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Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students enrolled in overseas schools are stranded as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt life and airlines worldwide. Learning at home in China, they all face one challenge: Their school websites and other academic resources load excruciatingly slowly because all web traffic has to pass through the country’s censorship apparatus known as the “great firewall.”
Spotting a business opportunity, Alibaba’s cloud unit worked on connecting students in China to their university portals abroad through a virtual private network arrangement with American cybersecurity solutions provider Fortinet to provide, Reuters reported last July, saying Tencent had a similar product.
Details of Tencent’s offering have come to light. An app called “Chang’e Education Acceleration” debuted on Apple’s App Store in March, helping to speed up loading time for a selection of overseas educational services. It describes itself in a mouthful: “An online learning free accelerator from Tencent, with a mission to provide internet acceleration and search services in educational resources to students and researchers at home and abroad.”
Unlike Alibaba’s VPN for academic use, Chang’e is not a VPN, the firm told TechCrunch. The firm didn’t say how it defines VPN or explain how Chang’e works technically. Tencent said Chang’e rolled out on the app’s official website in October.
The word “VPN” is a loaded term in China as it often implies illegally bypassing the “great firewall.” People refer to its euphemism “accelerator” or “scientific internet surfing tool” otherwise. When Chang’e is switched on, iPhone’s VPN status is shown as “on”, according to a test by TechCrunch.
Tencent’s Chang’e website ‘accelerator’ helps Chinese students stuck home get on their school websites faster. Screenshot: TechCrunch
On the welcome page, Chang’e asks users to pick from eight countries, including the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., for “acceleration”. It also shows the latency time and expected speed increased for each region.
Once a country is picked, Chang’e shows a list of educational resources that users can visit on the app’s built-in browser. They include the websites of 79 top universities, mostly U.S. and the U.K. ones; team collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Trello and Slack; remote-learning platforms UDemy, Coursera, Lynda and Khan Academy; research networks such as SSRN and JSTOR; programming and engineering communities like Stack Overflow, Codeacademy and IEEE; economics databases from the World Bank and OECD; as well as resources for medical students like PubMed and Lancet.
Many of these services are not blocked in China but load slowly on mainland China behind the “great firewall.” Users can request sites not already on the list to be included.
Accessing Stanford’s website through Chang’e. Screenshot: TechCrunch
Chang’e appears to have whitelisted only its chosen sites rather than all traffic on a user’s smartphone. Google, Facebook, YouTube and other websites banned in China are still unavailable when the Chang’e is at work. The app, available on both Android and iOS for free, doesn’t currently require users to sign up, a rare gesture in a country where online activities are strictly regulated and most websites ask for users’ real-name registrations.
Services accessible through Chang’e. Screenshot: TechCrunch
The offerings from Alibaba and Tencent are indicative of the inadvertent consequences caused by Beijing’s censorship system designed to block information deemed illegal or harmful to China’s national interest. Universities, research institutes, multinational corporations and exporters are often forced to seek censorship circumvention apps for what the authorities would consider innocuous purposes.
VPN providers have to obtain the government’s green light to legally operate in China and users of licensed VPN services are prohibited from browsing websites thought of us endangering China’s national security. In 2017, Apple removed hundreds of unlicensed VPN apps from its China App Store at Beijing’s behest.
In October, TechCrunch reported that the VPN app and browser Tuber gave Chinese users a rare glimpse into the global internet ecosystem of Facebook, YouTube, Google and other mainstream apps, but the app was removed shortly after the article was published.
Augmented reality and non-fungible tokens, need I say more? Yes? Oh, well NFTs have certainly had their moment in 2021 but the question of what they do or what can be done with them has certainly been getting voiced more frequently as the speculative gold rush begins to cool off and people start to think more about how digital goods can evolve in the future.
Anima, a small creative crypto startup built by the founders of photo/video app Ultravisual, which Flipboard acquired back in 2014, is looking to use AR to shift how NFT art and collectibles can be viewed and shared. Their latest venture is an effort to help artists bring their digital creations to a bigger digital stage and help find what the future of NFTs looks like in augmented reality.
The startup has put together a small $500k pre-seed round from Coinbase Ventures, Divergence Ventures, Flamingo DAO, Lyle Owerko and Andrew Unger.
“As NFTs move away from being a more speculative market where it’s all about returns on your purchases, I think that’s healthy and it’s good for us specifically because we want to make things that are more approachable,” co-founder Alex Herrity says.
Their broader vision is finding ways for digital objects to interact with the real world, something that’s been a pretty top-of-mind concern for the AR world over the last few years, though augmented reality development has cooled more recently as creators have sunk into a wait-and-see attitude towards new releases from Apple and Facebook. Both the AR and NFT spaces are incredibly early, something Anima’s co-founders were quick to admit, but they think both spaces have matured enough that the gimmicks are out in the open.
“There’s a context shift that happens when you see AR as a vehicle to have a tactile relationship with something that you collected or that you see is a lifestyle accessory versus the common thing now where it’s a little bit more of an experiential gimmick,” co-founder Neil Voss tells TechCrunch.
The team has worked with a couple artists already as they’ve made early experiments in bringing digital art objects into AR and they’re launching a marketplace late next month based on ConsenSys’s Palm platform where they hope to showcase more of their future partnerships.
Managing the technical side of open-source projects is often hard enough, but throw in the inevitable conflicts between contributors, who are often very passionate about their contributions, and things get even harder. One way to establish ground rules for open-source communities is the Contributor Covenant, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke back in 2014. Like so many projects in the open-source world, the Contributor Covenant was also a passion project for Ehmke. Over the years, its first two iterations have been adopted by organizations like the CNCF, Creative Commons, Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Linux project, in addition to hundreds of other projects.
Now, as work is starting on version 3.0, the Organization for Ethical Source (OES), of which Ehmke is a co-founder and executive director, will take over the stewardship of the project.
“Contributor Covenant was the first document of its kind as code of conduct for open-source projects — and it was incredibly controversial and actually remains pretty controversial to this day,” Ehmke told me. “But I come from the Ruby community, and the Ruby community really embraced the concept and also really embraced the document itself. And then it spread from there to lots of other open-source projects and other open-source communities.”
The core of the document is a pledge to “make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation,” and for contributors to act in ways that contribute to a diverse, open and welcoming community.
As Ehmke told me, one part that evolved over the course of the last few years is the addition of enforcement guidelines that are meant to help community leaders determine the consequences when members violate the code of conduct.
“One of the things that I try to do in this work is when people criticize the work, even if they’re not arguing in good faith, I try to see if there’s something in there that could be used as constructive feedback, something actionable,” Ehmke said. “A lot of the criticism for years for Contributor Covenant was people saying, ‘Oh, I’ll say one wrong thing and be permanently banned from our project, which is really grim and really unreasonable.’ What I took from that is that people are afraid of what consequences project leaders might impose on them for an infraction. Put that way, that’s kind of a reasonable concern.”
Ehmke described bringing the Covenant to the OES as an “exit to community,” similar to how companies will often bring their mature open-source projects under the umbrella of a foundation. She noted that the OES includes a lot of members with expertise in community management and project governance, which they will be able to bring to the project in a more formal way. “I’m still going to be involved with the evolution of Contributor Covenant, but it’s going to be developed under the working group model that the organization for ethical source has established,” she explained.
