Month: November 2020

Following a request from Apple, Foxconn could be shifting production out of China for some iPad and MacBook models according to a report from Reuters. The new assembly lines would be based in Vietnam.

As a recent investigation from The Information highlighted, both companies are intrinsically connected. The Taiwanese manufacturer is Apple’s main production partner. Apple is also Foxconn’s main client. When it comes to raw numbers, Foxconn is making 60% to 70% of iPhones, Apple’s main product.

Over the past few years, Apple has tried to diversify its supply chain in two major ways. First, Apple is trying to work with other manufacturing companies, such as Luxshare Precision Industry and Wistron.

Second, Apple is trying to manufacture its products in different countries. New tariffs and import restrictions have made that issue more pressing.

According to Reuters, Apple asked Foxconn to move some iPad and MacBook assembly to Vietnam. The assembly line should be operating at some point during the first half of 2021.

In addition to Vietnam, Foxconn also produces iPhone 11 devices in a plant near Chennai, India. Wistron also assembles iPhone models in India. Foxconn has also manufactured some iPhone models in Brazil.

Source: Tech Crunch

U.S. Fertility, one of the largest networks of fertility clinics in the United States, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack and that data was taken.

The company was formed in May as a partnership between Shady Grove Fertility, a fertility clinic with dozens of locations across the U.S. east coast, and Amulet Capital Partners, a private equity firm that invests largely in the healthcare space. As a joint venture, U.S. Fertility now claims 55 locations across the U.S., including California.

In a statement, U.S. Fertility said that the hackers “acquired a limited number of files” during the month that they were in its systems, until the ransomware was triggered on September 14. That’s a common technique of data-stealing ransomware, which steals data before encrypting the victim’s network for ransom. Some ransomware groups publish the stolen files on their websites if their ransom demand isn’t paid.

U.S. Fertility said some personal information, like names and addresses, were taken in the attack. Some patients also had their Social Security numbers taken. But the company warned that the attack may have involved protected health information. Under U.S. law, that can include information about a person’s health or medical conditions, like test results and medical records.

A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident. (Thursday is a national holiday in the U.S..)

U.S. Fertility didn’t say why it took more than two month to publicly disclose the attack, but said in the notice that its disclosure was not delayed at the request of law enforcement.

This is the latest attack targeting the healthcare sector. In September, one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S., Universal Health Services, was hit by the Ryuk ransomware, forcing some affected emergency rooms to close and to turn patients away. Several other fertility clinics have been attacked by ransomware in recent months.

Read more:

• Healthcare giant UHS hit by ransomware attack, sources say
• As ransomware gets craftier, companies must start thinking creatively
• Extra Crunch: Decrypted: The major ransomware attack you probably didn’t hear about
• The sinkhole that saved the internet

Source: Tech Crunch

Robots are no longer the high-tech tools reserved for university labs, e-commerce giants and buzzy Silicon Valley startups. The local grocer now has access too.

Tortoise, the one-year-old Silicon Valley startup known for its remote repositioning electric scooters, has taken its tech and adapted it to delivery carts. The company recently partnered with online grocery platform Self Point to provide neighborhood stores and specialty brand shops with electric carts that — with help from remote teleoperators — deliver goods to local consumers.

The companies have launched the product offering in Los Angeles with three customers. Each customer, which includes Kosher Express, has two to three carts that can be used to make deliveries up to three-mile radius from the store. Unlike the network models used by some autonomous sidewalk delivery companies, grocery stores lease the delivery carts and are responsible for the storage, charging and packing it up with goods that their customers have ordered.

The initial Self Point -Tortoise launch is small. But it has the makings of expanding far beyond Los Angeles. More importantly for Tortoise, it’s a validation of the company’s larger vision to make remote repositioning a horizontal business with numerous applications.

Tortoise started by equipping electric scooters with cameras, electronics and firmware that allow teleoperators in distant locales drive the micromobility devices to a rider or deliver it back to its proper parking spot. Now, it has taken that same hardware and software and used it to build its own delivery cart.

Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko has said the company’s remote repositioning kit can be used for security and cleaning bots as well as electric wheelchairs and other accessibility devices. He’s even fielded inquiries from farmers interested in using remote repositioning scooters to monitor crops.

“From a practical point of view we’re not trying to not be everywhere overnight, but there’s really no technological constraint for us,” Shevelenko said in a recent interview.

The emergence of COVID-19, and its affects on consumer behavior, prompted Tortoise to home in on delivery carts as its second act.

“We kind of quickly realized that we’re living in a once-in-a-generation change in consumer behavior where now everything is online and people are expecting it to be delivered same day,” Shevelenko said. Tortoise was able to go from the first renderings in May to a delivery cart launch by the fourth quarter because of its ability to repurpose its hardware, software and workforce.

The company still remains bullish on its initial application in micromobility. Earlier this year, Tortoise, GoX and and tech incubator Curiosity Labs launched a six-month pilot in Peachtree Corners, Georgia that allows riders to use an app to hail a scooter. The scooters are outfitted with Tortoise’s tech. Once riders hail the scooter, a Tortoise employee hundreds of miles away remote controls the scooter to the user. After riders complete trips, the scooters drive themselves back to a safe parking spot. From here, GoX employees charge and sanitize the scooters and then mark them with a sticker that indicates they have been properly cleaned.

While partnership with Self Point is Tortoise’s next big project, Shevelenko was quick to note that the company is only focused on one slice of the on-demand delivery pie.

“Low speeds and hot foods don’t work too well,” he said. Startups such as Kiwibot and Starship have smaller robots that focus on that market, Shevelenko added. Tortoise’s delivery carts were designed specifically to hold large amounts of groceries, alcohol and other goods.

“We saw kind of a big opening in grocery,” he said, adding that relying on remote operators and its kit is a low-cost combination that can be used today while automated technology continues to develop. “We’re doing for last-mile delivery what globalized call centers did for customer support.”

Source: Tech Crunch

France is going forward with its plan to tax big tech companies. The government has sent out notices to tech giants, as reported by the Financial Times, Reuters and AFP. There could be retaliation tariffs on French goods in the U.S.

For the past couple of years, France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has been pushing hard for a tax reform. Many economy ministers in Europe think tech companies aren’t taxed properly. They generate revenue in one country, but report to tax authorities in another country. They take advantage of countries with low corporate tax to optimize the bottom line.

Le Maire first pitched the idea of a European tax on big tech companies based on local revenue. But he failed to get support from other European countries — European tax policies require a unanimous decision from members of the European Union.

The French government chose not to wait for other European countries and started working on its own local tax. There are two requirements:

• You generate more than €750 million in revenue globally and €25 million in France.
• And you’re operating a marketplace (Amazon’s marketplace, Uber, Airbnb…) or an advertising business (Facebook, Google, Criteo…).

If you meet those two requirements, you have to pay 3% of your French revenue in taxes.

At the same time, the OECD has been working on a way to properly tax tech companies with a standardized set of rules that would work across the globe. But OECD members have yet to reach a compromise.

France and the U.S. have been arguing on and off for the past couple of years about the tech tax. In August 2019, then U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron reached a deal by promising that the French government would scrap the French tax as soon as the OECD finds a way to properly tax tech companies in countries where they operate.

In December 2019, the U.S. promised 100% tariffs on French wine, cheese and handbags because the previous deal wasn’t good enough. In January 2020, the two sides agreed to wait a little bit to see if the OECD framework would come through.

And here we are. According to the French government, OECD negotiations have failed, so it’s time to start collecting the French digital tax. Let’s s see how the U.S. reacts during the Trump-Biden transition.

