Category: Tech news

In 2019, UnitedHealthcare’s health-services arm, Optum, rolled out a machine learning algorithm to 50 healthcare organizations. With the aid of the software, doctors and nurses were able to monitor patients with diabetes, heart disease and other chronic ailments, as well as help them manage their prescriptions and arrange doctor visits. Optum is now under investigation after research revealed that the algorithm (allegedly) recommends paying more attention to white patients than to sicker Black patients.

Today’s data and analytics leaders are charged with creating value with data. Given their skill set and purview, they are also in the organizationally unique position to be responsible for spearheading ethical data practices. Lacking an operationalizable, scalable and sustainable data ethics framework raises the risk of bad business practices, violations of stakeholder trust, damage to a brand’s reputation, regulatory investigation and lawsuits.

Here are four key practices that chief data officers/scientists and chief analytics officers (CDAOs) should employ when creating their own ethical data and business practice framework.

Identify an existing expert body within your organization to handle data risks

The CDAO must identify and execute on the economic opportunity for analytics, and with opportunity comes risk. Whether the use of data is internal — for instance, increasing customer retention or supply chain efficiencies — or built into customer-facing products and services, these leaders need to explicitly identify and mitigate risk of harm associated with the use of data.

A great way to begin to build ethical data practices is to look to existing groups, such as a data governance board, that already tackles questions of privacy, compliance and cyber-risk, to build a data ethics framework. Dovetailing an ethics framework with existing infrastructure increases the probability of successful and efficient adoption. Alternatively, if no such body exists, a new body should be created with relevant experts from within the organization. The data ethics governing body should be responsible for formalizing data ethics principles and operationalizing those principles for products or processes in development or already deployed.

Ensure that data collection and analysis are appropriately transparent and protect privacy

All analytics and AI projects require a data collection and analysis strategy. Ethical data collection must, at a minimum, include: securing informed consent when collecting data from people, ensuring legal compliance, such as adhering to GDPR, anonymizing personally identifiable information so that it cannot reasonably be reverse-engineered to reveal identities and protecting privacy.

Some of these standards, like privacy protection, do not necessarily have a hard and fast level that must be met. CDAOs need to assess the right balance between what is ethically wise and how their choices affect business outcomes. These standards must then be translated to the responsibilities of product managers who, in turn, must ensure that the front-line data collectors act according to those standards.

CDAOs also must take a stance on algorithmic ethics and transparency. For instance, should an AI-driven search function or recommender system strive for maximum predictive accuracy, providing a best guess as to what the user really wants? Is it ethical to micro-segment, limiting the results or recommendations to what other “similar people” have clicked on in the past? And is it ethical to include results or recommendations that are not, in fact, predictive, but profit-maximizing to some third party? How much algorithmic transparency is appropriate, and how much do users care? A strong ethical blueprint requires tackling these issues systematically and deliberately, rather than pushing these decisions down to individual data scientists and tech developers that lack the training and experience to make these decisions.

Anticipate – and avoid – inequitable outcomes

Division and product managers need guidance on how to anticipate inequitable and biased outcomes. Inequalities and biases can arise due simply to data collection imbalances — for instance, a facial recognition tool that has been trained on 100,000 male faces and 5,000 female faces will likely be differently effective by gender. CDAOs must help ensure balanced and representative data sets.

Other biases are less obvious, but just as important. In 2019, Apple Card and Goldman Sachs were accused of gender bias when extending higher credit lines to men than women. Though Goldman Sachs maintained that creditworthiness — not gender — was the driving factor in credit decisions, the fact that women have historically had fewer opportunities to build credit likely meant that the algorithm favored men.

To mitigate inequities, CDAOs must help tech developers and product managers alike navigate what it means to be fair. While computer science literature offers myriad metrics and definitions of fairness, developers cannot reasonably choose one in the absence of collaborations with the business managers and external experts who can offer deep contextual understanding of how data will eventually be used. Once standards for fairness are chosen, they must also be effectively communicated to data collectors to ensure adherence.

Align organizational structure with the process for identifying ethical risk

CDAOs often build analytics capacity in one of two ways: via a center of excellence, in service to an entire organization, or a more distributed model, with data scientists and analytics investments committed to specific functional areas, such as marketing, finance or operations. Regardless of organizational structure, the processes and rubrics for identifying ethical risk must be clearly communicated and appropriately incentivized.

Key steps include:

• Clearly establishing accountability by creating linkages from the data ethics body to departments and teams. This can be done by having each department or team designate its own “ethics champion” to monitor ethics issues. Champions need to be able to elevate concerns to the data ethics body, which can advise on mitigation strategies, such as augmenting existing data, improving transparency or creating a new objective function.
• Ensuring consistent definitions and processes across teams through education and training around data and AI ethics.
• Broadening teams’ perspectives on how to identify and remediate ethical problems by facilitating collaborations across internal teams and sharing examples and research from other domains.
• Creating incentives — financial or other recognitions — to build a culture that values the identification and mitigation of ethical risk.

