Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

The FCC is finally going to require wireless carriers to implement an anti-robocalling technology, after asking them nicely for more than a year to do so at their convenience. Of course, the FCC itself is now required to do this after Congress got tired of waiting on them and took action itself.

The technology is called Secure Telephony Identity Revisited / Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs, mercifully abbreviated to STIR/SHAKEN, and amounts to a sort of certificate authority for calls that prevents phone numbers from being spoofed. (This is a good technical breakdown if you’re curious.)

STIR/SHAKEN has been talked about for quite some time as a major part of the fight against robocalls, and in 2018 FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that carriers would have until the end of 2019 to implement it. 2019 came and went, and while the FCC (and indeed carriers) took other actions against robocallers, STIR/SHAKEN went largely undeployed.

Meanwhile, Congress, perhaps tired of receiving scam calls themselves, managed to collectively reach across the aisle and pass the TRACED Act, which essentially empowers the FCC and other departments to take action against robocallers — and prevents carriers from charging for anti-robocall services.

It also ordered the FCC to set a timeline for STIR/SHAKEN implementation, which is what Pai is doing now.

“It’s clear that FCC action is needed to spur across-the-board deployment of this important technology. There is no silver bullet when it comes to eradicating robocalls, but this is a critical shot at the target,” he said in a statement issued today.

There does not, however, appear to be any great hurry. The proposal, which will be voted on at the FCC’s meeting later this month, would require voice service providers to implement STIR/SHAKEN by June 30… of 2021. And one-year extensions will be available to smaller providers who claim difficulty getting the system up and running.

In other words, you can expect to keep receiving strange calls offering discounts on cruises and warning you of IRS penalties for some time to come. Of course, there are some things you can do to stem the flow of scammers — check out our 101 on preventing robocalls for some simple tips to save yourself some aggravation.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | FCC looks to mandate anti-robocall tech after prodding from Congress

Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch.

True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration.

The company, which is astoundingly well-funded and led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, says there will be 50 shows live at launch, including:

• “Most Dangerous Game,” a dystopian action thriller starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz
• “Survive,” a drama starring Sophie Turner about the aftermath of a plane crash, based on a novel by Alex Morel
• “Chrissy’s Court,” in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small-claims court
• “Murder House Flip,” in which homeowners try to renovate homes that are infamous for murders committed inside
• “Thanks a Million,” a reality series where celebrities (including executive producer Jennifer Lopez) give $100,000 to regular people who must them pay it forward
• “Last Night’s Last Night,” Entertainment Weekly’s daily recap of late-night shows
• “The Replay by ESPN,” offering daily episodes covering sports news

Quibi says it will release a total of 8,500 episodes across 175 shows in its first year.

Using the company’s “Turnstyle” technology, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between watching videos in portrait and landscape mode. In fact, some shows are designed specifically to offer different-but-complementary viewing experiences in different viewing modes.

The service will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also announcing today that it’s offering a 90-day free trial — but you’ll need to sign up on the Quibi website before the official launch on April 6.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6

ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed backing from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time.

Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle — the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) — and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV, who has been tasked with taking the business forward.

“Dr Andy Simpson is our CSO [chief science officer] and inventor,” Tongue tells me. “He brings together the auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, neural signal processing and artificial Intelligence, is an AI maverick and contrarian thinker, and this unusual intersection are what has led to the creation of our proprietary ground up neuroscience-led AI. His prolific research had over 400 citations before he went into stealth mode”.

Since then the team have been busy (although largely flying under the radar). Chatable’s hearing assistant app is available in the Play Store in open beta but is still considered “pre-launch”.

“We’re in a constant cycle of pre-clinical validation, which is going amazingly,” says Tongue. “We’ve heard ‘life changing,’ and had tears in the eyes… of early adopters”.

