Category: Tech news

After gaming chat app startup Discord announced in August that they were building out a games store, today, they’ve detailed that they’ll be pursuing a very competitive 90/10 revenue split for self-published titles in 2019. In addition, the company revealed that they now have 200 million active users on their chat app, up from 130 million users in May.

The announcement follows a storefront launch from Epic Games last week with an 88/12 revenue split. Valve’s Steam store had typically offered a constant 70/30 revenue split for all developers regardless of the revenues they were pulling in. The company recently announced that Steam would give a more favorable split to devs pulling in more revenue.

Discord called up some of their thinking in a company blog post:

Why does it cost 30% to distribute games? Is this the only reason developers are building their own stores and launchers to distribute games? Turns out, it does not cost 30% to distribute games in 2018.

Steam’s efforts are largely focused on holding onto big developers, but indie devs now have to balance what advantages they’re earning by establishing their central home on a platform filled with tons of titles that’s also taking a more substantial cut.

This leaves some room for Discord to attract the self-publishing indies, though it’s still an uphill battle for the company that’s up against some big competitors.

Apple has signed a deal with DHX Media that will see the Canadian broadcaster producing new shows, specials and short films about Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang. That includes exclusive short-form content for Apple starring astronaut Snoopy, aimed at getting kids excited about STEM.

Peanuts was created by Charles Schulz, who wrote and illustrated the popular comic strip for five decades, starting in 1950. The characters moved to television in the 1960s with “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which was followed by a long list of specials. And they recently returned to the big screen in the computer animated “Peanuts Movie,” which grossed $246 million worldwide.

DHX acquired a controlling stake in Peanuts last year (the remaining 20 percent stake is still held by the Schulz family).

Apple, meanwhile, has been lining up lots of new, family-friendly content for its upcoming streaming service. That includes also enlisting Sesame Workshop to create original programming (not Sesame Street, which recently moved to HBO).

By the way, if you only know Peanuts secondhand, through Snoopy dolls or other merchandise, it’s worth revisiting the early strips (restored to print by Fantagraphics), which are among the finest you’ll ever read. There, you can fully appreciate Schulz’s art, as well as his ability to craft unforgettable jokes from Charlie Brown’s bleak outlook and constant heartbreak.

Facebook is restructuring its experimental hardware efforts and giving its moonshot projects a home within its AR/VR research division. The restructuring, reported by Business Insider (paywalled), didn’t result in any layoffs but did see some shifts of teams as the old Building 8 group rebranded to Portal and some projects moved to the former Oculus Research group (now, Facebook Reality Lab).

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the reorganization to Business Insider. TechCrunch has reached out to Facebook for further comment.

The Building 8 brand is dead but the big change seems to be Facebook moving its more headline-grabbing experiments further away from its nearly ready-for-production ideas.

With some of the more experimental hardware projects at Facebook — like a computer brain interface, “soft” robotics and a project to “hear” through a skin-worn device — moving to Facebook Reality Labs, it’s clear that the organization once centered around AR/VR technologies is seeing its scope expand to more distant-reaching technologies that aren’t vaguely ready for consumer products yet.

Meanwhile, the Portal group seems to be where some of Facebook’s more in-reach consumer hardware products are living, with the newly released video chat device serving as the foundation. The leader of Building 8, Rafa Camargo, who took over after the departure of Regina Dugan, is the VP of the Portal team now.

Meanwhile, Facebook Reality Labs is still led by Michael Abrash, who has long held a senior presence in the company’s AR/VR ambitions.

Having products like Portal that are already for sale fall under the same leadership as invasive brain chips research probably didn’t make a ton of organizational sense, especially when Facebook has already gone to lengths to separate projects focused on immediate product needs compared to ones that are more far-out in other areas of the company. Facebook’s hardware ambitions are nascent, but now that they have a product on shelves, it’s probably more clear that there are some completely different leadership needs and an organizational restructure makes sense.

Propel, maker of the Fresh EBT app for managing food stamps and other benefits, announced today that it has raised $12.8 million in Series A funding.