CDAOs are charged with the strategic use and deployment of data to drive revenue with new products and to create greater internal consistencies. Too many business and data leaders today attempt to “be ethical” by simply weighing the pros and cons of decisions as they arise. This short-sighted view creates unnecessary reputational, financial and organizational risk. Just as a strategic approach to data requires a data governance program, good data governance requires an ethics program. Simply put, good data governance is ethical data governance.

Helping Americans get their 40 winks has never been more necessary as the country faces what some health experts have called a sleep epidemic, and Snoop Dogg’s cannabis-focused firm Casa Verde Capital wants to help.

The firm is leading a $9.5 million investment into a company called Proper, which is launching with a combination of sleep coaching and supplements, pitching a “holistic” sleep health solution.

One-third of U.S. adults don’t get enough sleep according to Proper’s estimates, and the company’s chief executive, Nancy Ramamurthi, says that the COVID-19 epidemic has only made the problem worse.

“Proper aims to help solve what the CDC has identified as a public health crisis — insufficient sleep — with a truly more holistic and personalized solution,” said Ramamurthi, founder and CEO of Proper, in a statement. “Proper has combined the best of natural, safe, evidence-based sleep supplements with expert behavioral coaching, which consumers have not traditionally been able to access. Now, thanks to the increasing popularity of telehealth, sleep coaching can be delivered online.”

The sleep coaching services from Proper are provided by board-certified health and wellness coaches under the guidance of a clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine specialist, according to a statement from the company.

Ramamurthi said that clinical validation is a core component of the company’s business. Indeed, the company is currently running its formulations through a clinical trial to prove their efficacy. It’s an additional step that the company doesn’t need to take, she said, because the supplements have all been studied with clinical trials supporting the use of the ingredients as treatments for sleep therapy. “That’s in addition to them being used for thousands of years,” said Ramamurthi.

Proper was incubated within the consumer health venture studio Redesign Health and will use the new capital from investors led by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde to boost its sales and marketing efforts and continue its research and development activities.

While sleep aids may seem like a strange market for a cannabis-focused investment firm, Casa Verde partner Karan Wadhera says it’s a highly strategic investment for the firm.

“[Cannabis] is an input as well and its use case will go beyond how people think of cannabis stigmatically,” Wadhera said. “At its core, [Proper] is a company that’s helping us target this sleep epidemic. We think CBD and cannabis at large can play a big role in addressing that in a way that traditional products haven’t been able to.”

The investment in Proper, then, points to a maturation of the cannabis industry, as investors look at the various chemical components of the cannabis plant and try to tease out a broader range of health and wellness applications. “We are starting to shift how we think about the business. It doesn’t have to be a core, specific cannabis product,” Wadhera said. 

Image Credits: Proper

Ramamurthi says that her company will be exploring applications for cannabinoids in its supplements later. “As we continue our product development process one of the things we are looking at is CBD,” she said. “CBD is one of the more effective ingredients at reducing stress and anxiety, and stress and anxiety are one of the main reasons why people can’t get to sleep.”

Proper’s studies are supported by a scientific advisory board that includes Dr. Adam Perlman, the director of integrative health and well-being at the Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Allison Siebern, a clinical psychologist and board-certified sleep medicine specialist at the VA Medical Center in North Carolina.

There’s a reason why sleep is so poorly understood and ignored as a health issue in America. Around 90% of primary care physicians rate their understanding of sleep’s impact on the body as “poor to fair” and there’s only one board-certified sleep specialist for every 43,000 Americans, according to Proper’s data.

Customers who sign up for Proper’s service can select one of five sleep formulations available for $39.99 per bottle or for a subscription with a 10% discount. New users also get a free 30-minute consultation with a Proper sleep coach, the company said.

The five versions of Proper’s sleep products include a core sleep product made from GABA, valerian root extract, rafuma leaf extract, and ashwagandha root and leaf extract; a sleep and restore product that includes melatonin; a calming pill with L-theanine added to the core sleep product; a clarity product that includes concentrated grape extracts; and, finally, an immunity product with added zinc, vitamin C, B6 and D.

On day one of TechCrunch’s Early Stage virtual conference, Ali Partovi joined us to discuss best practices for startups looking to hire engineers.

It’s a subject that’s near and dear to his heart: Partovi is co-founder and CEO of Neo, a venture aimed at including young engineers in a community alongside seasoned industry vets. The fund includes top executives from a slew of different industry titans, including Amazon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Stripe.

Partovi is probably best known in the Valley for co-founding Code.org with twin brother, Hadi. The nonprofit launched in 2013 with a high-profile video featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey, along with a mission to make coding education more accessible to the masses.