For version 3.0, Ehmke hopes to turn the Covenant into what she described as more of a “toolkit” that will allow different communities to tailor it a bit more to their own goals and values (though still within the core ethical principles outlined by the OES).
“Microsoft’s adoption of Contributor Covenant represents our commitment to building healthy, diverse and inclusive communities, as well as our intention to contribute and build together with others in the ecosystem,” said Emma Irwin, a program manager in Microsoft’s Open Source Program Office. “I am honored to bring this intention and my expertise to the OES’s Contributor Covenant 3.0 working group.”
On Wednesday evening, Twitter announced thatSpaces– its Clubhouse competitor – will start rolling out for use on the web. Earlier this month, Twitter Spaces became available for any user with more than 600 followers on the iOS or Android apps, and around the same time, Clubhouse finally released its long-awaited Android app. Still, Clubhouse has yet to debut on the web, marking a success for Twitter in the race to corner the live social audio market.
Even Instagram is positioning itself as a Clubhouse competitor, allowing users to “go live”with the ability to mutetheir audio and video. How will each app differentiate itself? Twitter CFO Ned Segal attempted to address this at JP Morgan’s 49th Annual Technology, Media, & Communications conference this week.
“Twitter is where you go to find out what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about,” said Segal. “So when you come to Twitter, and you look at your home Timeline and you see a Space, it’s gonna perhaps be people who you don’t know but who are talking about a topic that’s incredibly relevant to you. It could be Bitcoin, it could be the aftershock from the Grammys, it could be that they’re talking about the NFL Draft.”
Twitter’sfocus areasfor the web version of Spaces include a UI that adapts to the user’s screen size and reminders for scheduled Spaces. Before joining a space, Twitter will display a preview that shows who is in a Space, and a description of the topic being discussed. Users will also be able to have a Space open on the right side of their screen while still scrolling through their Timeline.
Image Credits: Twitter
Most crucially, this update lists accessibility and transcriptions as a focus area. For an audio-only platform, live transcriptions are necessary for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to join in on the conversation. In screenshots Twitter shared of the new features, we can see how live captions will appear in Spaces. As for how accurate these transcriptions will be, the jury’s still out.
Twitter fieldedwell-deserved criticismlast year when it failed to include captioning on its audio tweet feature. Inan apology tweet, Twitter Support wrote, “Accessibility should not be an afterthought.” By September, Twitter launchedtwo accessibility teams.
Still, accessibility has often been treated as an afterthought throughout the rise of live audio. Clubhouse does not yet support live captioning.
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RevenueCat, a startup offering a series of tools for developers of subscription-based apps, has raised $40 million in Series B funding, valuing its business at $300 million, post-money. Founded by developers who understood the difficulties in scaling a subscription app first-hand, RevenueCat’s software development kit (SDK) solution gives companies the tools they need to build a subscription business, including not just adding subscriptions themselves, but maintaining them over time even as the app stores implement changes. It also aids by sharing subscription data with other tools the business uses, like those for advertising, analytics or attribution.
The funding round was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and included participation from Index Ventures, SaaStr, Oakhouse, Adjacent, and FundersClub, as well as Blinklist CTO Tobias Balling and Algolia CEO Nicolas Dessaign. With the round, YC Continuity Partner Anu Hariharan is joining RevenueCat’s board, which today includes Index’s Mark Fiorentino in addition to the founders.
Explains RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, the idea for the company came about after he and co-founder Miguel Carranza Guisado (CTO) struggled to figure out subscription infrastructure while working together at Elevate. After years of untangling a “subscription mess” in order to figure out answers to basic questions like subscriber retention and lifetime value, they realized there was potential in helping solve this problem for other developers.
Apple and Google, Eiting explains, aren’t always up to date with what companies actually need to build subscription businesses. “They’re kind of learning as they go. They just weren’t able to provide us the data we needed, and then also the infrastructure to do that is non-trivial.”
Image Credits: RevenueCat
When Eiting and Guisado sat down to work on on RevenueCat in 2017, no one else was even building anything like this. But the demand for the startup’s tools and integrations soon resonated with developers who had faced similar challenges it the growing subsection app market.
Using the service, developers can access a real-time dashboard that display key metrics, like subscription revenue, churn, LTV (lifetime value), subscriber numbers, conversions and more. The data can then be shared through integrations with other tools and services, like Adjust, Amplitude, Apple Search Ads, AppsFlyer, Branch, Facebook Ads, Google Cloud Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment, and several others.
After launching out of Y Combinator’s accelerator the following year, RevenueCat was soon live with 100 apps and had crossed $1 million in tracked revenue by the time it raised its $1.5 million seed round.
Today, RevenueCat has over 6,000 apps live on its platform, with over $1 billion in tracked subscription revenue being managed by its tools. That’s double the number of apps that were using its service as of its $15 million Series A last August.
With the additional funding, the company will lower its pricing to put its tools in reach of more developers. Previously, it charged $120 per month for its charts and some of its integrations, or $499 per month for access to all integrations. This was affordable for larger companies, but could still be a difficult sell to the long tail of app developers where revenues ranged from $10K to $50K per month.
Now, RevenueCat will charge a small percentage of an app’s sales instead of a flat fee. Developers with up to $10,000 in monthly tracked revenue (MTR) can get started with the service for free and as their demands grow — like needing access to charts, support for web hooks, integrations and others — they can move up to either the Starter or Pro plans as $8/mo or $12/mo per $1,000 in MTR, respectively.
“I’m excited to give those tools to developers, especially on the small end, because it might be what they need to get out of that ‘less than $10K range,'” Eiting says. “Also, the beauty of freemium, or having a really generous free tier, is that it makes your tool the de facto — you remove as much friction as possible for providing software services and then, if you get your pricing right — which I think we have — it all kind of pays for itself,” he adds.
The company also plans to use the new funds to further invest in its business, expanding from App Store and Google Play support to include Amazon’s Appstore. It will also grow its team.
As part of its expected growth, RevenueCat recently hired a Head of Product, Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, previously a PM at Microsoft and then product head at fitness app 8fit. Currently 30 people, in the year ahead, RevenueCat will grow to 60 people, hiring across design, product, engineering, sales and other roles.
“The world is moving toward subscriptions — and for companies, building out this model translates to weeks of developers’ time,” says YC Continuity’s Hariharan. “RevenueCat helps developers rollout subscriptions in minutes and creates a source of truth for customer data. With developers creating solutions to problems in the world, it’s important that they can find ways to monetize, grow, and support their most committed customers. RevenueCat is doing so by building subscriptions 2.0.”
If Instagram’s photo tagging feature was spun out into its own app, you’d have the viral sensation Poparazzi, now the No. 1 app on the App Store. The new social networking app, from the same folks behind TTYL and others, lets you create a social profile that only your friends can post photos to — in other words, making your friends your own ‘paparazzi.’ To its credit, the new app has perfectly executed on a series of choices designed to fuel day one growth — from its pre-launch TikTok hype cycle to drive App Store pre-orders to its post-launch social buzz, including favorable tweets by its backers. But the app has also traded user privacy in some cases to amplify network effects in its bid for the Top Charts, which is a risky move in terms of its long-term staying power.
The company positions Poparazzi as a sort of anti-Instagram, rebelling against today’s social feeds filled with edited photos, too many selfies, and “seemingly effortless perfection.” People’s real lives are made up of many unperfect moments that are worthy of being captured and shared, too, a company blog post explains.
