special permission from Apple or from the user, so there’s no way a user would know.

Expedia’s policy makes no mention of recording your screen, nor does Hotels.com’s policy. And in Air Canada’s case, we couldn’t spot a single line in its iOS terms and conditions or privacy policy that suggests the iPhone app sends screen data back to the airline. And in Singapore Airlines’ privacy policy, there’s no mention, either.

We asked all of the companies to point us to exactly where in its privacy policies it permits each app to capture what a user does on their phone.

Abercrombie responded, confirming that Glassbox “helps support a seamless shopping experience, enabling us to identify and address any issues customers might encounter in their digital experience.” The spokesperson pointing to Abercrombie’s privacy policy makes no mention of session replays, neither does its sister-brand Hollister’s policy.

After this story published, Air Canada responded: “Air Canada uses customer provided information to ensure we can support their travel needs and to ensure we can resolve any issues that may affect their trips,” said a spokesperson.” This includes user information entered in, and collected on, the Air Canada mobile app. However, Air Canada does not—and cannot—capture phone screens outside of the Air Canada app.”

No other company responded with answers to our questions.

“I think users should take an active role in how they share their data, and the first step to this is having companies be forthright in sharing how they collect their users data and who they share it with,” said The App Analyst.

When asked, Glassbox said it doesn’t enforce its customers to mention its usage in their privacy policy.

“Glassbox has a unique capability to reconstruct the mobile application view in a visual format, which is another view of analytics, Glassbox SDK can interact with our customers native app only and technically cannot break the boundary of the app,” the spokesperson said, such as when the system keyboard covers part of the native app, “Glassbox does not have access to it,” the spokesperson said.

Glassbox is one of many session replay services on the market. Appsee actively markets its “user recording” technology that lets developers “see your app through your user’s eyes,” while UXCam says it lets developers “watch recordings of your users’ sessions, including all their gestures and triggered events.” Most went under the radar until Mixpanel sparked anger for mistakenly harvesting passwords after masking safeguards failed.

It’s not an industry that’s likely to go away any time soon — companies rely on this kind of session replay data to understand why things break, which can be costly in high-revenue situations.

But for the fact that the app developers don’t publicize it just goes to show how creepy even they know it is.

Updated with comment from Air Canada.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Many popular iPhone apps secretly record your screen without asking

Facebook’s crack down on non-consensual ad targeting last year will finally produce results. In March, TechCrunch discovered Facebook planned to require advertisers to pledge that they had permission to upload someone’s phone number or email address for ad targeting. That tool debuted in June, though there was no verification process and Facebook just took businesses at their word despite the financial incentive to lie. In November, Facebook launched a way for ad agencies and marketing tech developers to specify who they were buying promotions “on behalf of.” Soon that information will finally be revealed to users.

Facebook’s new Custom Audiences transparency feature shows when your contact info was uploaded and by whom, and if it was shared between brands and partners

Facebook previously only revealed what brand was using your contact info for targeting, not who uploaded it or when

Starting February 28th, Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this?” button in the drop-down menu of feed posts will reveal more than the brand that paid for the ad, some biographical details they targeted and if they’d uploaded your contact info. Facebook will start to show when your contact info was uploaded, if it was by the brand or one of their agency/developer partners and when access was shared between partners. A Facebook spokesperson tells me the goal is to keep giving people a better understanding of how advertisers use their information.

This new level of transparency could help users pinpoint what caused a brand to get hold of their contact info. That might help them change their behavior to stay more private. The system could also help Facebook zero in on agencies or partners that are constantly uploading contact info and might not have attained it legitimately. Apparently seeking not to dredge up old privacy problems, Facebook didn’t publish a blog post about the change but simply announced it in a Facebook post to the Facebook Advertiser Hub Page.

The move comes in the wake of Facebook attaching immediately visible “paid for by” labels to more political ads to defend against election interference. With so many users concerned about how Facebook exploits their data, the Custom Audiences transparency feature could provide a small boost of confidence in a time when people have little faith in the social network’s privacy practices.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Facebook will reveal who uploaded your contact info for ad targeting

French company Chauffeur-Privé is going to expand aggressively over the next couple of years. That’s why the company is changing its name to Kapten — a name that sounds less French.

“We wanted to share with you a very important piece of news,” Kapten co-founder and CEO Yan Hascoet said in a press conference. “We changed our name while keeping the same positioning.”

Kapten is one of the leading ride-sharing players in France and recently launched in Lisbon (2 million users in France, 80,000 users in Lisbon). The company is going to launch in Geneva next week and London in the coming weeks. By 2020, Kapten should be in 15 major cities.

Kapten within Intelligent Apps

As a reminder, Daimler AG acquired a majority stake in Chauffeur-Privé/Kapten back in December 2017. Daimler AG and BMW Group later merged their mobility service businesses into a single entity called Intelligent Apps.

Kapten confirmed that Intelligent Apps will become Jurbey. Intelligent Apps’ free-floating services, parking services, charging services and itinerary apps will merge to simplify the product offering.

But Intelligent Apps’ ride-sharing services (Chauffeur-Privé, mytaxi, Clever Taxi and Beat) won’t merge for now.

