Paytm targets merchants to fight back Google and Walmart in India’s crowded payments field

Paytm today announced two new features for businesses as the financial services firm looks to expand its reach in the nation that has quickly become one of the world’s most crowded and competitive payments markets.

The Noida-headquartered firm, which raised $1 billion in late November, said its app for businesses now features an “all-in-one” QR code system to accept payments from multiple platforms, including mobile wallets (that act as an intermediary between a user and their bank but provide convenience) and those that are powered by UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of banks that has been widely adopted by the industry players.

Merchants had expressed an interest in having one QR code that could understand any payments app, said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and chief executive of Paytm’s parent firm One97 Communications. In addition to supporting mobile wallet apps, and UPI-powered payment apps, Paytm’s new QR codes also support payments through popular Rupay cards.

Merchants can also stick these QR codes on devices such as battery packs and chargers to enable quick transaction from users, Sharma explained at a press conference today.

Bookkeeping for merchants and small businesses

The nation’s highest-valued startup (at around $16 billion) also announced a bookkeeping feature for businesses to help them maintain their daily records. The feature is already rolling out to merchants, Sharma told TechCrunch.

Dubbed Paytm Business Khata, the feature will help merchants manage payments, record transactions and secure loans and insurance. The service will also enable them to set a reminder for credit transactions, receive an audio alert for new transactions, and send links to their customers to easily pay their dues, said Sharma.

Hundreds of millions of Indians, many in small towns and villages, came online for the first time in the last decade thanks to the proliferation of cheap Android smartphones and the availability of some of the world’s cheapest mobile data plans.

In recent years, millions of merchants and small businesses have also started to accept digital payments and listed them on the web for the first time. But most of them are still offline. Scores of startups and heavily backed firms such as Google, Walmart and Amazon are chasing this untapped market.

Google, which has amassed more than 67 million users on its payments app in India, last year announced a range of offerings to allow businesses to easily start accepting payments online. In the past, the company also launched tools to help mom and pop stores build presence on the web.

A number of startups today, including Bangalore-based Instamojo, Khatabook (which raised $25 million in October last year and counts GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital India and Tencent among its investors) and Lightspeed-backed OkCredit, which raised $67 million in August last year, offer bookkeeping features and allow their consumers to enable easier payment options.

Google Pay or GPay sticker pasted on the glass of a car in New Delhi India on 18 September 2019 (Photo by Nasir Kachroo/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Paytm’s Sharma claimed that his business app has already amassed more than 10 million merchant users, a number he expects to more than double by next year.

The announcements today illustrate how aggressively Paytm, which once led the mobile payments market in India, is expanding its service.

Some critics have cautioned that the firm, which counts SoftBank, Alibaba and T. Rowe Price among its key investors and has raised over $3.3 billion to date, is quickly losing its market share and chasing opportunities that could significantly increase its expenses and losses. According to several industry estimates, Google Pay and Walmart’s PhonePe now lead the mobile payments market in India.

Paytm lost more than half a billion dollars in the financial year that ended in March 2019. The trouble for the company is that there is currently little money to be made in the payments market because of some of the local guidelines set by the government.

“The current Paytm’s potential is a pale shadow of its former self. And to stay relevant, the company is entering new businesses (and failing spectacularly in some) at a pace that shows both a lack of clarity and urgency. Paytm is stuck between a glorious past that was built on the back of digital payments and a future that doesn’t look anything like Jack Ma’s Alibaba, one of Paytm’s largest investors and Sharma’s inspiration,” wrote Ashish Mishra, a long-time journalist, in a scathing post (paywalled).

Sharma said today that the company plans to offer services such as stock brokerage and insurance brokerage in the coming months.

At stake is India’s payments market that is estimated to be worth $1 trillion in the next four years, up from about $200 billion currently, according to Credit Suisse. And that market is only going to get more crowded when WhatsApp, which has amassed over 400 million users in India, rolls out its payments service to all its users in the country in the coming months.