This manifesto hits the right notes at the right time. User demand for less performative social media has been steadily growing for years — particularly as younger, Gen Z users wake up to the manipulations by tech giants. We’ve already seen a number of startups try to siphon users away from Instagram using similar rallying cries, including Minutiae, Vero, Dayflash, Oggl, and more recently, the once-buzzy Dispo and the under-the-radar Herd.
Even Facebook has woken up to consumer demand on this front, with its plan to roll out new features that allow Facebook and Instagram users to remove the Like counts from their posts and their feeds.
Poparazzi hasn’t necessarily innovated in terms of its core idea — after all, tagging users in photos has existed for years. In fact, it was one of the first viral effects introduced by Facebook in its earlier days.
Instead, Poparazzi hit the top of the charts by carefully executing on growth strategies that ensured a rocket ship-style launch.
The company began gathering pre-launch buzz by driving demand via TikTok — a platform that’s already helped mint App Store hits like the mobile game High Heels. TikTok’s powers are still often underestimated, even though its potential for to send apps up the Top Charts have successfully boosted downloads for a number of mobile businesses, including TikTok sister app CapCut and e-commerce app Shein, for example.
And Poparazzi didn’t just build demand on TikTok — it actually captured it by pointing users to its App Store pre-orders page via the link in its bio. By the time launch day rolled around, it had a gaggle of Gen Z users ready and willing to give Poparazzi a try.
The app launches with a clever onboarding screen that uses haptics to buzz and vibrate your phone while the intro video plays. This is unusual enough that users will talk and post about how cool it was — another potential means of generating organic growth through word-of-mouth.
After getting you riled up with excitement, Poparazzi eases you into its bigger data grab.
First, it signs up and authenticates users through a phone number. Despite Apple’s App Store policy, which requires it, there is no privacy-focused option to use “Sign In with Apple,” which allows users to protect their identity. That would have limited Poparazzi’s growth potential versus its phone number and address book access approach.
It then presents you with a screen where it asks for permission to access to your Camera (an obvious necessity), Contacts (wait, all of them?), and permission to send you Notifications. This is where things start to get more dicey. The app, like Clubhouse once did, demands a full address book upload. This is unnecessary in terms of an app’s usability, as there are plenty of other ways to add friends on social media — like by scanning each other’s QR code, typing in a username directly, or performing a search.
But gaining access someone’s full Contacts database lets Poparazzi skip having to build out features for the privacy-minded. It can simply match your stored phone numbers with those it has on file from user signups and create an instant friend graph.
As you complete each permission, Poparazzi rewards you with green checkmarks. In fact, even if you deny the permission being asked, the green check appears. This may confuse users as to whether whether they’ve accidently given the app access.
They had a killer and engaging intro video complete with gravity falling emoji and well-tuned haptics that built hype and informed proper use
(I feel like a lot of people these days actually download without knowing this stuff now, making onboarding even more important) pic.twitter.com/duUelcDm0H
While you can “deny” the Address Book upload — a request met with a tsk tsk of a pop-up message — Poparazzi literally only works with friends, it warns you — you can’t avoid being found by other Poparazzi users who have your phone number stored in their phone.
When users sign up, the app matches their address book to the phone number it has on file and then — boom! — new users are instantly following the existing users. And if any other friends have signed up before you, they’ll be following you as soon as you log in the first time.
In other words, there’s no manual curation of a “friend graph” here. The expectation is that your address book is your friend graph, and Poparazzi is just duplicating it.
Of course, this isn’t always an accurate presentation of reality.
Many younger people, and particularly women, have the phone numbers of abusers, stalkers and exes stored in their phone’s Contacts. By doing so, they can leverage the phone’s built-in tools to block the unwanted calls and texts from that person. But because Poparazzi automatically matches people by phone number, abusers could gain immediate access to the user profiles of the people they’re trying to harass or hurt.
Sure, this is an edge case. But it’s a non-trivial one.
It’s a well-documented problem, too — and one that had plaguedClubhouse, which similarly required full address book uploads during its early growth phase. It’s a terrible strategy to become the norm, and one thatdoes not appear to have created a lasting near-term lock-in for Clubhouse. It’s also not a new tactic. Mobile social network Path tried address book uploads nearly a decade ago and almost everyone at the time agreed this was not a good idea.
As carefully designed as Poparazzi is — (it’s even a blue icon — a color that denotes trustworthiness!) — it’s likely the company intentionally chose the trade off. It’s forgoing some aspects of user privacy and safety in favor of the network effects that come from having an instant friend graph.
More on @poparazzidotcom: they force you to upload your contacts to use it, as well as phone number—and also have this aggressive strategy to pull users from Snapchat. pic.twitter.com/SFx0TdCkaR
The rest of the app then pushes you to grow that friend graph further and engage with other users. Your profile will remain bare unless you can convince someone to upload photos of you. A SnapKit integration lets you beg for photo tags over on Snapchat. And if you can’t get enough of your friends to tag you in photos, then you may find yourself drawn to the setting “Allow Pops from Everyone,” instead of just “People You Approve.”
There’s no world in which letting “everyone” upload photos to a social media profile doesn’t invite abuse at some point, but Poparazzi is clearly hedging its bets here. It likely knows it won’t have to deal with the fallout of these choices until further down the road — after it’s filled out its network with millions of disgruntled Instagram users, that is.
Dozens of other growth hacks are spread throughout the app, too, from multiple pushes to invite friends scattered throughout the app to a very Snapchatt-y “Top Poparazzi” section that will incentivize best friends to keep up their posting streaks.
Looking at someone else’s profile.
The “Top Poparazzi” section is genius. Really incentivizes posting for your friends (which is the biggest friction point). pic.twitter.com/7WjH0S2hQd
It’s a clever bag of tricks. And though the app does not offer comments or followers counts, it isn’t being much of an “anti-Instagram” when it comes to chasing clout. The posts — which can turn into looping GIFs if you snap a few in a row — may be more “authentic” and unedited than those on Instagram; but Poparazzi uses react to posts with a range of emojis and how many reactions a post receives is shown publicly.
For beta testers featured on the explore page, reactions can be in the hundreds or thousands — effectively establishing a bar for Pop influence.
Finally, users you follow have permission to post photos, but if you unfollow them — a sure sign that you no longer want them to be in your poparazzi squad — they can still post to your profile. As it turns out, your squad is managed under a separate setting under “Allow Pops From.” That could lead to trouble. At the very least, it would be nice to see the app asking users if they also want to remove the unfollowed account’s permission to post to your profile at the time of the unfollow.
Overall, the app can be fun — especially if you’re in the young, carefree demographic it caters to. Its friend-centric and ironically anti-glam stance is promising as well. But additional privacy controls and the ability to join the service in a way that offers far more granular control of your friend graph in order to boost anti-abuse protections would be welcome additions.
TechCrunch tried to reach Poparazzi’s team to gain their perspective on the app’s design and growth strategy, but did not hear back. (We understand they’re heads down for the time being.) We understand, per SignalFire’s Josh Constine and our own confirmation, that Floodgate has invested in the startup, as has former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos’ Dream Machine and Weekend Fund.
A decade before investing outside of San Francisco and New York became trendy, entrepreneurs Jewel Burks, Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens were betting on Atlanta. Each experienced first-hand the biases that disproportionately hurts Black founders – while also being living proof of the wave of Black innovation and opportunity in their city.
