Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

Gooooood morning, Cupertino. Today’s the big event at Apple HQ. 2018’s been a slow year for Apple hardware (including a complete no-show at WWDC a few months back). As ever, we’ll be on-hand to help make sense of all the news as it breaks, and you can follow along with our handy live blog below. For those who want it straight from the source, you can follow Apple’s live stream or over on Twitter.

As far as what to expect, by all accounts there’s going to be A LOT. New iPhones are basically a given. Likely there will be a sequel to the iPhone X, along with a cheaper version that keeps the design intact, while swapping the OLED for something a bit cheaper. A new version of the Apple Watch also seems like all but a given at this point. Here’s a rundown of the most likely announcements for today’s big show to help you brace for the news.

Things kick off at 10AM PT, 1PM ET.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Live from Apple’s iPhone event

Google has secured a bit more buy in from Samsung for a next generation text messaging standard it’s long been promoting.

The Android OS maker’s hope for Rich Communication Services (RCS), which upgrades what SMS can offer to support richer comms and content swapping, can provide its fragmented Android ecosystem with a way to offer comparably rich native messaging — a la Apple’s iMessage on iOS.

But it’s a major, major task given how many Android devices are out there. And Google needs the entire industry to step with it to support RCS (not just device makers but carriers too) if it’s going to achieve anything more than fiddling around the edges.

Zooming out for a moment, the even bigger problem is the messaging ship has sailed, with massively popular platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram having already offloaded billions of users into their respective walled gardens, pulling the center of gravity away from SMS.

Not that that has stopped Google trying, though, even as it has been muddled in its strategy too — spreading its messaging efforts around quite a bit (with false starts like Allo).

Google doubled down on RCS in April when it pulled resources from the standalone Allo messaging app to focus on trying to drum up more support for next-gen SMS instead.

It has also managed to build a modicum of momentum behind RCS. At this year’s Mobile World Congress it announced more than 40 carriers now backed RCS — up from ~27 the year before. The most recent support figure put the carrier number at 55.

But, three years on from its acquisition of RCS specialist Jibe Mobile — and ambitious talk of building ‘the future of messaging’ — there’s little sign of that.

An added wrinkle is that carriers also have to have actively rolled out RCS support, not just stated they intend to. And it’s not clear exactly how many have.

Nor is it clear how many users of RCS there are at this stage. (Back in 2016 carriers were merely talking about building “a path” to one billion users — at a time when SMS had several billions of users, suggesting they saw little chance of creating anything near next-gen messaging ubiquity via the standard.)

The latest Google-backed RCS development, announced via press release, is of an “expanded collaboration” between Mountain View and Samsung — saying their respective message clients will “work seamlessly with each company’s RCS technology, including cloud and business messaging platforms”.

The pair have previously added RCS support to “select Samsung devices” but are now saying RCS features will be brought to some existing Samsung smartphones — including (and beginning with) the Galaxy S8 and S8+, as well as the S8 Active, S9, S9+, Note8, Note9, and select A and J series running Android 9.0 or later.

Which sounds like a fair few devices. But it’s also muddier than that — because again support remains subject to carrier and market availability. So won’t be universal across even that subset of Samsung Android handsets.

They also now say that (select) new Samsung Galaxy smartphones will natively support RCS messaging. But, again, that’s only where carriers support the standard.

“This means that consumers and brands will be able to enjoy richer chats with both Android Messages and Samsung Messages users,” they add, after their string of caveats.

Despite the PR ending on an upbeat note — with the two companies talking about bringing an “enhanced messaging experience across the entire Android ecosystem” — there’s clearly zero chance of that. A clear consequence of the rich ‘biodiversity’ of the Android ecosystem is reduced ubiquity for cross-device standardization plays like this. 

