Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

Tilting Point announced this morning that it has acquired Star Trek Timelines, a free-to-play character collection game, from the game’s developer Disruptor Beam. It has also hired Disruptor Beam team members to create a new studio, Wicked Realm Games.

This follows Disruptor Beam‘s shuttering of its other titles, Game of Thrones Ascent and The Walking Dead: March to War. Moving forward, the company says it will be focused on its Disruptor Engine tools for mobile game development and operations.

Tilting Point, meanwhile, had previously acquired the game Languinis and the monetization startup Gondola, but President Samir El Agili told me that this is the first time the company has acquired both a game and the development team behind it. CEO Kevin Segalla described this as an extension of Tilting Point’s “progressive publishing” model, where the company first works with developers on user acquisition, then develops a deeper business relationship over time.

In fact, Timelines — which Tilting Point says has been downloaded 8 million times and earned over $100 million — was one of the first games supported by the company’s user acquisition fund. And through those efforts, the Tilting Point team came to believe that there’s still plenty of opportunity for growth.

“We spent a good amount of time over the past year-and-a-half to two years helping the team scale the game to success, helping them bring a user to the game using our ability to do user acquisition, as well as improving the game itself in terms of our operations,” El Agili said. “What we have seen over this time is that Star Trek Timelines is a very impressive game, its users are very sticky.”

He noted that Tilting Point is increasing the size of the team working on Timelines from nine at Disruptor Beam to 19 at Wicked Realm Games, which will be led by Disruptor Beam’s former CTO David Cham.

The studio, El Agili said, will be “100% integrated from a financial standpoint, but they’re still going to be very independent in the way they operate.” And while Wicked Realm will be focused on Timelines for the near future, there are “more ideas that we can build with them.”

Segalla also said that as a result of the deal, Tilting Point is essentially becoming the first Disruptor Engine customer.

“Tilting Point has been a great partner to us and have proven that they care about the game and its community and there’s no one better to take Star Trek Timelines to the next level,” said Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff in a statement. “We are also excited that Tilting Point will be one of our first live customers for our live-ops technology and that we will be continuing our working relationship.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Tilting Point acquires mobile game Star Trek Timelines

Bookshlf has created a new way for people to recommend media — whether it’s music, videos, articles, podcasts or even tweets — to their friends and to the rest of the world.

The New York-based startup is officially launching its web and iOS app this week and announcing that David A. Steinberg, co-founder and CEO of marketing company Zeta Global, has signed on as both an investor and advisor.

The big emphasis here is curation. It’s a word that comes up a lot in the media industry, but President Andrew Boggs — who previously worked in business development at Zeta, then founded Bookshlf with Mike Abend and Justin Cadelago — argued that the major internet platforms aren’t actually designed for real curation.

“A lot of the legacy platforms have focused on quantity over quality,” Boggs said. “There’s also the nature of things being really fleeting there … For example, if you are sharing stuff about music, I have to sift through your feed to find that information.”

It sounds like this idea resonated with Steinberg, who argued, “The big social media platforms do not make a living by building small groups of very interesting people. They think, ‘How do we get as much volume as possible?’”

In Bookshlf, on the other hand, users can organize their recommendations into different “shelves” based on topic, and then easily add links using the iOS Share menu (or by just adding them directly in the app). You can also share links to your shelves via social media.

Boggs, for example, has shelves tied to topics like electronic music, humor, tech/media news and even the best burgers in New York. Steinberg, meanwhile, said, “I don’t believe people primarily go to Facebook or Instagram to consume business information,” so it’s not surprising his shelves are focused on artificial intelligence, DARPA and Zeta itself.

The paradigm of a shelf of content might seem a little quaint — Boggs compared it to the shelves of DVDs or albums that you might have shown off in the past. But in his view, the model makes sense for these kinds of recommendations, because it allows people to focus on what they’re actually interested in: “Because the shelves are a curated selection, you can jump to your profile, and if you have a music shelf, I can jump right into that.”

While it remains to be seen how people will actually use Bookshlf, Boggs said there’s a likely to be a minority of core users who are doing the most active curation and sharing. These are the kinds of people who are probably already doing a lot of sharing — whether that’s on social media or just over a group chat — and “love to send you interesting articles and interesting podcasts.” At the same time, other users will simply browse the app for interesting recommendations, and they can also use the shelves to save links for themselves.