Last year, the trio saw opportunity in that disconnect and launched Collab Capital, a firm designed to invest explicitly in Black founders. It debuted with $2 million in capital and a massive end target: $50 million. Today, the firm announced that it has met that goal, with backers such as Apple, Goldman Sachs, Google, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mailchimp, and PayPal, making it one of the largest funds closed from an entirely Black-led firm solely committed to Black founders.
“We really wanted to build a fund that was appropriate for the opportunity that we see [in Black founders],” Burks said. “And honestly I would say, it’s a small fund out there relative to the number of Black-led companies out there that are looking and seeking funding.”
With the new fund, Collab Capital plans to invest in 50 companies over a three-to-five-year period with check sizes between $500,000 and $750,000. The firm has also reserved up to $2 million per investment for follow-on bets. It is targeting ownership between 10% to 15% in each deal. To date, Collab Capital has backed six companies in the healthcare, edtech, and future of work spaces, including Music Tech Works and Hairbrella.
Internally, the team plans to stay based in Atlanta. Burks, who founded Atlanta-based PartPic, a TC Battlefield company that sold to Amazon, said that reinvesting in the community has always been a part of Collab Capital’s intention. Case in point? The firm’s first three deals were in Atlanta. As Zoom investing became more popular in the wake of the coronavirus, the team invested in startups from Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Miami, as well.
“We’re excited to be able to support founders anywhere in the United States, but we’re really focused on cities that have a high concentration of Black innovators and a lower concentration of capital,” she said.
The world before June
While part of Collab’s focus is avoiding coastal cities, network matters. The firm’s ability to secure heavyweight investors such as Apple and PayPal gives it a key signal that validates its bet on Black founders.
Burks thinks part of the reason that investors might be more intentional about backing firms such as hers is the result of the racial injustice that was highlighted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people at the hands of police.
After Floyd and Taylor were murdered, there was a global movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter in response to police brutality and racism in the United States. Burks says that Collab Capital had only raised a few million at that time, but then witnessed “a shift in the hearts and minds of capital allocators.”
Burks noted that when Collab Capital was first raising its fund, potential investors told them to have a “wider perspective” on what kinds of entrepreneurs to back. Some thought they should create a fund around underrepresented founders or multicultural founders. With general VC volatility in the early months of the pandemic, Collab Capital saw some of its LPs pull back or delay commitments.
“We were very adamant that the most important thing we wanted to solve was the funding gap for Black founders, so we were not willing to broaden the spectrum there because we saw that there were so many firms out there for diverse founders, and even in some of those, Black founders were still marginalized.”
Beyond a broader understanding of the importance of diversity in tech, Burks pointed to Zoom as a value unlock.
“If you’d asked me a year ago [if] I think we’d be successful in raising $50 million over Zoom meetings, I would have said absolutely not,” she said. “But you can build meaningful relationships with people and not even have to be in person. That’s a big surprise — and, oh, the realization that you don’t have to travel so much.”
The handling of user data in China has become a delicate matter for American tech companies operating in the country. Apple’s move to store the data of its Chinese customers in servers managed by a Chinese state-owned cloud service has stoked controversy in the West over the years. A recent New York Times investigation found that the setup could give the Chinese government easy access to Apple’s user data in China, compromising”, but Apple said it “never compromised the security” of its customers or their data.
Tesla, one of the few U.S. tech heavyweights that generate substantial revenues from China, is working out a similar data plan. The electric carmaker said it has established a data center in China to carry out the “localization of data storage,” with more data facilities incoming, the company announced through its account on microblogging platform Weibo. All data generated by Tesla vehicles sold in mainland China will be stored domestically.
Tesla is acting in response to new requirements drafted by the Chinese government to regulate how cameras- and sensors-enabled carmakers collect and utilized information. One of the requirements states that “personal or important data should be stored within the [Chinese] territory.”
It’s unclear what level of access Chinese authorities have to Tesla’s China-based data. In the case of Apple, the phone maker said it controlled the keys that protect the data of its Chinese customers.
Tesla recently fell out of favor with Chinese media and the public after a customer protested the carmaker’s faulted parts at an auto show in Shanghai, earning her widespread sympathy. Tesla also faces fierce competition from Chinese rivals like Nio and Xpeng, which are investing heavily in world-class designs and autonomous driving technology.
The American firm clearly wants the government’s good graces in its second-largest market. It appeared a few days ago at an industry symposium along with Baidu, Alibaba, research institutions, and think tanks to discuss the new vehicle policy proposed by the country’s cybersecurity watchdog.
“Important data” generated by vehicles as defined by the Chinese internet regulator include traffic conditions in military and government compounds; surveying and mapping data beyond what the government discloses; status of electric charging grids; face, voice, and car plate information; and any data deemed as affecting national security and public interest.
The regulations also urge car service providers to not track users by default, as well as inform them of the kinds of and reasons for data collection. If gathered, information should be anonymized and stored for only “the minimum period of time.”
Germany’s national competition regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, has continued its investigative charge against big tech — announcing that it’s opened two proceedings into Google.
The move follows earlier proceedings targeting Amazon and Facebook — both of which are also looking to determine whether their businesses are of “paramount significance for competition across markets”, as German competition law puts it. (The regulator is also probing Facebook’s tying of Oculus to Facebook accounts.)
In Google’s case, one of the Bundeskartellamt’s new proceedings will confirm whether amended competition rules, which came into force in January, apply in its case — which would enable the FCO to target it with proactive interventions in the interests of fostering digital competition.
The second, parallel procedure will see the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) undertake an in-depth analysis of Google’s data processing terms in a move that looks intended to avoid wasting time — i.e. that its working assumption is that Google/Alphabet’s business meets the legal bar in the GWB Digitalisation Act.
By running the two Google procedures in parallel the German competition regulator will be in a position to act faster — assuming the first proceeding confirms it can indeed intervene.
The second probe running alongside would then identify potential problems to shape any intervention — with the FCO saying for example that it will look at whether Google/Alphabet “makes the use of services conditional on the users agreeing to the processing of their data without giving them sufficient choice as to whether, how and for what purpose such data are processed”.
It also says it will “examine the extent to which the terms provide Google with an opportunity to process data on an extensive cross-service basis” and will seek to clarify “how the company’s data processing policy applies to the processing of user data obtained from third-party websites and apps” (such as through Google’s advertising services).
Another key element of the proceeding will aim to establish what choice users actually have with regard to Google’s processing of their data, with the FCO noting that protecting consumer choice is a primary aim of competition law.
Given those point of focus it’s possible to imagine a future order from the FCO to Google could require it to simplify how it asks users for consent, to ensure genuine choice — and also shrink its ability to link first party user data with information obtained on people elsewhere online.
Commenting in a statement, Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt said: “An ecosystem which extends across various markets may be an indication that a company holds such a market position [i.e. whether it is of paramount significance across markets]. It is often very difficult for other companies to challenge this position of power. Due to the large number of digital services offered by Google, such as the Google search engine, YouTube, Google Maps, the Android operating system or the Chrome browser, the company could be considered to be of paramount significance for competition across markets.”
“Google’s business model relies to a very large extent on processing data relating to its users. Due to its established access to data relevant for competition, Google enjoys a strategic advantage. We will therefore take a close look at the company’s data processing terms. A key question in this context is whether consumers wishing to use Google’s services have sufficient choice as to how Google will use their data,” he added.