It was a two-summer internship at Microsoft while studying at Harvard that gave Partovi an entrée into the world of tech. And while it was clearly a formative experience for the college student, he advises against prospective startup founders looking to large corporations as career launch pads.

“I spend a lot of time mentoring college students, that’s a big part of what I do at Neo,” Partovi said.

“And for anyone who wants to be a founder of a company, there’s a spectrum, from giant companies like Microsoft or Google to early-stage startups. And I would say, find the smallest point on that spectrum that you’re comfortable with, and start your career there. Maybe that’s a 100-person company or maybe for you, it’s a 500-person company. But if you start at Microsoft, it’ll be a long time before you feel comfortable doing your own startup. The skills you gain at a giant company are very valuable for getting promoted and succeeding in giant companies. They’re not often as translatable to being your own founder.”

Rivian has started to run a pilot production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, as the electric vehicle startup prepares to bring its pickup truck and SUV to market in summer 2021.

In an email sent to prospective customers, Rivian said deliveries of its R1T electric pickup truck will begin in June 2021. Deliveries of the R1S electric SUV will start in August 2021.

Rivian said in May that deliveries of the R1T and R1S would be pushed to 2021. It wasn’t clear — until today’s email — exactly when deliveries would begin.

Running a pilot production line is a critical step necessary to root out potential problems ahead of a full production launch. The two vehicles were supposed to come to market at the end of 2020. That timeline was extended to 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Rivian to suspend construction work on the factory, a former Mitsubishi plant that the company acquired in 2017. The factory was where Mitsubishi in a joint venture with Chrysler Corporation called Diamond-Star Motors produced the Mitsubishi Eclipse, Plymouth Laser and Dodge Avenger, among others.

The factory will produce its R1T and R1S electric vehicles for consumers, as well as 100,000 delivery vans for Amazon. Rivian has said it is still on track to begin deliveries of electric vans built for Amazon in early 2021. About 10,000 of these electric vans will be on the road as early as 2022, and all 100,000 vehicles will be on the road by 2030, Amazon previously said.

European data watchdogs have issued updated guidance in the wake of last week’s landmark ruling striking down a flagship transatlantic data transfer mechanism called Privacy Shield.

In an FAQ on the Schrems II judgement, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) warns there will be no regulatory grace period.

The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield is dead, and any companies still relying on it to authorize transfers of EU citizens’ personal data are doing so illegally is the top-line message.

“Transfers on the basis of this legal framework are illegal,” warns the EDPB baldly. Entities that wish to keep on transferring personal data to the U.S. need to use an alternative mechanism — but must first determine whether they can meet the legal requirement to protect the data from U.S. surveillance.

What alternatives are there? Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) were not invalidated by the CJEU ruling. Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) are also still technically available.

But in both cases, would-be data exporters must conduct an upfront analysis to ascertain whether they can in fact legally use these tools to move data in their specific context.

Anyone who is already using SCCs for the transfer of EU citizens’ data to the U.S. (hi, Facebook!) isn’t exempt from carrying out an assessment — and needs to inform the relevant supervisory authority if they intend to keep using the mechanism.

The rub here for U.S. transfers is that the CJEU judges invalidated Privacy Shield on the grounds that U.S. surveillance laws fundamentally clash with EU privacy rights. So, in other words, Houston, you have a privacy problem…

“The Court found that U.S. law (i.e., Section 702 FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] and EO [Executive Order] 12333) does not ensure an essentially equivalent level of protection,” warns the EDPB in answer to the (expected) frequently asked question: “I am using SCCs with a data importer in the U.S., what should I do?”

“Whether or not you can transfer personal data on the basis of SCCs will depend on the result of your assessment, taking into account the circumstances of the transfers, and supplementary measures you could put in place.”

The ability to use SCCs to transfer data to the U.S. hinges on a data controller being able to offer a legal guarantee that “U.S. law does not impinge on the adequate level of protection” for the transferred data.

If an EU-U.S. data exporter can’t be confident of that, they are required to pull the plug on the data transfer. No ifs, no buts.

Those who believe they can offer a legal guarantee of “appropriate safeguards” — and thus intend to keep transferring data to the U.S. via SCC — must notify the relevant data watchdog. So there’s no option to carry on “as normal” without informing the regulator. 

It’s the same story with BCRs — on which the EDPB notes: “Given the judgment of the Court, which invalidated the Privacy Shield because of the degree of interference created by the law of the U.S. with the fundamental rights of persons whose data are transferred to that third country, and the fact that the Privacy Shield was also designed to bring guarantees to data transferred with other tools such as BCRs, the Court’s assessment applies as well in the context of BCRs, since U.S. law will also have primacy over this tool.”

So, again, a case by case assessment is required to figure out whether you can be legally confident in offering the required level of protection.

