Month: April 2018

Last week, Apple called out the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to rollback the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. The company cited both the obvious environmental impact of such a move, along with potential economic fallout.

It turns out Apple’s got quite a bit invested in the latter.  The company announced today that its global facilities are now 100-percent run by renewable energy.

The move is in line with the company’s 2015 plan to push toward 100-percent renewable energy, a list that includes all of Apple’s data centers as of 2014. As of today, the company’s officially adding retail stores, offices and co-located facilities to that list, covering 43 countries, including the US, China, UK and India.

The addition of nine manufacturing partners, meanwhile, brings the total number up to 23 suppliers promising to produce their products entirely with clean energy. How the companies involved actually hit these numbers is, unsurprisingly, somewhat more complex.

“Where feasible, we produce our own renewable energy by building our own renewable energy facilities, including solar arrays, wind farms, biogas fuel cells, and micro-hydro generation systems,” the company writes in its 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report. “Where it’s not feasible to build our own generation, we sign long-term renewable energy purchase contracts, supporting new, local projects that meet our robust renewable energy sourcing principles.”

The push toward renewable energy has included some creative solutions, including 300 solar rooftops in Japan and 800 in Singapore. The company says it’s currently running 25 renewable energy projects globally, with 15 more in the process of being built. That will bump green energy capability from 626 megawatts to 1.4 gigawatts, by its count — and the finally tally doesn’t appear to include carbon offsets, unlike some of the competition. 

It’s easy to see how a rollback of the Clean Power Plan could ultimately have an averse effect on the company’s bottomline.

“We’re committed to leaving the world better than we found it. After years of hard work we’re proud to have reached this significant milestone,” Tim Cook said in a release tied to the news. “We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward-looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”

Source: Tech Crunch

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.”

Source: Tech Crunch

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.

Source: Tech Crunch

Dictionary app Reverso is getting new features with its 8.0 update. There are new exercices and games to help you learn new words. Reverso also now has an integrated thesaurus.

Reverso is one of the biggest dictionary players out there. It now has over 40 million unique visitors on its website and app every month. It’s a weird industry because a significant part of the traffic on those reference websites comes from search engines. And Google Translate is quite dominant as well.

So how do you go beyond search engine optimization? Reverso has been building many different services to become your go-to destination when it comes to your language needs. For instance, you can translate a word or a sentence and find contextual examples. You can access verb conjugation, translate big chunks of text, access traditional dictionaries and more.

More interestingly, the company has been focused on language learning for its mobile app. Every time you search for something, you can add a word to your phrasebook. After that, you can then go through your phrasebook with a quiz to learn those words.

Your data will get synced across multiple devices as long as you’re logged in. You could install Reverso’s Chrome extension to add words to the mobile app for instance.

If you don’t have time to add words yourself, the company is also putting together lists of not-so-simple-but-generally-useful words. The idea is that you could be learning new words when you’re waiting in line instead of wasting time scrolling through feeds.

In addition to those new exercices, Reverso now has an integrated thesaurus. You can search for a word and tap the tiny “S” in the corner to access related words. The company has been crunching all its translations to put this together. Chances are that two words that have the same translation in multiple languages probably mean the same thing.

Reverso isn’t necessarily reinventing the wheel with all those services. But there’s an advantage in having the same company run all of those services. You can jump from one service to another, add words from multiple scenarios and more.

Source: Tech Crunch

The growth of Windows has slowed as Microsoft’s mobile platform goals have faded and the PC market matured. As a result, Microsoft has had to seek new revenue outside of its operating system.

In 2017, as part of that effort to grow, Microsoft announced a new subscription product called Microsoft 365, bringing together Windows, the company’s cloud-centered productivity suite Office 365 and enterprise tooling into a single package.