It sounds like the Bookshlf team isn’t focused on monetization yet, but Boggs suggested that there are a number of interesting opportunities, including targeted advertising, sponsored shelves, micropayments for content and selling data about broader trends in the audience interest.

In addition to Steinberg, Bookshlf has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from CAIVIS Acquisition Corp, Dalton Partners and Cambridge Way Ventures.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Bookshlf launches an app to curate and share your favorite digital content

It wasn’t the leap year, a coding blip, or a hack that caused Robinhood’s massive outages yesterday and today that left customers unable to trade stocks. Instead, the co-CEOs write that “the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure — which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a “thundering herd” effect — triggering a failure of our DNS system.”

Robinhood was offline from Monday at 6:30am Pacific to 11pm Pacific, then had another outage this morning from 6:30am Pacific until just before 9am Pacific.

The $912 million-funded fintech giant will provide compensation to all customers of its Robinhood Gold premium subscription for borrowing money to trade plus access to Morningstar research reports, Nasdaq data, and bigger instant deposits. It’s offering them three months of service.

A month of Robinhood Gold costs $5 plus 5% yearly interest on borrowing above $1,000, charged daily. Before a pricing change, the flat fee per month could range as high as $200. However, compensated users will only get the $5 off per month, for a total of $15. That could seem woefully insufficient if Robinhood users missed out on buying back into stocks like Apple that went up over 9% on Monday. Robinhood is calling it a “first step”.

Impacted Robinhood users can contact the company here to ask for compensation. Below you can see the email Robinhood sent to custoemrs late last night.

Robinhood’s email to customers late last night

Robinhood is also working to contact impacted customers on a individual basis, and it’s looking into other forms of compensation on a case by case basis, company spokesperson Jack Randall tells me. It’s unclear if that might include cash to offset what traders might have lost by having their money locked in inaccessible Robinhood accounts during the outage.

Compensation could become a significant cost if the startup assesses that many of its 10 million users were impacted. The markets gained a record $1.1 trillion yesterday, but some Robinhood traders may not have been able to buy back in as the rebound occurred following mass selloffs due to fears of coronavirus.

Now the startup, valued at $7.6 billion, will have to try to regain users’ trust. “When it comes to your money, we know how important it is for you to have answers. The outages you have experienced over the last two days are not acceptable and we want to share an update on the current situation . . . We worked as quickly as possible to restore service, but it took us a while. Too long” wrote co-founders and co-CEO Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev [disclosure: who I know from college].

As for exactly what triggered the downtime, the founders write that “Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups.” There’s been a frenzy of retail trading activity in the wake of coronavirus. There’s also been sudden spikes in stocks like Tesla amidst mainstream media attention. 

Going forward, Robinhood promises to “work to improve the resilience of our infrastructure to meet the heightened load we have been experiencing. We’re simultaneously working to reduce the interdependencies in our overall infrastructure. We’re also investing in additional redundancies in our infrastructure.” However, they warn that “we may experience additional brief outages, but we’re now better positioned to more quickly resolve them.”

The outage comes at a vulnerable time for Robinhood as oldschool brokerages like Charles Schwab, Ameritrade, and Etrade all recently moved to eliminate per-trade fees to match Robinhood’s pioneering zero-comission trades. Though some of those brokerages experienced infrastructure troubles recently, Robinhood massive outages could push users towards those incumbents that they might perceive as more stable. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Robinhood offers discount, blames outage on record trades

As the company experiences its second day of outages, Robinhood, the popular trading app with a purported 10-million-strong user base and a $7.6 billion valuation, said it will offer compensation for yesterday’s outage on a case-by-case basis, according to a company spokesperson.

The company issued a statement early Tuesday documenting that the outage began at around 9:30 AM Eastern when the company experienced what it called instability in the part of its infrastructure that allows the company’s systems to communicate with each other.

The communication breakdown resulted in outages that took down the company’s app, website and help center, a spokesperson wrote in an email.

[Update 3/3 5pm Pacific: Robinhood has taken responsibility for the outages but will give Robinhood Gold customers just $15 in compensation in the form of three months of free subscription. It’s considering other compensation on a case-by-case basis.]

It’s perhaps the worst-timed bug in the history of the seven-year-old company, because it coincided with one of the biggest single-day gains in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and huge gains on the Nasdaq, as well. In all, markets gained $1.1 trillion in value while Robinhood users were forced to sit on the sidelines. 

In a statement, the company said the outage started on Monday at 6:30 AM Pacific and only came back online at 11 PM Pacific. 