Reached for comment on the FCO proceedings, Google said it will fully cooperate with the FCO’s process but rejected the charge that people are forced to use its services — further claiming in a statement attributed to spokesperson, Ralf Bremer, that it offers “simple controls” so people can “limit” its use of their information:
“People choose Google because it’s helpful, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives. German consumers have enormous choice online and we give people simple controls to manage their information and limit the use of personal data. We will cooperate fully with the German Competition Authority and look forward to answering their questions.”
The Bundeskartellamt‘s in-depth prove of Google’s data processing terms picks up on long running criticism that the tech giant relies on forced and/or manipulative consent from users to obtain their data. Whereas the pan-EU legal standard if consent is used as a legal basis to process people’s information is that it should be clear, informed and freely given.
Back in 2019 Google was fined $57M by France’s data protection watchdog under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) over a failure to provide “sufficiently clear” information to Android users when it sought their consent to use their data for targeted ads.
However, subsequent to the CNIL’s action, the tech giant limited its exposure to the privacy regulation by changing the legal jurisdiction of where it processes European users’ data to Ireland.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) then became Google’s lead data supervisor under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism. And the DPC has not decided a single GDPR complaint against Google — though it has a number of open investigations. It continues to face high level criticism over its enforcement record on key cross-border cases against big tech.
The awakening of European competition regulators to the issue of how abuse of user privacy is an anti-competitive tactic that can lock in the dominance of digital giants by unfairly enabling them to grab and link people’s data is thus a very important development in the regulation of big tech — and one where the Bundeskartellamt has already been a pioneer.
In an earlier FCO ‘super profiling’ case against Facebook — which predates the amendments to national digital competition law — it ordered the social media behemoth not to combine user data from across its different products.
Facebook has sought to block the order in the German courts. And, back in March, the case was referred to Europe’s top court — meaning the FCO’s order to it remains on hold pending the CJEU’s ruling (which could take years to be handed down).
The FCO confirmed today that the Facebook case is still pending before the court, reiterating the decision of theDüsseldorfHigher Regional Court to refer certain issues relating to the application of the GDPR to the European Court of Justice — which means that a decision on the merits of the case “can only be rendered after these issues have been clarified”.
The Bundeskartellamt’s investigation of Facebook’s data practices started all the way back in in March 2016. So it’s a safe bet that the regulator’s experience of digging into the detail of how tech giants process people’s data — and how hard it is to make cases stick against them — has helped inform the amendments to Germany’s competition law that introduce ex ante powers to tackle digital giants deemed to be of “paramount significance for competition across markets”.
Although there is still another waiting period baked in to this approach — as the regulator must first assess whether tech giants meet that legal bar.
The EU has proposed a similar ex ante approach for what it dubs as digital “gatekeepers”, under the Digital Markets Act, which it introduced at the end of last year.
Although with the bloc’s co-legislative process ongoing that regulation is likely some years away from adoption and pan-EU application — meaning Germany’s national law and the energetic FCO could be a significant actor in the meanwhile.
The EU’s competition commission are also digging into Google’s adtech practices — though they’re having to do so under existing powers, for now, which have been shown to be a painstakingly slow and not very effective route to tackle digital market power.
Elsewhere in Europe, the UK, which now sits outside the bloc, is also shaping its own an ex ante regime to curb the market power of digital giants. So regardless of political cross-currents in the region — and the problem of patchy privacy enforcement — there is growing consensus that European competition authorities must be empowered to step in proactively to tackle digital market abuses.
Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission and Parliament along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan and Microsoft, has closed a whopping $30 million Series A after usage of its tools grew 12x between 2019 and 2020 as demand for online meeting platforms surged during the coronavirus pandemic.
The Series A funding is led by Eight Roads Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Storm Ventures, along with participation from Practica Capital, Notion Capital, as well as notable angels such as Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, and Young Sohn, ex-chief strategy officer of Samsung.
The Vilnius, Lithuania-based startup offers digital tools to connect meetings with certified interpreters who carry out real-time interpretation to bridge language divides between participants. It does also offer a video conferencing platform which its customers can use to run remote meetings but will happily integrate with thirty party software like Zoom, Webex etc. (Last year it says its digital tools were used alongside 43 different video streaming platforms.)
Interactio’s interpreters can be in the room where the meeting is taking place or doing the real-time interpretation entirely remotely by watching and listening to a stream of the meeting. (Or, indeed, it can support a mix of remote and on-site interpretation, if a client wishes.)
It can also supply all the interpreters for a meeting — and it touts a strict vetting procedure for onboarding certified interpreters to its platform — or else it will provide training to a customer’s interpreters on the use of its tools to ensure things run smoothly on the day.
At present, Interactio says it works with 1,000+ freelance interpreters, as well as touting “strong relations with interpretation agencies” — claiming it can easily quadruple the pool of available interpreters to step up to meet rising demand.
It offers its customers interpretation in any language — and in an unlimited number of languages per event. And last year it says it hosted 18,000+ meetings with 390,000 listeners spread across more than 70 countries.
Now, flush with a huge Series A, Interactio is gearing up for a future filled with increasing numbers of multi-lingual online meetings — as the coronavirus continues to inject friction into business travel.
“When we started, our biggest competition was simultaneous interpretation hardware for on-site interpretation. At that time, we were on the mission to fully replace it with our software that required zero additional hardware for attendees besides their phone and headphones. However, for institutions, which became our primary focus, hybrid meetings are the key, so we started partnering with simultaneous interpretation hardware manufacturers and integrators by working together on hybrid events, where participants use hardware on-site, and online participants use us,” a spokeswoman told us.
“This is how we differentiate ourselves from other platforms — by offering a fully hybrid solution, that can be integrated with hardware on-site basically via one cable.”
“Moreover, when we look at the market trends, we still see Zoom as the most used solution, so we compliment it by offering professional interpretation solutions,” she added.
A focus on customer support is another tactic that Interactio says it relies upon to stand out — and its iOS and Android apps do have high ratings on aggregate. (Albeit, there are bunch of historical complaints mixed in suggesting it’s had issues scaling its service to large audiences in the past, as well as sporadic problems with things like audio quality over the years.)
While already profitable, the 2014-founded startup says the Series A will be used to step on the gas to continue to meet the accelerated demand and exponential growth it’s seen during the remote work boom.
Specifically, the funds will go on enhancing its tech and UX/UI — with a focus on ensuring ease of access/simplicity for those needing to access interpretation, and also on upgrading the tools it provides to interpreters (so they have “the best working conditions from their chosen place of work”).
It will also be spending to expand its client base — and is especially seeking to onboard more corporates and other types of customers. (“Last year’s focus was and still is institutions (e.g. European Commission, European Parliament, United Nations), where there is no place for an error and they need the most professional solution. The next step will be to expand our client base to corporate clients and a larger public that needs interpretation,” it told us.)
The new funding will also be used to expand the size of its team to support those goals, including growing the number of qualified interpreters it works with so it can keep pace with rising demand.
While major institutions like the UN are never going to be tempted to skimp on the quality of translation provided to diplomats and politicians by not using human interpreters (either on premise or working remotely), there may be a limit on how far professional real-time translation can scale given the availability of real-time machine translation technology — which offers a cheap alternative to support more basic meeting scenarios, such as between two professionals having an informal meeting.
Google, for example, offers a real-time translator mode that’s accessible to users of its smartphone platform via the Google voice assistant AI. Hardware startups are also trying to target real-time translation. The dream of a real-life AI-powered ‘Babel Fish’ remains strong.
