Category: Tech news

Duolingo today launched one of its biggest updates in recent years. The company is introducing a range of new exercise types, as well as a new leveling system that lets you choose between delving deeper into specific skills or learning new content.

When you are building a popular language learning service like Duolingo, you’re inevitably confronted with a problem: Some of your users are really serious about learning a new language and some are just casual users. Finding a balance is hard, even as you try to personalize the experience for every user. But as you add harder content, user engagement goes down and learners drop off.

To counter this, Duolingo is now launching “Crown Levels.” These new levels are part of a redesigned skills tree that gives users a choice between delving into harder content about a specific skill — or moving on to new skills.

The company quietly announced this feature earlier this year and after A/B testing it, decided to launch it to a wider audience now. “Whenever we tried to add harder content in order to teach better, our engagement metrics would go down. Learners would get discouraged and leave the app,” the team explained at the time. “This made it really hard to make any progress on our goal to not just be a fun learning app, but an effective one that really taught you a language well.”

The new tree now allows casual learners to move through the Duolingo skills tree just like before, while advanced learners can dig deeper into the new skills they just learned. Ideally, this means that everybody should be happy now and learn better.

With this update, Duolingo is also introducing a number of new exercise types that focus on listening and pronunciation. Among those is a new set of phonetics exercises around pronouncing specific sounds, as well as a new exercise type that asks you to tap words as you listen to them. Another new exercise focuses less on specific words but instead tests your listening comprehension.

The popular quiz startup HQ Trivia is beginning to roll out the first of many new social features to its app focused on leveraging competition with friends and family during game time.

HQ Trivia has managed to bring people together in real life to play the game on their phones, but the startup has done surprisingly little when it comes to bringing social interactions to the app itself. Today, HQ is launching a new feature called “Friends on HQ,” which will roll out to U.K. users for today’s game, with a U.S. launch to follow “soon after,” the company says.

The feature lets users search for and connect with friends and family inside the app. Once users connect, they’ll be able to keep track of how everyone is doing and which friends of theirs are playing in any given quiz match. It’s a very easy move for HQ that adds some familial familiarity to the game’s battle royale quiz format.

Building these connections will be important to strengthening its core group of players, which has grown to the millions. HQ Trivia has begun chasing sponsorship deals with companies like Warner Bros. and Nike. As the startup looks to experiment more with monetization, having a user base that is devoted enough to deal with some of these changes will be essential.

This update is far from a one-off and seems to signify a shift for the app. According to a spokesperson, “this update forms the basis of a variety of new features that HQ will be rolling out soon, leveraging friends’ connections.”

PayPal is expanding into traditional banking through partnership with smaller banks to offer consumers debit cards connected to their PayPal accounts, along with direct deposit for paychecks and other services, according to news the company shared with The Wall St. Journal. The company says its new products are targeted specifically at the unbanked, and will launch in the first half of 2018, following consumer testing.

As PayPal itself is not a bank, it’s been working with other banking partners behind the scenes to offer these new services. For example, a Delaware bank issues the debit cards and a Georgia bank helps with photo deposits of checks.

There are some small fees involved with using PayPal’s banking services, including ATM fees for withdrawals from those not in PayPal’s MoneyPass network, and 1 percent of any check deposited via a photo from a smartphone. However, it won’t charge monthly fees or require minimum balances.

Traditional banking customers may not want to pay for things like check deposits, but the lower fees will appeal to those who usually go to payday lenders, and don’t have regular bank accounts, the company tells us.

“We’re trying to bring more of those people into the digital economy,” Bill Ready, EVP and Chief Operating Officer at PayPal, tells TechCrunch. “For folks who don’t have bank accounts, for folks who don’t have credit and debit cards, we want to give them something so they’re not turning to prepaid cards, check cashiers and payday lenders.”

He says there are billions of people in the world without bank accounts, including some 30 million in the U.S. These people spend nine-and-half percent of their income on interest and fees from alternative financial services, he notes.

PayPal today already offers consumers a debit card (PayPal’s Cash card) for loading accounts with cash at retailers, as one way of serving the underbanked or unbanked user base. There’s also the PayPal prepaid MasterCard linked to PayPal customer accounts and other credit products.

The new banking products won’t be tied to a yet another debit card, but will be offered to existing prepaid card holders – something that wasn’t detailed in the original report.

