Month: January 2019

Ahead of its announcements of new TV partnerships at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Roku today shared some new numbers about the growing traction of its overall platform. The company said the number of active accounts grew 40 percent year-over-year in 2018, to top 27 million by year-end. In addition, its total streaming hours grew 61 percent year-over-year to 24 billion hours of movies, TV shows, sports and more being streamed across its devices.

In Q4 2018 alone, Roku users streamed an estimated 7.3 billion hours, up about 68 percent year-over-year.

Roku’s decision to release new numbers about active users and hours streamed comes at a time when the company itself is becoming more competitive with streaming services themselves, instead of just offering a platform on which their apps can run. In fall 2017 Roku began to aggregate the free content from the various channels across its platform in its own Roku Channel, then combined that with content it licensed directly from studios. This free, ad-supported content has given Roku a way to further grow its advertising revenues.

Since its launch, the channel has added more types of content, including sports, news and entertainment from both traditional and digital studios, and just last week launched its own set of premium subscriptions where it gets a cut of customers’ purchases.

Some analysts now believe The Roku Channel’s average revenue per user is now the fastest-growing contributor to overall revenue growth at Roku

Now Roku is working with more manufacturers to get its Roku OS – and therefore its Roku Channel – in front of more people.

At CES this week, Roku announced the Westinghouse Electronics was joining the Roku TV licensing program.

It also announced a partnership with TV brand TCL. The two companies will work together to make 8K TCL Roku TVs that will become available to consumers in late 2019. As a result of catering to TV makers, Roku said it’s updating its 4K and HDR hardware reference design to include far-field microphones for voice search and control. TCL will be the first to deliver these TV models in 2019.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber is expected to raise $10 billion later this year in one of the largest U.S. initial public offerings in history. The float will value the ride-hailing giant somewhere between $76 billion — the valuation it garnered with its last private financing — and $120 billion — a sky-high figure assigned by Wall Street bankers that’s had even early Uber investors scratching their heads.

A new report from The Information pegs Uber’s initial market cap at $90 billion. To develop the estimate, the site analyzed undisclosed documents Uber provided creditors in 2017 “in which the company projected it would double net revenue to $14.2 billion by 2019,” ran revenue multiples and compared Uber to GrubHub, which investors say is the business’s closest comparison.

Uber declined to comment on The Information’s analysis.

How we got here

Uber confidentially filed for its long-awaited IPO last month, marking the beginning of a race to the stock markets between it and U.S. competitor Lyft, which filed just hours before, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. Founded in 2009 by Travis Kalanick, Uber has brought in about $20 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding. It counts SoftBank as its largest shareholder in a cap table that also lists Toyota, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, TPG Growth and many more. As for the skepticism surrounding Uber’s lofty $120 billion valuation, the eye-popping figure seems unachievable considering the company isn’t profitable and has and continues to burn through cash.

An IPO that large would certainly make its investors happy. First Round Capital, for example, seeded Uber with $1.6 million in the company’s first two funding rounds in 2010 and 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal. At a $120 billion valuation, First Round’s shares would be worth some $5 billion. The venture capital firm, however, sold some of its shares to SoftBank alongside Benchmark, which itself would otherwise own shares worth about $14 billion.

Bradley Tusk, an early Uber investor who signed on to help the company surmount political and regulatory barriers in 2011, own shares said to be worth $100 million, though he too gave up 42 percent of his equity in a secondary sale to SoftBank, he recently told TechCrunch.

“I’m quite happy with the 120 number,” Tusk said. “But … I am a little surprised by [it], it does seem to be a really aggressive number.”

“Any investment in Uber is obviously a long-term bet on the future, like someone who invested in Amazon in the early days,” Tusk added. “One thing [Uber chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi] is doing well is really expanding Uber into a mobility company as opposed to just a ride-hailing company.”

A long-term bet on the future

Uber has opted to go public in a year poised to see the most high-flying unicorn IPOs in history. As we’ve reported in great detail on this site, both Lyft and Uber are planning to float, as are Slack and Pinterest . Many of these companies, however, made the call to make their public markets debut before the stock market took a quick turn south. Poor performing stocks may discourage unicorns from emerging from their cozy VC-protected stalls.

Uber will garner increased scrutiny from Wall Street investors as they begin to parse out its true value. Fortunately the company, which like Amazon has long prioritized growth over profit, has “’clear levers’ it could pull in order to turn on the cash spigots if it wanted to, by reducing its marketing spending both in the U.S. and developing markets and by finding partners to help finance its self-driving car development,” according to The Information. “Pulling those levers would slow revenue growth by a third—from a 33% growth in net revenue to 22 percent growth in net revenue in 2019 [but] it would save Uber $2 billion annually.”