“It seems obvious that there will be some consolidation in five years in one way or another,” Hascoet said. “But this is not on today’s agenda.”

Hascoet thinks that the ride-sharing space is still extremely competitive and there’s room for growth. It seems smarter to keep multiple services for now to see how it plays out in the coming years. Kapten is thinking about integrating Intelligent Apps’ scooter service Hive in its app though.

A new name and some new features

Kapten is also using today’s rebranding to launch an aggressive advertising campaign. The company will spend “millions of euros.”

There will be some tweaks to the service as well. The minimum price is now €6 instead of €8 just like on Uber. Kapten will compensate that change by paying drivers the equivalent of an €8 ride for the time being. Eventually, Kapten wants drivers to generate as much revenue with €6 rides. In all cases, Kapten takes a 20 percent cut on each ride.

Drivers are also getting new features starting today. Free waiting time has been lowered from 5 minutes to 3 minutes, which should help drivers waste less time. There’s also a new feature to go back home and accept rides on the way.

The company also used this opportunity to share some numbers. Over the past 7 years, the company managed to attract 2 million clients and 200 companies who generated 20 million rides in total. In 2018 alone, Kapten handled 7.5 million rides with an average price of €17 to €18. It currently works with 22,000 drivers and 250 employees. Kapten will hire around 100 employees in 2019.

Kapten has generated $54.9 million in revenue in 2016, $113 million in 2017 and $180.8 million in 2018 (€48.6 million, €100 million, €160 million respectively). Kapten wants to multiply its revenue by 5 by 2020.

In its announcement video, Kapten also differentiated its service from Uber by saying that they’ll keep paying taxes in local markets where they operate. The company wants to be the good guy, let’s see if that’s enough to capture some market share.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Uber competitor Chauffeur-Privé rebrands to Kapten

A gaggle of new emoji have just been approved by the Unicode Consortium, meaning they’ll be standard across any platforms that choose to support them. This batch includes some much-needed representation for people with various disabilities, new animals from guide dogs to otters, food and many more objects.

Folks with disabilities get a nice variety of new emoji, though of course these aren’t exhaustive (for example, how do you represent a learning disability or mental illness?). Still, Apple’s proposal for the new emoji points out the necessity of, for example, having both mechanical and manual wheelchairs:

The type of assistive technology that is used by individuals is very personal and mandated by their own disability need. For someone who cannot self-propel and therefore uses an electric wheelchair, it would not be realistic to only show a manual chair. For those who can use a manual version, it would not be realistic to insinuate that they have less mobility than they do. Therefore, these should be seen as two totally separate forms of assistive device.

These images, as usual, are only samples; the final emoji that will be used depend on your device or service. However, since Apple proposed these ones and they are of course a popular platform for emoji use, you can probably expect these to be very like the final ones.

There are lots of other useful things added as well. Guide and service dogs; otters and flamingos; some tasty food like waffles and butter (my breakfast can now finally be represented accurately); and some items particularly relevant to Indian users — a sari, diya lamp and tuk-tuk.

Adding support for people of different colors and genders, including non-gendered imagery, has been an ongoing process for the last few years. The latest addition is a pair of non-gendered people holding hands, with the full set of color variations. Expect more along these lines; other proposals have been made but haven’t yet been finalized.

You can browse the full list of new emoji here; expect them to be added to your favorite messaging app after a handful of months once art and code updates are final.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Official emoji debut for disabled folks, service dogs, waffles and more

Snap has finally begun publicly testing the engineering overhaul of its slow and buggy Android app that for years has cost Snapchat users. Promising early results and reduction in app startup time could help Snapchat fix its growth problem after daily active users sank in Q2 and Q3 before staying put at 186 million in Q4, Snap announced in its earnings report today.

“We ended the year with user engagement stabilizing and have started rolling out the new version of our Android application to a small percentage of our community,” CEO Evan Spiegel wrote. “Early tests show promising results especially on less performant devices, including a 20 percent reduction in the average time it takes to open Snapchat.” The problem is that because “Our engineering team remains focused on rebuilding our Android application,” they haven’t been dedicated to fixing the existing version. That means that despite iOS daily active users and average time spent growing faster than last year, Android dragged Snapchat again to see no total daily user growth.

Interim Chief Financial Officer Lara Sweet noted that, “While we are not going to give specific guidance on daily active users, we are cautiously optimistic and we do not foresee a sequential decline in daily active users in Q1 2019.” It seems Snap believes the new year is going well and the Android rollout could stem losses so it might finally grow its user count again, or at least stop shrinking.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Snapchat’s Android usage keeps falling but rebuild tests well

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

1. Facebook now lets everyone unsend messages for 10 minutes

For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender can tap on it and they’ll find the delete button has been replaced by “Remove for you” and “Remove for everyone” options. If you select the latter, recipients will see an alert saying that you removed a message, and they can still flag the message.

The feature could come in handy in those moments when you realize, right after hitting send, that you’ve made an embarrassing typo or said something dumb. It won’t, however, let people change ancient history.

