Category: Tech news

The social media giant has assembled a team of geeks, spooks, hackers, and lawyers to prevent a repeat of the 2016 abuse and manipulation on its network.

Security researchers have discovered a new instance code associated with APT1, a notorious Chinese hacking group that disappeared in 2013.

A new lawsuit alleges that Facebook inflated its video viewership numbers more than previously reported, and then hid the mistake. And that has journalists steamed.

Crowdfunding projects often crash and burn. But Ember’s heated travel mug just keeps improving.

The Donbass region has been convulsed by civil war since 2014, yet many residents refuse to evacuate.

Helm hopes to make running your own private, encrypted server easy for everyone.

If you’re a gamer, or a pro looking for a MacBook alternative, this is the laptop for you.

Things have been pretty quiet on the Canary front. In January at CES, the New York-based smart security startup released a stripped-down version of it its flagship camera. Beyond the odd software updates here and there, however, we haven’t heard much. This morning, however, the company announced some pretty big changes coming from the top, down.

Smartfrog, a European IoT company, has invested $25 million in the startup, bringing its total funding up to $66 million.  With its investment, Smartfrog will also take a controlling interest.

That means some shakeups, up top. Smartfrog CEO Charles Fraenkl will retain the top spot at the combined companies, while Bob Stohrer, Canary’s CMO, will be put in charge of its New York-based operations. Former Canary CEO Adam Sager, meanwhile, will stay around in an advisory role, according to the company. 

“We are very excited about the opportunities that derive from joining forces. Our businesses are extremely complementary and will enable us to scale the business faster globally,“ Stohrer told TechCrunch.

From a strategic standpoint, the move gives Smartfrog a foothold in the States, while potentially affording Canary the ability to spread into the EU. The camera maker offered a pretty impressive product out of the gate, putting it at the forefront of smart home security.

A spokesperson for the companies told TechCrunch,

Globally, the smart home security market is at an inflection point, and as the industry becomes increasingly competitive with some of the world’s largest technology companies, Smartfrog and Canary joining forces enables both companies to better compete globally. Together the group will immediately become a formidable global provider of IoT services and SaaS solutions leveraging combined strengths. With artificial intelligence, machine learning initiatives, easy-to-use products and affordable prices, the group ensures continued consumer benefits and accelerated global growth.

Increased competition from the likes of Nest, Amazon-owned Ring and, most notably, Netgear’s Arlo, have, however, made for a far more competitive space.

“Canary´s achievements — in creating an award-winning smart home security solution and becoming one of the fastest-growing category leaders in US — is nothing short of impressive,” Fraenkl said in a statement. “By joining forces, the group will be well positioned in an increasingly competitive market.”

Canary will continue to function as an independent brand, moving forward.

Some tech companies might have a problem taking money from the Department of Defense, but Amazon isn’t one of them, as CEO Jeff Bezos made clear today at the Wired25 conference. Just last week, Google pulled out of the running for the Pentagon’s $10 billion, 10-year JEDI cloud contract, but Bezos suggested that he was happy to take the government’s money.

Bezos has been surprisingly quiet about the contract up until now, but his company has certainly attracted plenty of attention from the companies competing for the JEDI deal. Just last week IBM filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office claiming that the contract was stacked in favor one vendor. And while it didn’t name it directly, the clear implication was that company was the one owned by Bezos.

Last summer Oracle also filed a protest and also complained that they believed the government had set up the contract to favor Amazon, a charge spokesperson Heather Babb denied. “The JEDI Cloud final RFP reflects the unique and critical needs of DOD, employing the best practices of competitive pricing and security. No vendors have been pre-selected,” she said last month.

While competitors are clearly worried about Amazon, which has a substantial lead in the cloud infrastructure market, the company itself has kept quiet on the deal until now. Bezos set his company’s support in patriotic terms and one of leadership.

“Sometimes one of the jobs of the senior leadership team is to make the right decision, even when it’s unpopular. And if if big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble,” he said.

“I know everyone is conflicted about the current politics in this country, but this country is a gem,” he added.

While Google tried to frame its decision as taking a principled stand against misuse of technology by the government, Bezos chose another tack, stating that all technology can be used for good or ill. “Technologies are always two-sided. You know there are ways they can be misused as well as used, and this isn’t new,” Bezos told Wired25.

He’s not wrong of course, but it’s hard not to look at the size of the contract and see it as purely a business decision on his part. Amazon is as hot for that $10 billion contract as any of its competitors. What’s different in this talk is that Bezos made it sound like a purely patriotic decision, rather than economic one.

