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Global Call Outsource

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SoftBank to invest $1B into German digital payments provider Wirecard in new fintech partnership

SoftBank is making a huge investment into one of the providers of the kind of digital commerce infrastructure that underpins many of the companies that it backs. Today, Wirecard — a digital payments provider based out of Germany — announced that SoftBank Group is investing around €900 million ($1 billion) as part of a broader digital payments partnership, to help Wirecard expand into Japan and South Korea, as well as build and provide financial services to SoftBank’s extensive list of portfolio companies, which includes the likes of Uber, OpenDoor Labs, WeWork, Grab, DoorDash, Alibaba and more.

“Under the [Memorandum of Understanding], SoftBank Group will seek to support Wirecard’s geographic expansion into Japan and South Korea, as well as providing collaboration opportunities within SoftBank Group’s global portfolio in digital payments, data-analytics/AI and other innovative digital financial services,” Wirecard noted in a statement. Wirecard added that the deal is also likely to include a “joint exploration of new product and service offers in digital lending in order to leverage from high quality customer portfolios, strong liquidity and other innovative financing solutions.”

Wirecard is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of €17.18 billion (around $19 billion). It competes with the likes of Adyen, FirstData, WorldPay, Stripe and more. Having had its start as far back as 1999 in working with online gambling sites, today it also works with challenger banks and other new fintech startups like Number26 and TransferWise.

But the investment to expand in Asia comes at a somewhat thorny time for Wirecard. The company has been facing an inquiry in Singapore over fraud allegations both in Asia and its home market of Germany. It has denied the allegations.

“As global innovators, we focus heavily on expanding our networks and creating opportunities for companies with groundbreaking ideas,” Wirecard CEO Markus Braun, said in a statement. “In SoftBank we have found a partner that shares both our passion for new technologies and drive to spearhead the latest innovations, all on a global scale. In addition, through this potential partnership, we will expand our reach and products to the East Asian markets, thereby further strengthening our position in Asia.”

Wirecard said that as part of the deal, it will issue convertible bonds with a term of five years exclusively to SoftBank, convertible to 6,923,076 ordinary Wirecard shares (currently corresponding to approximately 5.6% of common stock) at €130 per Wirecard share. The deal is subject to the approval of Wirecard’s Annual Shareholders meeting, which will be held on 18 June 2019.

Wirecard offers end-to-end services covering all aspects of payments, with a particular emphasis on digital transactions. It also provides card issuing, risk management, data analytics and related services.

SoftBank has become one of the world’s most influential investors with its $100 billion Vision Fund. It’s not clear which division of SoftBank is leading this particular transaction — the news announcement specifies only that “an affiliate of SoftBank” is making the investment — but despite the Vision Fund being located in London, it’s made relatively few fintech investments in Europe out of the Vision Fund. For that reason, this stake in Wirecard, based out of Munich, is also notable.

The first involved leading a $440 million round for OakNorth Holdings, a digital banking startup. It is also reportedly a partner in a new Abu Dhabi $400 million European investment fund.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/softbank-to-invest-1b-into-german-digital-payments-provider-wirecard-in-new-fintech-partnership/

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A court ruling ‘chalking’ illegal could make way for more privacy-invasive tech

If you’ve ever had a parking ticket, there’s a good chance you know what “chalking” is.

A federal appeals court ruled this week that the practice of marking a car tires unconstitutional, a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights against unwarranted searches and seizures.

For years traffic enforcement officers have marked car tires with chalk to see when they check back if a car has moved. It’s often used in places where parking meters aren’t available. Parking violations often serve as a key source of revenue for local municipalities.

That struck a nerve with one local resident of Saginaw, Michigan. Local resident Alison Taylor took the city to court after receiving more than a dozen citations in a year, alleging a local parking enforcement officer, Tabitha Hoskins, named defendant alongside the city in the case, was violating her constitutional rights.

The city initially won but the U.S. Sixth Circuit Appeals Court reversed the decision, said that chalking is a form of trespass that requires a warrant, similar to attaching a tracker to a car to monitor its real-time location, according to the court’s ruling.

While the Fourth Amendment generally protects Americans from law enforcement searching your house or devices without a court-approved warrant to obtain evidence of a crime, Taylor argued that those protections equally apply to obtaining information about whether her car was moved or not.

According to the court, the parking enforcement officer — a local government employee — trespassed on Taylor’s car “because the City made intentional physical contact with Taylor’s vehicle.” The court found that the chalking was an “attempt to find something or to obtain information” from the car — albeit in a low-tech way — specifically to determine if the vehicle has “been parked in the same location for a certain period of time.”

What may seem like a victory to anyone who’s ever wanted to fight a parking ticket, some are worried that the legal precedent could lead to the adoption of more privacy-invasive technologies instead.

“As cities begin to comply with the Sixth Circuit’s decision, it is crucial that they avoid adopting even more problematic practices,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project.

“Any attempt to enforce parking rules by building pervasive databases of vehicle location data or similar information would raise grave privacy concerns and run up against the Fourth Amendment,” he said.

Other cities are already using more advanced technologies like automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems to scan plates to see if a vehicle has moved from one place to another. ALPR remains controversial but arguably still legal at the federal level — even if these plate scanners have faced challenges at the local level.

Rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warn that creating databases of scanned license plate is “invasive” for residents’ privacy. Police don’t currently need a warrant to search through these vast databases. The EFF is campaigning to require a warrant to search ALPR databases.

Meanwhile, there are tech-ready and privacy-minded solutions to the parking enforcement problem, experts say.

Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said in a tweet that it “seems easy enough these days for parking enforcers to just take a photo of the car, or even just a close-up photo of the tire.”

Saginaw hasn’t yet responded to the ruling. City manager Tim Morales was unavailable for comment when reached Tuesday.

ICE has a huge license plate database targeting immigrants, documents reveal

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/chalking-unconstitutional/

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Audible now offers live customer service through Alexa devices

Alexa devices just got a new use case: live customer service help. This morning, Amazon’s e-book company Audible announced the first live customer service experience on Alexa devices, activated through voice commands. Instead of dialing a phone number or writing an email, Audible customers can ask Alexa to reach Audible on their behalf. They’re then connected to a customer service expert who can help them with their account, resolve technical problems, answer questions, and even make book recommendations.

To use the option, Alexa device owners just have to say “Alexa, call Audible,” to get started.

This is not the first time Amazon (or in this case, a subsidiary) has tried to connect users to live help through a hardware device. In previous years, Amazon offered a service called Mayday on its Fire tablets that could put people immediately in touch with Amazon’s own customer service agents. However, that service shut down last June. 

With Alexa devices, however, the process of reaching out to customer service may feel more natural than on tablets, because Echo owners already know how to use their devices to call friends, drop-in on family members, and otherwise. Echo devices have supported Alexa calling since 2017, for example, and the ability to call businesses following select voice commands since December.

Similarly, the new Audible voice command is able to trigger a call to the e-book company’s customer service department, as Alexa apps are assigned a phone number to facilitate these sorts of outbound calls.

“At Audible, we are always looking to further personalize the listening experience on behalf of the millions of customers we serve,” said Abhinav Mathur, Audible’s Senior Vice President of Global Customer Care, in a statement. “Audible isn’t just a destination, it’s a lifestyle that keeps people entertained and inspired while going about their daily routines, so we’re thrilled to offer listeners hands-free customer support from a live person while they cook, craft, or relax at home. Enjoying Audible on Alexa has never been so easy and convenient, and we hope this innovation ushers in a new era of customer service,” he added.

Audible already supported several other Alexa commands before today, including “Alexa, play my book,” “Alexa, read faster,” Alexa, next chapter,” “Alexa, what’s free on Audible?” and others.

The new customer service voice command is currently available to Alexa device owners in the U.S., 24/7.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/audible-now-offers-live-customer-service-through-alexa-devices/

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Getaround acquires European car rental platform Drivy for $300 million

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup that launched at TC Disrupt back in 2011, is making moves to become a global car rental service. Today, the Softbank-backed startup announced its acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.

“We were obviously looking at what our European strategy was and how we would expand out of the U.S. and into other parts of the world,” Getaround CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch. “When we started looking at Europe, it became clear Drivy was the market leader. They also shared the same vision.”

This marks Getaround’s first expansion out of the U.S.  As part of the deal, Drivy founder and CEO Paulin Dementhon will run the company’s operations in Europe as CEO for the continent.

“Getaround is an ideal partner for us because our companies are aligned in so many ways while being complimentary on key aspects of our business, like geography or fleet acquisition,” Dementhon said in a statement. “I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish together.”

Combined with Drivy, Getaround now has more than five million users. Moving forward, Getaround has its eyes set on becoming a truly global company.

“The objective here is to build the iconic brand for consumers in car share and next-generation mobility, and be one of those companies with a global footprint,” Zaid said. “Servicing people living in their home cities but also when they travel to other cities across the world.”

This acquisition and plans for expansion are undoubtedly fueled by the $300 million Series D round Getaround raised in August from SoftBank.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/getaround-acquires-european-car-rental-platform-drivy-for-300-million/

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Twitter to offer report option for misleading election tweets

Twitter is adding a dedicated report option that enables users to tell it about misleading tweets related to voting — starting with elections taking place in India and the European Union .

From tomorrow users in India can report tweets they believe are trying to mislead voters — such as disinformation related to the date or location of polling stations; or fake claims about identity requirements for being able to vote — by tapping on the arrow menu of the suspicious tweet and selecting the ‘report tweet’ option and then choosing: ‘It’s misleading about voting’.

Twitter says the tool will go live for the Indian Lok Sabha elections from tomorrow, and will launch in all European Union member states on April 29 — ahead of elections for the EU parliament next month.

The ‘misleading about voting’ option will persist in the list of available choices for reporting tweets for seven days after each election ends, Twitter said in a blog post announcing the feature.

It also said it intends to the vote-focused feature to be rolled out to “other elections globally throughout the rest of the year”, without providing further detail on which elections and markets it will prioritize for getting the tool.

“Our teams have been trained and we recently enhanced our appeals process in the event that we make the wrong call,” Twitter added.

In recent months the European Commission has been ramping up pressure on tech platforms to scrub disinformation ahead of elections to the EU parliament — issuing monthly reports on progress, or, well, the lack of it.

This follows a Commission initiative last year which saw major tech and ad platforms — including Facebook, Google and Twitter — sign up to a voluntary Code of Practice on disinformation, committing themselves to take some non-prescribed actions to disrupt the ad revenues of disinformation agents and make political ads more transparent on their platforms.

Another strand of the Code looks to have directly contributed to the development of Twitter’s new ‘misleading about voting’ report option — with signatories committing to:

Empower consumers to report disinformation and access different news sources, while improving the visibility and findability of authoritative content;

In the latest progress report on the Code, which was published by the Commission yesterday but covers steps taken by the platforms in March 2019, it noted some progress made — but said it’s still not enough.