Dave Franco’s directorial debut is a lean thriller about a home share from hell.

Have you ever taken something apart, like a clock or a motor?

The method is particularly useful when it comes to learning how things work — or how they don’t, in some cases.

During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, two venture capitalists took pitch decks and evaluated them with a critical eye on content, presentation and overall messaging. If you missed it the first time through, watch it below in its entirety.

The session was a blast. This was the first time we’ve hosted this event, but we’re working on bringing this session to TechCrunch’s main event, Disrupt, this September.

Accel’s Amy Saper and Bessemer’s Talia Goldberg gave great advice as we clicked through each deck. First impressions are everything, and pitch decks are often the first glimpse of companies by potential investors and business partners. It’s critical that these decks properly present and illustrate in a concise and effective manner the goals and potential of a company.

Whether you’re an early-stage startup founder, investor, enthusiast or another integral member of the community, you can’t afford to miss Disrupt 2020 — THE tech conference at the epicenter of the startup ecosystem. Here’s something else you can’t afford to miss — early-bird pricing. Buy your pass before July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT and you’ll save up to $300.

The all-virtual Disrupt, which takes place September 14 -18, may look and feel a bit different, but there’s nothing virtual about the programming quality, opportunities for growth and essential connections you can make to drive your business forward.

Your all-access pass lets you hear from an extraordinary lineup of tech founders, investors, icons and other leading experts across all Disrupt stages. Like interviews and panel discussions? TechCrunch editors always look past the hype to ask the hard questions. Here are just a few of the folks who will join us onstage:

• Finding the chocolate to your peanut butter has never been more challenging, and we can’t wait to hear Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd’s take on the pandemic’s effect on the future of dating apps.
• Conductor CEO Seth Besmertnik, Driver’s Seat CEO Hays Witt and Aniyia Williams of Black & Brown Founders and Zebras Unite have all taken a non-traditional route to success. We’ll talk with them about how they built companies that prioritize profits, users and employees while putting VCs last.

Check out the Extra Crunch Stage, where you’ll find information on topics that every early-stage founder needs to ace — like how to craft a killer pitch deck, how to pivot in a crisis or how to build a sales team. These are interactive sessions led by experts in marketing, business development and investing, and you’ll come away with actionable tips and tricks that you can apply to your business.

Of course, there’s the always-epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition, hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley and world-class networking. We can tell you it’s great, but here’s what two attendees — one founder and one investor — say about why they value the Disrupt experience:

“Disrupt has everything early stage founders need — from advice on raising money and how to scale to exposure and brand recognition. We connected with people we never would have met, including other founders going through the same pain points.” — Joel Neidig, founder of SIMBA Chain.

“Building relationships with early-stage startup founders is essential in my business. Disrupt draws that core group from across a wide range of industries, and the ability to easily network and connect with them is a huge benefit.” — Daniel Lloreda, general partner at H20 Capital Innovation.

Your Disrupt value-add starts when you buy an early-bird pass and save up to $300. The offer expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT, and that’s a deadline you can’t afford to miss.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Fintech startup Revolut just announced that it has raised $80 million as part of its Series D round that it announced in February. The new influx of funding comes from TSG Consumer Partners.

In February, Revolut raised a $500 million led by TCV at a $5.5 billion valuation. Today’s new funding extends that funding round to $580 million — the company says the valuation remains the same.

If you’re not familiar with Revolut, the company is building a financial service to replace traditional bank accounts. You can open an account from an app in just a few minutes. You can then receive, send and spend money from the app or use a debit card. Revolut also lets you exchange currencies.

The startup expanded beyond that simple feature set and now wants to become a financial hub, a super app for all things related to money. For instance, you can insure your phone, get a travel medical insurance package, buy cryptocurrencies, buy shares, donate to charities and save money from Revolut.

The company says it’ll use the investment to add new features in the U.S. and roll out banking operations across Europe — you can expect local banking details in multiple European countries. Eventually, Revolut also plans to offer credit products across Europe.

In addition to that, Revolut is working on a subscription management tool. It lets you see all your active subscriptions, cancel them from Revolut and receive alerts when a free trial ends.

There are now 12 million registered users on Revolut.

Online shopping service Instacart says reused passwords are to blame for a recent spate of account breaches, which saw personal data belonging to hundreds of thousands of Instacart customers stolen and put up for sale on the dark web.

The company published a statement late on Thursday saying its investigation showed that Instacart “was not compromised or breached,” but pointed to credential stuffing, where hackers take lists of usernames and passwords stolen from other breached sites and brute-force their way into other accounts.

“In this instance, it appears that third-party bad actors were able to use usernames and passwords that were compromised in previous data breaches of other websites and apps to login to some Instacart accounts,” the statement reads.

