Tencent leads $50M investment in NewsDog, an app vying to be India’s Toutiao

The growth of China’s Bytedance, an ambitious $30 billion tech firm, and its highly-addictive Toutiao news aggregator app has set off a search for services with similar growth potential across the world.

India, second in population only to China with rapidly-growing internet access, is an obvious place to look, and would-be pretender to the Toutiao crown has been found in the shape of NewsDog, a Chinese company that stumbled on success in India. Today, NewsDog announced a $50 million Series C round led by Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Toutiao is a phenomenon in China. The app has around 200 million daily users, and it is one of the few new tech products to emerge in a China where Tencent and Alibaba dominate the consumer app landscape. Point in case, it is so mainstream now that it has even run into issues with China’s internet censors. Toutiao is essentially a news aggregation service that lets consumers catch their daily reads and discover stories with an experience tailored to their habits and likes.

That’s very much the style of NewsDog, which claims over 50 million users. The service has branched out to cover 10 of Indians many languages, while it recently established a platform — ‘WeMedia’ — that augments its content aggregation by allowing users to submit stories, too.

This round is a major milestone for the company. In a competitive environment, it is the largest fundraising round from a news app company in India while it more obviously brings Tencent, the $500 billion tech giant, on board with its experience and support. Other investors include Chinese VCs Danhua Capital (DHVC) and Legend Capital as well as Chinese mobile app firm DotC United.

NewsDog’s competition includes Dailyhunt — which is backed by Toutiao-owner Bytedance — Inshorts, which counts Tiger Global among its investors, and NewsPoint, which is owned by media firm Times Internet.

One other competition is UC News, a service from Alibaba-owned UC Web, which, like NewsDog, is Chinese.

NewsDog was launched in 2016 by CEO Forrest Chen Yukun, a computer science graduate from Tsinghua University graduate, and Yi Ma, who holds a PhD from Princeton University and previously worked at Baidu and Goldman Sachs.

Data from App Annie shows that NewsDog is the top news app in the Google Play Store in India — Android is the country’s dominant operating system — ahead of Dailyhunt and NewsPoint in second and third, respectively. NewsDog plans to use this new funding to pull further ahead of the competition by focusing on adding more languages and deepening its content library.

The company said it is already using machine learning to help produce an experience that is customized to users — the experience that Toutiao pioneered in China — and it plans to double down on that.

“Poly culture and multiple languages make content matching an incredibly hard problem,” Chen said in a statement. “So far, we have made good initial progress but content business is like an endless journey. There is no finish line, you have to just keep running.”

NewsDog is aiming to reach 100 million users as its next milestone as India’s internet population surges. The country is tipped to reach 500 million internet users by June 2018, according to a report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB. That’s up from 481 million six months prior, but internet penetration in rural areas is at just 20 percent compared with 65 percent in urban India which indicates even more growth potential.

For Tencent, meanwhile, this investment is another upping of its pace in India.

Initially, the company was slow to put money to work in India, where Alibaba entered early to buy stakes in the likes of Paytm, but gradually Tencent has got its checkbook out. Its most notable India-based deals include WhatsApp challenger Hike, healthcare platform Practo, and music service Gaana. This year, it is reportedly focusing on finding promising early-stage startups where it can invest $5-15 million.

In NewsDog, Tencent will hope to jump on the news aggregator train that it missed in China, giving Bytedance an opportunity to become a major Chinese consumer brand.

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Apple started paying $15 billion European tax fine

It took a couple of years, but Apple has started to pay back illegal tax benefits to the Irish government. The company has paid $1.77 billion (€1.5 billion) into an escrow account designed to hold the fine. Apple has to pay $15 billion in total (€13 billion).

In August 2016, the European Commission said that Apple benefited from illegal tax benefits in Ireland from 2003 to 2014. According to Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, Apple managed to lower its effective corporate tax rate thanks to a Double Irish structure.

By creating two different Irish subsidiaries and allocating profit to the right subsidiary, you can end up paying corporate tax on a fraction of your actual profit. Of course, Apple wasn’t the only tech company that optimized its tax structure. And the company also claimed that everything was legal.

The Irish government tried to appeal the decision but the decision remained intact. Ireland had to recover €13 billion starting on January 2017.

But nothing happened.

At some point Vestager got mad again and referred the case to the European Court of Justice. This time, Vestager wasn’t attacking Apple, but Ireland.

It looks like the case is closed now and Apple will slowly pay back the fine over time. Unfortunately, the fine is now more expensive than before because the U.S. dollar has been going down for a couple of years. Apple has hundreds of billions in cash, and a significant portion is overseas.