Robinhood is now reaching out to customers with information on how to get in touch with the company so it can work on compensating users “on a case-by-case basis.”

The company said it would consider offering billing credits or other, undisclosed forms of compensation. It also added that no customer data, information or funds were lost during the outage.

Apparently, the company may have spoken too soon about its availability for users. While its trading services for cryptocurrencies were working, the company’s trading mechanisms for public companies on stock exchanges were down for some users during the first hours of trading on the East Coast. According to the company, service was restored before 9AM Pacific.

This story has been updated to indicate that Robinhood is experiencing its second day of outages. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Down again, Robinhood will offer ‘case-by-case’ compensation for its outage on the day markets gained .1 trillion

I was honestly surprised to find out from Sensel that the company is only just recently raising its Series A. The Sunnyvale-based hardware startup has been around since 2013, bringing its first product, the modular music and computing Morph peripheral, to market a few years back.

Over the past few years, however, the company’s been undergoing a bit of a slow motion pivot. As fascinating as the Morph has been, the multiple touch input device has proven to be something more akin to a proof of concept for Sensel. I’ve met with co-founder and CEO Ilya Rosenberg at CES the last couple of years and watched as it changed its outward facing focus from a standalone hardware offering to smartphone and tablet components.

The new $28 million Series A brings its total funding up to $38 million, courtesy of Susquehanna International Group, Morningside Group, SMiT, Palm Commerce Holdings Co. Ltd, Chariot Gold Limited, SV Tech Ventures and Innolinks Ventures. A big part of this funding will no doubt be used to play a role in that shift, as Sensel works with OEMs to bring its advanced sensing technology to different devices.

“Since Sensel’s founding in 2013, we’ve worked tirelessly to create a sensor that outperforms existing touch technologies on every metric and at a lower overall cost,” Rosenberg says in a release. “This financing brings us closer to our ultimate goal of improving how people experience the products they rely on every single day.”

Sensel notes that it will “continue supporting the Morph,” but the language seems to pretty heavily imply that the device will no longer be a focus — something the company more or less confirmed with me during our most recent meeting. But working with OEMs to implement its technologies on third-party device is potentially a much more lucrative way forward.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Sensel raises a M Series A to bring pressure sensing tech to more mobile devices

Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries.

The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25 per phone, as reported by Reuters.

Any settlement needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw the case brought in San Jose, Calif.

For consumers, the $25 payout may seem a little low, as a new iPhone can cost anywhere from $649 to $849 (for a lower-end model). The cost may be varied depending on how many people sue, and the company is set to pay at least $310 million under the terms of the settlement.

For its part, Apple is denying wrongdoing in the case and said it was only agreeing to avoid the cost and burden associated with the lawsuit.

Any U.S. owner of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7 Plus or SE that ran on iOS 10.2.1 or any of the later operating systems are covered by the settlement. Users of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017 are also covered by the settlement.

Apple customers said their phone performance slowed down after they installed Apple software updates. The customers contend that Apple’s software updates intentionally degraded the performance of older models to encourage customers to unnecessarily upgrade to newer models or install new batteries.

Lawyers for Apple said that the problems were mainly due to high usage, temperature changes and other issues and that its engineers tried to address the problems as quickly as possible.

In February, Apple was fined $27 million by the French government for the same issue.

As we reported at the time:

A couple of years ago, Apple  released an iOS update (10.2.1 and 11.2) that introduced a new feature for older devices. If your battery is getting old, iOS would cap peak performances as your battery might not be able to handle quick peaks of power draw. The result of those peaks is that your iPhone might shut down abruptly.

While that feature is technically fine, Apple failed to inform users that it was capping performances on some devices. The company apologized and introduced a new software feature called “Battery Health,” which lets you check the maximum capacity of your battery and if your iPhone can reach peak performance.

And that’s the issue here. Many users may have noticed that their phone would get slower when they play a game, for instance. But they didn’t know that replacing the battery would fix that. Some users may have bought new phones even though their existing phone was working fine.

Shares of Apple were up more than 9% today in a general market rally.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple agrees to settlement of up to 0 million from lawsuit alleging it throttled older phones

One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time, as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements. The first round of new features arrived in December, including a filter for robocalls, more photo controls, improved Duo calls and more. Today Google says Pixel owners are getting a second set of additions, this time including new music controls, new emoji, still more photo and video features, expanded emergency help features, Google Pay improvements and several others.

