Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

FlyCleaners, a New York startup offering on-demand laundry pickup and delivery, has laid off “a large number” of its employees, co-founder and CEO David Salama told TechCrunch.

This confirms a story earlier this week in Crain’s New York reporting that FlyCleaners filed a notification with the Department of Labor outlining plans to close its Long Island City plant and lay off 116 employees.

As Salama explained when we profiled him several years ago, FlyCleaners customers can use the mobile app whenever they want someone to pick up their laundry — the startup handles pickup and return, while the actual cleaning is handled by local businesses.

In an email about the layoffs, Salama told me that the company (which raised a $2 million round led by Zelkova Ventures back in 2013) created its own team for pickup and delivery because “when we started FlyCleaners six years ago, the last-mile logistics industry was simply not where we needed it to be in order to effectively service our customers.” More recently, however, the company has been testing partnerships with other logistics companies as a way to “supplement” its own team.

“Recently, it became clear to us that the cost of our internal team was just too large to bear and it was starting to hamper our ability to execute strategically and to sustain and grow our business,” Salama continued. “And so, that [led] to the painful decision to lay off a large number of employees and to proceed as a more asset-light organization.”

He added, “We don’t anticipate that this change will materially decrease the service we offer our customers. If anything, by partnering with larger-scale logistics providers, our service should be more efficient and resilient than it currently is.”

But if partners are handling pickups, delivery and the laundry, what does FlyCleaners bring to the table? When I asked what the company will focus on moving forward, Salama said, “I prefer to be discreet about it[,] but I’m comfortable saying that our plan is to leverage our technology to create the best customer experience possible.”

He also said that the startup is working with its logistics partners to find new positions for laid-off employees.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Laundry startup FlyCleaners confirms major layoffs

Background noise on calls could be a thing of the past if Krisp has anything to do with it. The app, now available on Windows and Macs after a long beta, uses machine learning to silence the bustle of a home, shared office or coffee shop so your voice and the voices of others comes through clearly.

I first encountered Krisp in prototype form when we were visiting UC Berkeley’s Skydeck accelerator, which ended up plugging $500,000 into the startup alongside a $1.5 million round from Sierra Ventures and Shanda Group.

Like so many apps and services these days, Krisp uses machine learning. But unlike many of them, it uses the technology in a fairly straightforward, easily understandable way.

The machine learning model the company has created is trained to recognize the voice of a person talking into a microphone. By definition pretty much everything else is just noise — so the model just sort of subtracts it from the waveform, leaving your audio clean even if there’s a middle school soccer team invading the cafe where you’re running the call from.

It can also mute sound coming the other direction — that is, the noise on your friend’s side. So if they’re in a noisy street and you’re safe at home, you can apply the smart noise reduction to them as well.

Because it changes the audio signal before it gets to any apps or services, it’s compatible with pretty much everything: Skype, Messenger, Slack, whatever. You could even use it to record podcasts when there’s a leaf blower outside. A mobile version is on the way for release later this year.

It works — I’ve tested it, as have thousands of other users during the beta. But now comes the moment of truth: will anyone pay for it?

The new, official release of the app will let you mute the noise you hear on the line — that is, the noise coming from the microphones of people you talk to — for free, forever. But clearing the noise on your own line, like the baby crying next to you, after a two-week trial period, will cost you $20 per month, or $120 per year, or as low as $5 per month for group licenses. You can collect free time by referring people to the app, but eventually you’ll probably have to shell out.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that: A straightforward pay-as-you-go business model is refreshing in an age of intrusive data collection, pushy “freemium” platforms and services that lack any way to make money whatsoever.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Krisp’s smart noise-cancelling gets official release and pricing

Private equity firms get a bad rap — and not without reason. In the prototypical example, a bunch of men in suits (and these folks always seem to be men for some reason) swoop in from Manhattan with Excel spreadsheets and pink slips, slashing and burning through an organization while ladening the balance sheet with debt in an algebraic alchemy of monetary extraction.