Source: Tech Crunch

As IBM makes a broad shift in strategy, Bloomberg reported this morning that the company would be cutting around 10,000 jobs in Europe. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that the organization will be spinning out its infrastructure services business next year. While IBM wouldn’t confirm the layoffs, a spokesperson suggested there were broad structural changes ahead for the company as it concentrates fully on a hybrid cloud approach.

IBM had this to say in response to a request for comment on the Bloomberg report: “Our staffing decisions are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. We also continue to make significant investments in training and skills development for IBMers to best meet the needs of our customers.”

Unfortunately, that means basically if you don’t have the currently required skill set, chances are you might not fit with the new version of IBM. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna alluded to the changing environment in an interview with Jon Fortt at the CNBC Evolve Summit earlier this month when he said:

The Red Hat acquisition gave us the technology base on which to build a hybrid cloud technology platform based on open-source, and based on giving choice to our clients as they embark on this journey. With the success of that acquisition now giving us the fuel, we can then take the next step, and the larger step, of taking the managed infrastructure services out. So the rest of the company can be absolutely focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.

The story has always been the same around IBM layoffs, that as they make the transition to a new model, it requires eliminating positions that don’t fit into the new vision, and today’s report is apparently no different, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.

“IBM is in the biggest transformation of the company’s history as it moves from services to software and specialized hardware with Quantum. That requires a different mix of skills in its employee base and the repercussions of that manifest itself in the layoffs that IBM has been doing, mostly quietly, for the last 5+ years,” he said.

None of this is easy for the people involved. It’s never a good time to lose your job, but the timing of this one feels worse. In the middle of a recession brought on by COVID, and as a second wave of the virus sweeps over Europe, it’s particularly difficult.

We have reported on a number of IBM layoffs over the last five years. In May, it confirmed layoffs, but wouldn’t confirm numbers. In 2015, we reported on a 12,000 employee layoff.

Source: Tech Crunch

When I was pronounced legally blind in 2009, I didn’t know one other person who called themselves blind – least of all “low vision” or “visually impaired.” Today, I manage the largest blindness community in the world, Be My Eyes, a support platform where more than 4 million people and companies use live video to support users in almost 200 languages. And though the growth of our collective community is a crucial step making our lives better, it’s just one piece of what makes today, as I’ve heard many others say, “a great time to be blind.”

That’s because in the past 10 years, “sight tech” has taken off. What we might have once called “assistive” or “special needs” technology has gone mainstream – and the technology developed by and for people with disabilities is now used by you, your kids, your grandparents – regardless of whether you identify as having a disability or not.

Sight tech – or more broadly, eyes-free tech – now touches every part of our lives and the devices that we depend on. And it’s not just blind and visually impaired people who are benefitting. It’s everyone. That’s why I’m pleased to be hosting the first ever Sight Tech Global conference on December 2 and 3, to sit down with the tech world’s most important figures in sight tech and talk about the past, present and future of how designing for the blind informs and affects all of our lives. Registration is free; sign up today.

What is Sight Tech?

Inventions to help the blind “see” have quietly been spurring innovation for decades. Often, idealistic inventors create with a charitable mindset – to help the needy or return something lost – but the real technological advances in sight tech have done a lot more than simply suggest a cure for human disability. They’ve created new abilities for everyone, and opened new doors to unpredictable innovation: The 12-inch record, the computer keyboard, and the text recognition software that laid the foundation for the modern database were all brought to market, initially, for blind consumers.

There was a time when a personal assistant, someone to read to you or a car at your door, were once thought of as “special” – but no longer. Today, every device shipped by Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft includes these capabilities and more, not as a bonus but as a necessity to compete in today’s competitive hardware and software markets. So whether you use your phone in dark mode or talk to Siri while you’re driving, you too use “sight tech” that was invented initially for the visually impaired.

Over and over again, designing for blind consumers has shown an ROI far beyond helping the needy. Audiobooks, which were heavily resisted by publishers when first developed for blind readers in 1934, now are the book industry’s only growing business. Likewise, coding your website for a blind person’s screen reader might seem like extra work until you realize it optimizes your SEO and makes your website more usable to about a billion other non-standard device users, as well. The world of sight tech is absolutely full of these types of happy surprises; unexpected synchronicities and wide applicability that started with designing for a seemingly small group.