Japan’s mobile payments app PayPay reaches 10 million users

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App Store customer spending hit record $1.42B from Christmas Eve through New Year’s Eve

Apple this morning released a year-end retrospective of its Services business, which includes the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and new in 2019, Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple News+, and Apple Card. In particular, the company highlighted new holiday 2019 records set on the App Store which sees over a half a billion visits from people in 155 countries per week. To date, App Store developers have earned over $155 billion, Apple noted.

What’s remarkable is that a quarter of those earnings came in last year alone.

Apple also noted it saw a busy holiday season on the App Store with customers spending reaching $1.42 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve — a 16% increase over 2018.

On New Year’s Day, customers spend $386 million alone — a 20% increase over 2019 and a new single-day record.

The company confirmed the year’s top 10 free and paid apps and games, with YouTube, Facetune, Mario Kart Tour and Minecraft snagging the No. 1 positions. (Full lists are below). Apple Arcade, meanwhile, grew to include over 100 games.

Beyond the App Store, Apple touted some of the major achievements for its other Services businesses, but not in terms of revenue generated.

For example, it said that more than 50% of Apple Music listeners tried the time-synced lyrics feature on iOS 13. It also noted that its Apple TV+ shows received Golden Globe and SAG nominations in year one. And it said Apple News now as over 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada.

On the podcasting front, Apple noted its Podcasts app now includes over 800,000 shows in 155 countries. For comparison’s sake, its chief rival Spotify has over 500,000.

Apple Pay allowed entry to more than 150 stadiums, ballparks, arenas and entertainment venues around the world was available with contactless tickets in 2019, and users could ride public transit in Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow, London, and New York. This year, more cities are being added, including Washington D.C., Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Foshan, plus several U.S. universities.

In terms of security, over 75% of iCloud users have enabled two-factor authentication, Apple noted.

“2019 was the biggest year for Services in Apple’s history. We introduced several exciting new experiences for our customers, all while setting the standard for user privacy and security,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, in a statement. “We begin the new decade with incredible momentum and gratitude to our customers who have shown such enthusiasm for all of our Services, and we continue to celebrate the work of the world’s best creators, storytellers, journalists and developers,” he added.

Top Apps of 2019

Top Free iPhone Apps

1. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream
2. Instagram
3. Snapchat
4. TikTok – Make Your Day
5. Messenger
6. Gmail – Email by Google
7. Netflix
8. Facebook
9. Google Maps – Transit & Food
10. Amazon – Shopping made easy

Top Paid iPhone Apps

1. Facetune
2. HotSchedules
3. Dark Sky Weather
4. The Wonder Weeks
5. AutoSleep Tracker for Watch
6. TouchRetouch
7. Procreate Pocket
8. Sky Guide
9. Toca Hair Salon 3
10. Scanner Pro: PDF Scanner App

Top Free iPhone Games

1. Mario Kart Tour
2. Color Bump 3D
3. aquapark.io
4. Call of Duty: Mobile
5. BitLife – Life Simulator
6. Polysphere – art of puzzle
7. Wordscapes
8. Fortnite
9. Roller Splat!
10. AMAZE!!

Top Paid iPhone Games

1. Minecraft
2. Heads Up!
3. Plague Inc.
4. Bloons TD 6
5. Geometry Dash
6. Rebel Inc.
7. The Game of Life
8. Stardew Valley
9. Bloons TD 5
10. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

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India’s Reliance Jio rolls out Wi-Fi calling feature

Two of the top three telecom operators in India are beginning to address one of the biggest challenges hundreds of millions of their subscribers face in the country each day: poor call quality and abrupt voice drops.

Reliance Jio, India’s second largest telecom operator, announced today that it now supports voice and video calling functionality over Wi-Fi network. The 4G-only network said it has started to roll out the feature to all of its subscribers in India and expects to reach all of its 360 million consumers by next week.