Vultures, parasites, octopuses — these are folks who almost certainly won popularity contests in high school and now seem to be shooting for most unpopular person to be compared to a crustacean in the Finance section of the WSJ (and there is some damn strong competition in those pages).

Sometimes that restructuring can save an org, and yes, many companies need a Marie Kondo armed with a business plan. But it’s a model that works best for, say, retail chains, and traditionally has been wholly incompatible with the tech industry.

Tech is a tough place for private equity buyouts, as the biggest expense for most companies is talent (i.e. R&D), and cutting R&D is usually the quickest path to cutting the valuation of the asset you just acquired. Unlike retail or manufacturing, there are just fewer cost levers to manipulate to make the numbers look better, and so PE firms have generally shied away from big tech acquisitions.

So it was interesting talking to Simon Segars this week in New York. Segars is the CEO and longtime executive at Arm, the U.K.-headquartered chip designer that powers billions of devices worldwide. Over the past two decades, Arm has had an incredible run: Last year, its designs were imprinted on 22.9 billion chips, thanks largely to the now ubiquitous adoption of smartphones across the world.

That success has been under stress though. As Brian Heater analyzed in his State of the Smartphone, smartphone growth has slowed in most markets as consumers extend their upgrade cycles and the pace of innovation has slowed. Add in the ongoing trade kerfuffle between the U.S. and China, and suddenly being the worldwide leading designer of smartphone chips isn’t as enviable as it was even just a few years ago.

As a public company facing this landscape, Arm would have faced incredible pressure from investors to meet short-term revenue targets while cutting back on R&D — the very source of future growth the company has relied on its entire history. But Arm isn’t a public company — instead, SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son bought out the company entirely in 2016 for $32 billion.

Rather than being pegged to its stock price or a quick return to a PE shop, Arm is now seemingly evaluated on growth in its intellectual property and strategy for capturing new markets. “I’m in a very fortunate position where, despite the slowing of the smartphone market … I’ve got an owner that says, invest, you know, invest like crazy to make sure you capture these waves of growth in the future, which is what we’re doing,” Segars explained to TechCrunch.

The company could have just doubled down on its existing product lines, but SoftBank’s ownership has opened the floodgates to explore other areas that could use Arm expertise. The company is now focused (if one can focus on many things) on everything from 5G and networking to IoT and autonomous driving. “We look to be in the right place at the right time with the right technology to catch the upswing into the future,“ Segars said.

That strategy requires some serious audacity though. Arm’s EBITDA was $225 million last year (21% lower than the year before) on $1.8 billion in net sales, which year-over-year grew a paltry 0.2% according to SoftBank’s latest financials. Meanwhile, operating expenses are up from the addition of hundreds of new employees and a new headquarters campus in Cambridge, outside London. R&D isn’t cheap, nor does it payoff quickly.

Yet, that is exactly how Son and SoftBank approach this take-private transaction. “During the acquisition process, Masa said to me, ‘You run the business, I only care about long-term strategy, not going to interfere, you know, you know what you’re doing.’ … [and] Masa has been absolutely true to his word on that,” Segars said. “From a day-to-day basis, SoftBank leaves us completely alone.”

And unlike the bean counters that plague most PE shops, Son isn’t interested in detailed operational data from the firm. “When I give tactical updates… he’s asleep, [but] try stopping him when he’s talking about long-term strategy,” Segars said.

And unlike the PE model of dumping a bunch of high-interest corporate debt on the balance sheet to eke out returns, SoftBank has — at least, so far — avoided that particular tactic. While there were ruminations that SoftBank was considering cashing out some dollars from Arm using loans early last year, such rumors have apparently not panned out. Segars confirmed that “we have none” when we asked about leverage, which has otherwise plagued much of the rest of SoftBank Group and its various entities.

While Arm clearly has a bullish owner who somehow uses financial wizardry to give the company the resources it needs to grow, Son doesn’t have an infinite timeline for the company. Much like classic PE firms with five to seven-year time horizons to harvest returns, Son has already spoken out loud about pushing Arm back into the public markets in roughly five years’ time.