Founded by former TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond earlier this year, Sight Tech Global provides a new venue for those who are passionate about AI, blind tech, digital inclusion and equal access for all to gather and hear from the accessibility community’s greatest thinkers and doers. Best of all, this free, all-virtual conference is a benefit for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired which has been helping individuals with blindness or low vision for the past 75 years.

Here’s a little preview of what we’ll be unveiling, cheering, arguing and dreaming about at Sight Tech Global. I hope you’ll join us! Here is a link to the full agenda.

Achieving perfect mobility

For most, the self-driving car is a long-promised luxury. For those of us who can’t get a driver’s license, it’s the key to an unprecedented level of independence. Researchers at Waymo are intent on making sure that, when the first self-driving taxi arrives on your doorstep, it shouldn’t matter whether you can see or not: You should be able to hop in and take a ride.

Similarly, maps are much more than just a handy tool for those of us with visual impairments. In many cases, they’re the only option for finding your bearings – the difference between independence and codependence. Blind and sighted inventors alike have been pushing for better, more exact navigational tools for decades, and today the team at GOOD Maps has harnessed the power of lidar, data and and faster-than-ever processors to make sure that someone with no sight can get themselves within arm’s reach of exactly what they’re looking for.

Join product managers from Waymo, Waymap, Goodmaps and more to hear about the future of getting from point A to point B.

The next talking computer

Since the late 1980s, companies like Freedom Scientific and Humanware have laid the foundation for accessible computing, writing software and building devices that can convert visual information into sound or touch. Those devices were operating computers, rendering digital Braille and delivering audio books to readers long before there was an app for that.

Today, mainstream tech giants Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google are creating screen readers and assistive devices of their own, not to mention the thousands of third-party apps for navigation, sensory optimization, recognizing text and images and more. And with this new functionality native to operating systems, established assistive tech companies are evolving, too.

We’ll take a deep dive into what’s next for the “screen reader” – and how new tech from AI to AR, and headgear to haptics are shaking up interfaces and reshaping paradigms across our industry.

Over the course of two days, we’ll be hearing from the accessibility leaders at Apple, Microsoft, Google, Vispero, Humanware, Amazon and more.

Tech that doesn’t discriminate

Even the greatest new tech creates great new problems. And as AI swoops in to save the day, allowing blind and visually impaired people to overcome barriers in their work and social lives, AI can also introduce new biases that we never expected. When training our systems to recognize, categorize and interact with real people, how do we account for disability and a diverse range of functional needs? How do we make machines that don’t inherit our own cultural prejudices?

We’ll also be joined by some of the blindness and disability community’s greatest advocates: people like Lainey Feingold, Haben Girma and George Kerscher, who will take a hard look at access to information as a civil right, how far we’ve come and how far we have to go in the era of AI.

Sight Tech Global is December 2-3 – all-virtual and 100% free. All sponsorship proceeds benefit the Vista Center for the Blind. It’s not too late to sponsor – learn more here.

Source: Tech Crunch

In the wake of insurtech unicorn Root’s IPO, it felt safe to say that the big transactions for the insurance technology startup space were done for the year.

After all, 2020 had been a big one for the broad category, with insurtech marketplaces raising lots, rental insurance startup Lemonade going public, Root itself debuting even more recently on the back of its automotive insurance business, a big round to help Hippo keep building its homeowners company and more.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But yesterday brought with it even more news: Metromile, a startup competing in the auto insurance market, is going public via a blank-check company (SPAC), and Hippo raised a huge, unpriced round.

So let’s talk about why Metromile might be plying the public markets, and why Hippo may have have decided to pick up more cash. Hint: The reasons are related.