Fresh EBT (the EBT stands for the Electronics Transfer Benefit card, which is how food stamp participants receive their benefits) allows users to check their food stamp/SNAP balance and find stores that accept food stamps. Users can also track their spending. The app is free for consumers and government agencies — the company makes money through digital coupons and a job board.

Propel says Fresh EBT is now used by more than 1.5 million Americans each month, and that more than 30,000 people have applied for jobs this year that they discovered through the app. For example, the announcement quotes one user, Tracy B. from Fairland, Virginia — she described Fresh EBT as her “personal financial adviser,” and also said she used it to find discount zoo tickets, and even her current job.

When Propel raised its $4 million seed round last year, founder and CEO Jimmy Chen described his mission as building “a more user-friendly safety net.” He argued that there’s no conflict between Propel’s social mission and its structure as a for-profit business, a position he reiterated in today’s announcement.

“Our investors are world-class experts in their respective fields,” he said. “They share an understanding of the challenges of low-income Americans and a belief that Propel can build a massive business by fighting poverty.”

Those investors include Nyca Partners, which led the round. Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Omidyar Network, Alexa von Tobel and Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures also participated.

“It’s not hard to see the huge opportunity in building better financial services for low-income people,” said Nyca Managing Partner Hans Morris in a statement. “We just haven’t seen many companies in this space that have an opportunity to have such a large impact at massive scale. That’s why we’re so excited to invest in Propel.”

Amazon recently said Apple Music would find its way onto Amazon Echo devices sometime soon — and sure enough, it appears to be rolling out now.

To make Alexa work with Apple’s streaming service, you should just have to jump into the newly updated iOS/Android Alexa app and link up your account. You can find the option under Settings > Music.

Once done, commands like “Alexa, play music by Halsey on Apple Music” should work. Or, if you don’t want to have to say the “… on Apple Music” bit every time, you can just set Apple Music as the default service. If you don’t have a specific artist in mind, you an also request playlists or genres.

One catch: as 9to5mac points out, it appears this currently only works with Amazon Echo speakers, and not yet with third-party speakers (like the Sonos ONE or Polk’s Audio Command sounder) that happen to have Alexa-support built in.

Not a fan of Apple’s offering? Alexa also works with Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, Deezer and Amazon’s own Music service.

Using Google devices, rather than Amazon’s? Alas, still no word on if/when proper Apple Music support might come to Google Home.

Makes sense. Slytherin are known for their resourcefulness and ambition.

Almost 10 percent of people on the interwebs used at least one of the 25 worst passwords on SplashData’s annual list, which was released this week. And nearly three percent of you are still using “123456,” the worst password of the entire ranking.

The eighth annual list of worst passwords of the year is based on SplashData’s evaluation of more than 5 million passwords leaked on the internet. Most of the leaked passwords evaluated for the 2018 list were held by users in North America and Western Europe. Passwords leaked from hacks of adult websites were not included in the report, according to SplashData, which provides password management applications TeamsID, Gpass and SplashID.

This year revealed the same takeaway as previous ones: computer users continue to use the same predictable, easily guessable passwords. For instance, 2018 was the fifth consecutive year that “123456” and “password” retained their top two spots on the list. The following five top passwords on the list are simply numerical strings, the company said.

There were a few newcomers on the list. President Donald Trump debuted on this year’s list with “donald” showing up as the 23rd most frequently used password.

“Hackers have great success using celebrity names, terms from pop culture and sports, and simple keyboard patterns to break into accounts online because they know so many people are using those easy-to- remember combinations,” according to Morgan Slain, CEO of SplashData.

SplashData does offer some tips to protect your data, including the use of passphrases of 12 characters or more with mixed types of characters, using different passwords for each login, and protecting assets and personal identity by using a password manager to organize passwords, generate secure random passwords and automatically log into websites.

In recent months, pressure has been mounting for major tech firms to develop strong policies regarding facial recognition. Microsoft has helped lead the way on that front, promising to put in place stricter policies, calling for greater regulation and asking fellow companies to follow suit.

Hidden toward the end of a blog post about using artificial intelligence to benefit health clinics in Asia, Google SVP Kent Walker affirmed the company’s commitment not to sell facial recognition APIs. The executive cites concerns over how the technology could be abused.