Chatable’s O’Driscoll says the company’s technology and approach is “completely unique,” as it doesn’t use noise filtering or other DSP techniques. “It’s actually a deep learning neural net approach to speech and noise separation that doesn’t apply filters to the original audio but rather it listens and re-prints a brand new audio stream in near real time which is a mimic of just the vocal components of the original audio,” he tells me.

Describing Chatable as a “click and go” universal hearing aid, O’Driscoll says the app has been engineered to work on any modern day £100 smartphone and with regular ear buds. “The app produces a clear and loud voice so is easy for the user to hear a conversation, and features two sliders, one to turn up volume, the other to control background noise,” he explains.

More broadly, Tongue believes the “global hearing epidemic” is the biggest health issue at scale that AI can solve, and that Chatable has an opportunity to help millions of people in a life changing way. According to the World Health Organisation there are 466 million people with disabling hearing loss. “I believe Chatable has the power to be the first app able to address a global health epidemic using an everyday smartphone,” he says.

Meanwhile, Chatable plans to generate revenue on a subscription basis, charging £9.99 per month. This is certainly designed to ensure the startup is sustainable and can continue to invest in its product for the long term (for example, an iPhone version of the app is currently in private beta. However, I hope the price can be brought down over time so that it becomes truly affordable to everybody that needs it.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Mark Cuban backs ChatableApps, developer of a hearing assist app that removes background noise

Another afternoon, another round of funding for a mobile banking app. This time, it’s Empower Finance, a San Francisco-based company that’s headed up by former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth and which just closed on $20 million in Series A funding from Icon Ventures and Defy Ventures.

David Velez, who is the founder and CEO of Nubank, the largest fintech in Latin America, also joined the round.

We’d first written about the company in 2017, when Hogarth was just getting the business off the ground. Fast-forward a bit and Empower now employs 35 people and has attracted more than 600,000 active users to its platform, says Hogarth. What has drawn them in: the company’s promise of combining AI and actual human financial planners to help millennials in particular accrue some wealth, including, more newly, through its own checking account product and through a savings account that’s currently promising 1.60% in annual percentage yield with no minimums, no overdraft fees and unlimited withdrawals.

It’s all part of an overall offering that crunches through account holders’ bank and credit card accounts, and recommends how much they save into which account, how much they should spend given their overall picture, various ways they can cut costs and where and when they’ve surpassed their pre-configured budgets.

Of course, the company has so much competition it’s dizzying, but like the various upstarts against which it’s battling for mindshare, the opportunity that Empower is chasing is enormous, too. Though companies like Chime can seem overpriced given how fast investors have marked up their rounds — Chime’s newest financing, announced in December, was done at a $5.8 billion post-money valuation, which was four times more than the company was worth at the outset of 2019 — digital banks are still tiny fish in an ocean of institutional financial services, representing something like 3% of the market.

They’re gaining more market share by the day, too, including by charging far lower fees for much more.

In Empower’s case, users pay $6 a month, but Hogarth says they also save $300 a year in additional fees they would pay a brick-and-mortar bank. He insists that on average, it also helps them save $1,300 more annually, too.

As for all those other companies — Mint, Acorns, the list goes on — Hogarth sounds surprisingly sanguine. “If you look at it from the outside, it looks crowded. But the consumer financial services in the U.S. is a $2 trillion business, and we haven’t had a fundamental shift since maybe Schwab came along 30 years ago.”

Indeed, says Hogarth, because Empower and its rivals are mobile and branchless and don’t have legacy software to contend with, they’re able to take 60 to 70% of the cost structure out of the business.

What that means on an individual company level is that even if each upstart can attract 2 to 3 million customers, they can get to a multibillion-dollar market cap. At least, that kind of math is “why there’s so much interest in this space,” says Hogarth.

It’s also why people like Nubank’s Velez, who have seen this story play out in Europe and Latin America and who are seeing the early phases of it in the U.S., are apparently keeping the money spigot open for now.