“Further technical improvements as well as sharing of methodology and data sets for fake accounts are necessary to allow third-party experts, fact-checkers and researchers to carry out independent evaluation,” EC commissioners warned in a joint statement.

In the case of Twitter the company was commended for having made political ad libraries publicly accessible but criticized (along with Google) for not doing more to improve transparency around issue-based advertising.

“It is regrettable that Google and Twitter have not yet reported further progress regarding transparency of issue-based advertising, meaning issues that are sources of important debate during elections,” the Commission said. 

It also reported that Twitter had provided figures on actions undertaken against spam and fake accounts but had failed to explain how these actions relate to activity in the EU.

“Twitter did not report on any actions to improve the scrutiny of ad placements or provide any metrics with respect to its commitments in this area,” it also noted.

The EC says it will assess the Code’s initial 12-month period by the end of 2019 — and take a view on whether it needs to step in and propose regulation to control online disinformation. (Something which some individual EU Member States are already doing, albeit with a focus on hate speech and/or online safety.)

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/twitter-to-offer-report-option-for-misleading-election-tweets/

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R/GA Ventures incubator to nurture enterprise blockchain startups in Portland, OR

R/GA Ventures, a company that acts as investment arm and startup incubator for R/GA corporate client work, announced plans to open a new studio in Portland devoted to encouraging startups working on enterprise blockchain projects.

R/GA itself has a three-pronged purpose. It helps companies like Samsung, Google and Verizon (which owns this publication) in the product concept and design phase. It will also sometimes build products conceived in the design phase for the same clients. As an extension of that work, the company, which is owned by Interpublic Group, a group of marketing and advertising agencies, opened the Ventures arm five years ago with the aim of encouraging start-ups to do some of that innovation work for them and extend the company.

The blockchain project is the lates piece, and the idea behind it is to connect these startups with their corporate clients, who are interested in developing enterprise blockchain solutions in verticals such insurance, healthcare and sports; while building up a blockchain development center in Portland. The goal may be helping the corporate clients, but the startups are independent entities with their own sales and marketing approaches. The company may also invest a modest amount of money in the companies.

Nick Coronges, the global chief technology officer for R/GA, says they are looking at real-world applications of blockchain with the understanding that it’s still very early days for distributed ledger and blockchain applications, and they are looking for ways to explore the utility of it in business.

“I think one of the assumptions that we make going into this is that blockchain, as we currently understand it is probably going to go through a lot of iterations. And it may be bigger in the next few years…we may talk about it as a kind of ecosystem or a set of adjacent technologies that are related to blockchain, and this idea of decentralized data processing systems,” he explained.

He added, “The main thing that we look for is cases where you have multiple participants in some type of workflow, requiring access and some kind of accountability, transparency and control over data.”

The company has partnered with several intuitions on this project including Moda, Umpqua Bank, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, Business Oregon, ConsenSys and blockchain research firm Smith and Crown.

The first cohort of blockchain startups will begin working at the end of July in an office space in Portland.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/r-ga-ventures-project-pushes-enterprise-blockchain-startups-in-portland-or/

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Ford invests $500m in Rivian and intends to build a vehicle on Rivian’s EV platform

Rivian today announced a major investment from Ford. The 115-year old automaker is investing $500 million into the Michigan-based EV startup. Along with the cash, Ford announced plans to build a vehicle on Rivian’s electric vehicle platform.

“This strategic partnership marks another key milestone in our drive to accelerate the transition to sustainable mobility,” said RJ Scaringe, Rivian founder and CEO, said in a released statement. “Ford has a long-standing commitment to sustainability, with Bill Ford being one of the industry’s earliest advocates, and we are excited to use our technology to get more electric vehicles on the road.”

This investment comes two months after Rivian netted $700 million from a funding round that was lead by Amazon.

Rivian was founded in 2009 by RJ Scaringe but operated in stealth until late 2018 when it unveiled its stunning electric pickup and SUV. Today, the company has more than 750 employees split between four development locations in the U.S. and an office in the U.K. The bulk of its employees are in Michigan to be close to an expansive automotive supply chain.

Today’s announcement stopped short about detailing the vehicle Ford intends on building on Rivian’s platform. It’s likely whatever Ford produces will have similar capabilities of the two products Rivian announced last year. Rivian’s five-passenger R1T pickup and seven-passenger R1S SUV both feature over 400 miles of range and the startup previously stated they would be available in late 2020.

Ford already has several electric vehicles in production and in the works. Along with small electric vehicles, Ford is developing an electric version of its best-selling model, the F-150 pickup.

With this investment, Rivian will stay an independent company. Following regulatory approval, Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of Automotive, will join Rivian’s board.

    source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/ford-invests-500m-in-rivian-and-intends-to-build-a-vehicle-on-rivians-ev-platform/

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Docker developers can now build Arm containers on their desktops

Docker and Arm today announced a major new partnership that will see the two companies collaborate in bringing improved support for the Arm platform to Docker’s tools.

The main idea here is to make it easy for Docker developers to build their applications for the Arm platform right from their x86 desktops and then deploy them to the cloud (including the Arm-based AWS EC2 A1 instances), edge and IoT devices. Developers will be able to build their containers for Arm just like they do today, without the need for any cross-compliation.

This new capability, which will work for applications written in Javascript/Node.js, Python, Java, C++, Ruby, .NET core, Go, Rust and PHP, will become available as a tech preview next week, when Docker hosts its annual North American developer conference in San Francisco.

Typically, developers would have to build the containers they want to run on the Arm platform on an Arm-based server. With this system, which is the first result of this new partnership, Docker essentially emulates an Arm chip on the PC for building these images.