The introduction of Microsoft 365 presaged the company’s re-organization which, to quote CNBC, “rebuilt the company around the cloud instead of Windows.” This seems reasonable; if Windows isn’t going to return to growth, other services have to keep adding top line revenue. Microsoft’s evolution to a cloud-powered, services-focused company is therefore set to continue.

In the pursuit of new, non-Windows top line, Microsoft wagered that it could expand its “commercial cloud” revenue to a $20 billion run rate by the end of its fiscal 2018. It beat the goal, reaching the $20 billion mark far ahead of the calendar-equivalent date of mid-Summer of this year.

One of those products, Teams, is a component to Office 365 and part of what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called a “growth opportunity” that is “a lot bigger than anything [his company has] achieved.”

Today we’re going to explore Microsoft’s current actions in one part of the cloud productivity space through the lens of Teams.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft’s Teams product is a communications tool often compared to Slack . TechCrunch, for example, recently called the software service “Microsoft’s Slack competitor.” ComputerWorld, in a news item earlier this year, wrote that “Microsoft turn[ed] up [the] heat on Slack” when it announced new Teams features.

It goes on and on, allowing us to comfortably hold up Microsoft Teams as Redmond’s answer to Slack, a company famous for its quick growth, impressive mind share and its independent status from any major tech company. That last fact remains true despite rumored acquisition interest from Microsoft itself, along with pretty much every big company in the sector you can name.

To see Microsoft invest in its own tool that competes with Slack isn’t surprising. There is a large market for the product, and Redmond is loath to let any rival service cut in on its productivity revenue.

Therefore, if there is a hot productivity tool in the market and Microsoft isn’t going to buy it, it might as well build one of its own. Unsurprisingly, the company has been hard at work doing just that.

News that Teams could release a free version made headlines. Teams also picked up guest access in February, its introduction of Cortana integration made it into mainstream tech publications and this week Microsoft announced new “retention policies” for Teams.

All that and Microsoft bought Teams a friend this year in the form of Chalkup, a collaboration company focused on the education world.

In short, Teams is adding new features while building its org chart and expanding access. All good things, certainly. However, it was not too long ago Microsoft spent quite a lot of money to buy a different, distinct collaboration tool. What happened to it?

Yammer

Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion, building out what TechCrunch called, at the time, its “Social Enterprise Strategy.” And while the Yammer-Microsoft deal was “great news” for the company and its investors, it also marked the beginning of the “tough part” for the newly acquired startup.

Joining a big company when you are a comparatively small company can be arduous. And if you do so when the larger company is undergoing a massive change in leadership (Microsoft hired a new CEO two years after the Yammer deal) and a business model change-up (Microsoft bought Nokia in 2014, also two years after the Yammer deal, before closing that strategic idea out years later), it’s probably even harder to integrate.

Externally, that difficulty showed. Following the Microsoft deal, Yammer search volume grew before stagnating and later slipping. The product was eventually switched on for free for Office 365 customers in early 2016, four years after it was purchased. Office 365 itself launched a half-decade before, making the moment a bit long in the works.

But all that is the past, and, notably, Microsoft is putting more emphasis on Yammer today than it has in recent years. That may feel odd, given what we just went over concerning Teams.

To dig into that, Crunchbase News got Microsoft’s Seth Patton on the phone, who explained the company’s thinking. According to the 15-year company veteran who now works on Office 365, Microsoft has two separate views for Teams and Yammer. Teams is built for what Patton calls inner-loop communication: stuff for teams, smaller companies and the like; Yammer, in contrast, is better for outer-loop communication: less tactical decisions and more company-wide communications.

The split between Slack and Teams products and the Yammers and Convos of the world isn’t hokum or mere corporate-speak. I’ve worked in newsrooms that used the mix of tools to allow for simple direct messaging between individuals (Slack) and team-wide threaded communications (Yammer). It takes a little getting used to, but it can flow well if you need that level of inter-party discussion.