The banking services have quietly been in testing with select consumers over the past several months, Ready says, and will begin rolling out publicly in the “weeks and months” ahead. They will certainly be live in the first half of 2018, he confirms.

PayPal will determine the best candidates for the new banking products, based on how customers are already using its services.

“For the consumers already in our base that we see using things like loading cash directly onto a PayPal account in retail locations…we’ll reach out directly,” he says. In some “banking deserts,” it may also invest in out-of-home advertising to reach those people without as many options.

The company is not alone in targeting those underserved by mainstream banks.

Amazon was recently cited as having discussions with banks regarding its own possible launch of consumer-facing banking services. Meanwhile, Square’s Cash app has been doling out bank cards to its users, as has its rival, the PayPal-owned Venmo. There are also digital banking services like Simple, Chime, and Varo Money, for example, which take advantage of new technology to address consumer needs, while having accounts backed by traditional banking partners. (Or in the case of Simple, owners – given BBVA’s acquisition of the service years ago.)

However, many of these existing digital banking efforts are targeting younger consumers, including millennials, who prefer to use apps to manage their money, save, and even invest. And if they get a card at all, they opt for debit over credit, studies have found.

But PayPal says it’s not going after millennials with its new products, just the “unbanked” population in general.

“The [banked and unbanked] divide isn’t necessarily along generational lines…those that are unbanked don’t have access to traditional financial services. We’re giving them a pathway to the digital economy,” Ready says.

Some network communication protocol vulnerabilities have been known for more than a decade and still aren’t fixed. Now they’re being exploited.

As Coinbase slowly earns the opportunity to begin thinking about taking a breath after the insane growth of the past few months, it’s thinking more about what all it has to say.

The cryptocurrency exchange startup has hired Spark Capital partner Rachael Horwitz as its first VP of communications.

Horwitz led marketing and communications work for Spark Capital and served as an advisor to some of the firm’s portfolio companies, one of which was Coinbase . Previous to that, she was the director of technology communications at Facebook.

As an industry, blockchain tech has had a bit of a PR problem. Its proponents have promised the moon, but scandals and scams have left the impression that it’s all still a bit of a wild west. For the more legitimate startups like Coinbase, that presents its own challenges — but also plenty of opportunities. Horwitz tells TechCrunch she is particularly excited about tackling public education of blockchain and ensuring that regular consumers know about it, but also that the Silicon Valley tech community is aware of its promise.

“Over the past year especially, it’s really been a blockbuster year in the cryptocurrency space, so now the opportunity is really how do you keep that momentum going and how do you capitalize on that, and I think there’s so much to do in education especially,” Horwitz told TechCrunch in an interview.

Horwitz is Coinbase’s third female executive hire made in recent months. Tina Bhatnagar (previously of Twitter) is the company’s VP of operations and technology, and Emilie Choi (formerly of LinkedIn) is VP of business development. Horwitz has previously taken part in events to promote female representation in the cryptocurrency space, not only in leadership roles at startups, but as investors.

“The mission is to create a more open financial system for the world. I think it goes without saying that you can’t do that without making sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to participate in this new system.”

Horwitz begins her position at Coinbase today.

In turns out, SpaceX was indeed not responsible for the loss of a top-secret government satellite that fell back to earth and was destroyed following a Falcon 9 rocket launch earlier this year, a report in The Wall Street Journal today states.

The Zuma satellite’s purpose was highly classified, but the fate of the project, which was rumored to cost $3.5 billion to develop, was covered in a high-profile fashion because it was intimately tied to a live-streamed SpaceX launch. Sources familiar with two separate federal and industry investigations tell the Journal that the blame for the failure rests with the failure of a payload adapter modified by top military contractor Northrop Grumman, which also built the Zuma satellite itself.

The payload adapter device struggled to operate in zero gravity conditions, the report details:

The device, purchased from a subcontractor, was significantly modified and then successfully tested three times on the ground by Northrop Grumman, according to one person familiar with the process. But upon reaching orbit, this person said, the adapter didn’t uncouple the satellite from the rocket in zero-gravity conditions.

Sensors on board failed to immediately report what happened, this person said, so officials tracking the launch weren’t aware of the major malfunction until the satellite was dragged back into the atmosphere by the returning second stage. The satellite ultimately broke free but by then had dropped to an altitude that was too low for a rescue.