“Overnight, the 2 million Docker developers that are out there can use the Docker commands they already know and become Arm developers,” Docker EVP of Business Development David Messina told me. “Docker, just like we’ve done many times over, has simplified and streamlined processes and made them simpler and accessible to developers. And in this case, we’re making x86 developers on their laptops Arm developers overnight.”

Given that cloud-based Arm servers like Amazon’s A1 instances are often signficantly cheaper than x86 machines, users can achieve some immediate cost benefits by using this new system and running their containers on Arm.

For Docker, this partnership opens up new opportunities, especially in areas where Arm chips are already strong, including edge and IoT scenarios. Arm, similarly, is interested in strengthening its developer ecosystem by making it easier to develop for its platform. The easier it is to build apps for the platform, the more likely developers are to then run them on servers that feature chips from Arm’s partners.

“Arm’s perspective on the infrastructure really spans all the way from the endpoint, all the way through the edge to the cloud data center, because we are one of the few companies that have a presence all the way through that entire path,” Mohamed Awad, Arm’s VP of Marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, said. “It’s that perspective that drove us to make sure that we engage Docker in a meaningful way and have a meaningful relationship with them. We are seeing compute and the infrastructure sort of transforming itself right now from the old model of centralized compute, general purpose architecture, to a more distributed and more heterogeneous compute system.”

Developers, however, Awad rightly noted, don’t want to have to deal with this complexity, yet they also increasingly need to ensure that their applications run on a wide variety of platform and that they can move them around as needed. “For us, this is about enabling developers and freeing them from lock-in on any particular area and allowing them to choose the right compute for the right job that is the most efficient for them,” Awad said.

Mesina noted that the promise of Docker has long been to remove the dependence of applications from the infrastructure they run on. Adding Arm support simply extends this promise to an additional platform. He also stressed that the work on this was driven by the company’s enterprise customers. These are the users who have already set up their systems for cloud-native development with Docker’s tools — at least for their x86 development. Those customers are now looking at developing for their edge devices, too, and that often means developing for Arm-based devices.

Awad and Messina both stressed that developers really don’t have to learn anything new to make this work. All of the usual Docker commands will just work.

  source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/docker-partners-with-arm/

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Embrace raises $4.5M for its mobile application performance management platform

Embrace, an LA-based startup that offers a mobile-first application performance management platform, today announced that it has raised a $4.5 million funding round led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $7 million. New investors Greycroft, Miramar Ventures and Vy Captial also participated in this round, as did previous investors Eniac Ventures, The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures, Tikhon Bernstam of Parse and others.

Current Embrace customers include the likes of Home Depot, Headspace, OKCupid, Boxed, Thrive Market and TuneIn. These companies use the service to get a better view of how their apps perform on their users’ devices.

As Embrace CEO and co-founder Eric Futoran, who also co-founded entertainment company Scopely, argues, too many similar services mostly focus on crashes, yet those only constitute a small number of the actual user experience issues in most apps. “To a large extent, crashes are solved,” he told me. “The crash percentages are often 99.8 percent crash-free and yet users are still complaining.”

That’s because there are plenty of other issues beyond code exceptions, which many tools focus on almost exclusively, that can force an app to close (think memory issues or the OS shutting down the app because it uses too many CPU cycles). “To users, that looks like a crash. Your app closed. But in no way, that’s a crash from a technical perspective,” Futoran noted.

Raising this new round, Futoran told me, was pretty easy. Indeed, Pritzker approached the company. “It was not fundraising,” he said. “They sat us down and said, ‘we want to fund you guys,’ which I find pretty unusual. So I’ve been calling it a pre-emptive round.” He also noted that having Pritzker involved should help open up the mid-west market for Embrace, which is mostly focusing on enterprise customers (though Futoran’s definition of ‘enterprise’ includes the likes of digital-first companies like Headspace).

“We saw many organizations trust Embrace’s seamless and innovative optimization platform to quickly identify and resolve any user-impacting issues within their apps, and we’re optimistic about the future of the company in this growing market,” said Gabe Greenbaum, an LA-based Partner for Pritzker Group Venture Capital. “We look forward to this next stage in the company’s growth journey and are honored to partner with Eric and Fredric to help them achieve their vision.”

The company plans to use the new funding to increase its go-to-market capabilities, and grow its team to build out its technology.

    source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/embrace-raises-4-5m-for-its-mobile-application-performance-management-platform/

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Databricks open-sources Delta Lake to make data lakes more reliable

Databricks, the company founded by the original developers of the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has open-sourced Delta Lake, a storage layer that makes it easier to ensure data integrity as new data flows into an enterprise’s data lake by bringing ACID transactions to these vast data repositories.

Delta Lake, which has long been a proprietary part of Databrick’s offering, is already in production use by companies like Viacom, Edmunds, Riot Games and McGraw Hill.

The tool provides the ability to enforce specific schemas (which can be changed as necessary), to create snapshots and to ingest streaming data or backfill the lake as a batch job. Delta Lake also uses the Spark engine to handle the metadata of the data lake (which by itself is often a big data problem). Over time, Databricks also plans to add an audit trail, among other things.

“Today nearly every company has a data lake they are trying to gain insights from, but data lakes have proven to lack data reliability. Delta Lake has eliminated these challenges for hundreds of enterprises. By making Delta Lake open source, developers will be able to easily build reliable data lakes and turn them into ‘Delta Lakes’,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks.

What’s important to note here is that Delta lake runs on top of existing data lakes and is compatible with the Apache spark APIs.