In its third quarter 2018 financial results, Uber posted a net loss of $939 million on a pro forma basis and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $527 million, up about 21 percent quarter-over-quarter. Revenue for Q3 was up five percent QoQ at $2.95 billion and up 38 percent year-over-year.

“We had another strong quarter for a business of our size and global scope,” Uber chief financial officer Nelson Chai said in a statement. “As we look ahead to an IPO and beyond, we are investing in future growth across our platform, including in food, freight, electric bikes and scooters, and high-potential markets in India and the Middle East where we continue to solidify our leadership position.”

We can speculate on Uber’s valuation for days but ultimately Wall Street will determine just how high Uber will go. For now, all we can do is sit and wait for the company to relinquish its S-1 to the masses.

Source: Tech Crunch

Let’s hope you’re not afraid of dogs, because if Continental gets its way, autonomous robot dogs are going to be delivering your packages. At the Consumer Electronics Show today, Continental unveiled its Black Mirror-esque vision for how driverless vehicles can autonomously deploy bots to facilitate last-mile deliveries.

But it’s not just to look cool while also horrifying you — it’s designed to increase availability, efficiency and safety in the realm of package delivery. The first part is the driverless vehicle itself, called the Continental Urban Mobility Experience (CUbE). Its specific purpose is to carry delivery robot dogs and deploy them to handle the last yards of the goods. So, imagine one of these CUbE pods dropping off a robot dog, and then seeing that robot dog run up to your door with your package.

“With the help of robot delivery, Continental’s vision for seamless mobility can extend right to your doorstep. Our vision of cascaded robot delivery leverages a driverless vehicle to carry delivery robots, creating an efficient transport team,” Continental Head of Systems and Technology, Chassis & Safety division Ralph Lauxmann said in a press release. “Both are electrified, both are autonomous and, in principle, both can be based on the same scalable technology portfolio. These synergies create an exciting potential for holistic delivery concepts using similar solutions for different platforms. Beyond this technology foundation, it’s reasonable to expect a whole value chain to develop in this area.”

It’s not clear if and when these will be deployed, but it’s undoubtedly an intriguing vision of the future. Segway is also at CES this week, showing off its new autonomous delivery bots. The idea is to use the bot to make autonomous deliveries for food, packages and other items.

Source: Tech Crunch

The international electronics and medical device giant Philips is pushing further into pregnancy and childcare services by leading a $6 million early stage investment in the pregnancy-focused app-developer and device manufacturer, Babyscripts. 

The Washington, DC-based company works with hospitals and healthcare providers to distribute a medical device and mobile app for monitoring blood pressure and providing neonatal care information for expecting mothers.

According to Babyscripts co-founder and President Juan Pablo Segura, typical neonatal care follows a standard script with women seeing an obstetrician typically fourteen times over the course of the pregnancy. And most of those visits are just to monitor a woman’s weight and blood pressure during pregnancy.

Babyscripts can adjust the frequency and scope of treatment required through its blood pressure and pregnancy monitoring application, Segura said.

Using remote-monitoring devices to monitor blood pressure and weight, the company claims it can tailor treatments to risk profiles and allow healthcare providers to manage up to 90% of pregnancies virtually.

The company is already being used to monitor 160,000 pregnancies across 20 states. In the U.S. there are roughly 4 million pregnancies per year.

Source: Tech Crunch

A new company called Flexit lets you pay for gym time by the minute, allowing you to walk into a nearby gym when you’re traveling, for example, and slam out thirty minutes of sweet glute action before dinner. The service is like Uber for gyms in that you only pay for the time you are inside the gym and you don’t need to pay monthly fees or a flat rate per visit.

Created by Michael Rojas, the co-CEO of Iron Grip Barbell Company, the service already has 400 gyms in the United States and plans to expand over the next year. They’ve raised $750,000 in notes.

The company launched today.

“FlexIt’s corporate team has superior industry reach, best-in-class technology and a concept unlike that of its competition,” said CEO Austin Cohen. “FlexIt’s corporate team has deep industry experience in fitness sales and marketing, fitness club ownership, and early-stage venture and venture capital aspects of the business. It’s relationships with C-level leaders at the largest gym chains in the country provide FlexIt with industry insights and access to best position it for success. These relationships have resulted in FlexIt having on-boarded a meaningful club base at a faster rate than any of the competition.”

The fact that Rojas has been selling barbells to gyms for 26 years definitely helped them scale up and the company has gyms in New York, DC, New Jersey, and Illinois as well as three other markets. They are launching an eighth market in two weeks.

Rojas has found that most modern gyms are amenable to the idea and they’re offering everything from classes to personal training via the app. Because it is paid by the minute they also get interesting new data that traditional gym membership plans don’t offer.