Still, if Google can cherry pick enough flagship devices and markets to buy in to supporting RCS it might have figured that’s critical messaging mass enough to stack against Apple’s iMessage. So added buy in from Samsung — whose high end devices are most often contending with iPhones for consumers’ cash — is certainly helpful to its strategy.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google gets more RCS messaging support from Samsung

Earlier this summer, Tinder began testing a new feature that surfaces a curated list of your best potential matches, called “Top Picks.” The feature, which is only available to paying subscribers on Tinder Gold, is now available worldwide, Tinder says.

Top Picks had also quietly launched in the U.S. and U.K. last week following initial tests in Germany, Brazil, France, Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Sweden, Russia and the Netherlands, in addition to the U.K. However, Tinder waited until the global rollout was underway to announce its arrival.

The idea behind Top Picks seems a bit inspired by the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel, which similarly focuses on curation of matches to reduce users’ impulse to continue swiping through what feels like an unlimited number of profiles. Humans don’t do well with too many choices – an overabundance of options can actually lead to anxiety, and – in the case of dating apps – an inability to settle on a decision, as users know there’s always another potential match just around the corner, or so it’s been argued.

Tinder’s solution for this is Top Picks, a more limited set of potential matches it thinks users will like based on information in users’ profiles like education, type of job, hobbies and interests. Tinder then uses this data to organize users into groupings, like “foodie” or “creative” or “adventurer” and so on.

This information is combined with users’ previous swiping behavior to determine the day’s Top Picks, which area available to toggle over to (via the diamond icon) on the app’s home screen.

While Top Picks will refresh daily, users can opt to buy more Top Picks in packs of 10, 20 or 30 a la carte, Tinder says. (Yes, by “packs” we do mean groups of user profiles – Tinder has turned people into in-app purchases you can buy. Yeah. Great.).

The feature is only available to Tinder Gold subscribers, meaning it varies in price. Tinder charges older users more for accessing Gold, and weights other factors like region, length of subscription, and recent in-app promotions when showing you its pricing.

Paid features like Top Picks have helped to fuel Tinder’s growth and its revenue.

Following the launch of its subscription service, Tinder Gold, the app quickly became the top grossing app in the App Store. And it has held a top spot ever since – even becoming the number 5 top grossing app of all-time, according to a recent report of the App Store’s biggest apps.

Paid subscribers are also soaring. Tinder parent company Match Group reported that Tinder added 299,000 paid members in the second quarter, totalling 1.7 million additions in the past year, and more than 3 million to date.

“We’re excited to finally share Top Picks with our users around the world given its early success,” said Brian Norgard, Chief Product Officer at Tinder, in a statement. “Data suggests users in test markets have loved the feature, and we’re happy to make one Top Pick available to all users each day with this global rollout. The feature refreshes every day, highlighting the diversity, talents and passions of our users in a simple, fun and useful manner.”

The launch of Top Picks arrives at the same time that a new documentary about Tinder’s outsized influence on dating culture, Swiped, has debuted on HBO.

The film takes a fairly damning view of online dating via apps like Tinder, by highlighting some of its worst attributes – like the men ordering women to their home the way they do Seamless; the swipe addicts who always think there’s someone better out there; the unsolicited sexual photos women receive; as well as the overall decline in value for genuine human connections, due to the abundance of choice offered by dating apps’ massive “catalogs.”

Top Picks won’t necessarily solve these problems. At best, it may at least help users narrow their focus and begin to understand there aren’t actually endless dating options when you have certain criteria in mind. At worst, it may encourage users to view people as even more of a commodity, as they click to pay merely pennies for more Top Picks “packs.”

The feature is rolling out globally on iOS and Android as of Monday evening.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Tinder launches its curated ‘Top Picks’ feature worldwide

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Verizon as soon as next month.

Armstrong heads up the carrier giant’s digital and advertising division, Oath (formerly AOL, prior to the Yahoo acquisition and the subsequent merger of the two units). Oath also happens to be TechCrunch’s parent, of course.

We reached out to our corporate overlords for a confirm or deny on the newspaper report. A Verizon spokesperson told us: “We don’t comment on speculation and have no announcements to make.”

