Amazon-backed lending platform Capital Float buys consumer finance startup Walnut

India-based lending platform Capital Float has been busy raising capital, having closed an Amazon-led $22 million extension to its $45 million Series C last year —  now it’s putting some of that capital work after it acquired personal finance service Walnut.

The acquisition is $30 million spread across cash and stock, the companies said, and it’ll boost five-year-old Capital Float’s move into the consumer space. The company has to date focused on serving SME and business customers, but last year it began to offer financial services to consumers.

Walnut helps consumers manage their finances and track spending, and it claims seven million downloads on Android. It also includes a feature — Walnut Prime — that offers an instant credit line. Already, it said, it has handed out nearly $15 million in consumer loans.

“Walnut Prime is a product of deep interest to us, and it will essentially become a new addition
to our stable of exceptional, customized credit products,” Capital Float co-founders Sashank Rishyasringa and Gaurav Hinduja said in a statement.

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Apple could release an updated MacBook Air

According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple has been working on multiple new Macs. In particular, Apple could be planning to release a new entry-level laptop to replace the aging MacBook Air.

This isn’t the first rumors about a MacBook Air refresh. While Apple has released a 12-inch retina MacBook, it’s not nearly as cheap as the MacBook Air. It’s also not as versatile as it only has a single USB Type-C port.

And yet, the MacBook Air is arguably Apple’s most popular laptop design in recent years. Many MacBook Air users are still using their trusty device as there isn’t a clear replacement in the lineup right now. According to Bloomberg, the updated MacBook Air could get a retina display. Other details are still unclear.

After Apple updated the MacBook Air in March 2015, the company neglected the laptop for a while. It received an update in June 2017, but it was such a minor update that it looked like the MacBook Air was on life support.

It sounds like neither the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro (the one without a Touch Bar) nor the 12-inch MacBook have fostered as much customer interest as the MacBook Air.

Bloomberg also says that the Mac Mini is going to receive an update. The story of the Mac Mini is quite similar as the product has been neglected for years. Apple last updated the Mac Mini in October 2014 — it’s been nearly four years.

And the fact that Apple still sells the Mac Mini from 2014 is embarrassing. You can find tiny desktop PCs that are cheaper, smaller and more powerful. They don’t run macOS, but that’s the only downside.

It’s clear that laptops have taken over the computer market. Desktop computers have become a niche market. That’s why the updated Mac Mini could focus on people looking for a home server and who don’t want to mess around with a Raspberry Pi.

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China reaches 800 million internet users

China’s internet population has now grown beyond 800 million, according to the latest data from the Chinese government.

A new report [in Chinese] issued by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) put the number of people in China with access to the internet at 802 million. The agency — which is a branch of the Ministry of Industry and Information and is responsible for controlling the .cn country code — estimates that 29.68 million people in China came online for the first time in the second half of 2018.

For some context, the U.S is estimated to have around 300 million internet users. The number of internet users in China is now more than the combined populations of Japan, Russia, Mexico and the U.S., as Bloomberg noted.

The new statistic takes internet adoption in the country to 57.7 percent, with 788 million people reportedly mobile internet users. That’s a staggering 98 percent and it underlines just how crucial mobile is in the country.

Other notable data points from the report include:

• 21 percent of China’s internet users are also online banking users
• 71 percent used online payments or e-commerce services
• 74.1 percent used short video applications, which include ByteDance’s Douyin app (known as TikTok outside of China)
• 30.6 percent used bike sharing apps
• 43.2 percent used taxi-booking apps
• 37.3 percent used the internet to reserve buses and trains

The growth of China’s internet also puts pressure on the government to maintain its policy of control over information that appears online.

It is common knowledge that Western services such as Twitter and Facebook are inaccessible in Mainland China, but the government has also cracked down on local services that include Toutiao, which is run by new media firm ByteDance, which is currently talking to investors to raise $2.5-$3.5 billion. ByteDance was ordered to shutter a parody app it operated in China while four news and content apps were suspended from the App Store and Google Play for offending authorities. ByteDance responded by doubling its content moderation team and developing stronger systems for checking content.

Apple has also been caught in the crosshairs. The company reported purged thousands of apps from the App Store in China recently. Last year it removed more than 50 VPN apps, which can be used to circumvent China’s internet censorship system, because they are deemed to be illegal in China.

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Google Fit gets a redesign, adds Heart Points and coaching

Google Fit is getting a major update today. The company’s activity tracking app has been around for a few years now but until today, it pretty much worked and looked that same as on the day it launched. Today’s redesign is quite a departure from that old look and feel, though, and it also introduces quite a few new features that help take the service in a new direction.

The most obvious new feature in the new version is that instead of only focusing on active minutes (or ‘Move Minutes’ as they are called now), Google has now introduces the concept of Heart Points. With this, you don’t just score points for moving but the app will also give you extra points for activities that actually get your heart beating a bit faster. Google Fit will give you one point for every minute of moderate activity and double points for more intense activities (think running or kickboxing). You won’t be able to buy anything with those points, but you’re more likely to live longer, so there’s that.

Like before, Google Fit will automatically track your activities thanks to the sensors in your phone or Wear OS watch. You can always manually add activities, too, or use apps like Strava, Runkeeper, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal to get credit for the workouts you track with them.