The rollout of calls over Wi-Fi functionality on Jio comes weeks after Airtel, India’s third largest telecom operator with over 260 million subscribers, began to support this feature in select places in the country. Neither of the operators are levying any additional fee for this feature and say that their subscribers can place phone calls over Wi-Fi across the networks.

Wi-Fi calling is a popular feature that enables users to latch onto their wireless internet connection to make phone calls. These calls tend to be of much better quality than those that rely on traditional telecom infrastructure. In the U.S., T-Mobile, Verizon (which owns TechCrunch), and AT&T began to offer this feature in late 2015 and early 2016.

In many markets such as India, calls over internet began to gain traction four to five years ago after services such as WhatsApp enabled such functionality. In the years since, telecom operators have also rolled out support for calls over LTE network.

Airtel currently supports Wi-Fi calling in select circles — such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu — and requires its users to be a subscriber of Airtel broadband service. It also works only on a handful of smartphone models.

Reliance Jio, on the other hand, supports more than 150 smartphone models including several recent iPhone generations and a wide-range of mid-tier and high-end Android smartphones. A Reliance Jio spokesperson told TechCrunch that Jio’s Wi-Fi calling functionality works on any Wi-Fi network.

Akash Ambani, Director of Jio, said Reliance Jio consumers already use over 900 minutes of voice calling every month. “The launch of Jio Wi-Fi Calling will further enhance every Jio consumer’s voice-calling experience, which is already a benchmark for the industry with India’s-first all VoLTE network,” he said in a statement.

Vodafone, which at the last count (PDF) was ahead of Reliance Jio by a few million subscribers, is yet to offer this functionality. The announcement follows price hike by all the top three telecom networks in India.

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PopSockets launches a $60 wireless charger that works with its PopGrips

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Popsockets is launching a new must-have item to its lineup of smartphone accessories — and one that solves a significant problem for PopGrip users. The company today is unveiling the PopPower Home wireless charger that allows you to wirelessly charge your supported Apple or Android smartphone by making room for the PopGrip on the back of your phone by way of a hole in the middle of the charging pad.

This design allows the mobile device to sit flush with the charging pad so it can wirelessly charge — something that hasn’t been possible with standard wireless chargers. Instead, PopGrips users would either have to remove their phone case to take advantage of wireless charging, or they’d have to forgo it altogether and instead opt to charge their phone with a power cord, as usual.

The new PopPower Home charger will also work through phone cases up to 5 mm thick and can charge devices that don’t have a PopGrip on the back, like other phones or the AirPods with Apple’s Wireless Charging Case – even if it’s protected by one of the AirPods case covers that PopSockets sells.

The new charger, powered by Nucurrent, features Qi certification wit Extended Power Profile (EPP) to deliver up to 15 watts of wireless power for fast-charging wireless mobile devices. (Many other chargers are 5 to 10 watts, for comparison’s sake.) Brand/model, case thickness and battery depletion will affect the charge times, PopSockets says.

 

At launch, the PopPower Home supports both Apple and Samsung’s Fast Wireless charging modes. (Popsockets tells us Pixel phones that support wireless charging will also be supported.)

Using the case is as simple as plugging it in, then placing your phone or another device on top, making sure the PopGrip slides down into the hole in the middle. An LED indicator on the side will subtly alert you that the case is charging.

Like PopGrips themselves, the case comes in an array of designs, including Night Bloom, Mountainscape, Matte White, Cosmic Cloud, and Carbonate Gray.

Unfortunately, the case only works with standard PopGrips, and excludes metal grips, PopGrip Mirror, and PopGrip Lips.

PopPower Home is available today exclusively on Popsockets.com for $60. That’s pricier than many of today’s wireless chargers, which tend to be $20 or less. But for dedicated PopGrips users, it’s worth it for the convenience of just being able to lay your phone down to charge.

At launch, only three styles are available, but the others will arrive in late January.

It’s not currently being sold as a bundle, but will arrive on Amazon later this year — possibly as soon as February.

Despite the price, the new product will likely do well because of PopSockets’ large, existing customer base. To date, the company has sold 165 million PopSockets, it says.