The statement comes after BuzzFeed News reported that data on more than 270,000 user accounts was for sale on the dark web, including the account user’s name, address, the last four digits of their credit card, and their order histories from as recently as this week.

Instacart said that the stolen data represents a fraction of the “millions” of Instacart’s customers across the U.S. and Canada, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News.

But who’s really to blame here: the customers for reusing passwords, or the company for not doing more to protect against password reuse?

Granted, it’s a bit of both. Any internet user should use a unique password on each website, and install a password manager to remember them for you wherever you go. That means if hackers make off with one of your passwords, they can’t break into all of your accounts. You should also enable two-factor authentication wherever possible to prevent hackers from breaking into your online accounts, even if they have your password. By sending a code to your phone — either by text message or an app — it adds a second layer of protection for your online accounts.

But Instacart cannot shift all the blame onto its users. Instacart still does not support two-factor authentication, which — if customers had enabled — would have prevented the account hacks to begin with. When we checked, there was no option to enable two-factor on an Instacart account, and no mention anywhere on Instacart’s site that it supports the security feature.

Data published by Google last year shows even the most basic two-factor can prevent the vast majority of automated credential stuffing attacks.

We asked the company if it plans to roll out two-factor to its users. When reached, Instacart spokesperson Lyndsey Grubbs would not comment on the record beyond pointing to Instacart’s already published statement.

Instacart claims security is a “top priority,” and that it has a “dedicated security team, as well as multiple layers of security measures, focused on protecting the integrity of all customer accounts and data.”

But without giving users basic security features like two-factor, Instacart users can barely protect their own accounts, let alone expect Instacart to do it for them.

The manufacturer of a vegan collagen, Geltor, has raised a new round of financing — $90 million, according to people familiar with the company.

It’s another sign of the newfound viability of sustainability and cell-based, vegetarian replacements for animal products.

Sustainable bio-products, whether plant-based, genetically modified or cell-cultured, are having a big year. In the month of July alone, companies developing sustainable alternatives to animal agriculture and the industry’s byproducts have announced or closed on investments totaling $335 million in just three companies. Those companies include Geltor, The Not Company and Perfect Day.

Geltor’s chief executive Alexander Lorestani declined to comment on the new round, and sources did not disclose who the lead investor was.

The company had previously raised capital from SOS Ventures, IndieBio, Fifty Years, Cultivian Sandbox Ventures, Starlight Ventures, New Crop Capital, Baruch Future Ventures and FTW Ventures, according to information in Crunchbase.

In November, TechCrunch reported that the company was in looking for at least $50 million in new financing, but could raise as much as $100 million in the new round.

“Geltor’s production method is vastly more sustainable and eliminates the need for animal cruelty, but the reason companies in the cosmetics and food industries are clamoring for their products is because Geltor allows them to achieve function they simply can’t get from animal-derived gelatin and collagen,” said one person familiar with the company and its technology. 

Worldwide, the collagen market is expected to reach $7.5 billion by 2027 according to data from the market research firm, Grand View Research. Another report from Grand View put the size of the gelatin market at another $6.7 billion over the same period.

Geltor’s aim is to make these additives — and other animal-derived proteins — cheaply, efficiently and animal-free.

Much of the cosmetics, skin care and food business is shaped by animal byproducts. Lanolin is made from wool grease, squaline is made from shark liver oil and gelatin is made from the bones, tendons and ligaments of cows and pigs. Geltor replaces all of that with a cell-derived protein brewed in a fermenter like beer.

The company’s founders, Alex Lorestani and chief technology officer Nick Ouzounov, first met as graduate students at Princeton and began working on their company in 2015.

As Lorestani told Forbes in a 2019 article, Ouzounov would always approach him about new ideas for companies. After graduation the two men relocated to Silicon Valley and were accepted into the IndieBio accelerator.

Geltor began as a manufacturer of gelatin, a food additive used in everything from marshmallows to Jell-O, but quickly expanded into collagen for beauty products and dietary supplements. The company is already working with Gelita, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of collagen.

The funding for companies like Geltor and Perfect Day show that industrial biology is having a moment. There are billions of dollars of value to be unlocked in the re-engineering of cell functions, and proteins are just one application.

For investors looking at new bio-products, the future is very much alive.

Netflix’s German science fiction series stuck the landing in its third and final season.

For anyone interested in the contested question of how much ‘value’ — or, well, how little — publishers derive from the privacy-hostile practice of tracking web users to behaviorally target them with ads, pro-privacy browser Brave has published some interesting data, obtained (with permission) from the Netherland’s public broadcaster, NPO.

The data shows the NPO grew ad revenue after ditching trackers to target ads in the first half of this year — and did so despite the coronavirus pandemic landing in March and dealing a heavy blow to digital advertising globally (contributing, for example, to Twitter reporting Q2 ad revenues down nearly a quarter).