Nonetheless, such efforts aren’t well suited to supporting meetings and conferences at scale — where having a centralized delivery service that’s also responsible for troubleshooting any audio quality or other issues which may arise looks essential.
And while machine translation has undoubtedly got a lot better over the years (albeit performance can vary, depending on the languages involved) there is still a risk that key details could be lost in translation if/when the machine gets it wrong. So offering highly scalable human translation via a digital platform looks like a safe bet as the world gets accustomed to more remote work (and less globetrotting) being the new normal.
“AI-driven translation is a great tool when you need a quick solution and are willing to sacrifice the quality,” says Interactio when we ask about this. “Our clients are large corporations and institutions, therefore, any kind of misunderstanding can be crucial. Here, the translation is not about saying a word in a different language, it’s about giving the meaning and communicating a context via interpretation.
“We strongly believe that only humans can understand the true context and meaning of conversations, where sometimes a tone of voice, an emotion and a figure speech can make a huge difference, that is unnoticed by a machine.”
Almost exactly a month ago, researchers revealed a notorious malware family was exploiting a never-before-seen vulnerability that let it bypass macOS security defenses and run unimpeded. Now, some of the same researchers say another malware can sneak onto macOS systems, thanks to another vulnerability.
Jamf says it found evidence that the XCSSET malware was exploiting a vulnerability that allowed it access to parts of macOS that require permission — such as accessing the microphone, webcam or recording the screen — without ever getting consent.
XCSSET was first discovered by Trend Micro in 2020 targeting Apple developers, specifically their Xcode projects that they use to code and build apps. By infecting those app development projects, developers unwittingly distribute the malware to their users, in what Trend Micro researchers described as a “supply-chain-like attack.” The malware is under continued development, with more recent variants also targeting Macs running the newer M1 chip.
Once the malware is running on a victim’s computer, it uses two zero-days — one to steal cookies from the Safari browser to get access to a victim’s online accounts, and another to quietly install a development version of Safari, allowing the attackers to modify and snoop on virtually any website.
But Jamf says the malware was exploiting a previously undiscovered third zero-day in order to secretly take screenshots of the victim’s screen.
macOS is supposed to ask the user for permission before it allows any app — malicious or otherwise — to record the screen, access the microphone or webcam, or open the user’s storage. But the malware bypassed that permissions prompt by sneaking in under the radar by injecting malicious code into legitimate apps.
Jamf researchers Jaron Bradley, Ferdous Saljooki, and Stuart Ashenbrenner explained in a blog post, shared with TechCrunch, that the malware searches for other apps on the victim’s computer that are frequently granted screen-sharing permissions, like Zoom, WhatsApp and Slack, and injects malicious screen recording code into those apps. This allows the malicious code to “piggyback” the legitimate app and inherit its permissions across macOS. Then, the malware signs the new app bundle with a new certificate to avoid getting flagged by macOS’ built-in security defenses.
The researchers said that the malware used the permissions prompt bypass “specifically for the purpose of taking screenshots of the user’s desktop,” but warned that it was not limited to screen recording. In other words, the bug could have been used to access the victim’s microphone, webcam or capture their keystrokes, such as passwords or credit card numbers.
It’s not clear how many Macs the malware was able to infect using this technique. But Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that it fixed the bug in macOS 11.4, which was made available as an update today.
How’s your Monday going? If you’re Apple, the answer is probably somewhere between “very busy” to “gaaaaaaah.” The company just dropped a whole bunch of new OS updates today, including iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, all ahead of the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference, which kicks off (virtually) on June 7.
Indeed, iOS and iPadOS are the headliners here — if for no other reason than the fact that they’ll impact the most devices. The public release of iOS/iPadOS 14.6 brings a couple of biggish features, including the addition of paid podcast subscriptions and Apple Card Family, both announced at a recent hardware event.
The former allows podcasters to charge for subscriptions to their show (imagine that!), with Apple taking a 30% commission for the first year. That will halve in a year. The latter, meanwhile, makes it possible for Apple Card owners to effectively split a card, with the various responsibilities that entails.
CEO Tim Cook noted at the time of announcement:
One of the things that became apparent to us in the beginning [of launching Apple Card] was a lack of fairness in the way the industry calculated credit scores when there were two holders of a credit card. One of you got the benefit of building a good credit history, and the other did not. We want to reinvent the way this works.
MacOS 11.4 brings support for additional graphics cards, a number of bug fixes and, like the new iOS, support for paid podcast subs. Ditto that last part and Apple Card Family for the new watchOS 7.5, along with support for additional health features in Malaysia and Peru, as well as expense tracking for the Apple Card. TVOS/HomePod 14.6, meanwhile, are getting bug fixes and some color balance changes for the former.
Along with all of this, the company also announced the slate of programming for this year’s virtual WWDC. Things will kick off on June 7 at 10 a.m. PT with the keynote. That’s where the big news on the latest version of all of the above will be announced — and, hopefully, some hardware, as well. At 2 p.m. the company will be offering more information with its annual Platforms State of the Union.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.
After a somewhat quiet weekend, things are kicking off in rapid-fire fashion this week. Here’s what you need to know:
The cryptocurrency selloff that was in full-swing on Friday continued over the weekend. Though bitcoin and ether managed to recoup some of their losses since they set new local minima, the value of popular cryptos is vastly depressed compared to recent highs.
Looking ahead, it’s the final day of arguments at the Epic Games vs. Apple trial. And we’re seeing a smaller company try to crack some of the hold that a major tech incumbent enjoys over a huge piece of the digital economy. So, if you like startups, you might want to put aside your Apple fandom for a minute.
With a busy funding market and a yet-busy IPO cycle, it should be yet another busy week. Strap in!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotifyand all the casts!
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year
This week we’re reviewing Google’s I/O developer event, rounding up the latest from Snap’s partner summit and taking a look at how Parler got back on the App Store, among other things.
Sorry, sorry. But it’s true. Without any new hardware announcements, the software-only event just didn’t feel as big and buzzy as it has in the past — which is kind of a bummer, since I/O was canceled entirely last year due to COVID-19. There was no announcement of an affordable Pixel 5a or 6 smartphone, no rumored Pixel Watch, no news on Pixel chips, no new smart home devices, no update on Google Stadia, and not even the Pixel Buds A-Series, which Google accidentally tweeted about ahead of schedule. What gives? Instead, Google I/O was filled with a lot of product news that could have been announced as blog posts — like Google Workspace improvements or neat Google Maps and Photos features. I mean, sure, a life-size 3D video calling booth is cool, but it’s not exactly going to be in your living room next year.
That’s not to downplay Google’s technical advancements, but if you’re sitting through a long live-ish (??) event, you don’t only want to hear about more conversational AI or less racist cameras (much less from the company that just fired multiple AI ethics researchers). You want to get excited about Google’s next new…thing.
When all was said and done, what stood out was Android 12.
The updated version of Google’s mobile OS with its new personalization features targets a current iPhone weakness: customization.
While iOS finally added support for widgets with iOS 14 and an App Library to clean up home screen clutter, Apple seemed almost caught off guard by the personalization madness that ensued after widgets went live. It had to quickly fix how app shortcuts worked — a workaround people had been using to tediously customize their home screen icons to match their wallpaper and widgets.