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Sony just announced a car

Today at CES 2020, Sony unveiled a car. I’m surprised too. There are very few details about the Sony Vision-S sedan at this time. We’ll get more once we can see it on the show floor.

According to the press account, Sony partnered with industry leaders to build this prototype, including Bosch, Continental, Genetex, Nvidia, Magna, and Nvidia.

This car is a bit surprising but fits within Sony’s current strategy. Over the last generation, Sony started building and selling key technologies as a supplier. Sony camera sensors are found in many leading smartphones, including the latest iPhone Pro. But before it hits the iPhone, Sony has long produced its own smartphone with similar smartphone sensors.

Expect a similar play with the Vision-S sedan. This concept vehicle is clearly designed to help Sony sell components. Sony doesn’t want to get into auto manufacturing. I think. We’re asking Sony a bunch of questions and will relay the answers.

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Intel and Google plot out closer collaboration around Chromebooks and the future of computing

Intel, the chip-making giant, has been on the road of refocusing its strategy in recent months. While it has sold its mobile chip operation to Apple and is reportedly looking for a buyer for its connected home division, it’s also been going through the difficult task of rethinking how best to tackle the longtime bread and butter of its business, the PC.

Part of that latter strategy is getting a big boost this week at CES 2020. Here, Intel is today announcing a deeper partnership with Google to design chips and specifications for Chromebooks built on Project Athena. Project Athena is framework first announced last year that covers both design and technical specs, with the aim of building the high-performance laptops of tomorrow that can be used not just for work, but media streaming, gaming, enterprise applications and more, all on the go — powered by Intel, naturally.

(The specs include things like requiring ‘fast wake’ using fingerprints or push-buttons or lift lids; using Intel Core i5 or i7 processors; “Ice Lake” processor designs; better battery life and charging; WiFi 6; touch displays; 2-in-1 designs; narrow bezels and more.)

Earlier today, the first two Chromebooks built on those Athena specifications — from Samsung and Asus — were announced by the respective companies, and Intel says that there will be more to come. And on stage, Google joined Intel during its keynote to also cement the two companies’ commitment to the mission.

“We’re going a step further and deepening our partnership with Google to bring Athena to Chromebooks,” Gregory Bryant, the EVP and GM of Intel’s client computing group, said in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of today. “We’ve collaborated very closely with Google [so that device makers] can take advantage of these specs.”

For Intel, having a Chromebook roster using Athena is important because these have been very popular, and it brings its processors into machines used by people who are buying Chromebooks to get access to Google services around security and more, and its apps ecosystem.

But stepping up the specifications for Chromebooks is as important for Google as it is for Intel in terms of the bottom line and growing business.

“This is a significant change for Google,” said John Solomon, Google’s VP of ChromeOS, in an interview ahead of today. “Chromebooks were successful in the education sector initially, but in the next 18 months to two years, our plan is to go broader, expanding to consumer and enterprise users. Those users have greater expectations and a broader idea of how to use these devices. That puts the onus on us to deliver more performance.”

The renewed effort comes at an interesting time. The laptop market is in a generally tight spot these days. Overall, the personal computing market is in a state of decline, and forecast to continue that way for the next several years.

But there is a slightly brighter picture for the kinds of machines that are coming out of collaborations like the one between Intel, Google, and their hardware partners: IDC forecasts that 2-in-1 devices — by which it means convertible PCs and detachable tablets — and ultra-slim notebook PCs “are expected to grow 5% collectively over the same period,” versus a compound annual growth rate of -2.4% between 2019 and 2023. So there is growth, but not a huge amount.

Up against that is the strength of the smartphone market. Granted, it, too, is facing some issues as multiple markets reach smartphone saturation and consumers are slower to upgrade.

All that is to say that there are challenges. And that is why Intel, whose fortunes are so closely linked to those of personal computing devices since it makes the processors for them, has to make a big push around projects like Athena.