“[F]acial recognition technology has benefits in areas like new assistive technologies and tools to help find missing persons, with more promising applications on the horizon,” Walker writes. “However, like many technologies with multiple uses, facial recognition merits careful consideration to ensure its use is aligned with our principles and values, and avoids abuse and harmful outcomes. We continue to work with many organizations to identify and address these challenges, and unlike some other companies, Google Cloud has chosen not to offer general-purpose facial recognition APIs before working through important technology and policy questions.”

In an interview this week, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed similar growing concerns around AI ethics. “I think tech has to realize it just can’t build it and then fix it,” he told The Washington Post. “I think that doesn’t work,” adding that artificial intelligence could ultimately prove “far more dangerous than nukes.”

The ACLU, which has offered sharp criticism over privacy and racial profiling concerns, lauded the statement. In the next paragraph, however, the company promised to continue to apply pressure on these large orgs.

“We will continue to put Google’s feet to the fire to make sure it doesn’t build or sell a face surveillance product that violates civil and human rights,” ACLU tech director Nicole Ozer said in a statement. “We also renew our call on Amazon and Microsoft to not provide dangerous face surveillance to the government. Companies have a responsibility to make sure their products can’t be used to attack communities and harm civil rights and liberties — it’s past time all companies own up to that responsibility.”

The organization has offered particularly sharp criticism against Amazon for its Rekognition software. This week, it also called out the company’s patent application for a smart doorbell that uses facial recognition to identify “suspicious” visitors.

Electric scooter and bike-share company Lime is not giving up on San Francisco. This afternoon, Lime plans to protest on the steps of SF City Hall to petition the city’s scooter selection process.

“We are calling the SFMTA to expand equitable transportation options throughout the City by allowing more choice and greater options, by requiring a scalable low-income program that ensures equal access to scooters and other mobility options, and by working with experienced operators with a proven track record of success,” Lime wrote in its petition. “The SFMTA scooter selection process resulted in an extremely small service area as well as an absence of robust equity options. If you are as frustrated as we are, come let your voice be heard.”

The SFMTA has previously said it was “confident” it picked the right companies. When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency selected Skip and Scoot as the only two electric scooter companies permitted to operate in the city, competitor Lime took legal steps to attempt to prevent Skip and Scoot from deploying. A San Francisco judge, however, promptly denied Lime’s request for a temporary restraining order.

Meanwhile, Lime had officially appealed the SFMTA’s decision. Other companies, including Spin and Uber’s JUMP, have also appealed the scooter selection process.

Earlier today, the SFMTA heard Lime’s case. It’s not clear how it went, but I’ve reached out to Lime and the SFMTA to learn more. Based on Lime’s actions, it seems as if it didn’t work out very well for the company.

Update 1:57PM PT: About 30 or so people showed up to Lime’s protest. It was relatively uneventful, but the gist is that Lime is seeking community support to petition the SFMTA and convince the agency to allow Lime to operate its electric scooters in the city.

When Kahoot, the startup that operates a popular platform for user-generated educational gaming, raised $15 million in October of this year, we mentioned that Disney had a stake in the company by way of the Disney Accelerator, and it had an option to become a larger shareholder if it exercised its warrants.

Now with some 60 million games on its platform, today Kahoot announced that this has come to pass: Disney is taking that option, working out to a four percent stake in the startup at a $376 million valuation, based on the current share price of 28 Norwegian kroner (shares of Kahoot are traded on the Norway OTC as an unlisted stock). It makes Disney’s stake in the app worth about $15 million, although the actual value of the warrants Disney is exercising is smaller than this.

Kahoot declined to comment for this story beyond the investment announcement posted on the exchange, but for some context, this is a nice bump up in Kahoot’s valuation from October, when it was at $300 million. Other sizeable and notable investors in the company include Microsoft and Nordic investor Northzone (which has backed Spotify and other significant startups out of the region).