The WSJ cites “people familiar with the matter” telling it Armstrong is in talks to leave, which would mean he’s set to step away from an ongoing process of combining the two business units into a digital content and ad tech giant.

Though he has presided over several rounds of job cuts already, as part of that process.

Verizon acquired Armstrong when it bought AOL in 2015. The Yahoo acquisition followed in 2017 — with the two merged to form the odd-sounding Oath, a b2b brand that Armstrong seemingly inadvertently outted.

Building an ad giant to challenge Google and Facebook is the underlying strategy. But as the WSJ points out there hasn’t been much evidence of Oath moving Verizon’s growth needle yet (which remains tied to its wireless infrastructure).

The newspaper cites eMarketer projections which have Google taking over a third of the online ad market by 2020; Facebook just under a fifth; and Oath a mere 2.7%.

Meanwhile, Verizon’s appointment of former Ericsson CEO, Hans Vestberg, as its new chief exec in June, taking over from Lowell McAdam (who stepped down after seven years), suggests pipes (not content) remain the core focus for the carrier — which has the expensive of 5G upgrades to worry about.

A cost reduction program, intending to use network virtualization to take $10BN in expenses out of the business over the next four years, has also been a recent corporate priority for Verizon.

Given that picture, it’s less clear how Oath’s media properties mesh with its plans.

The WSJ’s sources told the newspaper there were recent discussions about whether to spin off the Oath business entirely — but said Verizon has instead decided to integrate some of its operations more closely with the rest of the company (whatever ‘integrate’ means in that context).

(Since the story broke, Verizon CFO Matt Ellis has expanded slightly on the ‘no comment’. Speaking during an appearance at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference this morning, he said: “Our commitment is as strong today to Oath as it has ever been… There’s a lot of good work going on there. It’s really setting the foundation of what we expect to do with the business going forward, and we still feel very strongly there’s a great opportunity there… So we continue to be very committed to Oath. There’s a significant opportunity for us there.”)

There have been other executive changes at Oath earlier this year, too, with the head of its media properties, Simon Khalaf, departing in April — and not being replaced.

Instead Armstrong appointed a COO, K Guru Gowrappan, hired in from Alibaba, who he said Oath’s media bosses would now report to.

“Now is our time to turn the formation of Oath into the formation of one of the world’s best operating companies that paves a safe and exciting path forward for our billion consumers and the world’s most trusted brands,” Armstrong wrote in a staff memo on Gowrappan’s appointment obtained by Recode.

“Guru will run day to day operations of our member (consumer) and B2B businesses and will serve as a member of our global executive team helping to set company culture and strategy. Guru will also be an important part of the Verizon work that is helping both Oath and Verizon build out the future of global services and revenue,” he added, saying he would be spending more of his time “spread across strategic Oath opportunities and Verizon… leading our global strategy, global executive team, and corporate operations”.

At the start of the year Oath also named a new CFO, Vanessa Wittman, after the existing officer, Holly Hess, moved to Verizon to head up the aforementioned cost-saving program.

Reaction to the rumour of Armstrong’s imminent departure has sparked fresh speculation about jobs cuts on the anonymous workplace app Blind — with Oath/AOL/Yahoo employees suggesting additional rounds of company-wide layouts could be coming in October.

Or, well, that could always just be trolling.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Verizon declines to comment on WSJ report saying Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Oath

Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a year later scored a $363 million Series D, both led by Russian-backed firm DST Global. Combined with the growth of its premium subscription for trading on margin called Robinhood Gold, the startup now has the firepower and revenue to make a viable Wall Street debut.

Today during Robinhood CEO Baiju Bhatt’s talk at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, he revealed that his company is on the path to an IPO and has begun its search for a chief financial officer. It’s also undergoing constant audits from the SEC, FINRA and its security team to make sure everything is kosher and locked up tight.