The Pentagon’s JEDI contract could have a value of up to $10 billion with a maximum length of 10 years. The contract is framed as a two year deal with two three-year options and a final one for two years. The DOD can opt out before exercising any of the options.

Bidding for the contract closed last Friday. The DOD is expected to choose the winning vendor next April.

At our one-day TC Sessions: AR/VR event in LA on October 18, we’ll be joined by Walt Disney Imagineering’s R&D Studio Executive Jon Snoddy.

We’re going to talk about how Disney is using augmented and virtual reality in their parks and other projects and how they’re coupling those technologies with physical spaces and robotics in ways that no other company is attempting. Disney has shipped a bunch of ambitious projects lately, like their robotic acrobats, a series of autonomous robots to add life to queues and attractions and a variety of different applications of AR.

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Final tickets are now on sale — book yours here and you’ll save 35 percent on general admission tickets. Student tickets are $45.

 

 

Only six months ago Barcelona-based TravelPerk bagged a $21 million Series B, off the back of strong momentum for a software as a service platform designed to take a Slack-like chunk out of the administrative tedium of arranging and expensing work trips.

Today the founders’ smiles are firmly back in place: TravelPerk has announced a $44 million Series C to keep stoking growth that’s seen it grow from around 20 customers two years ago to approaching 1,500 now. The business itself was only founded at the start of 2015.

Investors in the new round include Sweden’s Kinnevik, Russian billionaire and DST Global founder Yuri Milner and Tom Stafford, also of DST. Prior investors include the likes of Target Global, Felix Capital, Spark Capital, Sunstone, LocalGlobe and Amplo.

Commenting on the Series C in a statement, Kinnevik’s Chris Bischoff, said: “We are excited to invest in TravelPerk, a company that fits perfectly into our investment thesis of using technology to offer customers more and much better choice. Booking corporate travel is unnecessarily time-consuming, expensive and burdensome compared to leisure travel. Avi and team have capitalised on this opportunity to build the leading European challenger by focusing on a product-led solution, and we look forward to supporting their future growth.”

TravelPerk’s total funding to date now stands at almost $75 million. It’s not disclosing the valuation that its latest clutch of investors are stamping on its business but, with a bit of a chuckle, co-founder and CEO Avi Meir dubs it “very high.”

Gunning for growth — to West and East

TravelPerk contends that a $1.3 trillion market is ripe for disruption because legacy business travel booking platforms are both lacking in options and roundly hated for being slow and horrible to use. (Hi Concur!)

Helping business save time and money using a slick, consumer-style trip booking platform that both packs in options and makes business travelers feel good about the booking process (i.e. rather than valueless cogs in a soul-destroying corporate ROI machine) is the general idea — an idea that’s seemingly catching on fast.

And not just with the usual suspect, early adopter, startup dog food gobblers but pushing into the smaller end of the enterprise market too.

“We kind of stumbled on the realization that our platform works for bigger companies than we thought initially,” says Meir. “So the users used to be small, fast-growing tech companies, like GetYourGuide, Outfittery, TypeForm etc… They’re early adopters, they’re tech companies, they have no fear of trying out tech — even for such a mission-critical aspect of their business… But then we got pulled into bigger companies. We recently signed FarFetch for example.”

Other smaller-sized enterprises that have signed up include the likes of Adyen, B&W, Uber and Aesop.

Companies small and big are, seemingly, united in their hatred of legacy travel booking platforms — and feeling encouraged to check out TravelPerk’s alternative, thanks to the SaaS being free to use and free from the usual contract lock ins.

TravelPerk’s freemium business model is based on taking affiliate commissions on bookings. Down the road, it also has its eye on generating a data-based revenue stream via paid-tier trip analytics.

Currently it reports booking revenues growing at 700 percent year on year. And Meir previously told us it’s on course to do $100 million GMV this year — which he confirms continues to be the case.

It also says it’s on track to complete bookings for one million travelers by next year. And it claims to be the fastest growing software as a service company in Europe, a region which remains its core market focus — though the new funding will be put toward market expansion.

And there is at least the possibility, according to Meir, that TravelPerk could actively expand outside Europe within the next 12 months.

“We definitely are looking at expansion outside of Europe as well. I don’t know yet if it’s going to be first U.S. — West or East — because there are opportunities in both directions,” he tells TechCrunch. “And we have customers; one of our largest customers is in Singapore. And we do have a growing amount of customers out of the U.S.”

Doubling down on growth within Europe is certainly on the slate, though, with a chunk of the Series C going to establish a number of new offices across the region.