Android 12 addresses this demand for its own users and takes things a step further. Now, when Android 12 users set a new wallpaper the system can automatically create a custom palette of colors as the Android theme, including both the dominant and complementary colors. This is applied across the OS, including in the Quick Settings under the Notification Shade, in buttons on the lock screen, widgets and more. Google calls this “Material You,” which is a bit silly but gets the point across. The phone can really start to feel like yours.
Material You also introduces refreshed widgets with interactive controls and easier personalization options, smoother transitions, more animations and a privacy dashboard, where you can check in on which apps are accessing your location, mic and camera, for instance. But what sells it is how all those parts come together to present a new version of Android that actually feels fresh.
ICYMI: An I/O Round-up
Stats: Android now powers 3 billion devices globally, up from 2.5 billion in May 2019. The figure includes 250 million active tablets as of last year.
Foldables: Google announced a series of Android 12 updates that add support for foldable screens. (Is a foldable Pixel coming?)
Design: “Material You” is Android’s new, adaptive design language which fully embraces the home screen personalization trend, allowing users to set themes that apply across the operating system. One of its more clever tricks is that it’s able to build the color palette for the theme based on the wallpaper you choose.
Wearables: Google and Samsung team up on a unified wearable platform to take on Apple’s watchOS. The goal will be to combine the best of both worlds, Android Wear OS and Samsung’s Tizen, allowing apps to start faster and battery life to last longer, while users will gain more apps and watch faces. Meanwhile, the best of Fitbit — like tracking health progress and on-wrist goal celebrations — will come to Android Wear. Other updates include a Tiles API, watch face designer from Samsung, new consumer experience focused on speed and customization and redesigned Maps, Assistant and Pay.
Flutter: Google’s cross-platform UI toolkit for building mobile and desktop apps now powers 200K Play Store apps, including those from WeChat, ByteDance, BMW, Grab and Didi. The new version, Flutter 2.2, adds reliability, performance improvements, a payment plugin for IAPs and a more streamlined process for bringing Flutter apps to Windows, macOS and Linux.
Android Studio: Google announced the next version of its Android Studio IDE, Arctic Fox, which focuses on bringing more of the tooling around building apps directly into the IDE. The marquee feature of the update is Jetpack Compose, the toolkit for building modern UIs for Android.
Google Play: Google shared details on sharing details (from 30% to 15%) and is adding new resources like an SDK website to help you find the right ones for you, and a dedicated Policy and Programs section in Play Console. Apps will later this year be able to monetize in new ways, including multi-quantity purchases, multi-line subscriptions and prepaid plans (access to content for a fixed amount of time).
Ads: Google’s App campaigns on Android will expand to the desktop versions of Google.com and the Google Display Network. That means if a user clicks an ad in the desktop browser, they’ll be directed to the Play Store website to install the app to their linked device. Also, the Google Analytics for Firebase SDK now allows event creation and modification without app updates. Plus, Google introduced a deep link validator and impact calculator to make it easier to get started with deep linking.
Snap, an app with now with 500 million MAUs, this week hosted an event for its partners, where the company unleashed a host of news about what’s next for its platform, including developer tools, AR updates, shopping features and more.
Among the highlights was Snap’s computer vision-enabled Scan product, which will analyze content in the camera feed to pull up matching products, similar to efforts by Pinterest and Google. Meanwhile, AR updates and partnerships with brands like Farfetch and Prada will make possible virtual try-on of clothes using AR. (Honestly, sometimes it feels like Snap’s tech is being lost in an app that’s mainly used by teenagers and young adults for socializing. Are they really Prada shoppers?)
Image Credits: Snap
Another big news item was Snap’s plans to release a brand-new app, Story Studio, which will give creators access to more powerful editing tools, for precisely trimming shots, adding captions, stickers and other visual elements, accessing licensed music, and more. Creators can then publish to Snapchat Spotlight, which is now available on the web, as well as other platforms.
Meanwhile, Snap Map is getting an update with a product called Layers, that allows users to add data from Snap’s developer partners to their map to personalize their experience. For instance, a Ticketmaster Layer will show nearby concert venues.
Image Credits: Snap
The company also gave an update on its creator funding efforts, saying it had doled out more than $130 million to more than 5,400 creators making content for its TikTok rival, Spotlight, since November. It now says it will now longer pay out $1 million per day to encourage creator adoption.
Facebook debuted “Live Shopping Fridays” across the web and Facebook’s mobile apps to encourage consumers to make appointments to shop for beauty, skin care and fashion items from major brands like Abercrombie and Fitch, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Sephora, Dermalogica and others.
Image Credits: Facebook
Fast fashion e-commerce app Shein took the crown from Amazon this week to become the most downloaded app on iOS and Android in the U.S. The company controls its own production chain, from prototype to manufacturing, allowing it to churn out products tailored to different regions and tastes at a daily rate, giving it the name the “TikTok for e-commerce.”
Africa’s largest carrier, Vodacom, has developed Africa’s first super-app with help from China’s Alibaba. The app will include a range of services, including e-commerce, banking and making mobile payments.
Adtech
Apple’s IDFA change has pushed Android ad spending up by 21%, per Liftoff. The growth comes when as many as 63.5% to 83.2% of iOS users are opting out of being tracked.
Apple released an update, iOS 14.5.1, which fixed the ATT bug that had grayed out the App Tracking Transparency toggle for some users in the Settings.
Fintech
Google Pay’s app was redesigned to make it easier for users to find businesses in the U.S., India and Singapore to start, with new discovery features, branded experiences for businesses, money organization tools and spending insights, Google Pay APIs for Web and Android, and a loyalty enrollment and sign-in API.
Social
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Parler’s back. After getting booted from the app stores and from its web host for inciting violence ahead of the January 6 Capitol riots, Parler has returned to the App Store. Now, posts that are labeled hate, (yes, “hate,” — this app doesn’t take down hate speech), won’t be visible on iPhone. The “hate” posts, which may include things like racial slurs, will be visible on other platforms and on the web version.
Apple had insisted that Parler must follow Apple’s App Store guidelines in order to return to its app marketplace, which meant Parler had to moderate its content. Parler however, would rather the option to view hate speech be a toggle, not hidden entry, saying it would prefer to put tools in the hands of it users. The company also dismissively referred to the sanitized version of Parler for iOS as “Parler PG.” The app is now No. 10 in the News category on iPhone.
Pinterest introduced Idea Pins, a video-first evolution of its Story Pins feature, aimed at creators. The Pins allow creators to publish videos of up to 60 seconds per page, with a total of 20 pages per Pin. They can also feature stickers, music and detail pages with more info, like recipe ingredients or project instructions.
TikTok rolled out new tools that allow creators to bulk delete and report comments as well as bulk block users. The feature could help someone quickly clean up their comments section when being trolled and keep their account safe from abusers. But it also could help them to create a false persona of being well-liked, as all negative feedback is removed.
Instagram will host its first Creator Week as an invitation-only series of events June 8-10. The virtual event will include 5,000 creators from the U.S. and will discuss topics like how to grow your online following and make money.
Facebook’s experimental app from its NPE team, Tuned comes to iPhone. The app is designed for users in relationships to stay in touch, messaging and sharing photos, replaying moments and sharing memories, and participating in newly expanded Q&A challenges.
Image Credits: Facebook
Photos
Reface’s buzzy face-swapping app now lets users upload their own source material for face swapping and animations, which rely on GAN algorithms. That means you can face-swap yourself into a famous piece of art, for instance. The app, launched 14 months ago, now has more than 100 million installs.