Last year, Google introduced a new sort of gesture control, called Motion Sense, with the introduction of the Pixel 4. The idea is that you can now control your phone without having to touch it. Instead, the smartphone detects the wave of your hands and translates that into software controls.

Already, Motion Sense allowed Pixel 4 owners to skip forward or go back to a previous song. With today’s update, they’ll also be able to pause and resume music by making a tapping gesture above the phone.

Google suggests this will be an easy way to pause your music when you need to have a conversation. But in reality, it will only be useful if it works consistently — and so far, reviews have said the Motion Sense system was finicky and underdeveloped. That could change in time, of course.

Another improvement today is an update to Pixel 4’s Personal Safety app, which first arrived in October. The app uses the phone’s sensors to detect if you’ve been in a severe car crash and checks with you to see if you need help. It also lets U.S. users call 911 with a tap or voice command. If you’re unresponsive, the phone shares your location and details with emergency responders. Now the feature is coming to users in Australia (000) and the U.K. (999).

The new set of updates also includes added AR effects for Google’s video calling app Duo, which can change with your expression and move around the screen. These aren’t Duo’s first set of effects, but keeping the roster of effects updated is critical for social communication apps.

Meanwhile, the Pixel 4’s selfie camera can now create images with depth, which improves Portrait Blur and color pop, and lets you create 3D photos for Facebook.

Pixel phones will also now receive the emoji version 12.1 update, which hit iPhone with the iOS 3.2 update in October 2019, and which arrived on Twitter in January 2020. The set includes 169 new and more inclusive emoji, offering a wider array of gender and skin tones as well as more couple combinations.

A change to Google Pay will now let you press and hold the power button to swipe through your debit and credit cards, event tickets, boarding passes and other stored items. This is coming first to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Taiwan and Singapore.

You can also now take a screenshot of a boarding pass’s barcode, then tap a notification to add it to Google Pay to then receive real-time flight updates as notifications. This is rolling out to all countries with Google Play on Pixel 3, 3a and 4 during March.

For power users, another useful addition lets you now configure rules based on Wi-Fi or physical location. For example, you can set your phone to automatically silence your ringtone when you arrive at work, or go to Do Not Disturb mode when you get home, among other things.

Other new features include the rollout of Live Caption (automatic captions) to Pixel 2 phones, the ability to schedule when Pixel’s Dark Theme turns off and on, an easier means of accessing emergency contacts and medical info, improved long-press options for getting faster help from your apps and an update to Adaptive brightness to make reading in direct sunlight easier.

Google says the new feature set is rolling out starting today. You may not see it immediately, but should fairly soon.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Pixel phones updated with new gesture controls, emoji, AR effects & more

Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020.

1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over

The company, like its rivals Sweden-based Ericsson and Chinese giant Huawei, has shifted its attention in recent years to aggressively build a portfolio of technologies and products for 5G networks.

“After 25 years at Nokia, I have wanted to do something different,” said Rajeev Suri, who will leave his current position on August 31 and continue to serve as an advisor to the Nokia Board until the end of this year. Pekka Lundmark is expected to start in his new role on September 1.

2. Streaming service AT&T TV launches nationwide, but isn’t meant for cord cutters

Not to be confused with AT&T TV Now — AT&T’s over-the-top live TV service aimed at cord-cutters, previously called DirecTV Now — the new service is more of an alternative to AT&T-owned DirecTV. AT&T TV offers hundreds of live TV channels, plus 40,000 on-demand titles, and 500 hours of DVR space on a set-top box.

3. How to work during a pandemic

The world is bracing for the seemingly inevitable proliferation of  the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has already paralyzed cities and isolated millions. Devin Coldewey offers some guidelines for CEOs, aspiring founders and tech industry employees on how they can continue working in this environment.

4. mParticle raises $45M to help marketers unify customer data

A whole industry of customer data platforms has sprung up since mParticle was founded back in 2013, all offering tools to help marketers create a single view of their customers by unifying data from various sources.

5. Making money from games: The future of virtual economies

In part six of our series about “multiverse” virtual worlds, we explore the dynamics of games’ virtual economies, the exchange of virtual assets for real money, challenges with money laundering and underage gambling, the compliance infrastructure needed for virtual economies and the challenges in balancing a virtual economy’s monetary supply. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. India’s Spinny raises $43.7M to expand its online platform for selling used cars

Niraj Singh, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, told TechCrunch that Spinny brings the trust factor that people are looking for when they are purchasing a car.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity looks at the stock market’s tumble due the coronavirus pandemic, while the Monday news roundup discusses the continuing trickle of tech IPOs. (Original Content will be back next week!)