Having more local bases to better serve customers is the idea. Meir notes that, perhaps unusually for a startup, TravelPerk has not outsourced customer support — but kept customer service in-house to try to maintain quality. (Which, in Europe, means having staff who can speak the local language.)

He also quips about the need for a travel business to serve up “human intelligence” — i.e. by using tech tools to slickly connect on-the-road customers with actual people who can quickly and smartly grapple with and solve problems, versus an automated AI response which is — let’s face it — probably the last thing any time-strapped business traveler wants when trying to get orientated fast and/or solve a snafu away from home.

“I wouldn’t use [human intelligence] for everything but definitely if people are on the road, and they need assistance, and they need to make changes, and you need to understand what they said…” argues Meir, going on to say ‘HI’ has been his response when investors asked why TravelPerk’s pitch deck doesn’t include the almost-impossible-to-avoid tech buzzword: “AI.”

“I think we are probably the only startup in the world right now that doesn’t have AI in the pitch deck somewhere,” he adds. “One of the investors asked about it and I said ‘well we have HI; it’s better’… We have human intelligence. Just people, and they’re smart.”

Also on the cards (it therefore follows): More hiring (the team is at ~150 now and Meir says he expects it to push close to 300 within 18 months), as well as continued investment on the product front, including in the mobile app, which was a late addition, only arriving this year.

The TravelPerk mobile app offers handy stuff like a one-stop travel itinerary, flight updates and a chat channel for support. But the desktop web app and core platform were the team’s first focus, with Meir arguing the desktop platform is the natural place for businesses to book trips.

This makes its mobile app more a companion piece — to “how you travel” — housing helpful additions for business travelers, as nice-to-have extras. “That’s what our app does really well,” he adds. “So we’re unusually contrarian and didn’t have a mobile app until this year… It was a pretty crazy bet but we really wanted to have a great web app experience.”

Much of TravelPerk’s early energy has clearly gone into delivering on the core product via nailing down the necessary partnerships and integrations to be able to offer such a large inventory — and thus deliver expanded utility versus legacy rivals.

As well as offering a clean-looking, consumer-style interface intended to do for business travel booking feels what Slack has done for work chat, the platform boasts a larger inventory than traditional players in the space, according to Meir — by plugging into major consumer providers such as Booking.com and Expedia.

The inventory also includes Airbnb accommodation (not just traditional hotels), while other partners on the flight side include Kayak and Skyscanner.

“We have not the largest bookable inventory in the world,” he claims. “We’re way larger than old-school competitors… We went through this licensing process which is almost as difficult as getting a banking license… which gives us the right to sell you the same product as travel agencies… Nobody in the world can sell you Kayak’s flights directly from their platform — so we have a way to do that.”

TravelPerk also recently plugged trains into its directly bookable options. This mode of transport is an important component of the European business travel market, where rail infrastructure is dense, highly developed and often very high-speed. (Which means it can be both the most convenient and environmentally friendly travel option to use.)

“Trains are pretty complex technically so we found a great partner,” notes Meir on that, listing major train companies including in Germany, Spain and Italy as among those it’s now able to offer direct bookings for via its platform.

On the product side, the team is also working on integrating travel and expenses management into the platform — to serve its growing numbers of (small) enterprise customers who need more than just a slick trip booking tool.

Meir says getting pulled to these bigger accounts is steering its European expansion — with part of the Series C going to fund a clutch of new offices around the region near where some of its bigger customers are based. Beginning in London, with Berlin, Amsterdam and Paris slated to follow soon.

Picking investors for the long haul

What does the team attribute TravelPerk’s momentum to generally? It comes back to the pain, says Meir. Business travelers are being forced to “tolerate” horrible legacy systems. “So I think the pain-point is so visible and so clear [it sells itself],” he argues, also pointing out this is true for investors (which can’t have hurt TravelPerk’s funding pitch).

“In general we just built a great product and a great service, and we focused on this consumer angle — which is something that really connects well with what people want in this day and age,” he adds. “People want to use something that feels like Slack.”

For the Series C, Meir says TravelPerk was looking for investors who would be comfortable supporting the business for the long haul, rather than pushing for a quick sale. So they are now articulating the possibility of a future IPO.

And while he says TravelPerk hadn’t known much about Swedish investment firm Kinnevik prior to the Series C, Meir says he came away impressed with its focus on “global growth and ambition,” and the “deep pockets and the patience that comes with it.”

“We really aligned on this should be a global play, rather than a European play,” he adds. “We really connected on this should be a very, big independent business that goes to the path of IPO rather than a quick exit to one of the big players.