“I’m pretty sure, the night before we go public again, I’m going to be thinking ‘Man, I wish we’d had more time, you know, five years sounds like a lot,” Segars said. But “the way I talk about it within Arm is we’re in an investment phase now … and the goal is that by the time we re-list … the revenues from these new markets are taking off and that’s flowing to the bottom line and we get back to a world of growing top line and expanding margins.”

In other words, Arm is a classic PE deal, but with the focus on actually getting the fundamentals in the business right without that financial alchemy and employee firing sadness. Maybe the plan will work, or maybe it won’t, but it is the right approach to handling the growth of a tech company.

How many other tech companies could use such an approach? How many other companies are currently languishing if only they had more focused owners with a true growth mindset to invest in the future? Silicon Valley has created trillions of dollars in market value over the past two decades, but there is even more waiting to be unlocked. And the best part is, it doesn’t even require an Excel macro to make it happen.

Update: Changed ARM Holdings to Arm

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Arm shows SoftBank does tech PE the right way

With 200X the range of Wi-Fi at 1/1000th of the cost of a cellular modem, Helium’s “LongFi” wireless network debuts today. Its transmitters can help track stolen scooters, find missing dogs via IoT collars and collect data from infrastructure sensors. The catch is that Helium’s tiny, extremely low-power, low-data transmission chips rely on connecting to P2P Helium Hotspots people can now buy for $495. Operating those hotspots earns owners a cryptocurrency token Helium promises will be valuable in the future…

The potential of a new wireless standard has allowed Helium to raise $51 million over the past few years from GV, Khosla Ventures and Marc Benioff, including a new $15 million Series C round co-led by Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital. That’s in part because one of Helium’s co-founders is Napster inventor Shawn Fanning. Investors are betting that he can change the tech world again, this time with a wireless protocol that like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth before it could unlock unique business opportunities.

Helium already has some big partners lined up, including Lime, which will test it for tracking its lost and stolen scooters and bikes when they’re brought indoors, obscuring other connectivity, or their battery is pulled, out deactivating GPS. “It’s an ultra low-cost version of a LoJack” Helium CEO Amir Haleem says.

InvisiLeash will partner with it to build more trackable pet collars. Agulus will pull data from irrigation valves and pumps for its agriculture tech business. Nestle will track when it’s time to refill water in its ReadyRefresh coolers at offices, and Stay Alfred will use it to track occupancy status and air quality in buildings. Haleem also imagines the tech being useful for tracking wildfires or radiation.

Haleem met Fanning playing video games in the 2000s. They teamed up with Fanning and Sproutling baby monitor (sold to Mattel) founder Chris Bruce in 2013 to start work on Helium. They foresaw a version of Tile’s trackers that could function anywhere while replacing expensive cell connections for devices that don’t need high bandwith. Helium’s 5 kilobit per second connections will compete with SigFox, another lower-power IoT protocol, though Haleem claims its more centralized infrastructure costs are prohibitive. It’s also facing off against Nodle, which piggybacks on devices’ Bluetooth hardware. Lucky for Helium, on-demand rental bikes and scooters that are perfect for its network have reached mainstream popularity just as Helium launches six years after its start.

Helium says it already pre-sold 80% of its Helium Hotspots for its first market in Austin, Texas. People connect them to their Wi-Fi and put it in their window so the devices can pull in data from Helium’s IoT sensors over its open-source LongFi protocol. The hotspots then encrypt and send the data to the company’s cloud that clients can plug into to track and collect info from their devices. The Helium Hotspots only require as much energy as a 12-watt LED light bulb to run, but that $495 price tag is steep. The lack of a concrete return on investment could deter later adopters from buying the expensive device.

Only 150-200 hotspots are necessary to blanket a city in connectivity, Haleem tells me. But because they need to be distributed across the landscape, so a client can’t just fill their warehouse with the hotspots, and the upfront price is expensive for individuals, Helium might need to sign up some retail chains as partners for deployment. As Haleem admits, “The hard part is the education.” Making hotspot buyers understand the potential (and risks) while demonstrating the opportunities for clients will require a ton of outreach and slick marketing.