Up to this month, all of the laptops built to Athena specs have been Windows PCs — 25 to date — but Intel had always said from the start Chromebooks would be part of the mix, to help bring the total number of Athena-based devices up to 75 by the end of this year (adding 50 in 2020).

Chromebooks are a good area for Intel to be focusing on, as they seem to be outpacing growth for the wider market, despite some notable drawbacks about how Chrome OS has been conceived as a “light” operating system with few native tools and integrations in favor of apps. IDC said that in Q4 of 2019, growth was 19% year-on-year,  and from what I understand the holiday period saw an even stronger rise. In the US, Chromebooks had a market share of around 27% last November, according to NPD/Gfk.

What’s interesting is the collaborative approach that Intel — and Google — are taking to grow. The Apple-style model is to build vertical integration into its hardware business to ensure a disciplined and unified approach to form and function: the specifications of the hardware are there specifically to handle the kinds of services that Apple itself envisions to work on its devices, and in turn, it hands down very specific requirements to third parties to work on those devices when they are not services and apps native to Apple itself.

While Google is not in the business of building laptops or processors (yet?), and Intel is also far from building more than just processors, what the two have created here is an attempt at bringing a kind of disciplined specification that mimics what you might get in a vertically integrated business.

“It’s all about building the best products and delivering the best experience,” Bryant said.

“We can’t do what we do without Intel’s help and this close engineering collaboration over the last 18 months,” Solomon added. “This is the beginning of more to come in this space, with innovation that hasn’t previously been seen.”

Indeed, going forward, interestingly Bryant and Solomon wouldn’t rule out that Athena and their collaboration might extend beyond laptops.

“Our job is to make the PC great. If we give consumers value and a reason to buy a PC we can keep the PC alive,” said Bryant, but he added that Intel is continuing to evolve the specification, too.

“From a form factor you’ll see an expansion of devices that have dual displays or have diff kinds of technology and form factors,” he said. “Our intention is to expand and do variations on what we have shown today.”

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HTC had a terrible 2019

HTC can’t seem to catch a break.

The once-king-of-the-hill smartphone vendor, which had a terrible 2018, continued to bleed last year, according to financial disclosures it made on Monday.

HTC reported revenue of 10,015 TWD ($333 million) in 2019, down 57.8% from 23,741 TWD ($789 million) it posted the year before, and whopping 87% below over $2 billion it grossed in 2017. As Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan pointed out, Apple now generates more from selling AirPods in a fortnight than HTC clocks from selling each of its offering in a year.

The drop in revenue comes as the Taiwanese firm scales back its smartphone business — a sizeable portion of which it sold to Google two years ago — and focuses on virtual reality headsets and accessories.

HTC has yet to disclose how much money it lost in the quarter that ended in December, but in the other three quarters last year, it lost 7.05 billion TWD ($234.4 million).

Last year, HTC made significant changes to its smartphone strategy in many nations including India, the world’s second largest smartphone market. HTC no longer sells flagship and other high-end smartphones in India, and instead focuses on mid-range handsets.

In September, HTC appointed a longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitre, as its new chief executive officer. In an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, Maitre candidly opened about the once-iconic firm’s recent performance, saying HTC had “stopped innovating in the hardware of the smartphone.”

“And people like Apple, like Samsung and, most recently, Huawei, have done an incredible job investing in their hardware. We didn’t, because we have been investing in innovation on virtual reality,” he said.

Maitre has said that the company will focus on virtual reality headsets and many of its applications such as training and education in the future. In recent quarters, HTC has launched Vive Pro Eye headset for enterprises, revamped its consumer-facing VR headset to better compete with Facebook’s offering, and produced VR works at the Venice Film Festival. It has not disclosed how many VR headsets it has sold.

The company has also launched a 5G-enabled mobile hotspot for users who don’t want to commit to a 5G smartphone just yet to enjoy the faster download speed (provided their local carrier supports it). It also refreshed its blockchain handset lineup in October last year, adding a cheaper variant to the mix.

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