“Consumers seek more choice and control over how, when and where they consume, FlexIt is the logical solution to this pain point in the fitness space,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ahead of Apple’s plans to introduce its own streaming service this year, the company has partnered with Samsung to allow iTunes content to be accessible on Samsung Smart TVs. Samsung announced this morning that it will offer access to iTunes Movies and TV shows through a new “iTunes Movies and TV” app on its Smart TVs across 100 countries, and it will offer AirPlay 2 support on its Smart TVs in 190 countries worldwide.

Samsung is the first TV maker to have direct access to iTunes content though this new “iTunes Movies and TV” app, but this is not the first time that iTunes content has been accessible outside of Apple’s own ecosystem.

iTunes content is already accessible today through the third-party Movies Anywhere application, alongside purchases from Prime Video, Google Play, Microsoft Movies & TV, Vudu, and others. That app currently works on a number of streaming media devices, like Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV and others, but not yet on Samsung Smart TVs. In addition, Apple Music can today be streamed on Android devices and iTunes is available on Windows PCs. 

According to Samsung, Apple’s new “iTunes Movies and TV Shows” app will allow Samsung Smart TV owners to browse their existing iTunes library and the iTunes store, where they can purchase and rent hundreds of thousands of movies and TV episodes, including a large selection of 4K HDR titles. The movies and TV shows will also work with Samsung Smart TV features, like the Universal Guide, the new Bixby, and Search.

Meanwhile, Samsung is making AirPlay 2 support available on a range of Smart TVs, including QLED 4K and 8K TVs, The Frame and Serif lifestyle TVs, as well as other Samsung UHD and HD models. This will allow TV owners to play videos, photos, music, podcasts, and more on their TV.

“We look forward to bringing the iTunes and AirPlay 2 experience to even more customers around the world through Samsung Smart TVs, so iPhone, iPad and Mac users have yet another way to enjoy all their favorite content on the biggest screen in their home,” said Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet Software and Services at Apple, in a statement about the launch.

Given Apple’s plans to launch its own streaming service in 2019 – presumably through its existing iTunes app – it makes sense that Apple would make that app available on more devices in the living room, where it doesn’t have as much of a presence thanks to Apple TV’s small footprint.

The new app and AirPlay 2 will be offered on 2019 Samsung Smart TV models this spring. Samsung says. 2018 Samsung Smart TVs will receive a firmware update to enable access.

 

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Huawei, currently the world’s second-largest smartphone company by sales, has won over users partly by loading its devices with a ton of new features, from wireless charging to top-class cameras and catchy cosmetic features like the colorful gradients on their shiny backsides. Now, a leaked image of its next flagship Android phone appears to reveal a surprising reverse course. According to Indian blog 91phones (and via Engadget) its next premium device, dubbed the P30, will feature a HEADPHONE JACK.

What’s that, you say? Aren’t headphone jacks so yesterday?

Well, it turns out that sometimes progress isn’t universally loved. (Pour one out for the futurists here.)

Over the past couple of years, Apple and others have gradually removed the jack from their devices.

Yes, it’s been done in the name of thinner handsets and more features like waterproofing. But — let’s be honest — also most likely also to up-sell people to those very pricey, sometimes pretentious-looking wireless earphones.

But you know what? People — say, those who have a favorite set of corded headphones, or who hate the idea of losing the ability to charge using said headphones — are still missing those inky black holes.

Huawei has been no different, removing its jack in the P30’s P20 predecessor.

But the leaked image reveals that it seems to be making a return in the familiar lower edge of the handset, to the left of the USB-C charging port.

Other features revealed in this and previous leaks of the phone include a six-inch screen, more of that gradient backing, a 24MP selfie camera in a streamlined notch on the front, with a Sony triple camera at 38MP with 5x optical zoom on the back, and no fingerprint sensor port, with the device likely to be shipping in 128GB and 256GB versions.

Huawei overtook Apple as the world’s second largest smartphone vendor in Q2 of 2018, and the last two quarters have only cemented that position. In Q3, only Samsung (the leader) and Huawei saw shipment growth among all the top players; and as for Q4, well, Apple’s given us a little preview of what we will expect there.

Interestingly, Apple specifically has singled out China as a disappointing market when it comes to iPhone sales: Huawei happens to be the market leader there.

So — if this leak is accurate — it’s interesting to think that as Huawei grows often by aggressively following the playbook of other brands, it may be making a bold move by bringing something back that appeared to have gotten discarded in the tech march forward.

If its pace of handset sales continues to stay strong, this could be coming at a key time for Huawei. The company remains in hot water with governments in Europe, the US and elsewhere over questionable and potentially illegal business practices, and that appears to be potentially impacting its massive telecoms equipment business and its lucrative deals with carriers.