Without enough Helium Hotspots, the Helium network won’t function. That means this startup will have to simultaneously win at telecom technology, enterprise sales and cryptocurrency for the network to pan out. As if one of those wasn’t hard enough.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Helium launches M-funded ‘LongFi’ IoT alternative to cellular

Adjust is announcing that it has raised $227 million in new funding.

The company, founded in Berlin back in 2012, has created a variety of ad measurement and anti-fraud tools — CEO Christian Henschel said the goal is to “make marketing simpler, smarter and safer.” Adjust says it’s now being used in more than 25,000 mobile apps for customers like NBCUniversal, Zynga, Robinhood, Pinterest and Procter & Gamble.

It’s been nearly four years since the company raised its previous round of $15 million. Henschel (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Paul Müller) told me the company was already profitable back then, and it’s continued to be profitable while growing revenue by an average of 80 percent every year. So it raised more money (a lot more), he said, “because we saw the opportunity … to grow our business even further.”

Henschel pointed to three broad areas where Adjust is planning to invest and grow. First, there’s combating fraud, where he said the company was “very early,” first launching its mobile fraud prevention suite in 2016. It expanded its offerings earlier this year with the acquisition of Unbotify.

Second, he said Adjust will continue to invest in automation and aggregation — an area where it made another recent acquisition, namely the data aggregation company Acquired.io.

“We’re giving our customers the ability to get rid of the repetitive and boring tasks and really focus them back on thigns that human beings are very good at — that is creativity,” Henschel said.

Lastly, the company (which already has 350 employees in 15 offices worldwide) will continue to invest in customer service and geographic expansion, particularly in Asia.

Speaking of acquisitions, Adjust says it’s also partnered with Japanese marketing agency Adways and acquired Adways’ attribution tool PartyTrack. So naturally, you might assume that this new capital means  even more deals are in the works, but Henschel said, “Acquisitions are always tough — it’s hard to find the right companies, and even harder to integrate them.”

In other words, he’s open to acquiring more companies, but he said, “We don’t have any plans right now.”

This new round brings Adjust’s total funding to $250 million. It was led by Eurazeo Growth, Highland Europe, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners and Sofina.

“Adjust reached profitability just three years after its creation, and has seen extraordinary growth since then,” said Eurazeo Growth’s Yann du Rusquec in a statement. “The company is ideally positioned to further expand its product and footprint throughout 2019 and beyond, cementing its position as one of the most successful global tech champions to come out of Europe.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Adjust raises 7M to measure mobile ads and prevent fraud

Dropbox is evolving from a file-storage system to an enterprise software portal, where you can coordinate work with your team. Today the company launches a new version of Dropbox that allows you to launch apps with shortcuts for G Suite and more, plus use built-in Slack message-sending and Zoom video calls. It lets you search across all your files on your device and inside your other enterprise tools, and communicate and comment on your team’s work. Dropbox is also becoming a task manager, with the ability to add notes and tag co-workers in to-do lists attached to files.

The new Dropbox launches today for all of its 13 million business users across 400,000 teams plus its consumer tiers. Users can opt-in here for early access and businesses can turn on early access in their admin panel. “The way we work is broken,” CEO Drew Houston said to cue up the company’s mission statement: “to design a more enlightened way of working.”

Dropbox seems to have realized that file storage by itself is a dying business. With storage prices dropping and any app being able to add their own storage system, it needed to move up the enterprise stack and become a portal that opens and organizes your other tools. Becoming the enterprise coordination layer is a smart strategy, and one that it seems Slack was happy to partner into rather than building itself.

As part of the update, Dropbox is launching a new desktop app for all users so it won’t have to live inside your Mac or Windows file system. When you click a file, you can see a preview and presence data about who has viewed it, who is currently and who has access.

The launch includes deep integrations with Slack, so you can comment on files from within Dropbox, and Zoom, so you can video chat without leaving the workspace. Web and enterprise app shortcuts relieve you from keeping all your other tools constantly open in other tabs. Dropbox’s revamped search tool lets you crawl across your computer’s file system and all your cloud storage across other productivity apps.