The CFO hire could help the five-year-old Silicon Valley startup pitch itself as the cheaper youthful alternative to E*Trade and traditional stock brokers. They’d also have to convince potential investors that even though cryptocurrency prices are in a downturn, allowing people to trade them for cheaper than competitors like Coinbase is a powerful user acquisition funnel.

Robinhood now has 5 million customers tracking, buying and selling stocks, options, ETFs, American depositary slips receipts of international companies and cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum. That’s twice as many customers as its incumbent competitor E*Trade despite it having 4,000 employees compared to Robinhood’s 250.

The startup has raised a total of $539 million to date from prestigious investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Google’s Capital G, allowing it to rapidly roll out products before its rivals can react. This rapid rise in valuation can go to some founders’ heads, or crush them under the pressure, but Bhatt cited “friendship” with his co-CEO Vlad Tenev as what keeps him sane.

The startup has three main monetization streams. First, it earns interest on money users keep in their Robinhood account. Second, it sells order flow to stock exchanges that want more liquidity for their traders. And it sells Robinhood Gold subscriptions which range from $10 per month for $2,000 in extra buying power to $200 per month for $50,000 in margin trading, with a 5 percent APR charged for borrowing over that. Gold was growing its subscriber count at 17 percent per month earlier this year, showing the potential of giving trades away for free and then charging for extra services.

But Robinhood is also encountering renewed competition as both startups and incumbents wise up. European banking app Revolut is building a commission-free stock trading, and Y Combinator startup Titan just launched its app that lets you buy into a  managed portfolio of top stocks. Finance giant JP Morgan now gives customers 100 free trades in hopes of not being undercut by Robinhood.

Over on the crypto side, Coinbase continues to grow in popularity despite its 1.4 percent to 4 percent fees on trades. It’s rapidly expanding its product offering and the two fintech startups are destined to keep clashing. Robinhood may also be suffering from the crypto downturn, which is likely dissuading the mainstream public from dumping cash into tokens after seeing people lose fortunes as Bitcoin and Ethereum’s prices tumbled this year.

There’s also the persistent risk of a security breach that could tank Robinhood’s brand. Meanwhile, the startup uses both human and third-party software-based systems to moderate its crypto chat rooms to make sure pump and dump schemes aren’t running rampant. Bhatt says he’s proud of making cryptocurrency more accessible, though he didn’t say he felt responsible for prices plummeting, which could mean many of Robinhood Crypto’s users have lost money.

Fundamentally, Robinhood is using software to make the common but expensive behavior of stock trading much cheaper and more accessible to a wider audience. Traditional banks and brokers have big costs for offices and branches, trading execs and TV commercials. Robinhood has managed to replace much of that with a lean engineering team and viral app that grows itself. Once it finds its CFO, that could give it an efficiency and growth rate that has Wall Street seeing green.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Robinhood aims at IPO as the fintech startup seeks CFO

In a move aimed at upping standards across biometric user verification systems, the industry consortium, Fido Alliance, has launched a certification program for biometrics systems.

“The goal of the Biometric Certification Component Program is to provide a framework for the certification of biometric subsystems that can in turn be integrated into FIDO Certified authenticators,” it writes on its website.

While biometric verification systems such as fingerprint readers have been pretty widely adopted in the mobile space already — with Apple introducing its fingerprint biometric, Touch ID, to the iPhone a full five years ago; followed, last fall, by a facial recognition biometric (Face ID) for its high end iPhone X — the Alliance says that, up to now, there hasn’t been a standardized way to validate the accuracy and reliability of biometric recognition systems in the commercial marketplace. Which is where it’s intending the new certification program to come in.

While few would doubt the robustness of Apple’s biometrics components (and testing regime), the sprawlingly diverse Android marketplace hosts all sorts of OEM players — which inevitably raises the risk of some lesser quality components (and/or processes) slipping in.

And in recent years there have been plenty of examples of poorly implemented biometrics, especially in the mobile space — with hackers easily able to crack into various Android devices that were using facial or iris recognition technology in trivially bypassable ways.