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.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Daily Crunch: Nokia’s CEO is stepping down

mParticle, which helps companies like Spotify, Paypal and Starbucks manage their customer data, is announcing that it has raised $45 million in Series D funding.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Katz told me that the company has benefited from broader shifts — like new privacy regulation and the shift away from cookie-based browser tracking — that increase brands’ needs for a platform like mParticle that uses “modern data infrastructure” to deliver a personalized experience for customers without running afoul of any regulations.

As result, he said mParticle has nearly quintupled its revenue since it raised a $35 million Series C in 2017. (The company has raised more than $120 million total.)

“The challenges that we solve are universal,” Katz said. “It doesn’t matter if there’s a small company or big company. Data fragmentation, data quality, consistent change in the privacy landscape, consistent change in the technology ecosystem, these are universal challenges.”

Perhaps for that very reason, a whole industry of customer data platforms has sprung up since mParticle was founded back in 2013, all offering tools to help marketers create a single view of their customers by unifying data from various sources. Even big players like Adobe and Salesforce have announced their own CDPs as part of their larger marketing clouds.

When asked about the competition, Katz said, “The market has responded overwhelmingly by saying, ‘I don’t want one vendor to rule everything for me.’ Why be beholden to one suite of tools that’s just an amalgamation of products that were built in the early 2000s?”

Instead, he argued that mParticle customers want “a best-in-breed combination of independent solutions that can be integrated seamlessly.”

Getting back to the new funding — Arrowroot Capital led the round, with the firm’s managing partner Matthew Safaii joining mParticle’s board of directors. Existing investors also participated.

Katz said the funding will be spent in three broad areas: building new products, scaling its global data infrastructure and finding new partners. In fact, the company is also announcing a partnership with LiveRamp, through which mParticle customers can combine their first-party data with the third-party party data from Liveramp.

“We see this partnership with Liveramp as an opportunity to extend the surface area by which our customers can deliver highly personalized, privacy-friendly experiences,” Katz said.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | mParticle raises M to help marketers unify customer data

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’ll look at the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the App Store, China’s demand for App Store removals — and soon-to-be-removals, it seems. We’re also talking about Facebook’s lawsuit over a data-grabbing SDK, Tinder’s new video series, the TSA ban on TikTok, Instagram’s explanation for its lack of an iPad app and how Democratic presidential primary candidates are performing on mobile and social, among other things.

Headlines

Coronavirus concerns send Chinese ride-hailing apps crashing, games surging

One of the many economic fallouts related to COVID-19 coronavirus concerns is a significant decline in the usage of Chinese ride-hailing applications. According to Sensor Tower data, downloads of the three most popular apps — Hello, Didi and Dida — were down 75% year-over-year during the week of February 10 compared with the same time frame in 2019. Meanwhile, people staying home have been ordering food and groceries more often. Overall downloads of the top 10 apps in the food-ordering category increased by 68% from January 13 to the week of February 3.

Also on the rise are mobile games. According to a recent report by the FT, users in China downloaded a record number of games and apps as the virus outbreak confined people to their homes. More than 22 million downloads were registered in Apple’s App Store in China during the week of February 2, according to App Annie, and average weekly downloads during the first two weeks of February were up 40% over the same time last year.

Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba and Tencent, have been deploying health-rating systems to help authorities track the movements of millions of Chinese. Alibaba had been tapped to explore the rollout of a rating app to help the government control who can travel into and around the city. Along with Ant Financial, it worked to develop a smartphone-based rating system in conjunction with the government of Hangzhou. Tencent created a program for Shenzhen, reported The WSJ.

Top mobile game Plague Inc. pulled from China’s App Store amid coronavirus outbreak

Plague Inc., a simulation game with more than 130 million players, was pulled from the Chinese App Store this week, a move that appears to be linked to the coronavirus outbreak. The company behind the game, Ndemic, posted a statement announcing that the game’s content is now considered “illegal in China as determined by the Cyberspace Administration of China.” Ndemic says it’s trying to reach out to find out what, specifically, it could change in order to get the game back in China.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | This Week in Apps: Coronavirus impacts app stores, Facebook sues mobile SDK maker, Apple kicks out a cloud gaming app