European governments lobbied to put an end to the Double Irish back in 2014. Apple moved some of its international cash to the tiny island of Jersey around the same time.

European governments are currently discussing a tax reform to tax big tech companies based on actual revenue in each European country. This way, tech companies wouldn’t be able to report profit in just one country with a lower corporate tax rate. But it’s taking longer than expected as some member countries are still dragging their feet.

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Fortnite is finally coming to Android this summer

Fornite is finally coming to Android…in a matter of months. After dominating the iOS gaming charts since March, the wildly popular sandbox survival game will be hitting the world’s top mobile operating system at some point this summer.

Creator Epic Games buried the news in the middle of a larger blog post titled, “The State of Mobile,” noting, vaguely, “We know many of you are excited for this release, and we promise that when we have more information to share, you’ll hear it from us first.”

That news comes amid a flurry of other Fornite related announcements this week. Earlier this morning, Epic unveiled a Battle Royale competition with a large in-game cash prize. This morning, the company also laid out plans to bring voice chat and improved gameplay and controls to the mobile side of things. Stats are coming to mobile, as well, along with a reduced install size.

Not that any of those issues have hampered the games success, of course. Earlier this year, the game was reportedly bringing in $126 million in monthly revenue — even before it arrived on iOS. With its imminent release on Android, that number’s likely to get a whole lot larger. 

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For Apple, this year’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day is all about education

It turns out Apple could build its new campus in North Carolina

The Washington Post reported just yesterday that Apple was talking with Virginia officials for a new campus in Northern Virginia. But WRAL is now reporting that Apple is about to announce a new campus in North Carolina.

According to WRAL’s sources, it’s “a done deal.” The company and legislators plan to talk about a tax break to seal the deal. If North Carolina agrees to reduce the taxes, Apple could create a new campus in the Research Triangle Park.

Multiple tech companies already have offices in the Research Triangle Park as it is close to top universities (Duke University, NC State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). IBM and Cisco have established huge offices in the region.

It’s also worth noting that Apple CEO Tim Cook got his MBA at Duke University.

This report doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple didn’t talk with Virginia officials. The company could be considering opening a big office in one of those two locations and a smaller one in the other.

Apple has been looking for a new location for its new campus. The company already has thousands of employees in Cupertino and Austin. Apple expects to hire 20,000 employees over the next five years in those three locations.

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Apple brings its coding lessons to schools for students who are blind and deaf

Apple this morning announced another expansion of Everyone Can Code, bringing its Swift coding curricula to a number of US schools focused on students who are blind and deaf. The current list includes eight schools in California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas.

“Apple’s mission is to make products as accessible as possible,” Tim Cook says in the announcement. “We created Everyone Can Code because we believe all students deserve an opportunity to learn the language of technology. We hope to bring Everyone Can Code to even more schools around the world serving students with disabilities.”

According to a release issued around the news, the lessons will be augmented for students using Apple’s accessibility, and tailored to individual needs with help from teachers. VoiceOver will play a key role here, reading step by step on-screen instructions for students with visual impairments. For students with hearing impairments, the Swift curricula will utilize captions, LED flash alerts and iPhone compatible hearing aids.

The company is also marking today’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day with events in its retail and corporate locations.

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Apple reportedly looks to Virginia for another US campus

It seems Virginia is for tech lovers.

According to a report in The Washington Post, Apple has been searching for places to put hubs as it contemplates how to spend the $30 billion it has committed for new facilities and 20,000 new employees in the U.S. over the next five years — and it looks like Virginia is on the list.

If Virginia makes the cut, Apple would be the second large tech company to call the state a (second or third) home, as Amazon is also reportedly looking at Virginia as a site for its second U.S. headquarters.

The Post is reporting that Apple could seek to put up to 20,000 employees in a potential Northern Virginia campus that would total 4 million square feet of office space.

Citing conversations between the company and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, the Post reported that state officials had proposed several sites for the Apple campus, which would be two-thirds the size of the Pentagon and half of what Amazon is looking for in its new HQ.

All of the attention from Amazon and Apple speaks to the new realty for tech companies, which is that Washington, DC has its eye on them… and, conversely, these companies need to have a closer eye on Washington.

Facebook and Google, which is owned by parent company Alphabet, have both also expanded their presence in the DC area. Four years ago, Google opened new offices in the capital to much fanfare and ballyhoo, while Facebook plans to site a $1 billion data center in the Richmond area.

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