As for when this supposed phone might launch, we’re just about to kick off CES in Vegas, but it’s unlikely to appear here. The P20 launched in March last year, a few weeks after the big MWC mobile event in Barcelona, and that could potentially be the same timescale the company follows again.

We’re contacting Huawei for comment and will update this post as we learn more.

Source: Tech Crunch

HP today announced the Pavilion 27 and it looks spectacular. This is the first display that offers a QLED screen — HP calls it by it’s official name Quantum Dot — that’s on glass instead of film. The differences should be clear. When offered on glass, the images are sharper and cleaner — though so is the glare. I like glass displays.

This is a big step forward in the display world and should open up opportunities for additional products both larger and smaller. This screen offers over a billion different colors.

The Pavilion 27 is also HP’s thinnest screen to date. Most of it is just 6.5mm thick though the bottom of the display, where the ports and power supply lives, is much thicker. This screen cannot be mounted flush on a wall and that’s a sham.

Connectivity options include USB-C, DisplayPort and HDMI. It will be available in March for $399.

Source: Tech Crunch

Good news: HP made an AMD Chromebook. Bad news: It uses an old chipset.

Meet the new HP Chromebook 14. This is one of the first Chromebooks powered by an AMD processor. But don’t get too excited. This isn’t the AMD-powered Chromebook a lot of people were waiting for. This Chromebook is powered by a really old AMD chipset.

Traditionally, Chromebooks use Intel chips. But in the summer of 2018, word spread that Chromebooks would eventually be offered with Qualcomm and AMD chips — both offering unique advantages over their Intel counterparts. The Qualcomm models, in theory, could offer always-on connectivity options with stellar battery life while the AMD could, in theory, bring better graphic render capabilities to Chromebooks.

This HP Chromebook offers neither.

The new HP Chromebook 14 packs a AMD Dual-Core A4-9120. This chip was released in June 2016. Compared to the chips in other Chromebooks announced at CES 2019, this chip is slower and has less power management capabilities. On the upside it packs Radeon R4 graphics, but again, when paired with the older silicon, the net result will not likely be a impressive as it could be.

Hopefully, this model will lead to another AMD Chromebook but one with a modern chipset.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s tax season! You know what that means? It’s scamming season, too.

You might have heard this story before. A scammer starts by spoofing an email pretending to be the chief executive of a company, angrily demanding that someone in accounting or human resources immediately sends over their employees’ W-2 forms “or there will be trouble!” The person doesn’t think twice, not wanting to get told off, and emails back the forms, which spell out exactly how much the employees’ earned and how much the company withheld from your wages in tax for the year.

Lo and behold, they’ve just handed over the crown jewels for committing fraud to criminals.

Then, after the scammers steal your W-2 forms, they file your tax returns as though they were you. By fudging the numbers, they can trick the Internal Revenue Service into turning over a tax refund — which then they cash in, using none other than the information from your stole W-2 form.

All the while, you’re putting off doing your taxes until late March because the thought of doing them is so depressing that you literally need months of mental preparation before you start crunching the numbers.

These so-called “W-2 scams” are far too easy to carry out. They’re easy for scammers to obtain and the scammers go undetected for weeks or months, and the IRS doesn’t tell you when your tax return has been filed, meaning anyone can do it without your knowledge.

Scamming consumers out of their tax refunds costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year — and the IRS knows full well how damaging these scams can be. Earlier this year, a government watchdog said that the IRS could do a lot more to prevent W-2 scams in the future — not least telling taxpayers when their filings have been accepted, so that it can be withheld and refunds are protected in case the taxpayer flags it as fraudulent.

Right now, the U.S. is in the midst of a government shutdown — and that’s affecting the IRS. Normally, the IRS lets you start submitting your tax returns by the end of January. This year, it’s not clear when taxpayers can start submitting their filings. Worse, because of the shutdown, any refunds are expected to be delayed.

But it doesn’t mean you can drag your feet and put things off. Now’s a better time than ever to get prepared.

If you haven’t already received your W-2 by mail, you’ll receive it from your employer the end of January. (Many companies these days let you download your W-2 form early through Workday, if you’re subscribed, or other internal corporate portals.) Once you’ve received all of the documents and paperwork you need to file, sit down with a pot of coffee and get the return done.

Once the IRS flings open the doors, file your return as soon as possible.

You should check before you file using the IRS’ filing status checker to see if your tax return has already been submitted. If it has, contact your company and speak to the IRS to file a certain form to get it voided.

Remember, in security, humans are the weakest link. And that’s never been more true than during tax season.

Source: Tech Crunch