The company is still looking at how the project will be governed in the future. “We are still exploring different models of open source project governance, but the GitHub model is well understood and presents a good trade-off between the ability to accept contributions and governance overhead,” Ghodsi said. “One thing we know for sure is we want to foster a vibrant community, as we see this as a critical piece of technology for increasing data reliability on data lakes. This is why we chose to go with a permissive open source license model: Apache License v2, same license that Apache Spark uses.”

To invite this community, Databricks plans to take outside contributions, just like the Spark project.

“We want Delta Lake technology to be used everywhere on-prem and in the cloud by small and large enterprises,” said Ghodsi. “This approach is the fastest way to build something that can become a standard by having the community provide direction and contribute to the development efforts.” That’s also why the company decided against a Commons Clause licenses that some open-source companies now use to prevent others (and especially large clouds) from using their open source tools in their own commercial SaaS offerings. “We believe the Commons Clause license is restrictive and will discourage adoption. Our primary goal with Delta Lake is to drive adoption on-prem as well as in the cloud.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/databricks-open-sources-delta-lake-to-make-data-lakes-more-reliable/

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Ride-hailing firm Grab is losing its CTO

Grab is once again on the hunt for a CTO after Theo Vassilakis, the former Microsoft and Google executive who currently occupies the role, announced that he will leave the ride-hailing company this summer.

Vassilakis became Grab CTO in October 2017, ending a very long search to fill the job, but he explained in a LinkedIn post that he is leaving the Singapore-based firm, and Southeast Asia, for family reasons.

My family and I moved to Singapore in late 2017 when I joined Grab. Living and working in Southeast Asia has been an adventure that broadened our horizons and will always be in our hearts. Unfortunately, our personal circumstances have changed unexpectedly and we’ll need to spend most of our time outside the region — mostly in the south of China for the foreseeable future.

Following his exit on June 30, Vassilakis will remain an advisor to Grab, with a specific focus on “coaching our senior tech leaders and shepherding our ongoing AI and marketplace optimization efforts.” He said that he will be involved in finding and hiring his replacement.

While it will lack a ‘group CTO,’ Grab does have CTOs for its transport and financial business units — Mark Porter and Vikas Agrawal, respectively — while head of product and design Jerald Singh will be involved in filling the void. Grab’s first CTO was Wei Zhu, who is credited with creating Connect with Facebook, but he left in 2015 after just a year and later sued over alleged unpaid earnings.

Under Vassilakis’ leadership, Grab massively increased its tech presence. The company now has seven R&D offices — Bangalore, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Seattle and Singapore — and it claims to have doubled its headcount in 2018. Grab said in December that it is projected to add a further 1,000 “tech roles” this year.

The company has also expanded from merely transportation services to on-demand services, apps from third-parties via its ‘platform’ strategy, and payments and financial services.

Grab has also become the largest tech company in Southeast Asia by some margin in the eyes of investors. The company was most recently valued at $14 billion when it raised nearly $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in March. To date, Grab has raised in excess of $7.5 billion from investors, and there’s more to come. The company said earlier this month that it plans to pull in $2 billion more from investors this year to battle rival Go-Jek, make acquisitions and develop its ‘super app’ strategy.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/grab-cto-theo-vassilakis-leaving/

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Selina raises $100M at an $850M valuation for its network of living spaces for digital nomads

The rising tide of Airbnb is lifting all boats, and today a startup that’s building a series of living-coworking-activity spaces across the world primarily geared at digital nomads is reeling in a sizeable round to take its business to the next level.

Selina, which operates a network of 22,000 beds out of boutique hostel-style operations in some 13 countries, has raised $100 million in funding — money that it plans to to use to expand its footprint to 130,000 beds across 400 properties by 2023, capitalising on the surge in remote working and the more holistic approach taken by digital nomads, who seek out places where they can take a bite or two out of life but still be productive at the same time.

In 2019 alone, the plan will be to open 35 Selina properties in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

The funding is being made at a post-money valuation of $850 million, the company confirmed. Co-founder and CEO Rafael Museri said in an interview that the startup is likely to tip over $1 billion in its next round.

This latest round, which brings the total raised by Selina to $225 million, is being led by Access Industries, with participation from Grupo Wiese and existing investors Colony Latam Partners.

Selina itself has taken a page out of the digital nomad bible: the company’s first properties were across Latin America — founded in 2015 when Museri and co-founder Daniel Rudasevski were resident in Panama — although the company itself was established in New York and now its co-founders are relocating to London.

In addition to the equity funding, Selina has also secured some $300 million in country partnerships to build out its hostels and their related activities across the globe. Museri noted that the company mainly leases the buildings where it operates its services rather than buying the real estate outright, and so some of these local contributions will be from property owners who pay in to help refurbish their locations to share in some of the returns that come from the hostels that eventually open up.

“We are converting boring spaces into cultural hubs, quickly,” is how Museri describes it.

This latest funding will be used to bring on more talent and build more bridges into local communities — which Selina relies on to build out its operations, which include not just a place to sleep and work, but activities throughout the day for those staying in its rooms as well as other locals — as well as to continue investing in its tech. That is built out of the co-founders’ home country of Israel, in Tel Aviv, and one focus will be to improve the booking process and algorithmic recommendations that people use both to figure out where to travel next, as well as what they want to do when they get there.

Selina’s rise comes at a time when we’ve seen an interesting convergence in the worlds of working and travel, where people are demanding an increasingly greater amount of flexibility in terms of how they approach both.

