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China's three state-backed wireless carriers launch 5G in some cities, ahead of original 2020 date; China Mobile aims to bring 5G to 50+ cities by year's end — BEIJING — Chinese cellphone carriers will begin offering super-fast, next-generation 5G service on a commercial basis Friday …
Amazon says Alexa skill personalization, which allows developers to provide personalized experiences for different customers, is now generally available — Future voice skills built for Alexa might respond uniquely to your voice. That's thanks to Alexa skill personalization …
Facing increasing scrutiny from international and domestic regulators, the Altria Group has decided to write down its investment into the e-cigarette company JUUL by $4.5 billion.
That’s roughly one-third of the $12.8 billion that the tobacco giant had invested into JUUL a little less than one year ago.
What a difference a year has made.
JUUL, which has become synonymous with the vaping phenomenon that has swept the U.S., was once hailed as being at the forefront of a wave of companies that were making smoking obsolete and nicotine consumption safer for consumers.
The company began running into problems as its popularity increased exponentially (in part by allegedly turning to some of the same tactics big tobacco used to target underage consumers).
As the complaints began to roll in, and as JUUL was held responsible for an explosion in the use of tobacco products among underage Americans, the regulatory scrutiny also began to increase.
First the company was compelled to limit its sale of flavored tobacco products. Now it may be forced to pull all of its flavored products outright.
None of the company’s troubles have been helped by the wave of vaping related illnesses that have swept through the U.S. causing several deaths in users across multiple states.
Indeed, a new lawsuit against the company (filed two days ago) alleges that JUUL knowingly sold contaminated pods despite warnings from at least one employee.
First reported by BuzzFeed, the lawsuit was brought by Siddharth Breja, a former senior vice president of global finance at Juul from May 2018 to March 2019.
Breja alleges he was fired for complaining about the charge — a claim that a spokesperson for JUUL called “baseless”.
“[Breja] was terminated in March 2019 because he failed to demonstrate the leadership qualities needed in his role,”a spokesperson for JUUL wrote in an email. “The allegations concerning safety issues with Juul products are equally meritless, and we already investigated the underlying manufacturing issue and determined the product met all applicable specifications.”
The write down by Altria follows an announcement from JUUL that it intends to lay off around 500 people — or roughly 10% of its workforce.
Paidy, a Japanese financial tech startup that provides instant credit to consumers in Japan, announced today that it has raised a total of $143 million in new financing. This includes a $83 million Series C extension from investors including PayPal Ventures and debt financing of $60 million. The funding will be used to advance Paidy’s goals of signing large-scale merchants, offering new financial services and growing its user base to 11 million accounts by the end of 2020.
In addition to PayPal Ventures, investors in the Series C extension also include Soros Capital Management, JS Capital Management and Tybourne Capital Management, along with another undisclosed investor. The debt financing is from Goldman Sachs Japan, Mizuho Bank, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank. Earlier this month, Paidy and Goldman Sachs Japan established a warehouse facility valued at $52 million. Paidy also established credit facility worth $8 million with the three banks.
This is the largest investment to date in the Japanese financial tech industry, according to data cited by Paidy and brings the total investment the company has raised so far to $163 million. A representative for the startup says it decided to extend its Series C instead of moving onto a D round to preserve the equity ratio for existing investors and issue the same preferred shares as its previous funding rounds.
Launched in 2014, Paidy was created because many Japanese consumers don’t use credit cards for e-commerce purchases, even though the credit card penetration rate there is relatively high. Instead, many prefer to pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores and other pickup locations. While this makes online shopping easier for consumers, it presents several challenges for sellers, because they need to cover the cost of merchandise that hasn’t been paid for yet or deal with uncompleted deliveries.
Paidy’s solution is to make it possible for people to pay for merchandise online without needing to create an account first or use their credit cards. If a seller offers Paidy as a payment method, customers can check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses, which are then authenticated with code sent through SMS or voice. Paidy covers the cost of the items and bills customers monthly. Paidy uses proprietary machine learning models to score the creditworthiness of users, and says its service can help reduce incomplete transactions (or items that buyers ultimately don’t pick up and pay for), increase conversion rates, average order values and repeat purchases.
How Netflix is navigating strict, sometimes vague, censorship standards in countries like Turkey and India, while viewers decry the concessions to censorship — The streaming giant is having to navigate different political and moral landscapes, and calls for government oversight, as it seeks subscribers worldwide.
Twitter's political ad ban will run into enforcement issues on defining issue ads and possibly disadvantage lesser-known or nontraditional candidates — If you've ever wondered about the value of having multiple social networks competing to develop the best products and policies, Wednesday offered us a clear example.
One of the world’s most static technologies may be the humble mug, but startup Ember decided it was time for a change when they introduced their temperature-controlled smart mug to the market in 2016. Now, the company has launched its Ember Mug 2 – a follow-up that keeps the concept and design intact, but that improves the lineup in some key ways.