Even more interesting than the fact that Yammer is not dead is that Microsoft is actively investing in it. According to Patton, Microsoft’s chiefs “doubled down” on Yammer while Teams was being brought into the market in late 2016. This gave Yammer about a year of redoubled investment and attention.

Taking all that together, Microsoft is investing in two communications products at the same time, both of which are baked into its productivity suite. So why the huge push now?

Slack: Software’s favorite rocket ship

You are no doubt familiar with Slack’s growth arc. It’s been a nearly chronic narrative in tech for the past few years. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. (I’m as guilty as anyone else.)

But, in case you have a life, here are some highlights: Slack reached ARR of $50 million in December of 2015. In October of 2016, Slack hit the $100 million ARR mark. Then the company bested $200 million last September. That’s darn quick, and investors took notice, showering the company with cash and ever-rising valuations.

Fueling Slack’s continued growth is a push into the realm of bigger companies. The firm launched Slack Enterprise Grid last January, bringing enterprise-grade management tools to Slack’s product. With Enterprise Grid, Slack can keep going after bigger accounts. (To that point, IBM has more than 200,000 active users on Slack that use Enterprise Grid.)

That quick growth has made Slack an acquisition target. One way to get acquired, after all, is to stick out by worrying the biggest companies in the market through growth. It’s just hard as heck to do, as incumbent revenue numbers are so large that, well, you have to grow fast to become interesting.

An even bigger scrap

As we know, Slack has rebuffed acquisition offers. As a result, we’re seeing Microsoft, the dominant player in the world of productivity, attempt to slow down Slack in an effort to not lose future users and future dollars. Hell, even Google is in on the race. Its Slack competitor launched for early users in February. Facebook is also tinkering around the edges. It’s fun to watch.

But productivity is Microsoft’s cash cow. For Google, it’s a big side project, but nothing compared to its advertising revenue. That puts Microsoft and Slack more up against one another in the enterprise chat fight.

(In mid-March, Microsoft announced that 200,000 organizations now use Teams, up from 125,000 in September of 2017. That’s 60 percent growth in a half-year or so — a quick growth pace, too.)

What we’ll learn over the next few years is if Microsoft’s enormous enterprise channel can be leveraged enough to slow Slack’s growth, or if Slack’s momentum can actually capture a piece of the productivity market and hold onto it.

It’s a startup against a platform company, a classic enough battle. But with big tech bigger, richer and more powerful than ever, it’s a more relevant business case than we might think at first blush. More when one draws blood or Slack goes public.

Source: Tech Crunch

Netflix’s revival of Queer Eye transports five gay men around Georgia, where they remake the lives of individuals in sore need of their assistance. Each member of the “Fab Five” has their own specialty — food, fashion, grooming, design and culture.

This might sound like just another reality show, but as one of the Fab Five declares in the first episode, where the original show was about tolerance, the new one is about acceptance, in many forms. It’s not a preachy series, but there’s a message under the surface, and the politics occasionally burst out into the open.

And as we admit in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the new Queer Eye formula ends up being surprisingly affecting — we won’t name names, but more than one of us found themselves crying at the end of episodes.

We also cover some of the week’s streaming and entertainment news, specifically MoviePass’ acquisition of Moviefone and a plagiarism lawsuit against the creators of Stranger Things.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly.

Source: Tech Crunch

You may not be aware that the rough consensus in the tech community is that Cambridge Analytica were almost certainly bullshit artists. Oh, don’t get me wrong, what they tried to do, and/or claimed to do, was super shady and amoral and would have been ruinous to reasonable informed democracy if successful. But I have yet to find anyone credible who thinks that their “psychographics” approach actually works.

That is: it doesn’t work yet.

We may yet thank Cambridge Analytica, for inadvertently raising the red flag before the real invaders are at the gate. Because in this era of ongoing exponential leaps and growths in data collection, which is also an era of revolutionary, transformative AI advancement, it’s probably only a matter of time before electorates can be subtly manipulated wholesale.