On the part of Disney, it’s not clear yet whether its Kahoot stake will lead to more Disney content on the platform, or if this is more of an arm’s length financial backing. The two have already put Lucasfilm content on Kahoot and there may be more to come. The entertainment giant has made nearly 50 investments by way of its accelerator program. In some cases, it increases those to more significant holdings, as it has in the case of HQ Trivia, Sphero, Epic Games (the company behind Fortnite, a very different take on gaming compared to Kahoot), Samba TV and more.

Disney has been dabbling in both gaming and education as vehicles to market its many brands, and also as salient businesses of their own — no surprise, given that one primary focus for it has been on younger consumers and their needs and interests.

In some cases, it seems it may use strategic investments to do this, for example with Disney-themed nights on HQ Trivia. Interestingly, although it doesn’t appear that Disney invests in the Indian educational app Byju’s — which itself just raised $300 million — the educational app, which has been described as “Disneyesque,” teamed up with Disney in October to develop co-branded educational content, another sign of Disney’s interest in the field.

Kahoot has been around in one form or another since 2006 — originally as a gamified education concept called Lecture Quiz before launching as Kahoot in 2013 — but has seen a sharp rise in users in the last few years on the back of strong growth in the U.S. — benefiting from a wider trend of educators creating content on mediums and platforms that they know students already use and love.

Kahoot’s last reported user numbers come from January, when it said it had 70 million registrations, but its CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth told TechCrunch in October that it was on track to pass 100 million by this month. Kahoot didn’t release updated figures today, but my guess is that Kahoot has hit its target (maybe even passed it), and that is one reason Disney decided to exercise its investment option.

Kahoot is not your average gaming company: some games are created in-house, but the majority of them are user-generated — “Kahoots” in the company’s parlance — created by the people setting the learning tasks or those trying to create a more entertaining way of remembering or learning something. These, in turn, become games that potentially anyone can use to learn something (hence the name).

There have been about 60 million of these games created to date, a pretty massive amount considering this is educational content at the end of the day.

Kahoot has developed its business along two avenues, with games for K-12 students and games for business users, building training and other professional development in a wrapper of gamification to engage workers more in the content. 

In practice, about half the games in Kahoot’s catalogue are available to the public and half are private, with the split roughly following the company’s business model: games made for corporate purposes tend to be kept private, while the educational ones tend to be made publicly available. The business model also follows that split, with Kahoot’s business users accounting for the majority of its revenue, too.

Updated with more clarification on the investment.

Pokémon GO creator Niantic is raising a $200 million Series C at a valuation of $3.9 billion, according to a report from Katie Roof at the WSJ. The round is expected to be led by IVP with participation from Samsung and aXiomatic Gaming.

The upcoming raise would bring the company’s total funding to $425 million, according to Crunchbase. Niantic’s last round was raised at a $3 billion valuation.

TechCrunch has reached out to Niantic for comment.

The gaming startup, which has invested significantly in augmented reality technologies, is also behind titles such as its recently updated Ingress title and an upcoming Harry Potter mobile game. The company was founded as a startup within Google in 2010 and was spun out as its own entity in 2015, releasing its hit title Pokémon GO the next year.

The company is currently working on its next big augmented reality mobile title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, aiming to create a proper follow-up hit that can capture the excitement of its Pokémon title. The app’s success will likely be crucial to perceptions that Pokémon GO was more than a fluke breakout success. A release date has not yet been set for the title.

Although many of the milestones of the digital revolution have sprung directly from the research output of America’s colleges and universities, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, on the instructional side, American higher education has taken a laid-back approach. Sure, there are more courses in computer science, millions of students taking courses online and MIT just committed $1 billion to build a new college for AI. But a campus-visiting time-traveler from 25 or 50 years ago would find a very familiar setting — with the possible exception of students more comfortable staring at their devices than maintaining eye contact.

This college stasis may be even more surprising to visitors from the transformed workplace. Jobs that made no or marginal use of digital devices 10 years ago now tether workers to their machines as closely as today’s students are glued to their smartphones. Processes that involved paper are now entirely digital. And experience with relevant function- and industry-specific business software is required in job descriptions for many entry-level jobs.

This hit home a few weeks ago when speaking to an audience of 250 college and university officials. I asked which of their schools provide any meaningful coursework in Salesforce, the No. 1 SaaS platform in American business.