In the aftermath of the successful Falcon 9 launch, word emerged that the Zuma satellite separation had been far less successful, but because of the project’s classified nature there was no official word to be found. Given the often tenuous nature of SpaceX’s history with public perception of its rocket safety, the company did later publicly note that the Falcon 9 “did everything correctly,” insinuating that the fault did not lie with its tech.

Reports soon emerged that the failure was likely not the fault of SpaceX, and it seems that after investigations, the government has concluded the same.

Facebook has released a tool that lets you see if you were caught up in the Cambridge Analytica fiasco—and what other apps know about you know.

The most interesting part of Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony for Congress that was released today shows that Facebook has been fighting Russian election interference since before the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Facebook shut down accounts related to Russian GRU military intelligence-linked group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, which had created an organization called DCLeaks run by fake personas to seed stolen information to journalists.

Wired detailed the methods of the “Advanced Persistent Threat 28” group in January 2017. APT28 uses zero-day exploits, malware-equipped spearfishing emails, publicly known but unfixed vulnerabilities in computer systems and malicious iFrames embedded in hacked websites to steal people’s files. The group has been connected to attacks against NATO, French television station TV5Monde and the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The Washington Post reported in September 2017 that Facebook had detected the APT28 accounts in June 2016 and reported their activity to the FBI, but didn’t detail that Facebook had fought back directly by shutting down their accounts. Facebook had not previously confirmed this story.

Here’s Zuckerberg’s full explanation of the situation:

Elections have always been especially sensitive times for our security team, and the 2016 U.S. presidential election was no exception. Our security team has been aware of traditional Russian cyber threats — like hacking and malware — for years. Leading up to Election Day in November 2016, we detected and dealt with several threats with ties to Russia. This included activity by a group called APT28, that the U.S. government has publicly linked to Russian military intelligence services. But while our primary focus was on traditional threats, we also saw some new behavior in the summer of 2016 when APT28-related accounts, under the banner of DC Leaks, created fake personas that were used to seed stolen information to journalists. We shut these accounts down for violating our policies.

The Post reported that APT28 was known for stealing data and military plans from political targets, leading Facebook’s security team to assume it was planning traditional espionage rather than a more public-facing disinformation campaign to skew the election. But they did share their findings with the FBI. Later, when Facebook discovered APT28 had created the Guccifer 2.0 hacker persona and DCLeaks Facebook to deliver stolen emails and documents to journalists, Facebook contacted the FBI again. Guccifer 2.0, who had claimed sole responsibility for providing hacked Democratic National Convention emails to WikiLeaks, has since been identified as a GRU operative.

Now Zuckerberg’s testimony indicates Facebook didn’t just hand off responsibility to the FBI, but worked to combat the trolls on its own.

This information could give Facebook and Zuckerberg a better defense as he’s questioned by the U.S. Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees Tuesday, then the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. If Facebook can demonstrate that it wasn’t completely asleep at the wheel regarding election interference, it could get softer treatment than if Congress thinks it was caught completely off-guard.

You can see Zuckerberg’s full prepared testimony below:

Zuckerberg Statement to Congress by Jordan Crook on Scribd

Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released the Facebook CEO’s prepared statement.

In it, Zuckerberg explains that Facebook has always been an optimistic organization, focusing on connecting people and giving them a voice. But Zuckerberg also admits that the idealist train of thought might have blinded the company to potential misuses of Facebook’s toolset.

But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.

The statement also goes over both the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian election interference, thoroughly explaining what happened in each situation and what Facebook is doing to solve these problems.

Zuckerberg is set to testify before the Senate tomorrow and before Congress on Wednesday. We’ll be covering both hearings.

You can read the full statement embedded below.

Last week, Facebook revealed that 87 million or so users potentially had their data improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica — and you’ve no doubt been wondering if yours is among them. Today the site will share that information with users.

The disclosure arrives by way of a new “protecting your information” link set to appear at the top users’ feeds. The landing page lets users manage the third-party apps using the site to log-in and lets them know whether that information has been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica

“We have banned the website ‘This Is Your Digital Life,’ which one of your friends used Facebook to log into,” the note is set to read. “We did this because the website may have misused some of your Facebook information by sharing it with a company called Cambridge Analytica.”