In the world of startups, that evolution has been spearheaded by the likes of WeWork and Airbnb, which have respectively turned the concept of leasing or buying an office, or renting a stodgy and soulless hotel room, on its head, providing more interesting and way more flexible approaches to both.

In more recent times, both WeWork and Airbnb have in effect moved ever-closer to each other, with WeWork now starting to provide its customers with places to sleep, and Airbnb offering places to work as part of its bigger Business effort.

Notably, WeWork founder Adam Neumann is actually an investor in Selina, having been a part of its previous $95 million round. (That’s something to think about when considering that move the We Company, as it’s now called, makes into adjacent areas like accommodations.)

While these outsized companies present inevitable competition to Selina and the many others that are approaching the opportunity, Selina is continuing to build out its business not just as co-working or co-living space in a variety of urban and exotic locations, but as a place to go for experiential enjoyment — one of the reasons it has attracted this funding.

“We believe Selina’s focus on building a global hospitality platform for digital nomads will redefine the way millennials live, work, play, learn and give back,” said Lincoln Benet of Access Industries, in a statement.

Museri said that today some 80 percent of travellers stay for 2.5-2.8 days, although it’s not completely unusual for people to stay 12 or 60 days, too. “It’s a process,” he said when I asked him for a more concrete figure. “If they are happy, they stay longer. If they want to move, they can jump to another Selina. It’s flexible. We do have people who fall in love and stay longer, but three nights is the average stay, and it’s growing every day.”

The average age of its residents is 25 to 35, he said, but again the range is pretty wide, with some travelling not as individuals but in groups of friends or families.

Most activities are free, Museri notes, although there are also additional paid experiences you can get on top (example: surfing — one of the typical activities in the beach properties — might be free, but surf lessons come at a price; or basic yoga might be free, but an extended multi-day program would not be).

“This is the future of accommodation,” Museri said. “Airbnb is improving but we are doing something completely different. We don’t think any one brand will touch all three spaces [of work, sleep, play] the way that we will.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/selina-raises-100m-at-an-850m-valuation-for-its-network-of-living-spaces-for-digital-nomads/

[toomanysinks]

VDOO secures $32M for a platform that uses AI to detect and fix vulnerabilities on IoT devices

Our universe of connected things is expanding by the day: the number of objects with embedded processors now exceeds the number of smartphones globally and is projected to reach some 18 billion devices by 2022. But just as that number is growing, so are the opportunities for malicious hackers to use these embedded devices to crack into networks, disrupting how these objects work and stealing information, a problem that analysts estimate will cost $18.3 billion to address by 2023. Now, an Israeli startup called VDOO has raised $32 million to address this, with a platform that identifies and fixes security vulnerabilities in IoT devices, and then tests to make sure that the fixes work.

The funding is being led by WRVI Capital and GGV Capital and also includes strategic investments from NTT DOCOMO (which works with VDOO), MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of the global cyber insurance firm), and Avigdor Willenz (who founded both Galileo Technologies and Annapurna Labs, respectively acquired by Marvell and Amazon). 83North, Dell Technology Capital and David Strohm, who backed VDOO in its previous round of $13 million in January 2018, also participated, bringing the total raised by VDOO now to $45 million.

VDOO — a reference to the Hebrew word that sounds like “vee-doo” and means “making sure” — was cofounded by Netanel Davidi (co-CEO), Uri Alter (also co-CEO) and Asaf Karas (CTO). Davidi and Alter previously co-founded Cyvera, a pioneer in endpoint security that was acquired by Palo Alto Networks and became the basis for its own endpoint security product; Karas meanwhile has extensive experience coming to VDOO of working, among other places, for the Israeli Defense Forces.

In an interview, Davidi noted that the company was created out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IoT.

“Many embedded systems have a low threshold for security because they were not created with security in mind,” he said, noting that this is partly due to concerns of how typical security fixes might impact performance, and the fact that this has typically not been a core competency for hardware makers, but something that is considered after devices are in the market. At the same time, a lot of security solutions today in the IoT space have focused on monitoring, but not fixing, he added. “Most companies have good solutions for the visibility of their systems, and are able to identify vulnerabilities on the network, but are not sufficient at protecting devices themselves.”

The sheer number of devices on the market and their spread across a range of deployments from manufacturing and other industrial scenarios, through to in-home systems that can be vulnerable even when not connected to the internet, also makes for a complicated and uneven landscape.

VDOO’s approach was to conceive of a very lightweight implementation that sits on a small group of devices — “small” is relative here: the set was 16,000 objects — applying machine learning to “learn” how different security vulnerabilities might behave to discover adjacent hacks that hadn’t yet been identified.

“For any kind of vulnerability, using deep binary analysis capabilities, we try to understand the broader idea, to figure out how a similar vulnerability can emerge,” he said.

Part of the approach is to pare down security requirements and solutions to those pertinent to the device in question, and providing clear guidance to vendors for how to best avoid problems in the first place at the development stage. VDOO then also generates specific “tailor-made on-device micro-agents” to continue the detection and repair process. (Davidi likened it to a modern approach to some cancer care: preventive measures such as periodic monitoring checks; followed by a “tailored immunotherapy” based on prior analysis of DNA.)

It currently supports Linux- and Android-based operating systems, as well as FreeRTOS and support for more systems coming soon, Davidi said. It sells its services primarily to device makers, who can make over the air updates to their devices after they have been purchased and implemented to keep them up to date with the latest fixes. Typical devices currently secured with VDOO tech include safety and security devices such as surveillance cameras, NVRs & DVRs, fire alarm systems, access controls, routers, switches and access points, Davidi said.