What’s also new in this update is actionable coaching, something that was sorely missing from the old version. It remains to be seen how useful this new feature is in day-to-day use, but the idea here is to give you feedback on how active you’ve been throughout the week and help you stay motivated.

What I’m actually the most excited about, though, is the new look and feel. Based on the screenshots Google has shared so far, the app now provides you with far more details at a glance, without having to dig into timelines (which weren’t all that usable in the old version to begin with).

The new version is now rolling out to Android and Wear OS users.

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Costco now supports Apple Pay across all of its US stores

Apple has landed a big new partner for Apple Pay in the U.S. after Costco began accepting the mobile payment service across 750 stores. The retailer plans to include support at its gas stations, but that isn’t yet complete.

The rollout — first reported by MacRumors — follows limited trials at selected Costco outlets, including a warehouse near its corporate headquarters in Washington.

This new partnership comes hot on the heels of Apple’s landing similar deals with CVS and 7-Eleven. The deal with CVS is particularly notable since the retailer had held off on supporting the Apple service, to the point that it even developed its own alternative that is based on barcodes. Apple also secured a deal this summer to add Apple Pay support to eBay which gives it more breath among online retailers, too.

The service is operational in 30 international markets and, in the U.S., it is tipped to account for half of all contactless payments operated by an OEM by 2020, according to a recent analyst report.

The market for such services — which includes Samsung Pay, Google Pay and others — is tipped to reach 450 million consumers. Apple, though, is already seeing the benefits. Apple Pay is part of the company’s ‘services’ division which recorded revenue of $9.6 billion in the last quarter, that’s up 31 percent year-over-year.

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Apple cracks down on gambling apps in China

Apple is cracking down on illegal content in China after it removed potentially thousands of apps related to gambling.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. phone-maker purged as many as 25,000 apps — that’s a figure that was first cited by state-owned broadcaster CCTV [link in Chinese]. Apple didn’t comment on the number of apps removed, but it did confirm that it took action.

“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China. We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Apple offers over 1.5 million apps in China. Greater China — which includes China, Hong Kong and Taiwan — is Apple’s third largest region based on business, grossing $9.6 billion in the most recent quarter. That’s around 18 percent of its total revenue.

The removals come weeks after a number of state-media reported criticism of Apple for failing to prevent issues such a spam, gambling, pornography and more concerning its business in Asia.

That criticism has been linked to the ongoing trade war between China and the U.S. — a spat that cost Qualcomm’s its $44 billion acquisition of NXP — but that may be wide of the mark. Apple is not alone in being rebuked by Beijing for content deemed unsuitable, a number of China’s up-and-coming startups have also had their wings clipped.

Earlier this year, ambitious new media firm ByteDance — which operates news and video apps and is currently talking to investors to raise $2.5-$3.5 billion — was ordered to shutter a parody app it operated in China. Additionally, four news and content apps were suspended from the App Store and Google Play for offending authorities. ByteDance responded by doubling its content moderation team and developing stronger systems for checking content.

“Content had appeared that did not accord with core socialist values and was not a good guide for public opinion. Over the past few years, we put more effort and resources toward expanding the business, and did not take enough measures to supervise our platform,” founder and CEO Zhang Yiming said in a statement that seemed designed to appease internet regulators.

Apple has, of course, taken criticism for kowtowing to Beijing by removing more than 50 VPN apps, which can be used to circumvent China’s internet censorship system, from the App Store. CEO Tim Cook has expressed his belief that the apps — and others removed by Apple in order to comply with Chinese law — will return, but it is difficult to envisage a scenario in which that happens.

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Google One is more proof of commoditization of consumer cloud storage

We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over time. Yesterday’s launch of Google One in the U.S. dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.

As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs $9.99 a month. Consider that without joining Google One, that was the same price for 1 terabyte of storage. By signing up for Google One, you could double your storage without paying one penny more, and let’s face it this was a ton of storage before the change.

Let’s compare that with some of the other players out there. Each one is a little different, but the storage costs tell a story.

Google One’s shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple’s pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along. Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything? Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above the pure storage being offered.

Regardless, if you consider Apple and Google’s pricing, the price of a terabyte of cloud storage has dropped to $5.00 a month. That’s pretty darn cheap and it shows just how commoditized online storage has become and how much scale you require to make money.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been watching this space for years says that consumer cloud storage pricing has always been a race to the bottom. “You can only make a margin with mass scale. That’s why firms who are not Microsoft, Amazon or Google are pushing hard for business and enterprise customers. Google One just brings that message home,” he said.

If you get enough scale, as Dropbox has with an estimated 500 million users, if you can get a percentage to pay $8.25 a month for a terabyte of storage, it can add up to real money. When Dropbox filed its S-1 to before it went public earlier this year, it reported more than $1 billion in consumer revenue. It would be difficult if not impossible for a startup launching today to compete with the existing players, but the ones out there continue to compete with one another, driving the cost down even further.

Today’s announcement is just another step in that downward price pressure of consumer cloud storage, and when you get double the storage from one day to the next for the exact same price, it shows just how true that it is.

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