Empower had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Sequoia, followed by a $4.5 million round led by Initialized Capital.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Mobile banking app Empower Finance just closed a million Series A round

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey might not spend six months a year in Africa, claims the real product development is under the hood and gives an excuse for deleting Vine before it could become TikTok. Today he tweeted, via Twitter’s investor relations account, a multi-pronged defense of his leadership and the company’s progress.

The proclamations come as notorious activist investor Elliott Management prepares to pressure Twitter into a slew of reforms, potentially including replacing Dorsey with a new CEO, Bloomberg reported last week. Sources confirmed to TechCrunch that Elliott has taken a 4% to 5% stake in Twitter. Elliott has previously bullied eBay, AT&T and other major corporations into making changes and triggered CEO departures.

Specifically, Elliott is seeking change because of Twitter’s weak market performance, which as of last month had fallen 6.2% since July 2015, while Facebook had grown 121%. The corporate raider reportedly takes issue with Dorsey also running fintech giant Square, and having planned to spend up to six months a year in Africa. Dorsey tweeted that “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!),” despite cryptocurrency having little to do with Twitter.

Rapid executive turnover is another sore spot. Finally, Twitter is seen as moving glacially slow on product development, with little about its core service changing in the past five years beyond a move from 140 to 280 characters per tweet. Competing social apps like Facebook and Snapchat have made landmark acquisitions and launched significant new products like Marketplace, Stories and Discover.

Dorsey spoke today at the Morgan Stanley investor conference, though apparently didn’t field questions about Elliott’s incursion. The CEO did take to his platform to lay out an argument for why Twitter is doing better than it looks, though without mentioning the activist investor directly. That type of response, without mentioning to whom it’s directed, is popularly known as a subtweet. Here’s what he outlined:

On democracy: Twitter has prioritized healthy conversation and now “the #1 initiative is the integrity of the conversation around the elections” around the world, which it’s learning from. It’s now using humans and machine learning to weed out misinformation, yet Twitter still hasn’t rolled out labels on false news despite Facebook launching them in late 2016.

On revenue: Twitter expects to complete a rebuild of its core ad server in the first half of 2020, and it’s improving the experience of mobile app install ads so it can court more performance ad dollars. This comes seven years late to Facebook’s big push around app install ads.

On shutting down products: Dorsey claims that “5 years ago we had to do a really hard reset and that takes time to build from… we had been a company that was trying to do too many things…” But was it? Other than Moments, which largely flopped, and the move to the algorithmic feed ranking, Twitter sure didn’t seem to be doing too much and was already being criticized for slow product evolution as it tried to avoid disturbing its most hardcore users.

On stagnation: “Some people talk about the slow pace of development at Twitter. The expectation is to see surface level changes, but the most impactful changes are happening below the surface,” Dorsey claims, citing using machine learning to improve feed and notification relevance.

Yet it seems telling that Twitter suddenly announced yesterday that it was testing Instagram Stories-esque feature Fleets in Brazil. No launch event. No U.S. beta. No indication of when it might roll out elsewhere. It seems like hasty and suspiciously convenient timing for a reveal that might convince investors it is actually building new things.

On talent: Twitter is apparently hiring top engineers “that maybe we couldn’t get 3 years ago.” 2017 was also Twitter’s share price low point of $14 compared to $34 today, so it’s not much of an accomplishment that hiring is easier now. Dorsey claims that “Engineering is my main focus. Everything else follows from that.” Yet it’s been years since fail whales were prevalent, and the core concern now is that there’s not enough to do on Twitter, rather than what it does offer doesn’t function well.

On Jack himself: Dorsey says he should have added more context “about my intention to spend a few months in Africa this year,” including its growing population that’s still getting online. Yet the “Huge opportunity especially for young people to join Twitter” seemed far from his mind as he focused on how crypto trading was driving adoption of Square’s Cash App.

“I need to reevaluate” the plan to work from Africa “in light of COVID-19 and everything else going on.” That makes coronavirus a nice scapegoat for the decision while the phrase “everything else” is doing some very heavy lifting in the face of Elliott’s activist investing.

Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On fighting harassment: Nothing. The fact that Twitter’s most severe ongoing problem doesn’t even get a mention should clue you in to how many troubles have stacked up in front of Dorsey.

Running Twitter is a big job. So big it’s seen a slew of leaders ranging from founders like Ev Williams to hired guns like Dick Costolo peel off after mediocre performance. If Dorsey wants to stay CEO, that should be his full-time, work-from-headquarters gig.

This isn’t just another business. Twitter is a crucial communications utility for the world. Its absence of innovation, failure to defend vulnerable users and an inability to deliver financially has massive repercussions for society. It means Twitter hasn’t had the products or kept the users to earn the profits to be able to invest in solving its problems. Making Twitter live up to its potential is no side hustle.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Twitter CEO’s weak argument why investors shouldn’t fire him

Those TCL concept phones that were set for Mobile World Congress have finally arrived in prototype form. The Chinese hardware maker showcased a pair of devices this week, including one that saw a brief unveiling during a CES event.

The usual concept caveat certainly applies here. As with concept cars, TCL is clearly gauging consumer interest in certain design elements for the product. And while I’m usually not a fan of dead-end concept devices, there’s something to be said for approaching the foldable category with the same sort of caution you would use to open and close the original Galaxy Fold.

The tri-fold is the product we caught a glimpse of back in January. The name betrays the concept a bit. The device has three screens and two folding mechanisms. That makes for a pretty massively beefy phone when closed, but a luxurious (dual-creased) 10-inch tablet when unfurled.

There’s already some skepticism around how eager users will ultimately be in adopting this technology, and I don’t see effectively double the footprint (and, for that matter, the potential points of failure) as a particularly engaging solution, as nice as it might be to stick a 10-inch tablet in my pocket.

The slide-out device is nothing if not more compelling, allowing the user to essentially pull out the screen for more real estate. That addresses, certainly, hinge and crease issues, but it’s impossible to see if it’s any more robust.

There’s apparently a working unit somewhere in a lab on the other side of the world, but we’re all understandably skeptical until we can get one in our hands.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | TCL riffs on the foldable format with a pair of prototypes

Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store Review Guidelines that detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management and more, the company says. Some of the more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.

This latter change to police-spotting apps, surprisingly, didn’t get as much attention as push ads or changes to dating apps — though it’s among the most notable of the new rules.

A previous version of the App Store Review Guidelines (seen in a snapshot here from January 2020) stated that apps could only display DUI checkpoints that were published by law enforcement agencies, and noted that apps shouldn’t encourage activities like “drunk driving” or “excessive speed.” These were reasonable concerns.

The revised rule (section 1.4.4.) now says that Apple will reject apps “used to commit or attempt to commit crimes of any kind by helping users evade law enforcement,” in addition to the existing language.

As you may recall, Apple last year got into hot water over its decision to reject a crowdsourced mapping app, HKmap, that was being used by Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors to evade police. Initially, the app had been approved, but was pulled a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media who said the app allowed “rioters…to go on violent acts.”

The app had allowed users to crowdsource information like the location of police, the use of tear gas and other details about the protests, which were added to a regularly updated map. In a statement, Apple said it removed the app when it learned it was used to “target and ambush police.”

Above: Section 1.4.4, before and after

The new App Store Review Guidelines now put into writing Apple’s final decision over this sort of app. Effectively, it bans apps that help users evade law enforcement. Arguably, avoiding police isn’t always about wanting to “commit crimes,” as the guidelines state, however. Amnesty International, for example, documented cases of police brutality, including beatings and torture of people in police detention during the Hong Kong protests. The HKmap may have also allowed users to bypass police for their own safety.

Apple’s rule, therefore, is vague enough that it still allows the company itself to make the ultimate call over how an app is being used before deciding to reject or ban it.

Other worthy-of-note changes to the guidelines include an update (section 4.5.4) that allows app developers to send marketing messages (aka ads) in their push notifications. Before, these were banned. This change was immediately hit with user outcry, but it may not be as bad as it first seems.