It’s the focus on providing security services for hardware makers, in fact, that helps VDOO stand out from the others in the field.

“Among all startups for embedded systems, VDOO is the first to introduce a unique, holistic approach focusing on the device vendors which are the focal enabler in truly securing devices,” said Lip-Bu Tan, founding partner of WRVI Capital. “We are delighted to back VDOO’s technology, and the exceptional team that has created advanced tools to allow vendors to secure devices as much as possible without in-house security know-how, for the first time in many decades, I see a clear demand for security, as being raised constantly in many meetings with leading OEMs worldwide, as well as software giants.”

Over the last 18 months, as VDOO has continued to expand its own reach, it has picked up customers along the way after identifying vulnerabilities in their devices. Its dataset covers some 70 million embedded systems’ binaries and more than 16,000 versions of embedded systems, and it has worked with customers to identify and address 150 zero-day vulnerabilities and 100,000 security issues that would have potentially impacted 1.5 billion devices.

Interestingly, while VDOO is building its own IP, it is also working with a number of vendors to provide many of the fixes. Davidi says that VDOO and those vendors go through fairly rigorous screening processes before integrating, and the hope is that down the line there will more automation brought in for the “fixing” element using third-party solutions.

“VDOO brings a unique end-to-end security platform, answering the global connectivity trend and the emerging threats targeting embedded devices, to provide security as an essential enabler of extensive connected devices adoption. With its differentiated capabilities, VDOO has succeeded in acquiring global customers, including many top-tier brands. Moreover, VDOO’s ability to uncover and mitigate weaknesses created by external suppliers fits perfectly into our Supply Chain Security investment strategy,” said Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital, in a statement. “This funding, together with the company’s great technology, skilled entrepreneurs and one of the best teams we have seen, will allow VDOO to maintain its leadership position in IoT security and expand geographies while continuing to develop its state-of-the-art technology.”

Valuation is currently not being disclosed.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/vdoo-secures-32m-for-a-platform-that-detects-and-fixes-vulnerabilities-on-iot-devices/

[toomanysinks]

Drone delivery startup Zipline launches UAV medical program in Ghana

Zipline, the San Francisco-based UAV manufacturer and logistics services provider, has launched a program in Ghana today for drone delivery of medical supplies.

Working with the Ghanaian government, Zipline will operate 30 drones out of four distribution centers to distribute vaccines, blood, and life-saving medications to 2000 health facilities across the West African nation daily.

“We’ll do 600 flights day…and serve 12 million people. This is going to be the largest drone delivery network on the planet,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch on a call from Accra.

“No one in Ghana should die because they can’t access the medicine they need in an emergency,” Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement. “That’s why Ghana is launching the world’s largest drone delivery service…a major step towards giving everyone in this country universal access to lifesaving medicine.”

The Ghana program adds a second country to Zipline’s live operations. Zipline got off the ground in Rwanda and has leveraged its experience in East Africa to begin testing medical delivery services in the United States.

Zipline has been making moves in Africa since at least 2016 — after it raised capital and solidified its mission to carve out a global revenue-generating business around UAV delivery of critical medical supplies.

To date, the startup has raised $41 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Subtraction Capital.

Founded in 2014, Zipline designs and manufactures its own UAVs, launch and landing systems, and logistics software. After a testing period in coordination with the government of Rwanda, Zipline went live in the East African country in 2016, claiming the first national drone-delivery program at scale in the world.

Through its non-profit foundation, the logistics giant UPS came in to partner with Zipline on the Rwanda program, and that support continues.

“They’re providing funding to build a lot of the infrastructure required, they are an adviser to us, and they provide some logistical support in moving equipment,” Rinaudo said of Zipline’s collaboration with the UPS Foundation. Zipline has also received grants and support from from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Pfizer .

Zipline then carried its experience in Africa to the U.S. In May 2018 the startup was accepted into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP). Out of 149 applicants, the Africa focused startup was one of 10 selected to participate in a drone pilot in the U.S.—and started testing beyond visual line of sight medical delivery services in North Carolina.

“Healthcare logistics is a $70 billion global industry, and it’s still only serving a golden billion on the planet,” says Rinaudo. “The economics of our business is pretty simple. We’re using small, electric, fully autonomous vehicles…these kinds of systems are much more efficient than the analog way of delivering things.”

Zipline is eyeing additional countries for delivery operations beyond Ghana, Rwanda, and its pilot operations in the U.S. “We’ll be launching in several additional countries, not all of which are in Africa,” said Rinaudo, though he declined to disclose specifics.

Zipline is well aware that its drone logistics systems have applications beyond medical supply chain services and Rinaudo confirmed moving cargo other than medical supplies is something Zipline has considered.

If the company moves toward other commercial applications, it could leverage its programs and relationships in Africa. The continent has become testbed for commercial drone delivery and regulatory structures.

African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect

Over the last two years South Africa passed commercial drone legislation to train and license pilots and Malawi opened a Drone Test Corridor to African and global partners. Over the same period, Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania have issued or updated drone regulatory guidelines and announced future UAV initiatives. The government of Tanzania launched a medical drone delivery program in 2019, with DHL as one of the main partners.

In addition to its launch today in Ghana, Zipline plans to move from pilot-phase to live-delivery of medical supplies in the U.S. sometime this summer, a company spokesperson confirmed.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/drone-delivery-startup-zipline-launches-uav-medical-program-in-ghana/

[toomanysinks]

UK gives Huawei an amber light to supply 5G

The UK government will allow Huawei to be a supplier for some non-core parts of the country’s 5G networks, despite concerns that the involvement of the Chinese telecoms vendor could pose a risk to national security. But it will be excluded from core parts of the networks, according to reports in national press.