But what’s most important about today’s changes is that Dropbox is becoming a task-management app. Each file lets you type out descriptions, to-do lists and tag co-workers to assign them tasks. An Activity Feed per file shows comments and actions from co-workers so you don’t have to collaborate in a separate Google Doc or Slack channel.

When asked about how Dropbox decided who to partner with (Slack, Zoom) versus who to copy (Asana), VP of biz dev Billy Blau essentially dodged the question while citing the “shared ethos” of Dropbox’s partners.

Houston kicked off the San Francisco launch event by pointing out that it’s easier to find info from the public than our own company’s knowledge that’s scattered across our computers and the cloud. The “Finder” on our computers hasn’t evolved to embrace a post-download era. He described how people spend 60% of our office time on work about work, like organization and communication, instead of actually working — a marketing angle frequently used by task-management startup Asana that Dropbox is now competing with more directly. “We’re going to help you get a handle on all this ‘work about work,’ ” Dropbox writes. Yet Asana has been using that phrase as a core of its messaging since 2013.

Now Dropbox wants to be your file tree, your finder and your desktop for the cloud. The question is whether files are always the central unit of work that comments and tasks should be pegged to, or whether it should be the task and project at the center of attention with files attached.

It will take some savvy onboarding and persistence to retrain teams to see Dropbox as their workspace instead of their computer’s desktop or their browser. But if it can become the identity and collaboration layer that connects the fragmented enterprise software, it could outlive file storage and stay relevant as new office tools emerge.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Dropbox relaunches as an enterprise collaboration workspace

Mobile gaming continues to hold its own, accounting for 10% of the time users spend in apps — a percentage that has remained steady over the years, even though our time in apps overall has grown by 50% over the past two years. In addition, games are continuing to grow their share of consumer spend, notes App Annie in a new research report out this week, timed with E3.

Thanks to growth in hyper-casual and cross-platform gaming in particular, mobile games are on track to reach 60% market share in consumer spend in 2019.

The new report looks at how much time users spend gaming versus using other apps, monetization and regional highlights within the gaming market, among other things.

Despite accounting for a sizable portion of users’ time, games don’t lead the other categories, App Annie says.

Instead, social and communications apps account for half (50%) of the time users spent globally in apps in 2018, followed by video players and editors at 15%, then games at 10%.

In the U.S., users generally have eight games installed per device; globally, we play an average of two to five games per month.

The number of total hours spent on games continues to grow roughly 10% year-over-year, as well, thanks to existing gamers increasing their time in games and from a broadening user base, including a large number of mobile app newcomers from emerging markets.

This has also contributed to a widening age range for gamers.

Today, the majority of time spent in gaming is by those aged 25 and older. In many cases, these players may not even classify themselves as “gamers,” App Annie noted.

While games may not lead the categories in terms of time spent, they do account for a large number of mobile downloads and the majority of consumer spending on mobile.

One-third of all worldwide downloads are games across iOS, Google Play and third-party app stores.

Last year, 1.6+ million games launched on Google Play and 1.1+ million arrived on iOS.

On Android, 74 cents of every dollar is spent on games, with 95% of those purchases coming as in-app purchases, not paid downloads. App Annie didn’t have figures for iOS.

Google Play is known for having more downloads than iOS, but continues to trail on consumer spend. In 2018, Google Play grabbed a 72% share of worldwide downloads, compared with 28% on iOS. Meanwhile, Google Play only saw 36% of consumer spend versus 64% on iOS.

One particular type of gaming jumped out in the new report: racing games.

Consumer spend in this subcategory of gaming grew 7.9 times as fast as the overall mobile gaming market. Adventure games did well, too, growing roughly five times the rate of games in general. Music games and board games were also popular.

Of course, gaming expands beyond mobile. But it’s surprising to see how large a share of the broader market can be attributed to mobile gaming.

According to App Annie, mobile gaming is larger than all other channels, including home game consoles, handheld consoles and computers (Mac and PC). It’s also 20% larger than all these other categories combined — a shift from only a few years ago, attributed to the growth in the mobile consumer base, which allows mobile gaming to reach more people.