“So with them we buy patience, and also the condition, when offers do come onto the table, to say no to them.”

Given it’s been just a short six months between the Series B and C, is TravelPerk planning to raise again in the next 12 months?

“We’re never fundraising and we’re always fundraising I guess,” Meir responds on that. “We don’t need to fundraise for the next three years or so, so it will not come out of need, hopefully, unless something really unusual is happening, but it will come more out of opportunity and if it presented a way to grow even faster.

“I think the key here is how fast we grow. And how good a product we certify — and if we have an opportunity to make it even faster or better than we’ll go for it. But it’s not something that we’re actively doing it… So to all investors reading this piece don’t call me!” he adds, most likely inviting a tsunami of fresh investor pitches.

Discussing the challenges of building a business that’s so fast growing it’s also changing incredibly rapidly, Meir says nothing is how he imagined it would be — including fondly thinking it would be easier the bigger and better resourced the business got. But he says there’s an upside too.

“The challenges are just much, much bigger on this scale,” he says. “Numbers are bigger, you have more people around the table… I would say it’s very, very difficult and challenging but also extremely fun.

“So now when we release a feature it goes immediately into the hands of hundreds of thousands of travelers that use it every month. And when you fundraise… it’s much more fun because you have more leverage.

“It’s also fun because — and I don’t want to position myself as the cynical guy — the reality is that most startups don’t cure cancer, right. So we’re not saving the world… but in our little niche of business travel, which is still like $1.3 trillion per year, we are definitely making a dent.

“So, yes, it’s more challenging and difficult as you grow, and the problems become much bigger, but you can also deliver the feedback to more people.”

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen passed away this afternoon in Seattle at age 65, owing to complications relating to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Vulcan, the privately held company that Allen founded in 1986, released a statement that says it is “with deep sadness that we announce the death of our founder Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and noted technologist, philanthropist, community builder, conservationist, musician and supporter of the arts.”

His sister, Jody Allen, a businesswoman and long the CEO of Vulcan, released a separate statement, writing that her brother “was a remarkable individual on every level. While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.

“Paul’s family and friends were blessed to experience his wit, warmth, his generosity and deep concern. For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends. At this time of loss and grief for us – and so many others – we are profoundly grateful for the care and concern he demonstrated every day.”

Allen had been battling for the second time non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that originates in the body’s lymphatic system and causes tumors to develop from lymphocytes, a type of white blood cell.

Just two weeks ago, Allen disclosed that the cancer, for which he was successfully treated nine years ago, had returned, writing on Twitter that his doctors were “optimistic that I will see a good result.”

In recent decades, Allen was known for many things, including his love of sports, his love of music, and, relatedly, expensive toys, out of which he often built collections.

Allen owned the Seattle Seahawks NFL team, the Portland Trail Blazers NBA team and was part-owner of the Major League Soccer club the Seattle Sounders FC. A highly capable guitarist, Allen also amassed an impressive number of guitars over the years, including pieces that had belonged to Jimi Hendrix and Woodie Guthrie.

Allen’s 414-foot mega-yacht “Octopus” may have made the most headlines, because of its grand scale but also for its ambitious expeditions. Most notably, in 2015, directed by Allen, a research team used the vessel to discover the wreck of one of the biggest warships of the Second World War, the Japanese ship Musashi, which sank in 1944.

Allen told CNN at the time that his fascination with World War II history stemmed from his father’s service in the U.S. Army, saying, “The Musashi is truly an engineering marvel and, as an engineer at heart, I have a deep appreciation for the technology and effort that went into its construction.” (Allen also owned at least 20 World War II airplanes at one point.)

Despite his decadent lifestyle, the personal computing pioneer was also known for his philanthropy, most recently donating $30 million to Seattle’s city government to help it build an apartment complex that’s expected to house 94 homeless or low-wage families. In 2010, he also signed the Giving Pledge, thereby committing to give away more than half of his fortune. His net worth was most recently estimated to be roughly $20 billion.

Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 when he was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s, which has become more treatable in recent years but can be fatal if not caught early enough or when it causes respiratory failure or infections.

He first met his co-founder, Bill Gates, when both attended Lakeside School in Seattle. Allen was 14 years old at the time. Gates was 12. Less than a decade later, they created Microsoft, though by the time Allen left the company, their long friendship was in apparent tatters.

Indeed, in 2011, Allen published an autobiography that characterized Gates as demanding and confrontational and said while he was battling cancer back in 1982, Gates and eventual Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer were “scheming to rip me off.”