In 2017, for example, Chaos Computer Club members used a print out of an eye combined with a contact lens to fox iris scanners on the Samsung Galaxy S8. And that was one of the most sophisticated biometric hacks. Others have just required a selfie of the person to be held up in front of a ‘face unlock’ system to get an easy open sesame.

Where the not-for-profit Alliance comes in — an industry group whose board includes security exec reps from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft, among others — is it’s on a mission to reduce reliance on passwords for digital security because they inject friction into the online experience.

And biometrics do tend to be convenient, given they are attached to each person. Which is why they have been increasingly finding their way into smartphones and all sorts of other consumer electronics — from wearables to car tech, helped by component costs shrinking as biometrics adoption grows.

But it’s no good trying to speed up ID verification if the alternatives being reached for are badly implemented — and end up actively damaging security.

It certainly doesn’t have to be that way.

Apple’s biometrics are not so easily mocked. And while Touch ID is vulnerable to spoofing, like pretty much any fingerprint reader, its depth-mapping Face ID tech is by far the most sophisticated biometric implementation in the consumer electronics space to date. And hasn’t been meaningfully hacked (well, barring attacks by identical twins/strikingly similar looking family members).

So there’s clearly a world of difference (and, well, cost) between a well architected biometric recognition system which puts security considerations front and center, vs the awful sloppy stuff we’ve seen in recent years — where OEMs were just rushing to compete.

Biometrics has certainly often been treated more as a convenience gimmick for device marketing purposes, rather than viewed as a route to evolve (and even potentially enhance) device security.

The Alliance’s certification program is using accredited independent labs to test that biometric subcomponents meet what it dubs “globally recognized performance standards for biometric recognition performance and Presentation Attack Detection (PAD)” — and thus that they are “fit for commercial use”.

PAD refers to various methods that can be used to try to attack and circumvent biometric systems, such as using silicon or gelatine fingerprints, or deploying harvested facial or video imagery of the device owner.

So it looks like the Alliance’s hope for the program is to ‘upskill’ biometric implementations — or at least weed out the really stupid stuff.

“For customers, such as regulated online service providers, OEMs and enterprises, it provides a standardized way to trust that the biometric systems they are relying upon for fingerprint, iris, face and/or voice recognition can reliably identify users and detect presentation attacks,” it writes.

Speed is another goal too, as it says prior to this certification program due diligence was carried out by enterprise customers (or at least by those “who had the capacity to conduct such reviews”) — which required biometric vendors to repeatedly prove performance for each customer.

Whereas going forward vendors can use the program to test and certify just once to validate their system’s performance and re-use that third-party validation across the market — gaining what the Alliance bills as” substantial time and cost savings”.

Commenting in a statement, Brett McDowell, executive director of the Alliance, said: “While border control and law enforcement markets have mature assessment programs for their biometric systems, we were surprised that no such program existed for this rapidly growing consumer market.”

“With biometrics being a popular option for mobile and web applications implementing Fido Authentication, there is a growing need for those service providers to appropriately assess the risk of fraud from lost or stolen devices,” he added.

Asked whether the program had been introduced in response to particular concerns about weak consumer biometrics — given some of the aforementioned examples of poor implementations — McDowell also told us: “With the rise of any new technology, there’s a risk that some suppliers may over emphasize visible features at the expense of security considerations as they rush to market.

“This program, motivated by our online services community, mitigates that risk for mobile and desktop biometrics by providing a commercial-grade benchmark and independent lab assessment for performance features and spoof attack detection security considerations. Another benefit of the program is a clear way for service providers to prove compliance with strong authentication regulation, which is becoming the norm for financial services. This trend is expected to expand to other sectors as passwords continue to be exploited at increasingly alarming rates.”

Currently only one lab has been accredited to perform components testing for the program.

The lab, iBeta, is located in the U.S. but a spokeswoman for the Fido Alliance told us: “The Alliance is actively working to bring in additional labs.”

She added that the Alliance will update this list as more are added.