Google Photos updateadds new Memories and a Locked Folder and previews Cinematic moments which animate a series of photos.
Image Credits: Google
Utilities
Google Maps is adding a number of updates this year, including new routing updates designed for safety, Live View enhancements, an expansion of detailed street maps to 50 more cities, a new “area busyness” feature, which shows crowded blocks and neighborhoods, and a more personalized Maps experience, which adjusts to your location and time of day.
The Chrome app for Android is bringing back RSS. A new feature for users in the U.S. on Chrome Canary is a “follow” button that will allow you to get the latest content from websites and blogs directly in Chrome. The feature relies on the open RSS web standard, so maybe stop building “blogs” that don’t have an RSS feed, OK?
Messaging
WhatsApp rivals, including Telegram and Signal, saw nearly 1,200% growth ahead of WhatsApp’s privacy policy deadline, Sensor Tower reports.
India told WhatsApp to withdraw its new privacy policy terms, or else the government of India will consider various options available to it under laws in India.
Spotify launched a virtual concert series with The Black Keys and other artists. The pre-recorded streams are $15 each for the 40-75 minute show. Some unknown portion of that revenue is shared with the artists.
Spotify is adding automatic transcripts to its own Original and Exclusive podcasts, with the goal of rolling out transcripts to all shows over time.
Apple announced it’s bringing lossless audio streaming to Apple Music in June, as a free upgrade. The upgrade will also include support for Dolby Atmos and lossless audio files. The Android version will support lossless but not Dolby Atmos at launch. On Apple devices, lossless does not work on AirPods, AirPods Pro or AirPods Max, even when in wired listening mode. Nor does it work on HomePod devices.
On the same day, Amazon announced its own lossless music streaming service, Amazon Music HD, would also be a free upgrade for Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers.
Deezer technically beat Spotify to offer offline listening on Apple Watch this week, but not by much.Spotify on Friday added support for downloads on the Apple Watch so you can enjoy phone-free listening. Meanwhile Spotify is adding offline listening to Android Wear, too.
Mobile reading app Wattpad expanded its publishing arm with new adult fiction imprint, W by Wattpad Books, shortly after its acquisition by Naver was finalized.
Spotify expands into the audiobooks market by partnering with Storytel. The partnership is the first notable example of what’s possible with Spotify’s recently introduced Open Access Platform (OAP), which aims to give creators and publishers a way to extend their reach. With OAP, Storytel subscribers will be able to connect their account in Spotify, then stream their audiobooks through Spotify’s app.
Gaming
The Epic-Apple trial revealed that Apple generated at least $100 million in revenue and possibly much more from Fortnite’s time on the App Store from 2018 until it was pulled in 2020. Sensor Tower had estimated the figure was around $354 million.
Security & Privacy
Local crime-spotting app Citizen got into trouble for sparking a $30,000 manhunt for the wrong person. The app’s real-time feature, OnAir, broadcast to users that there was a reward for a man suspected of setting an LA area wildfire. But the person described — which was sent to the app’s 860K users — was not the person actually responsible, who was later arrested.
The Epic trial also revealed that there have been 130 types of Mac malware since last May, a level the company doesn’t find acceptable. The point was made as a defense for why the iOS App Store needs to exist — without it, the more than 1 billion iPhones in use would be an attractive target for attackers.
Funding and M&A
Indonesia’s BukuKas raised $50 million in Series B funding for its app helping to digitize small businesses. The startup began as a bookkeeping app but expanded to include online payments and an e-commerce platform that now services 6.3 million businesses.
Ethel’s Club founder Naj Austin raised $3.75 million in seed funding for Somewhere Good, a Clubhouse-ish mobile app that connects people across interests, allowing them to post content and have real-time audio conversations.
Mobile-first car ownership “super app” Jerry raised $57+ million to date, including its new $28 million Series B led by Goodwater Capital. The Palo Alto-based startup launched its car insurance comparison service and now has nearly 1 million U.S. customers.
Egyptian digital banking app Telda raised $5 million pre-seed funding to help grow its business focused on helping Egyptians save, send and spend money.
Spot Meetings raised $5 million from Kleiner Perkins to modernize remote meetings for mobile. The app includes an assistant “Spot” that can transcribe meeting notes, and offers a scratch pad for copying / pasting snippets of important info, among other things.
PhonePe is in talks to acquire the Samsung-backed Indus OS, an Indian startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store.
U.K.-based Robinhood rival Stake raised $30 million from Tiger Global and London-based DST Global to expand into Europe. The app has grown 6x since its U.K. launch in early 2020 and now has over 330K customers.
Snap acquired AR startup WaveOptics for over $500 million. The company, which represents Snap’s biggest acquisition to date, provides the waveguides and projectors used in Snap’s AR glasses, Spectacles.
Jam City has filed to go public via a SPAC at $1.2 billion value. Th Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery publisher will use some of the money to acquire mobile game publisher Ludia for $175 million.
Downloads
Halide for iPad
Image Credits: Lux
The popular third-party camera app Halide made its way to the iPad this week, with an interface designed from scratch for the iPad with controls placed within reach near the edge of the big screen, special features for composition and iPad shooting (yes, really), custom icons to match either your Silver or Space Gray iPad Pro and support for either right or left handed users. The app is free with in-app purchases for iPad.
Silk + Sonder (Soft Launch)
Image Credits: Silk + Sonder
AAPI, female-founded Silk + Sonder was created by Meha Agrawal, a software engineer and PM for companies including Goldman Sachs, Stitch Fix, The Muse, and others to take an analog-first approach to mental wellness. Now, the company is launching its first mobile app after growing its me business to tens of thousands of subscribers and raising $4+ million in seed funding.
The new app offers curated self-care experiences, daily affirmations, a community club, a private memories feature and others meant to complement the company’s analog journal/planners that are shipped to member’s doorstep monthly. In calming shades of pinks and whites, the app guides users through their wellness journey and helps them stay accountable to their goals.
Since the app’s soft launch this month, it’s added thousands of users, more than 50% of whom engage regularly.
The new app is initially available only to active subscribers, but other users will be able to join a waitlist.
Herd (Beta)
Image Credits: Herd
Female-founded Herd has been building demand for its non-toxic Instagram alternative via TikTok. Now the app is live on iOS as a beta.
The goal of Herd is to give users a safer, social space focused on community, not influence, clout-chasing or data collection.
Users can customize their home feed by interest and use sliders to control what they want to see more of less of, while also posting their own photos, saving favorites, and staying private, if they choose. At present, Herd offers a basic photo-sharing experience. There are no Stories or photo filters or videos or much of anything that could lure users away from more advanced, feature-rich social apps. But what it does have is a mission that users feel connected with — and that pushed the app to No. 18 in the Social category on the App Store on launch day, May 18. It’s now still sitting in the top 50 a few days later.
But ultimately, all the marketing and social buzz can’t prop up an app forever. Herd needs to capitalize on the goodwill it’s built by leaning into quickly upgrading the UI/UX so the app itself feels as fresh as the ideas it espouses.
Apple and Epic Games can agree on one thing: The app economy is worth fighting over. Here’s a look at the explosive growth that turned app marketplaces into multibillion-dollar businesses. https://t.co/0279yhUS0I
(@chasestubb) 
Parler’s back. After getting booted from the app stores and from its web host for inciting violence ahead of the January 6 Capitol riots, Parler 
Indonesia’s BukuKas 
PhonePe 
Jam City has 