There are two separate new second-generation Ember mugs – the Ember Travel Mug, and the Ember Mug designed for home and office use. Both add extended battery life, thanks to swapping its old battery technology with “the most advanced battery technology on the market,” and both gain new redesigned charging coasters, while the Travel Mug 2 gets a new control interface for adjusting the temperature of the beverage within, and it’s a bit lighter while holding the same volume.
This sequel to Ember’s home mug comes in black, white and copper versions, as well as in two sizes: 10z and 14oz. Like its predecessor, it features an internal heating element and battery, Bluetooth connectivity for smartphone control from the Ember app, and a durable ceramic coating.
The Ember Mug 2 has a customizable LED that shows you when it’s working, and that you can change to whatever color you wish, which is handy if you have a couple of these in use in one household. It comes in black and white (as well as the pricier copper edition) in order to set your desired temperature, you pair it with an app on your phone (a quick and painless process).
Ember will send you notifications when the liquid within reaches the desired temperature. I’ve long used one of their first generation products, and the one thing I found was that on my three-a-day coffee schedule, sometimes my third cup would end up cold, because the battery, while decent, would run out before my appetite for caffeine did.
Enter the sequel, which offers up to 50 percent better battery life than the original version. It’s hard to quantify, since the speed with which I drink my coffee differs day to day, but I will say that in testing I haven’t seen the low battery warning before I was long done actually drinking coffee for the day. In short, if you make sure to pop the mug back on its charging coaster every evening, you should have plenty of juice for a full day of use the next day without any sense of mug range anxiety.
The Travel Mug 2 gets a slight redesign as well as battery improvements. Whereas Ember used a physical dial to control temperature adjustments without requiring you to use your phone on the last generation, now there’s a touch sensitive area on the cup just above where the body expands out towards the top. You can slide your fingers around this to increase or decrease the temperature of whatever you have within.
This tweak is likely what allowed Ember to slim down the design while keeping the internal volume (12 oz) the same, so that it’s a bit more lightweight and travel friendly than before (while also offering as much as three hours of battery life). Ember also took the auto sleep and wake features that it introduced with the original Ember ceramic Mug and brought them to the Travel Mug 2, meaning that it’ll turn itself on and off automatically depending on whether it detects liquid inside. or motion from being picked up, to extend battery life even further.
The design of the Ember Travel Mug 2 is top-notch, with a smooth matte surface and hand-friendly design, along with clear, easy to red LED displays that just disappear when not in use. The bottom display shows current temperature, as well as an indicator of remaining battery life, and you can add a custom name to show for avoiding confusion if there are multiple Travel Mugs in use.
Ember’s follow-up hardware to its initial lineup isn’t a dramatic change – but the collection didn’t need a major overhaul because it gets so many things right. The added battery life in the new generation is great, and the appeal remains the same: If you’re a coffee or tea fanatic and don’t love returning to a lukewarm or cold cup, then this is the stuff for you.
Could you opt for a vacuum-walled mug or travel tumbler? Absolutely, and the Zojirushi line-up of insulated travel mugs will keep liquids hot for days. But Ember’s home mug is without peer for actually keeping things hot in an open-top design, and the Travel Mug’s ability to actually adjust and increase temperature on the fly is also a unique value proposition that can’t be matched by any passive insulation.
The founders of Seattle-based Modus cold emailed Pete Flint, the founder of Trulia and a current managing partner at the venture capital firm NFX, for months to no avail. In a last ditch effort, Alex Day, Jai Sim and Abbas Guvenilir sent one more message to the investor who’s real estate listings tool sold to Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion. They were at a coffee shop below his San Francisco office, was he interested in meeting?
Fortunately for them, he was.
Modus co-founders
Modus, a real estate startup focused on title and escrow services, is today announcing a $12.5 million Series A financing co-led by NFX’s Flint and Niki Pezeshki of Felicis Ventures. Liquid 2 ventures and existing backers including Mucker Capital, Hustle Fund, 500 Startups, Rambleside and Cascadia Ventures also participated in the round.
“The first revolution in online real estate was transforming the research experience, the next revolution in the industry is transforming the transaction,” Flint said in a statement.
Modus launched in 2018 with a focus on Washington State real estate opportunities. The startup, led by former employees of a nearly-defunct lunch delivery company Peach, has developed software to help both agents and home buyers navigate the home closing process, which, unlike many other real estate experiences, has yet to receive a boost of innovation from startups building in the sector. That’s why Modus started with an emphasis on escrow services, though the team’s long term vision, they explain, is to power all real estate transactions.
“When you think about communication, you think of Gmail; when you think of traveling, you think of Uber. We want to be synonymous with home closing,” Sim, the company’s executive chairman, tells TechCrunch.
Sim, the former head of marketing at Peach, says Modus has ambitions of becoming a sort of operating system for real estate, or “like what Stripe is for payment processing, we want to become for real estate transactions.”
Since closing its Series A financing in May–the team waited until now to make its financing information public–Modus has increased its headcount to 50 employees across product, engineering and operations. Their goal now is to provide their software to home-buyers in 15 to 20 states over the next two years. To support expansion efforts, Modus plans to raise a Series B in the second or third quarter of next year.