Cross-platform gaming is a key gaming trend today, thanks to titles like PUBG and Fortnite in particular, which were among the most downloaded games across several markets last year.

Meanwhile, hyper-casual games are appealing to those who don’t think of themselves as gamers, which has helped to broaden the market further.

App Annie is predicting the next big surge will come from AR gaming, with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite expected to bring Pokémon Go-like frenzy back to AR, bringing the new title $100 million in its first 30 days. The game is currently in beta testing in select markets, with plans for a 2019 release.

In terms of regions, China’s impact on gaming tends to be outsized, but its growth last year was limited due to the game license regulations. This forced publishers to look outside the country for growth — particularly in markets like North America and Japan, App Annie said.

Meanwhile, India, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia lead the emerging markets with regard to game
downloads, but established markets of the U.S. and China remain strong players in terms of sheer numbers.

With the continued steady growth in consumer spend and the stable time spent in games, App Annie states the monetization potential for games is growing. In 2018, there were 1,900 games that made more than $5 million, up from 1,200 in 2016. In addition, consumer spend in many key markets is still growing too — like the 105% growth in two years in China, for example, and the 45% growth in the U.S.

The full report delves into other regions as well as game publishers’ user acquisition strategies. It’s available for download here.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Mobile games now account for 33% of installs, 10% of time and 74% of consumer spend

Facebook shut down its Research and Onavo programs after TechCrunch exposed how the company paid teenagers for root access to their phones to gain market data on competitors. Now Facebook is relaunching its paid market research program, but this time with principles — namely transparency, fair compensation and safety. The goal? To find out which other competing apps and features Facebook should buy, copy or ignore.

Today Facebook releases its “Study from Facebook” app for Android only. Some adults 18+ in the U.S. and India will be recruited by ads on and off Facebook to willingly sign up to let Facebook collect extra data from them in exchange for a monthly payment. They’ll be warned that Facebook will gather which apps are on their phone, how much time they spend using those apps, the app activity names of features they use in other apps, plus their country, device and network type.

Facebook promises it won’t snoop on user IDs, passwords or any of participants’ content, including photos, videos or messages. It won’t sell participants’ info to third parties, use it to target ads or add it to their account or the behavior profiles the company keeps on each user. Yet while Facebook writes that “transparency” is a major part of “Approaching market research in a responsible way,” it refuses to tell us how much participants will be paid.

“Study from Facebook” could give the company critical insights for shaping its product roadmap. If it learns everyone is using screensharing social network Squad, maybe it will add its own screensharing feature. If it finds group video chat app Houseparty is on the decline, it might not worry about cloning that functionality. Or if it finds Snapchat’s Discover mobile TV shows are retaining users for a ton of time, it might amp up teen marketing of Facebook Watch. But it also might rile up regulators and politicians who already see it as beating back competition through acquisitions and feature cloning.

An attempt to be less creepy

TechCrunch’s investigation from January revealed that Facebook had been quietly operating a research program codenamed Atlas that paid users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month in gift cards in exchange for root access to their phone so it could gather all their data for competitive analysis. That included everything the Study app grabs, but also their web browsing activity, and even encrypted information, as the app required users to install a VPN that routed all their data through Facebook. It even had the means to collect private messages and content shared — potentially including data owned by their friends.

Facebook’s Research app also abused Apple’s enterprise certificate program designed for distributing internal use-only apps to employees without the App Store or Apple’s approval. Facebook originally claimed it obeyed Apple’s rules, but Apple quickly disabled Facebook’s Research app and also shut down its enterprise certificate, temporarily breaking Facebook’s internal test builds of its public apps, as well as the shuttle times and lunch menu apps employees rely on.

In the aftermath of our investigation, Facebook shut down its Research program. It then also announced in February that it would shut down its Onavo Protect app on Android, which branded itself as a privacy app providing a free VPN instead of paying users while it collected tons of data on them. After giving users until May 9th to find a replacement VPN, the Onavo Protect was killed off.

This was an embarrassing string of events that stemmed from unprincipled user research. Now Facebook is trying to correct its course and revive its paid data collection program but with more scruples.