Not one hand went up.

There are many reasons for this. Few if any faculty have dedicated their careers to (or even get marginally excited about) equipping students with the skills they need to secure and succeed in their first jobs. No one’s losing their job (yet) over failure to help students get jobs. Another is the cost of teaching; with strong employer demand for these skills, finding and hiring capable faculty costs more than teaching non-technical subjects. Finally, there’s the rapid pace of change in technology, and the sense that any educational effort will be obsolete in a few years. (Of course, the reality of business software is quite different; foundational platforms like Salesforce have a long shelf life — 10-plus years and counting — and some platforms are expected to last for a generation.)

But the primary reason colleges aren’t educating students on the software they need to launch their careers is the notion that it’s unnecessary because millennials (and now Gen Zers) are “digital natives.”

The idea of digital natives isn’t new. It’s been around for decades: Kids have grown up with digital technologies and so are adept at all things digital. It’s certainly true that today’s college students are proficient with Netflix and Spotify and smartphones. But it’s equally true that the smartphones they’ve grown up with haven’t remotely prepared them to use office phones, let alone career-critical business software.

Eleanor Cooper, co-founder of Pathstream, a startup partnering with higher education institutions to provide business software training, notes that millennials and Gen Zers are “accustomed to Instagram-like platforms which are both intuitive and instantly gratifying. But without exception, we find the user experience of learning business software to be exactly the opposite: instant friction and delayed gratification. Students first face an often multi-hour series of technical steps just to get the software set up before they begin working through tedious button-clicking instructions, which are at best mind-numbing and at worst outdated and inaccurate for the current version of the software.”

In an article in The New Yorker last month, “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers,” Dr. Atul Gawande describes the challenge of implementing Epic, a SaaS platform for managing patient care: “recording and communicating our medical observations, sending prescriptions to a patient’s pharmacy, ordering tests and scans, viewing results, scheduling surgery, sending insurance bills.”

First, there’s 16 hours of mandatory training. Gawande “did fine with the initial exercises, like looking up patients’ names and emergency contacts. When it came to viewing test results, though, things got complicated. There was a column of thirteen tabs on the left side of my screen, crowded with nearly identical terms: ‘chart review,’ ‘results review,’ ‘review flowsheet.’ We hadn’t even started learning how to enter information, and the fields revealed by each tab came with their own tools and nuances.”

Business software is really hard, even for digital natives. Today’s students are accustomed to simple interfaces. But simple interfaces are possible only when the function is simple, like messaging or selecting video entertainment. Today’s leading business software platforms don’t just manage a single function. They manage hundreds, if not thousands.

Gawande references a book by IBM engineer Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, which sets forth a Darwinian theory of software evolution from a cool, easy-to-use program (“built by a few nerds for a few of their nerd friends” to perform a limited function), to a bigger program “product” that delivers more functionality to more people, to a “very uncool program system.” Gawande points to the example of Fluidity, a program written by a grad student to run simulations of small-scale fluid dynamics. Researchers loved it, and soon added code to perform new features. The software became more complex, harder to use and more restrictive.

And so beyond cumbersome interfaces, the second reason why business software is really hard is that it has become inextricably and tightly wound up with business processes. Salesforce consultants will tell you it’s easier to conform your business practices to Salesforce than to try to customize (or even configure) Salesforce to support the way you do business today. And that’s true for almost all business software. As Gawande notes, “as a program adapts and serves more people and more functions, it naturally requires tighter regulation. Software systems govern how we interact as groups, and that makes them unavoidably bureaucratic in nature.”

Software-defined business practices are increasingly standardized across functions and industries, and highly knowable. And because they’re knowable, hiring managers want to see candidates who know them. So it’s not just about educating students on software; inherent in preparing students on business software is equipping them with industry and/or job-function expertise. And that requires much more than 16 hours of training.

“Why can’t our work systems be like our smartphones — flexible, easy, customizable? The answer is that the two systems have different purposes,” Gawande explained. “Consumer technology is all about letting me be me. Technology for complex enterprises is about helping groups do what the members cannot easily do by themselves — work in coordination.”