The news was announced last week, as part of a larger data privacy push for the site, which has scrambled to rehabilitate its image in the wake of political upheaval tied to information sharing. The slate of announcements also included new restrictions to Events, Groups and Pages APIs, along with Facebook log in, among others.

Earlier today, the site announced that it is working with nonprofits to improve the study of the ways in which its data is being used to impact elections.

UK startup Juro, which is applying a “design centric approach” and machine learning tech to help businesses speed up the authoring and management of sales contracts, has closed $2m in seed funding led by Point Nine Capital.

Prior investor Seedcamp also contributed to the round. Juro is announcing Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise’s co-founder) as an investor now too, as well as Michael Pennington (Gumtree co-founder) and the family office of Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com).

Back in January 2017 the London-based startup closed a $750,000 (£615k) seed round, though CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey tells us that was really better classed as an angel round — with Point Nine Capital only joining “late” in the day.

“We actually could have strung it out to Series A,” he says of the funding that’s being announced now. “But we had multiple offers come in and there is so much of an explosion in demand for the [machine learning] that it made sense to do a round now rather than wait for the A. The whole legal industry is undergoing radical change and we want to be leading it.”

Juro’s SaaS product is an integrated contracts workflow that combines contract creation, e-signing and commenting capabilities with AI-powered contract analytics.

Its general focus is on customers that have to manage a high volume of contacts — such as marketplaces.

The 2016-founded startup is not breaking out any customer numbers yet but says its client list includes the likes of Estee Lauder, Deliveroo and Nested. And Mabey adds that “most” of its demand is coming from enterprise at this point, noting it has “several tech unicorns and Fortune 500 companies in trial”.

While design is clearly a major focus — with the startup deploying clean-looking templates and visual cues to offer a user-friendly ‘upgrade’ on traditional legal processes — the machine learning component is its scalable, value-added differentiator to serve the target b2b users by helping them identify recurring sticking points in contract negotiations and keep on top of contract renewals.

Mabey tells TechCrunch the new funding will be used to double down on development of the machine learning component of the product.

“We’re not the first to market in contract management by about 25 years,” he says with a smilie. “So we have always needed to prove out our vision of why the incumbents are failing. One part of this is clunky UX and we’ve succeeded so far in replacing legacy providers through better design (e.g. we replace DocuSign at 80% of our customers).

“But the thing we and our investors are really excited about is not just helping businesses with contract workflow but helping them understand their contract data, auto-tag contracts, see pattens in negotiations and red flag unusual contract terms.”

While this machine learning element is where he sees Juro cutting out a competitive edge in an existing and established market, Mabey concedes it takes “quite a lot of capital to do well”. Hence taking more funding now.

“We need a level of predictive accuracy in our models that risk averse lawyers can get comfortable with and that’s a big ask!” he says.

Specifically, Juro will be using the funding to hire data scientists and machine learning engineers — building out the team at both its London and Riga offices. “We’re doing it like crazy,” adds Mabey. “For example, we just hired from the UK government Digital Service the data scientist who delivered the first ML model used by the UK government (on the gov.uk website).

“There is a huge opportunity here but great execution is key and we’re building a world class team to do it. It’s a big bet to grow revenue as quickly as we are and do this kind of R&D but that’s just what the market is demanding.”

Juro’s HQ remains in London for now, though Mabey notes its entire engineering team is based in the EU — between Riga, Amsterdam and Barcelona — “in part to avoid ‘Brexit risk’”.

“Only 27% of the team is British and we have customers operating in 12 countries — something I’m quite proud of — but it does leave us rather exposed. We’re very open minded about where we will be based in the future and are waiting to hear from the government on the final terms of Brexit,” he says when asked whether the startup has any plans to Brexit to Berlin.

“We always look beyond the UK for talent: if the government cannot provide certainty to our Romanian product designer (ex Kalo, Entrepreneur First) that she can stay in the UK post Brexit without risking a visa application, tbh it makes me less bullish on London!”

Global app downloads and consumer spending in apps had yet another record quarter, according to a new report from App Annie, out on Monday. In the first quarter of 2018, iOS and Google Play downloads grew more than 10 percent year-over-year to reach 27.5 billion – the highest figure to date. In addition, consumer spending on iOS and Google Play grew 22 percent year-over-year to reach $18.4 billion – also a record number.