This post was updated with additional comment from McDowell 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Fido Alliance adds a biometrics certification program to help fight spoofing

Meet Stealthy a new messaging app that leverages Blockstack’s decentralized application platform to build a messaging app. The company is participating in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF and launching its app on iOS and Android today.

On the surface, Stealthy works like many messaging apps out there. But it gets interesting once you start digging to understand the protocol behind it. Stealthy is a decentralized platform with privacy in mind. It could become the glue that makes various decentralized applications stick together.

“We started Stealthy because Blockstack had a global hackathon in December of last year,” co-founder Prabhaav Bhardwaj told me. “We won that hackathon in February.” After that, the #deletefacebook movement combined with the overall decentralization trend motivated Bhardwaj and Alex Carreira to ship the app.

Blockstack manages your identity. You get an ID and a 12-word passphrase to recover your account. Blockstack creates a blockchain record for each new user. You use your Blockstack ID to connect to Stealthy.

Stealthy users then choose how they want to store their messages. You can connect your account with Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Every time you message someone, the message is first encrypted on your device and sent to your recipient’s cloud provider. Your recipient can then open the Stealthy app and decrypt the message from their storage system.

All of this is seamless for the end user. It works like an iMessage conversation, which means that Microsoft or Amazon can’t open and read your messages without your private key. You remain in control of your data. Stealthy plans to open source their protocol and mobile product so that anybody can audit their code.

Some features require a certain level of centralization. For instance, Stealthy relies on Firebase for push notifications. If you’re uncomfortable with that, you can disable that feature.

The company also wants to become your central hub for all sorts of decentralized apps (or dapps for short). For instance, you can launch Graphite Docs or Blockusign from Stealty. Those dapps are built on top of Blockstack as well, but Stealthy plans to integrate with other dapps that don’t work on Blockstack.

“We have dapp integrations in place right now and we want to make it easier to add dapp integrations. If somebody wants to come in and start selling messaging stickers, you could do that. If you want to come in and implement a payment system to pay bloggers, you could do that,” Bhardwaj said. “Eventually, what we want to be is to make it as easy as submitting an app in the App Store.”

When you build a digital product, chances are you’ll end up adding a messaging feature at some point. You can chat in Google Docs, Airbnb, Venmo, YouTube… And the same is likely to be true with dapps. Stealthy believes that many developers could benefit from a solid communication infrastructure — this way, other companies can focus on their core products and let Stealthy handle the communication layer.

Stealthy is an ambitious company. In many ways, the startup is trying to build a decentralized WeChat with the encryption features of Signal. It’s a messaging app, but it’s also a platform for many other use cases.

A handful of messaging apps have become so powerful that they’ve become a weakness. Governments can block them or leverage them to create a social ranking. Authorities can get a warrant to ask tech companies to hand them data. And of course, the top tech companies have become too powerful. More decentralization is always a good thing.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Stealthy wants to become the WeChat of blockchain apps

AnchorFree, a maker of a popular virtual private networking app, has raised $295 million in a new round of funding, the company announced Wednesday.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based app maker’s flagship app Hotspot Shield ranks as one of the most popular VPN apps on the market. The app, based on a freemium model, allows users across the world tunnel their internet connections through AnchorFree’s servers, which masks users’ browsing histories from their internet providers and allows those under oppressive regimes evade state-level censorship.

The app has 650 million users in 190 countries, the company said, and also has a business-focused offering.

The funding was led by WndrCo, a holding company focusing on consumer tech businesses, in addition to Accel Partners, 8VC, SignalFire, and Green Bay Ventures, among others.

“The WndrCo team brings deep operational experience in launching and scaling global tech products, and we look forward to working closely with them in pursuit of our mission to provide secure access to the world’s information for every person on the planet,” said AnchorFree’s chief executive David Gorodyansky in remarks.

The news was first reported by The New York Times.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | AnchorFree, maker of Hotspot Shield, raises 5 million in new funding