Clearly, many apps were already spamming their users with ads, despite the prior ban. Now, they’re being required to get customer consent within their app’s user interface and to provide an opt-out mechanism in their app that lets users turn off the push notification ads. This change will at least force reviewers to look for mechanisms and opt-outs in apps offering in-app purchases or that rely on sales to generate revenues.

“Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges,” Apple also warns.

Another change adds “fortune-telling” and “dating” apps to the list of apps that are considered spam if they’re not providing a “unique, high-quality” experience. The relevant section (4.3) warns developers about the app categories that Apple thinks are oversaturated, and where it will be more critical with its reviews.

The guidelines also now include a section (5.6.1) that instruct developers on how to respond to App Store reviews, reminding them to “treat customers with respect when responding to their comments” and not include irrelevant information, personal information, spam, and marketing in their messages. The section also notes that developers must use Apple’s own API to solicit reviews, instead of other mechanisms. This will allow users to toggle off App Store review prompts across all apps from the iOS settings. This language was in the guidelines before, but was moved to 5.6.1 from 1.1.7.

Finally, Apple reminded developers that all apps going forward, including app updates, will need to use the iOS 13 SDK as of April 30, 2020. Apps will need to support the “Sign in with Apple” login/sign-up option as of that date, too.

Correction, 2/5/20, 3:20 PM ET: Clarified that section 5.6.1 is actually a relocated section 1.1.7, instead of a new addition. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | App Store Guidelines ban police-spotting apps, raise bar on dating apps and more

Emma, the personal finance management app that bills itself as your best “financial friend,” has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Connect Ventures led the round, with participation from Ithaca Investments, Tiny.vc and existing investor, Aglaé Ventures. The fintech previously raised $700,000 in angel funding in June 2018.

Launched in the U.K. in early 2018 — and most recently expanding to the U.S. and Canada — the Emma app connects to your bank accounts (and crypto wallets) to help you budget, track spending and save money.

It aims to let you understand how much money you have left to spend until payday, track and find wasteful subscriptions or alert you when you are paying over the odds on utility bills, and preemptively help you avoid going into your bank’s overdraft.

For those who like to be more hands-on with tracking their finances, Emma also offers a paid subscription version of its app dubbed “Emma Pro”. It lets you do additional things like create custom categories, add emojis to custom categories, export your data between specified time ranges, create manual accounts in any currency, create manual transactions, and split transactions,

“In a world where 70% of mental health issues are derived by financial problems, Emma is defining a new category, financial therapy,” says Emma founder and CEO Edoardo Moreni. “Our mission is to remove anxiety regarding money matters and bring instant gratification whenever our users interact with money regardless of their financial situation”.

Noteworthy, Connect Ventures is also an investor in open banking platform TrueLayer, which Emma uses to power its account aggregation in the U.K. (it uses Plaid in the U.S.). Describing TrueLayer as the “infrastructure layer,” Connect’s Rory Stirling says Emma represents investing in the “application layer” – perhaps as it is just the kind of app open banking promised.

“The team at Emma have built a product people love and as a result they have the highest engagement and retention we’ve seen in this category,” he says in a statement. “That’s really exciting to us – better tools for financial education and empowerment are only valuable if people engage with them”. (Users open the app on average five times a week, twice a day).

“We have about 200,000 users now and are growing pretty fast in the U.S., Canada and U.K.,” Moreni tells me. “We’ll be launching in every english speaking country and we’ll raise our Series A in the next 12 months. If you think about it, every single generation in history had a tracker. At Emma, we want to become the abacus for the modern world”.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Emma, the personal finance tracker, scores .5M seed led by Connect Ventures

Bluecrew, a flexible staffing business owned by holding company IAC, is launching a new mobile app called Bluecrew Manager.

Rather than relying on a network of independent contractors, Bluecrew hires its own W-2 employees, who in turn have the option to accept hourly jobs from Bluecrew customers.