Gates and Allen seemed to have a kind of reconciliation subsequently, even recreating a classic 1981 photo of the two of them in 2013. In a statement released this afternoon, Gates said that he was “heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen.”

Twilio, the ubiquitous communications platform, today announced its plan to acquire the API-centric email platform SendGrid for about $2 billion in an all-stock transaction. That’s Twilio’s largest acquisition to date, but also one that makes a lot of sense given that both companies aim to make building communications platforms easier for developers.

“The two companies share the same vision, the same model, and the same values,” said Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson in today’s announcement. “We believe this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring together the two leading developer-focused communications platforms to create the unquestioned platform of choice for all companies looking to transform their customer engagement.”

SendGrid will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Twilio and its common stock will be converted into Twilio stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the first half of 2019, after it has been cleared by the authorities.

Twilio’s current focus is on omnichannel communication, and email is obviously a major part of that. And while it offers plenty of services around voice, video and chat, email hasn’t been on its radar in the same way. This acquisition now allows it to quickly build up expertise in this area and expand its services there.

SendGrid went public in 2017. At the time, it priced its stock at $16. Today, before the announcement, the company was trading at just under $31, though that price obviously spiked after the announcement went public. That’s still down from a high of more than $36.5 last month, but that’s in line with the overall movement of the market in recent weeks.

Today’s announcement comes shortly before Twilio’s annual developer conference, so I expect we’ll hear a lot more about its plans for SendGrid later this week.

We asked Twilio for more details about its plans for SendGrid after the acquisition closes. We’ll update this post once we hear more.

One of the top-funded VR content startups, with backers including Disney and GV (Google Ventures), is laying off a “significant portion” of its employees as it pivots away from virtual reality.

In a blog post titled “The Future of Jaunt is AR,” the formerly VR-focused company announced it was leaving much of its VR business behind and shifting toward AR tech, laying off many of its employees in the process:

We will be winding down a number of VR products and content services in the coming weeks. We will work with our current clients to deliver our existing commitments and manage this transition smoothly and professionally. In addition, this unfortunately means that some of our valued and highly talented colleagues will be moving on.

“Today we had to make some difficult decisions in an effort to realign Jaunt for continued success. We are restructuring the company, resulting in letting go of a significant portion of our staff,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement.

Jaunt’s VR effort was a victim of their going full throttle on an emerging business model before enough details were clear. Months before Oculus and HTC had even released their flagship headsets, Jaunt had already raised $100 million from investors with the promise that it was going to capture and gobble up the new VR medium before people event knew what it was.

The endless potential open to Jaunt ultimately led to them losing out to other startups as they sought more areas for growth.

Startups like NextVR were able to whittle away at their ambitions of becoming a hub for live VR entertainment by steadily building up partnerships with sports leagues and entertainment companies. Meanwhile, the live-action VR space has failed to grow as much as many expected, while work in computer-generated cinematic VR content remains slow, steady and unsure as creative strides are made but the business model of the industry remains a big honking question mark. Creation tools have remained an area of focus for Jaunt, especially volumetric capture, on which they seem to have doubled down as of late.

The entire industry has progressed more slowly than fervent investors had hoped, with sluggish headset sales being particularly damaging to content companies that needed those extra eyeballs. The pivot to AR means future potential for content on AR headsets like those from Magic Leap and Microsoft, but the focus is likely structured largely on the wide reach of smartphone-based platforms like Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore.

While the early 2010s were marked by a number of media companies “pivoting to video,” Jaunt is in the unique position of “pivoting to AR,” strangely leaving the much more entertainment-friendly VR platform in the dust in favor of a medium than can run on hundreds of millions of smartphones instead.

A new dating app for Trump supporters that wants to “make America date again” has leaked its entire database of users — on the day of its launch.

The app, called “Donald Daters,” is aimed at “American-based singles community connecting lovers, friends, and Trump supporters alike” and has already received rave reviews and coverage in Fox News, Daily Mail and The Hill.

On its launch day alone, the app had a little over 1,600 users and counting.

We know because a security researcher found issues with the app that made it possible to download the entire user database.

Elliot Alderson, a French security researcher, shared the database with TechCrunch, which included users’ names, profile pictures, device type, their private messages — and access tokens, which can be used to take over accounts.

The data was accessible from a public and exposed Firebase data repository, which was hardcoded in the app. Shortly after TechCrunch contacted the app maker, the data was pulled offline.

We reached out to Emily Moreno, the app’s founder and a former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio; she did not comment.

According to the app’s website, “all your personal information is kept private.” Except, as it happens, when it’s not.