The context here is that in January the broadcaster switched to serving contextual ads across its various websites, where it has an online video audience of 7.1 million per month, and display reach of 5.8 million per month.

Brave has just published an analysis of six months’ worth of data which shows NPO’s ad revenue increased every month over this period. Year-over-year increases after the broadcaster unplugged the usual morass of background adtech that makes surveillance capitalism ‘function’ are as follows:

• January: 62%; February 79%; March 27%; April 9%; May 17%; June 17%;

Earlier this month Brave published five months’ worth of the NPO ad revenue data. So this is actually an update on an earlier blog post on the topic. The updated figures from Ster, the NPO’s ad sales house, slightly amend the earlier amounts, revising the reported figures further upwards. So, in short, non-tracking ad revenue bump has been sustained for half a year. Even amid a pandemic.

Now the idea that switching from behavioral to contextual targeting can lead to revenue growth is not a narrative you’ll hear from the ad tracking industry and its big tech backers. Aka the platform giants whose grip on the Internet’s attention economy and the digital infrastructure used for buying and selling targeted ads has helped them to huge profits over the past half decade or so (even as publisher revenues have largely stagnated or declined during this boom period for digital ad spending).

The adtech industry prefers to chainlink tracking and targeting to ad revenue — claiming publisher revenues would tank if content producers were forced to abandon their reader surveillance systems. (Here’s Google’s VP of ad platforms, last year, telling AdExchanger that the impact of tracker blocking on publishers’ programmatic ad revenues could cut CPMs in half, for example.)

Yet it’s not the first time there’s been a report of (surprise!) publisher uplift after ditching ad trackers.

Last year Digiday reported that the New York Times saw its ad revenue rise in Europe after it switched off creepy ads ahead of a major regional regulatory update, shifting over to contextual and geographical targeting.

The NYT does have a certain level of brand cache which not every publisher can claim. Hence the tracking industry counterclaims that its experience isn’t one that can be widely replicated by publishers. So the NPO data is additionally interesting in that it shows revenue uplift for a public broadcaster even across websites that aren’t dominant in their particular category, per Brave’s analysis.

Here’s its chief policy & industry relations officer, Dr Johnny Ryan, who writes:

NPO and its sales house, Ster, invested in contextual targeting and testing, and produced vast sales increases even with sites that do not appear to dominate their categories. This may be a tribute to Ster’s ability to sell inventory across NPO’s media group as a collective, but this benefit would have applied in 2019 and does not account for the revenue jump in 2020. A publisher does not therefore need to have market dominance to abandon 3rd party tracking and reproduce NPO’s vast revenue increase.

And here’s Ryan’s take on why “legitimate” (i.e. non junk/clickbait) publishers of all sizes should be able to follow the NPO’s example:

Although it is a national broadcast group, NPO websites do not dominate the web traffic rankings in the Netherlands. Only one of NPO’s properties (Nos.nl) ranks in the top 5 in its category in the Netherlands, according to Similar Web. None of the other NPO properties are in the Netherland’s top 100. The other NPO websites for which Similar Web provides a traffic rank estimation (versus other websites in the Netherlands) range from 180th to 5,040th most popular in the Netherlands. NPO properties’ popularity or market position in each content category are not correlated with increases in impressions sold. Country site rank, category site rank, and numbers of page views, vary widely between the properties, whereas the increases in impression sold are all above 83%, with one explicable exception [due to technical difficulties over the tracked period which prevented ads being served against one of its most popular programs].

Brave has its own commercial iron in the fire here, of course, given its approach to monetizing user eyeballs aligns with an anti-tracking marketplace ethos. But that hardly takes away from the NPO’s experience of — surprise! — revenue growth from ditching creepy ads.

Joost Negenman, NPO’s privacy officer, told TechCrunch they had certainly not expected to see ad revenue uplift from making the switch. The decision to move to contextual ads was made mid last year, as a result of the public broadcaster becoming “convinced” the programmatic targeting ad system it was using wasn’t compatible with its “public task”, as he tells it.

“We expected a rather dramatic drop in revenue,” says Negenman, noting that at that time the NPO was only getting a consent rate from users of around 10% for the ad cookies Ster needed for its programmatic ad system — down from 75%+ prior to GDPR (“probably” because its Cookie Consent Module at the time had been based on “implicit instead of explicit consent”; whereas GDPR mandates for consent to be legally valid it must be specific, informed and freely given).

“We also expected a drop because advertisers could completely ignore us when NPO and Ster turned away from this market adtech standard together, at a time when there was no sophisticated alternative in place,” he continues. “This fortunate misjudgment on our side was also fuelled by the strong belief (and preaches) in programmatic ad-solutions by online marketeers and companies.”

Negenman attributes the surprise revenue bounty from selling contextual ads to a couple of factors: Namely the “A-brand” pull of NPO and its affiliate broadcasters, meaning advertisers still wanted to be able to reach their users. And, well, to having the pro-privacy zeitgeist on its side.