2. Alphabet revenues are up 22% but the stock is still dropping

The company’s beat of analyst estimates would have been a miss if not for a $1.3 billion unrealized gain “related to a non-marketable debt security.”

3. Toyota’s new car subscription company Kinto is gamifying driving behavior

Toyota has officially launched Kinto, a company first revealed late last year that will manage a car subscription program and other mobility services in Japan, including the sale and purchase of used vehicles as well as automotive repair and inspection.

4. Apple pays millions in backdated taxes to French authorities

“The French tax administration recently concluded a multi-year audit on the company’s French accounts, and those details will be published in our public accounts,” the company told Reuters. French authorities can’t confirm the transaction due to tax secrecy.

5. Self-driving truck startup Ike raises $52 million

The startup was founded by veterans of Apple and Google, as well as Uber Advanced Technologies Group’s self-driving truck program. Its mission — expand and deploy — sounds a lot like other autonomous vehicle startups, but that’s where the parallels end.

6. Facebook bans four armed groups in Myanmar

Facebook has introduced new security features and announced plans to increase its team of Burmese language content translators to 100 people. While it doesn’t intend to open an office in Myanmar, it has ramped up its efforts to expel bad actors.

7. Backed by Benchmark, Blue Hexagon just raised $31 million for its deep learning cybersecurity software

According to co-founder Nayeem Islam, Blue Hexagon has created a real-time, cybersecurity platform that he says can detect known and unknown threats at first encounter, then block them in “sub seconds” so the malware doesn’t have time to spread.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Daily Crunch: Facebook lets you unsend recent messages

Apple released a new beta version of iOS 12.2 yesterday. While the final version isn’t available just yet, here’s what you should expect: new Animojis and a fake 5G logo if you’re an AT&T customer.

If you have an iPhone X, XS, XS Max or XR, you’ll see new animals in the Animoji collection. As 9to5mac spotted, you will be able to record a video message and replace your head with a giraffe, an owl, a shark or a warthog. These Animojis will also work during FaceTime calls.

Here’s a picture from 9to5mac with the new lineup:

More interestingly, Apple succumbed to AT&T’s marketing plot to rename 4G to 5G. MacRumors noticed that some AT&T users now have a “5G E” icon in the top-right corner when they upgrade to the beta version of iOS 12.2. Some Android phones already show a 5G E icon after an AT&T update.

But don’t get fooled, this isn’t 5G — this icon replaces the LTE icon. AT&T has basically rebranded LTE with carrier aggregation as 5G Evolution. But it still runs on the same network.

Here’s a picture from the MacRumors forums:

The same thing happened in the U.S. during the transition from 3G to 4G. AT&T decided to rebrand its 3G HSPA+ network to 4G. It’s the reason why many carriers talk about LTE instead of 4G.

AT&T confused everyone back then, and the company is about to do the same again. It’s too bad Apple is helping AT&T with this iOS update.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is a Verizon Media company.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | iOS 12.2 beta includes new Animojis and fake 5G logo

Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out “Remove for everyone” to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarrassing thoughts or any other message.

For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender can tap on it and they’ll find the delete button has been replaced by “Remove for you,” but there’s now also a “Remove for everyone” option that pulls the message from recipients’ inboxes. They’ll see an alert that you removed a message in its place, and can still flag the message to Facebook, which will retain the content briefly to see if it’s reported. The feature could make people more comfortable having honest conversations or using Messenger for flirting since they can second-guess what they send, but it won’t let people change ancient history.

The company abused its power by altering the history of Zuckerberg’s Facebook’s messages in a way that email or other communication mediums wouldn’t allow. Yet Facebook refused to say if it will now resume removing executives’ messages from recipients even long after they’re delivered after telling TechCrunch in April that “until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages.”

For a quick recap, here’s how Facebook got to Unsend:

-Facebook Messenger never had an Unsend option, except in its encrypted Secret messaging product where you can set an expiration timer on chats, or in Instagram Direct.

-In April 2018, TechCrunch reported that some of Mark Zuckerberg’s messages had been removed from the inboxes of recipients, including non-employees. There was no trace of the chats in the message thread, leaving his conversation partners looking like they were talking to themselves, but email receipts proved the messages had been sent but later disappeared.

-Facebook claimed this was partly because it was “limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages” for security purposes in the wake of the Sony Pictures hack, yet it never explained why only some messages to some people had been removed.

-The next morning, Facebook changed its tune and announced it’d build an Unsend button for everyone, providing this statement: “We have discussed this feature several times . . . We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.”

-Six months later in October 2018, Facebook still hadn’t launched Unsend, but then TechCrunch found Facebook had been prototyping the feature.

-In November, Facebook started to roll out the feature with the current “Remove for everyone” design and 10-minute limit.

-Now every iOS and Messenger user globally will get the Unsend feature.

So will Facebook start retracting executives’ messages again? It’d only say that the new feature would be available to both users and employees. But in Zuckerberg’s case, messages from years ago were removed in a way users still aren’t allowed to. Remove for everyone could make messaging on Facebook a little less anxiety-inducing. But it shouldn’t have taken Facebook being caught stealing from the inboxes of its users to get it built.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Facebook now lets everyone unsend messages for 10 minutes