The download figure is especially notable because App Annie is not counting app updates or re-installs. That means someone re-downloading an app on a new phone – like one received as a gift over the holidays – wouldn’t have been counted here. Only new app installs were counted.

Plus, the report points out that the total dollar amount to the app economy is much higher than the $18.4 billion reported for Q1, as App Annie only takes into account paid apps, in-app purchases, and subscriptions. It’s not measuring things like in-app advertising, the commerce taking place in apps (e.g. shopping and ride-sharing), or the money being made on the third-party Android app stores around the world.

This is not the first time App Annie has reported record numbers for downloads and consumer spending. The app marketplaces have continued to see steady growth, even as reports of app saturation in the U.S. circulate.

In Q4 2017 – the busy holiday quarter – the app stores had also broken these same records around downloads and revenues. Specifically, Google Play saw its highest downloads to date in the fourth quarter. The app stores had a record-breaking Q3 2017, too – something App Annie attributed then to the growth of the app market in China, India, and other Southeast Asian nations.

This time, App Annie pointed to India, Indonesia and Brazil’s impact on the year-over-year growth in Google Play downloads, and the U.S., Russia and Turkey’s impact on the growth of iOS downloads.

Also notable is that Google Play achieved another record of its own in Q1 2018, with record growth in consumer spend thanks to the U.S, followed by Japan and the Philippines. The Play Store grew 25 percent year-over-year, versus iOS’s 20 percent growth. Despite this, iOS continued to have a large lead in terms of total dollars spent.

Music & Audio along with Entertainment apps had a big impact on Google Play spending, the report noted, both on a quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year basis. This is attributed to the rise in music and video subscription services delivered via apps. App Annie isn’t the only one to spot this trend – app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower had previously found that top subscription video on demand apps grew by 77 percent in 2017, reaching $781 million in revenues across iOS and Google Play. And Netflix became 2017’s top non-game app by revenue.

App Annie said also that iOS spending in Q1 2018 benefitted from subscriptions to health and fitness apps, driven by New Year’s Resolutions and people’s embrace of the subscription model. The U.S., followed by the U.K. then Germany saw the largest market share growth quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.

Combined, Google Play and the iOS App Store offered 6.2 million apps by the end of Q1 2018, with games driving downloads across both stores during the quarter. PUBG Mobile and Fortnite were especially big, App Annie noted.

Shopping apps also saw large year-over-year growth in market share, the report found.

More broadly, the new report is yet another example of how big a role emerging markets are having on app downloads and the app economy. This trend, while still remarkable, is not all that new. In 2016, China overtook the U.S. in App Store revenue, and App Annie has continued to note China, India and other emerging markets as key drivers of growth in its quarterly and annual reports.

Only a few weeks after launching a major overhaul of its Cloud Text-to-Speech API, Google today also announced an update to that service’s Speech-to-Text voice recognition service. The new and improved Cloud Speech-to-Text API promises significantly improved voice recognition performance. The new API promises a reduction in word errors around 54 percent across all of Google’s tests, but in some areas the results are actually far better than that.

Part of this improvement is a major new feature in the Speech-to-Text API that now allows developers to select between different machine learning models based on this use case. The new API currently offers four of these models. There is one for short queries and voice commands, for example, as well as one for understanding audio from phone calls and another one for handling audio from videos. The fourth model is the new default, which Google recommends for all other scenarios.

In addition to these new speech recognition models, Google is also updating the service with a new punctuation model. As the Google team admits, its transcriptions have long suffered from rather unorthodox punctuation. Punctuating transcribed speech is notoriously hard though (just ask anybody who has ever tried to transcribe a speech by the current U.S. president…). Google promises that its new model results in far more readable transcriptions that feature fewer run-on sentences and more commas, periods and question marks.

With this update, Google now also lets developers tag their transcribed audio or video with some basic metadata. There is no immediate benefit to the developer here, but Google says that it will use the aggregate information from all of its users to decide on which new features to prioritize next.

Google is making a small change to how it charges for this service. Like before, audio transcripts cost $0.006 per 15 seconds. The video model will cost twice as much, though, at $0.012 per 15 seconds, though until May 31, using this new model will also cost $0.006 per 15 seconds.

If you’re on the prowl for a new Android, Galaxy, or iPhone, read our full guide to the best smartphones of 2018.

A new study from Pew Research shows that the bulk of links on Twitter don’t come from actual humans.