“We’re all aware of the growing scrutiny on the adtech business, no explanation needed!” he says.

It’s worth noting the NPO’s switch to contextual ads did require some investment to pull off. The publisher shelled out for technology to enable contextual targeting across its web properties — such as building out descriptive metadata to enable more granular contextual targeting on video content. And the level of investment required to achieve similarly sophisticated contextual ad targeting might not be available to every publisher.

Yet the sustained revenue bump NPO experienced post-switch means it very quickly earned back what it spent — so for publishers that can afford to invest up front in transitioning away from tracking it looks like a very compelling case study.

“It paid for itself within a month or so!” confirms Negenman. “Considering all the money Ster didn’t have to share with Google and other in-betweens. From 1 advertisement Euro, 1 Euro goes to Ster!”

Though he also notes the broadcaster was helped by Dutch law placing an obligation on it to have subtitles for over 90% of its assets — meaning some of the leg work to build out contextual targeting had already been done.

“Subtitles data of course provides valuable descriptive metadata. So those tools where already in place,” he says. “But beside subtitles — that are nowadays easier to automate — standard program information like (sub)genre, titles of actors are of great value as well to add context on a video asset.”

Brave’s Ryan posits that the role of NPO’s sales house is also important to its success with contextual ads. “Smaller publishers may benefit from engaging with reputable sales houses that can aggregate supply as Ster does for NPO’s various properties,” he suggests. “Publishers of all sizes will benefit according to their reputations — unless advertisers and agencies purchase from sales houses with poor reputations.”

Asked whether he believes the switch would work for all publishers, Negenman does not go that far. “For all A-brands I definitely see this approach working, also news outlets have the perfect (meta)data needed to feed such a system,” he says, arguing there’s a place in the market for both contextual and targeted ads.

“Not all online advertising is the same,” he argues. “A shoe annoyingly following you online is something other than creating (A-)brand awareness. Perhaps the contextual system can start by creating privacy friendly ‘lagoons’ where a person is not tracked or followed by a shoe. There the system gets time to prove its worth in revenue and respect for its audience.”

“For other public broadcasters I believe they have more or less an (moral) obligation to at least start testing contextual ads,” he adds. “The adtech system’s use of personal and behavioral data has become so un-explainable that the GDPR information obligation is almost impossible to meet.”

As we’ve said before, the evidence of viable alternatives to privacy-torching surveillance capitalism is stacking up — even as harms linked to adtech platforms’ exploitation of people’s information keep piling up.

And while contextual ads may not sum to a revenue boom for every type of publisher, the notion that it’s tracking or nothing is clearly bogus.

(You could also make a pretty compelling case that abusive exploitation of people’s data that sustains low grade publishing is not at all a net societal good and so supporting a system that supports bottom feeding clickbait (and massive levels of ad fraud) is simply bad for everyone — well, other than the bottom feeders… )

Ryan goes so far as to call conventional adtech “a cancer eating at the heart of legitimate publishers”. And having worked inside the beast he’s castigating, via an earlier stint at anti-ad-blocking adtech company called PageFair, his critique is all the more hard hitting.

He’s used his insider knowledge to file a number of complaints with European regulators — most notably against the real-time bidding (RTB) practice programmatic advertising can rely on, drawing in vast quantities of Internet users’ personal information and scattershotting it back out again.

He contends this high velocity trading of personal data can’t possibly be compliant with Europe’s data protection framework — which, conversely, mandates that people’s information be securely handled, not spread around like confetti. (Though he believes RTB can work fine if you strip out personal data and only use it for contextual ads.)

European data protection regulators agree there’s a ‘lawfulness’ problem with current adtech practices. But have so far sat on their hands rather than taking enforcement action, given how widespread the problem is.

(Interestingly, Negenman says the NPO investigated continuing using programmatic RTB but with personal data stripped out. Though, in the event, he says this idea never got past the production stage. “Personally I can imagine a compliant combination,” he notes, adding: “Most importantly, the personal data must not leave the trusted data partner [and be shared with] the advertisers.”)

Turning a tanker clearly takes time. But the more publishers that see not pushing creepy ads on their users as an opportunity to experiment with alternatives, the more chance there will be for the market to shift wholesale for privacy — a shift that can be a huge win for publishers and users alike, as the NPO experience illustrates. 

Competition regulators, meanwhile, are closing in on big (ad)tech’s market power — and the conflicts of interest that arise from the “vertically integrated chain of intermediaries” which work to funnel the lion’s share of digital ad spend into platform coffers. So it’s not hard to conceive of an intervention to force market reform by breaking up Google’s business empire — to separate the ‘ad’ bits from its other ‘tech’.