The myth of the digital native is convenient for colleges and universities, because it allows them to stay focused on what faculty want to teach rather than what students actually need to learn. But it’s self-centered, superficial and silly. Rather than thinking about technology in terms of Netflix and smartphones, walk down the street and take a look at the software being utilized to manage your college’s admissions, financial aid and human resources functions. Indeed, 95 percent of your graduates will begin their careers working in places that look a lot more like this than like the faculty lounge. And that’s if they’re lucky. Otherwise they’ll begin their careers working in places that look a lot more like Starbucks.

In his article, Gawande notes that despite the many challenges of adapting to working (and living) on a business software platform, software is eating the world for a good reason: to improve outcomes for consumers. The Epic implementation should allow hospitals to scan records to identify patients who’ve been on opioids for more than three months in order to provide outreach and reduce risk of overdose, or to improve care for homeless patients by seeing that they’ve already had three negative TB tests and therefore don’t need to be isolated. “We think of this as a system for us and it’s not,” said the hospital system’s chief clinical officer. “It is for the patients.”

These improved outcomes are synonymous with the data analytics revolution — a revolution that has colleges and universities excited about new programs and increased enrollment. But all the additional data to improve these outcomes needs to be captured first. And that’s done with complex business software. So it’s unfair, or at least hypocritical, of colleges and universities to attempt to pick the fruit of big data without first sowing the seeds. And sowing the seeds entails a serious investment in preparing students with the technical and business process knowledge they’ll need to use the software that makes big data possible.

Climate change is real, and it’s impacting us right now. How much of it can be fixed by personal responsibility versus policy?

Pimcore, an open-source platform for data and customer experience management which has emerged out of Austria, has closed $3.5 million in a Series A funding led by German Auctus Capital Partners AG. The funding will be used for its U.S. expansion.

Pimcore is aimed at any channel, device or industry that wants to manage its digital data and customer experience. While there are several such companies on the market today, Pimcore claims to be an “out-of-the-box” solution and the only open-source platform out there, thus competing with more proprietary products from SAP or Informatica which typically run on licensing business models.

CEO of Pimcore, Dietmar Rietsch says: “Our primary goal is to disrupt traditional licensing business models as open-source adoption skyrockets in enterprises. This funding round gives us the resources and tools to be able to stand up to legacy players like SAP and Oracle, and to really transform the customer experience and data management spaces, especially in the U.S.”

Pimcore recently acquired the U.S.-based Pimcore Global Services and its whole outsourcing infrastructure in Delhi.

After being founded in 2013, it now has over 82,000 customers across 56 countries, including global enterprises such as Audi, Burger King, Continental and Intersport.

Goldex, a trading app that claims to power so-called “ethical pricing” for retail gold investments, says it has now raised more than £1 million ($1.25 million) in a pre-Series A round led by a group of angels and institutional investors.

Amongst those participating in the round are Prepaid Financial Services (a European payment card issuer); Gaël de Boissard, former Executive Board Member of Credit Suisse; Richard Balarkas, former president and CEO of Instinets; Nachi Muthu, former global head of IT trading technology at Credit Suisse; and Craig James, founder and CEO of Neopay.

Goldex was launched in late July this year. The company was founded by former City electronic trading pioneers from Credit Suisse and UBS, Sylvia Carrasco and Fernando Ripolles, who wanted to remove barriers to retail gold trading and address some of the questionable practices in the gold investment markets.

The U.K. app claims to discover the best price amongst all the gold dealers offering bids and offers within the Goldex platform. Sylvia Carrasco, CEO of Goldex, says the funding “has taken us a step closer to becoming the leading gold trading platform that is both ethical and fully transparent to consumers.”

Goldex is not alone in the space. Glint is a competitor, but it does not hold any physical gold — whereas Glint does — and Glint sets the price for buying and selling it.

Instead, Goldex routes all clients’ orders to the largest global peer-to-peer gold exchange in five international vaults (London, Zurich, New York, Toronto and Singapore). The company claims this ensures an average savings of 8-12 percent on the trades and attempts therefore to avoid price manipulation as well as improving transparency over charges.