The company already offered web-based management tools for those customers, but CEO Adam Roston said the mobile app is designed to help them accomplish “the stuff you need to do right now, while you’re on-the-go.”

For example, he said that a warehouse manager spends most of their day “running around the floor,” so if they’re visiting the pick-and-pack department and need to see who’s on the team that day, they can open the app and see pictures of everyone who’s supposed to be working. And if they see that someone forgot to check in, they can adjust their time clock directly from the app.

Other features include the ability to request more workers and to “favorite” a worker, making it more likely that they’ll be assigned to the same company for future jobs.

Bluecrew says it has been testing out the Manager app (which is available for free to all customers) for the past month. In the launch announcement, Eduardo Medrano, cafe manager at hospitality company Eurest, said the app “is completely changing how I approach staffing” because it allows him “to make adjustments and check who will be there right on my phone.”

The company says that since its acquisition by IAC in 2018, its client base has nearly quadrupled, with growth in industries like logistics and manufacturing, hospitality/culinary and warehousing.

Roston also pointed to California’s new AB-5 law (which limits the ways that companies can classify workers as independent contractors) as a sign that Bluecrew has taken the right approach to combining flexibility and worker protections.

“When [co-founder and CTO Gino Rooney] started the company five years ago, it seemed a little bit crazy to be doing this with W-2 employees,” Roston said. “Over the last year. the landscape has just shifted … The reality, is most companies in the country are already following labor laws and have been at W-2 for years. But we’ve seen some increased momentum from AB-5, and we would expect to see it elsewhere.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Bluecrew launches a mobile app to help businesses manage a flexible workforce

The next-gen flavor of mobile connectivity, 5G, is now live in 24 markets globally, according to GSMA’s annual state of the global mobile economy report.

The cutting edge network tech is capable of supporting speeds up to 100x faster than LTE/4G and delivering latency of just a few milliseconds, as well as being able to connect many more devices per cell site. As it rolls out, it’s expected to underpin a new wave of “smarter” digital services which bake in real-time AI assistance and help drive the digitization of legacy industries.

In last year’s report the carrier association didn’t break out a firm figure for markets where 5G is live — but dubbed the tech “a reality” after commercial launches in the US and South Korea towards the end of 2018. It also said it was expecting 16 more “major countries” to have launched 5G networks by the end of 2019.

It’s now touting “significant traction” for 5G — saying 79 operators across a further 39 markets had announced plans to launch commercial 5G services as of January 20, 2020. 

As it stands actual 5G connections remain a fraction of the connectivity pie vs current (4G) and previous gen cellular favors. Per the report, 4G became the dominant mobile tech globally in 2019 — with over 4BN connections, accounting for 52% of total connections (excluding licensed cellular IoT).

The GSMA expects 4G connections to continue to grow for the next few years, peaking at just under 60% of global connections by 2023.

For 5G its forecast is that it will account for a fifth (20%) of global connections by 2025, with the carrier association expecting “particularly strong” take-up across developed Asia, North America and Europe.

(For wider context, almost half of the global population (3.8BN people) are now users of the mobile internet as a whole (2G-5G), per the report — which is forecast to grow to 61% (5BN people) by 2025.)

It’s worth emphasizing that the presence of 5G in a market does not mean universal coverage.

On the contrary, 5G rollouts have tended to be targeted on urban centers. Which means 5G availability in the 24 markets that have launched commercial networks so far is likely highly limited vs population. There are also still relatively few 5G smartphones vs non-5G handsets (though since this time last year more are being unboxed; Sony, for example, just announced its first 5G handsets).

Perhaps, most importantly, consumer demand for the next-gen flavor of connectivity has yet to be robustly stood up. The GSMA’s report poses the (existential, for telcos) question of: “Will they pay for it?”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | 5G is now live in 24 markets, GSMA predicts it’ll be 20% of global connections by 2025 — and eyes a big tech break-up