Modus has previously raised $1.8 million in seed funding.
Freetrade, which offers commission-free stock investing in the UK, raises $15M Series A led by Draper Esprit — Freetrade, the U.K. challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing, has closed $15 million in Series A funding. The round includes a $7.5 million investment from Draper Esprit …
Nation-sponsored hackers have a new tool to drain telecom providers of huge amounts of SMS messages at scale, researchers said.
Dubbed "Messagetap" by researchers from the Mandiant division of security firm FireEye, the recently discovered malware infects Linux servers that route SMS messages through a telecom’s network. Once in place, Messagetap monitors the network for messages containing either a preset list of phone or IMSI numbers or a preset list of keywords.
Messages that meet the criteria are then XOR encoded and saved for harvesting later. FireEye said it found the malware infecting an undisclosed telecom provider. The company researchers said the malware is loaded by an installation script, but didn’t otherwise explain how infections take place.
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Crunchbase, a platform for finding business information about private and public companies, raises $30M Series C led by Omers Ventures — We are excited to share that Crunchbase just closed a $30 million dollar Series C funding round led by OMERS Ventures.
The internet and search engines like Google have made the world our oyster when it comes to sourcing information, but when it comes to business, there remains a persistent need for more targeted market intelligence, a way to get reliable data quickly to get on with your work. Today, one of the startups hoping to build a big business around that premise is announcing a round of funding to get there.
Crunchbase — a directory and database of company-related information that originally got its start as a part of TechCrunch before being spun off into a separate business several years ago — has raised $30 million, a Series C that it plans to use to continue expanding its base of paid subscribers and expanding its product to include more predictive, personalised information for its users by way more machine learning and other AI-based technology.
CEO Jager McConnell, who has long viewed Crunchbase as the “LinkedIn for company profiles,” said that of the 55 million people who visit the site each year currently, the company currently has “tens of thousands” of subscribers — subscriptions are priced at $29/user/month varying by size of company contract — which works out to less than 1% of its active users. That’s “growing quickly,” he added, speaking to site’s potential.
Indeed, he noted that since its last round in 2017, when it raised $18 million, Crunchbase has tripled its employees to 120 and has ten times more annual revenue run rate. It’s also more doubled its traffic since being spun out.
This latest round was led by Omers Ventures, the prolific investment arm of the giant Canadian pension fund of the same name (which is, incidentally, also now opening an office in Silicon Valley to get even more active with startups there).
Existing backers Emergence, Mayfield, Cowboy Ventures, and Verizon (which still owns TC) also participated. McConnell said Crunchbase is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but he did note that it was “well within the target range” that the startup had set, that it was an oversubscribed upround, and that it was on the more practical than exuberant side.
“I believe we are seeing too many high valuations with low annual revenue rates, and it’s catching up with people, and we were very focused on not hitting that valuation trap in order to be successful in the future,” he said. “This is a good round but not something insane.” Strong logic I suspect could be supported by Crunchbase data. For some context, Crunchbase had a post-money valuation of $70 million in its previous round in 2017 (having raised $26 million), according to PitchBook — ironically, one of Crunchbase’s big competitors (CB Insights, Owler being others.)
With its start as a side project of TechCrunch, the DNA of Crunchbase has always been in tech companies, and that is still very much the heart of the data that is in the system today. The kind of data you can see there includes basics on when a company was founded, who the founders are, who the current executive leadership is, how much money it has raised and from whom, what has been written about it in the media.
Then, via a number of third-party integrations with companies like Siftery and SimilarWeb, you can also get deeper data around competitors and more (most of which you can only see if you are a paying, not free, user). The company notes that it currently makes 3.9 billion annual updates to its data set — which people upload themselves in the old wiki style, or are manually or automatically uploaded, by way of some 4,000 data partnerships and syndication deals (these include with the likes of Yahoo! Finance, LinkedIn, Business Insider, and Amazon Alexa, which in turn make some 1.6 billion annual calls to the Crunchbase API).
What’s interesting to me is to see which direction Crunchbase will evolve in in the longer term. As the world has continued to grow into the bigger vision of “every company is a tech company, and every problem has a tech solution” it seems that Crunchbase’s own ambitions have also grown. In the company’s blog post and press release announcing the fundraise, it’s notable to me that technology, or any variation of it, isn’t mentioned even once in the text (only exception being the boilerplate description of Omers). That could point to how — as Crunchbase expands its horizons in terms of the kinds of information on businesses it can provide to users — it might see role for itself not unlike that of LinkedIn, spanning across multiple verticals and the communities of people (or in CB’s case, businesses) that have built around them.
“We are thrilled to partner with Jager and the talented leadership team at Crunchbase,” commented Michael Yang, Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “Crunchbase continues to show significant traction as the leader in research, information, and prospecting for private companies – an incredibly large and valuable market to address and service. By utilizing and collecting aggregated data, adding tools and apps, and continuing to customize each user experience, the lead generation and deal value Crunchbase can provide is unprecedented, and we are proud to support this next phase of growth.”