How Study from Facebook works

Unlike Onavo or Facebook Research, users can’t freely sign up for Study. They have to be recruited through ads Facebook will show on its own app and others to both 18+ Facebook users and non-users in the U.S. and India. That should keep out grifters and make sure the studies stay representative of Facebook’s user base. Eventually, Facebook plans to extend the program to other countries.

If users click through the ad, they’ll be brought to Facebook’s research operations partner Applause’s website, which clearly identifies Facebook’s involvement, unlike Facebook Research, which hid that fact until users were fully registered. There they’ll be informed how the Study app is opt-in, what data they’ll give up in exchange for what compensation and that they can opt out at any time. They’ll need to confirm their age, have a PayPal account (which are only supposed to be available to users 18 and over) and Facebook will cross-check the age to make sure it matches the person’s Facebook profile, if they have one. They won’t have to sign and NDA like with the Facebook Research program.

Anyone can download the Study from Facebook app from Google Play, but only those who’ve been approved through Applause will be able to log in and unlock the app. It will again explain what Facebook will collect, and ask for data permissions. The app will send periodic notifications to users reminding them they’re selling their data to Facebook and offering them an opt-out. Study from Facebook will use standard Google-approved APIs and won’t use a VPN, SSL bumping, root access, enterprise certificates or permission profiles you install on your device like the Research program that ruffled feathers.

Different users will be paid the same amount to their PayPal account, but Facebook wouldn’t say how much it’s dealing out, or even whether it was in the ball park of cents, dollars or hundreds of dollars per month. That seems like a stern departure from its stated principle of transparency. This matters, because Facebook earns billions in profit per quarter. It has the cash to potentially offer so much to Study participants that it effectively coerces them to give up their data; $10 to $20 per month like it was paying Research participants seems reasonable in the U.S., but that’s enough money in India to make people act against their better judgement.

The launch shows Facebook’s boldness despite the threat of antitrust regulation focusing on how it has suppressed competition through its acquisitions and copying. Democrat presidential candidates could use Study from Facebook as a talking point, noting how the company’s huge profits earned from its social network domination afford it a way to buy private user data to entrench its lead.

At 15 years old, Facebook is at risk of losing touch with what the next generation wants out of their phones. Rather than trying to guess based on their activity on its own app, it’s putting its huge wallet to work so it can pay for an edge on the competition.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Facebook’s new Study app pays adults for data after teen scandal

Welcome is a new app that CEO Matthew Rosenberg said is designed for a more spontaneous approach to traveling.

“What we’re going after is these millennials [and] Gen Z travelers who feel comfortable going in the moment,” Rosenberg told me. “Eighty-five percent of people aren’t even looking at activities before they arrive.”

So instead of asking travelers to create their own itineraries by browsing through a list of recommendations and reviews, Welcome builds the itinerary for them. When you’re planning to visit a destination, or when you’ve arrived and you’re wondering what to do, you can open Welcome and browse through a list of potential locations and activities, indicating which ones interest you. You also can browse recommendations from local experts, or ask for tips from your friends.

Welcome then uses your responses to create a schedule for you, consisting both of places you’ve explicitly said you want to visit and of things that would probably be of interest. The itineraries are also based on location, with different travel options like taking an Uber or Lyft, mass transit or walking.

Most intriguingly, the itineraries adjust in real time — if one of the items on the list doesn’t interest you, you can swipe to skip it, and Welcome will automatically fill in the gap with new activities. Or if you find a great spot where you want want to spend the whole afternoon, the app will once again adjust. Rosenberg said it’s even pulling in weather data, so “if we were going to send you to a park in the afternoon, and at lunch it starts raining, we can replace it with a museum.”

He acknowledged that this approach might be less suited for travelers who like to plan everything in advance — but even then, he noted, “The truth is, for all the planning that happens, most people’s plans tend to fall apart in the moment. Something always changes, some alley you want to go down, some boat you want to take, some sort of adventure that if you didn’t take it, you’d regret. That’s what we’ve really tried to embrace.”