Don’t take my word for it. Take that of Google senior AI / deep-learning researcher François Chollet, in a truly remarkable Twitter thread:

To quote the crux of what he’s saying:

In short, Facebook can simultaneously measure everything about us, and control the information we consume. When you have access to both perception and action, you’re looking at an AI problem. You can start establishing an optimization loop for human behavior … A loop in which you observe the current state of your targets and keep tuning what information you feed them, until you start observing the opinions and behaviors you wanted to see … A good chunk of the field of AI research (especially the bits that Facebook has been investing in) is about developing algorithms to solve such optimization problems as efficiently as possible

Does this sound excessively paranoid? Then let me point your attention to another eye-opening recent Twitter thread, in which Jeremy Ashkenas enumerates a set of Facebook’s more dystopian patent applications:

Again let me just summarize the highlights:

a system that watches your eye movements […] record information about actions users perform on a third party system, including webpage viewing histories, advertisements that were engaged, purchases made […] “Data sets from trusted users are then used as a training set to train a machine learning model” […]“The system may monitor such actions on the online social network, on a third-party system, on other suitable systems, or any combination thereof” […] ‘An interface is then exposed for “Political analysts” or “marketing agencies“’ […]

Are those quotes out of context? They sure are! So I encourage you to explore the context. I think you’ll find that, as Ashkenas puts it, “these patent applications don’t necessarily mean that Facebook wants to use any of these techniques. Instead, they illustrate the kinds of possibilities that Facebook management imagines.”

An explosion of data. A revolution in AI, which uses data as its lifeblood. How could any tech executive not imagine using these dramatic developments in new and groundbreaking ways? I don’t want to just beat up on Facebook. They are an especially easy target, but they are not the only fish in this barrel:

Here’s yet another viral privacy-related Twitter thread, this time from Dylan Curran, illustrating just how much data Facebook and Google almost certainly have on you:

Mind you, it seems fair to say that Google takes the inherent dangers and implicit responsibility of all this data collection, and the services it provides with this data, far, far more seriously than Facebook does. Facebook’s approach to potential malfeasance has been … well … let me point you to still another Twitter thread, this one from former Google Distinguished Engineer Yonatan Zunger, who I think speaks for all of us here while reacting to reports of Facebook’s CTO saying “the company is now mapping out potential threats from bad actors before it launches products.”

But the larger point is that the problem is not restricted to Facebook, or Google, or the big tech companies. It’s more acute with them, since they have more data and more power, and, in Facebook’s case, very little apparent sense that with great power comes great responsibility.

But the real problem is far more fundamental. When your business model turns data into money, then you are, implicitly, engaging in surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance and privacy are issues not limited to businesses, of course; consider the facial recognition goggles already in use by Chinese police, or India’s colossal fingerprint-face-and-retina-driven Aadhaar program, or dogged attempts by the UK and US governments to use your phone or your Alexa as their surveillance device. But corporations currently seem to be the sharp and amoral edge of this particular wedge, and we have no real understanding of how to mitigate or eliminate the manifold and growing dangers of their surveillance capitalism.

I’m not saying all data gathering is ipso facto bad; but I am saying that, given the skyrocketing quantity of sensors and data in our world, and the ability to tie that data to individuals, any initiatives which support privacy, pseudonymity, and anonymity should be considered desirable until proven otherwise, given the ever-growing oceans of data whose tides threaten to wash those lonely islands away.

I’m certainly not saying AI is bad. Its potential for improving our world is immense. But like every powerful tool, we need to start thinking about how its potential misuses and side effects before we rush to use it at scale.

And I’m saying we should almost be grateful to Cambridge Analytica, for selling snake oil which claimed to do what tomorrow’s medicines actually will. Let’s not overreact with a massive moral panic. (checks Internet) Whoops, too late. OK, fine — but let’s try to take advantage of this sense of panic to calmly and rationally forestall the real dangers, before they arrive.

Source: Tech Crunch