The news of prime minister Theresa May’s decision made during a meeting of the National Security Council yesterday was reported earlier by The Telegraph. The newspaper said multiple ministers raised concerns about her approach — including the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Defence Secretary, International Trade Secretary, and International Development Secretary.

The FT reports that heavy constraints on Huawei’s involvement in U.K. 5G networks reflect the level of concern raised by ministers.

May’s decision to give an amber light to Huawei’s involvement in building next-gen 5G networks comes a month after a damning report by a U.K. oversight body set up to evaluate the Chinese company’s approach to security.

The fifth annual report by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board blasted “serious and systematic defects” in its software engineering and cyber security competence.

Though the oversight board stopped short of calling for an outright ban — despite saying it could provide “only limited assurance that all risks to U.K. national security from Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term”.

But speaking at a cyber security conference in Brussels in February, Ciaran Martin, the CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) expressed confidence UK authorities can mitigate any risk posed by Huawei.

The NCSC is part of the domestic GCHQ signals intelligence agency.

Dr Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity advisor and research associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University, told TechCrunch he’s not surprised by the government’s decision to work with Huawei.

“It’s a message that was long expected,” he said. “U.K. officials have been carefully sending signals in the previous months. In a sense, this makes us closer to the end of the 5G drama.”

“With proper management most risk can be mitigated. It all depends on the strategic planning,” he added.

“I believe the level of [security] responsibility at telecoms will remain similar to today’s. The main message expected by telecoms is clarity to enable them to move on with infrastructure.”

The heaviest international pressure to exclude the Chinese vendor from next-gen 5G networks has been coming from the U.S. where president Trump has been leaning on key intelligence-sharing allies to act on espionage fears and shut Huawei out — with some success.

Last year Australia and New Zealand both announced bans on Chinese kit vendors citing national security fears.

But in Europe governments appear to be leaning in another direction: Towards managing and mitigating potential risks rather than shutting the door completely.

The European Commission has also eschewed pushing for a pan-EU ban — instead issuing recommendations encouraging Member States to step up individual and collective attention on network security to mitigate potential risks.

It has warned too — and conversely — of the risk of fragmentation to its flagship ‘digital single market’ project if Member State governments decide to slam doors on their own. So, at the pan-EU level, security considerations are very clearly being weighed against strategic commercial imperatives and technology priorities.

Equally, individual European governments appear to have little appetite to throw a spanner in the 5G works, given the risk of being left lagging as cellular connectivity evolves and transforms — an upgrade that’s expected to fuel and underpin developments in artificial intelligence and big data analysis, among other myriad and much hyped benefits.

In the UK’s case, national security concerns have been repeatedly brandished as justification for driving through domestic surveillance legislation so draconian that parts of it have later been unpicked by both UK and EU courts. Even if the same security concerns are here, where 5G networks are concerned, being deemed ‘manageable’ — rather than grounds for a similarly draconian approach to technology procurement.

It’s not clear at this stage how extensively Huawei will be involved in supplying and building U.K. 5G networks.

The NCSC sent us the following statement in response to questions:

National Security Council discussions are confidential. Decisions from those meetings are made and announced at the appropriate time through the established processes.

The security and resilience of the UK’s telecoms networks is of paramount importance.

As part of our plans to provide world class digital connectivity, including 5G, we have conducted an evidence based review of the supply chain to ensure a diverse and secure supply base, now and into the future. This is a thorough review into a complex area and will report with its conclusions in due course.

“How ‘non-core’ will be defined is anyone’s guess but it would have to be clearly defined and publicly communicated,” Olejnik also told us. “I would assume this refers to government and military networks, but what about safety communication or industrial systems, such as that of power plants or railroad? That’s why we should expect more clarity.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/uk-gives-huawei-an-amber-light-to-supply-5g/

[toomanysinks]

Holded, the ‘business operating system’ for SMEs, gets €6M in Series A funding led by Lakestar

Holded, the Barcelona-based startup that offers a SaaS to help SMEs with a range of business tasks, has raised €6 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lakestar, with previous backers Nauta Capital and Seedrocket 4Founders Capital following on.

Founded in 2016 by Bernat Ripoll and Javi Fondevila, Holded describes itself as a “Business Operating System”. The idea is to provide a single platform for small to medium-sized business owners to manage every aspect of their business.

The Saas covers financial management such as accounting and invoicing to HR, CRM, and project and inventory management. In addition, the customisable platform offers multiple integrations to connect with a number of popular payment and e-commerce solutions. They include Amazon, Paypal and Shopify.

Alongside this, Holded is able to “automate” a number of core business administration tasks via the cloud-based platform’s own AI. It also uses data garnered through the use of the software to benchmark business performance and provide managers and business owners with actionable insights with regards to how they might increase sales, reduce expenses and save time.

Holded co-founder Bernat Ripoll says the company set out to develop next generation Enterprise-Resource-Planning (ERP) software that addresses the needs of modern companies, which is something that appears to be resonating with SMEs. Since closing its seed round in early 2018, Holded has increased user numbers from 10,000 to 30,000, claiming to now be the leader in Spain.

Meanwhile, Holded says the new capital will be used to accelerate its expansion into international markets. The Spanish startup will also invest further in the development of the software’s core functionality.

“[We] now aim to replicate this [success] in other countries while continuing to consolidate the Spanish market,” says Holded co-founder Javi Fondevila, adding that the startup plans to roll out new product features and “country-specific” integrations.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/holded/