Rosenberg added that the app could eventually introduce new ways for users to more explicitly filter the results based on their preferences — say, if they’re particularly interested in theater or museums, or if they’re on a tight budget.

Welcome says it already offers recommendations in more than 250 cities worldwide.

It’s a free app, and Rosenberg said the focus is on growth, not monetization. While he plans to make money by driving purchases and transactions, he said Welcome will never be advertising-driven. “Everything we show you is authentic. No one’s paying us to send you to some mediocre restaurant.”

The startup was founded by Rosenberg (who previously founded video app Cameo) and Peter Gerard, and has raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by 3 Rodeo.

“What we use today in travel is rooted in this old-school style of thinking,” Rosenberg said. “What I mean by that is, most travel sites put a bunch of pins on a map, but it’s still up to you to look around and figure out what to do. I don’t think anyone’s really thought: How can we take advantage not only of the mobile device, but really the data that’s out there right now … No one’s really built tools for our generation.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Welcome’s new app will do your travel planning for you

UK mobile network operators have drafted a letter urging the government for greater clarity on Chinese tech giant Huawei’s involvement in domestic 5G infrastructure, according to a report by the BBC.

Huawei remains under a cloud of security suspicion attached to its relationship with the Chinese state, which in 2017 passed legislation that gives authorities more direct control over the operations of internet-based companies — leading to fears it could repurpose network kit supplied by Huawei as a conduit for foreign spying.

Back in April, press reports emerged suggesting the UK government was intending to give Huawei a limited role in 5G infrastructure — for ‘non-core’ parts of the network — despite multiple cabinet ministers apparently raising concerns about any role for the Chinese tech giant. The UK government did not officially confirmed the leaks.

In the draft letter UK operators warn the government that the country risks losing its position as a world leader in mobile connectivity as a result of ongoing uncertainty attached to Huawei and 5G, per the BBC’s report.

The broadcaster says it has reviewed the letter which is intended to be sent to cabinet secretary, Mark Sedwill, as soon as this week.

It also reports that operators have asked for an urgent meeting between industry leaders and the government to discuss their concerns — saying they can can’t invest in 5G infrastructure while uncertainty over the use of Chinese tech persists.

The BBC’s report does not name which operators have put their names to the draft letter.

We reached out to the major UK mobile network operators for comment.

A spokesperson for BT, which owns the mobile brand EE — and was the first to go live with a consumer 5G service in the UK last month — told us: “We are in regular contact with UK government around this topic, and continue to discuss the impact of possible regulation on UK telecoms networks.”

A Vodafone spokesperson added: “We do not comment on draft documents. We would ask for any decision regarding the future use of Huawei equipment in the UK not to be rushed but based on all the facts.”

At the time of writing Orange, O2 and 3 had not yet responded to requests for comment.

A report in March by a UK oversight body set up to evaluate Huawei’s security was damning — describing “serious and systematic defects” in its software engineering and cyber security competence, although it resisted calls for an outright ban.

Reached for comment on the draft letter, a spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport told us it has not yet received it — but sent the following statement:

The security and resilience of the UK’s telecoms networks is of paramount importance. We have robust procedures in place to manage risks to national security and are committed to the highest possible security standards.

The Telecoms Supply Chain Review will be announced in due course. We have been clear throughout the process that all network operators will need to comply with the Government’s decision.

The spokesperson added that the government has undertaken extensive consultation with industry as part of its review of the 5G supply chain, in addition to regular engagement, and emphasized that it is for network operators to confirm the details of any steps they have taken in upgrading their networks.

Carriers are aware they must comply with the government’s final decision, the spokesperson added.

At the pan-Europe level, the European Commission has urged member states to step up individual and collective attention on network security to mitigate potential risks as they roll out 5G networks.

The Commission remains very unlikely to try to impose 5G supplier bans itself. Its interventions so far call for EU member states to pay close attention to network security, and help each other by sharing more information, with the Commission also warning of the risk of fragmentation to its flagship “digital single market” project if national governments impose individual bans on Chinese kit vendors.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | UK carriers warn over ongoing Huawei 5G uncertainty: Report