The self-interested forces that underpin surveillance capitalism made their fortunes when no one was really looking at how their methods exploit people’s data. Now, with many more eyes trained on them, they are operating on borrowed time. It’s no longer a question of whether change is coming. The sands are shifting, with platforms themselves now moving to limit access to third party tracking cookies.

Savvy publishers would do well to get out ahead of the next round of platform power moves — and skate to where the puck’s headed.

Scores of online learning startups have emerged in India in recent years to serve school-age students. More than 250 million students are enrolled across schools in urban and rural parts of the country.

Whether one is in kindergarten, or preparing to join a college to pursue an undergraduate course, there are several startups offering a plethora of courses at affordable price points to help these students get there.

Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu among other local startups today help tens of millions of students each year gain access to high-profile and established teachers and a repository of study material that many might not have been able to find in an offline setting.

These startups — and legacy educational institutions — are helping students chase some of the most aspirational jobs: careers in engineering and medicine.

Most of these students, however, will either end up not getting their dream job — or based on their skills and India’s growing unemployment figures, a job altogether.

There are about 400 million people in India, or roughly a third of the country’s population, who are confronting a fundamental challenge: Not able to speak English, and lacking other skills that could prove crucial when applying for a job.

Entri, a startup based in the Southern city of Kochi, is attempting to address this market. The three-year-old startup offers upskilling courses to help people excel at exams that would land them a job with state and federal governments. And it teaches them these courses in the language with which they are most comfortable.

Students who dropped out before high school to those who have already attained graduate-level degrees account for the vast majority of users of Entri .

The startup began its courses in Malayalam, a language spoken by about 50 million people in India and especially popular in South India, explained Mohammed Hisamuddin, co-founder and chief executive of Entri. It has since added its courses in several other languages, including Hindi, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil.

Over the years, Entri has also expanded its course catalog to help people pursuing other kinds of jobs, including those in the blue-collar category, replicating a model similar to that of San Francisco-headquartered Udemy .

The team at Kochi-based startup Entri. (Photo provided by Entri)

“We soon realized that only about 1.5 to 2% of the people who appear in these exams are able to make the shortlist,” he said. “These exams are very competitive, so many start to explore jobs in the private sector, sometimes even when they already have some low-profile job.”

The startup now offers more than 150 courses, including several languages, accounting and those that teach popular computer applications such as Microsoft Office. These pre-recorded video courses and quizzes run for 30 to 60 days.

“Starting with the 100 million people who apply for government jobs each year, Entri is expanding the universe of employable candidates by skilling people in their own language — as it should be,” said Arjun Malhotra, a partner at venture firm Good Capital . “It’s ridiculous that economic opportunities are bottlenecked because of the medium of learning. Skills bringing employability shouldn’t require people to be proficient in English.”

Hisamuddin said Entri has amassed more than 3 million users on its platform, up from 1.5 million early this year. About 90,000 of these users are paying subscribers. “We are adding close to 10,000 paying subscribers each month now,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch early this week.

Entri offers a portion of its courses in certain languages at no charge, but complete access requires a subscription. Paid subscriptions start as low as 300 Indian rupees a year ($4) and go as high as 10,000 Indian rupees ($133), said Hisamuddin. The most popular subscription tier costs 1,500 Indian rupees ($20).

The startup said this week that it had closed a $3.1 million Pre-Series A financing round, led by Good Capital. Hari TN, head of human resources at online grocery startup BigBasket, and HyperTrack founder Kashyap Deorah also participated in the round.

It plans to deploy the fresh capital into introducing 50 additional courses to its platform and reach more users. Hisamuddin said Entri’s revenues have surged 150% in the last three months and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has reached $2 million. He aims to scale Entri’s ARR to $5 million by this year.

Gaming has always been one of the world’s most massive niches, but as game-streaming and esports have drifted to the forefront of mainstream culture, it’s clear that there’s plenty of room left for the industry to expand. One harbinger of this shift has been the widespread adoption of esports leagues in high schools and colleges across the country, a movement that has pushed online gameplay as just another athletic program schools should be offering.

One of the central catalysts of this change has been Delane Parnell, whose company PlayVS has pushed school districts in the United States to embrace esports, all while courting venture capitalists to shower the startup with tens of millions in funding.

We’re amped to announce that Parnell is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt in September to discuss the future of esports competition and gaming’s continued mainstream drift.

Parnell started PlayVS in 2018, hoping to bring high schools into the fold of esports competitions. Through an exclusive partnership with the NFHS (the NCAA of high schools), PlayVS enables schools across America to build teams and compete against neighboring schools on its platform.

Last year, the company picked up a $50 million Series C, bringing their total funding to a whopping $96 million. With the COVID-19 pandemic threatening the future of in-person sporting events at school districts, esports leagues are likely to be less impacted, an outcome that could gather even more momentum for the company’s platform.