A market hungry for growth

The Lemonade IPO was a key moment for neoinsurance startups, a key part of the broader insurtech space. When the rental insurance provider went public, it helped set the tone for public exit valuations for companies of its type: fast-growing insurance companies with slick consumer brands, improving economics, a tech twist and stiff losses.

For the Roots and Metromiles and Hippos, it was an important moment.

So, when Lemonade raised its IPO range, and then traded sharply higher after its debut, it boded well for its private comps. Not that rental insurance and auto insurance or homeowners insurance are the same thing. They very most decidedly are not, but Lemonade’s IPO demonstrated that private investors were correct to bet generally on the collection of startups, because when they reached IPO-scale, they had something that public investors wanted.

Source: Tech Crunch

Discord, the communications service that’s become the 21st century’s answer to MUD rooms, is close to closing a new round of financing that would value the company at up to $7 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the round.

The new funding comes just months after a $100 million investment that gave the company a $3.5 billion valuation. Discord’s doubling in corporate value comes as the persistent, inept, American response to the COVID-19 pandemic continues to accelerate the adoption and growth of businesses creating virtual social networking opportunities.

Those opportunities are apparent in Discord’s explosive growth. Monthly active users have almost doubled to 120 million this year and the company has seen 800,000 downloads a day thanks, in part, to the wildly popular game Among Us (which received a ringing endorsement from the popular congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez).

Discord built its initial growth on the back of the gaming industry and the rise of multi-player, multi-platform games that supplanted earlier social networks as the online town square for a generation of young gamers (whose numbers globally now spiral north of several billion).

But, as the company’s founders noted when they announced their last round of financing, the Discord use case has extended far beyond the gaming community.

“It turns out that, for a lot of you, it wasn’t just about video games anymore,” wrote co-founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a July blog post announcing the latest financing.

The two men frame their company as “a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends.” Discord, they say, is “a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something or sharing ideas.”

If that sounds familiar to some of the internet’s earliest users, that’s because it is. Back in the dawn of the world wide web, multi-user dungeons (MUD) provided ways for practitioners of any number of sub cultures to find each other online and chat about whatever tickled their collective fancy.

As the web evolved, so did the number of places and spaces for these conversations to happen. Now there are multivariate ways for users to find each other within the web, but Discord seems to have risen above most of the rest.

As analyst John Koetsier noted in Forbes back in 2019, there were already 250 million Discord users sending 315 million messages a day. Those are the company’s pre-pandemic numbers — and they’re impressive by any standards.

As with any platform that has become popular on the web, Discord isn’t without its underbelly. Three years ago, the company tried to boot a number of its most racist users, but their ability to use the platform to disseminate hate speech has stubbornly persisted.

Until mid-2019, white nationalists were comfortable enough using the service to warrant a shoutout from Daily Stormer founder, Andrew Anglin, who urged his fellow travelers to stop using the service.

“Discord is always on and always present among these groups on the far-right,” Joan Donovan, the lead researcher on media manipulation at the Data & Society Research Institute, told Slate in 2018. “It’s the place where they do most of the organizing of doxing and harassment campaigns.”

To date, Discord has raised $379.3 million, according to Crunchbase, from an investor group that includes Greylock, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Tencent and Benchmark.

In addition to the cash it raised earlier this year, Discord emphasized a new user experience and added video functionality so that users could communicate more readily (and so the company could compete with Zoom). There are templates available to help users create servers, and the company has increased its voice and video capacity by 200%.

As part of this new focus on product, Discord has launched what it calls a “Safety Center” that clearly defines the company’s rules and regulations and what actions users can take to monitor and manage their use of service for hate speech and abuse.

“We will continue to take decisive action against white supremacists, racists and others who seek to use Discord for evil,” the founders wrote in June.

As we reported at the time, Index Ventures co-founder Danny Rimer, who led the investor group that backed Discord’s latest $100 million cash infusion, was an advocate for the company’s expanded vision for itself.

“I believe Discord is the future of platforms because it demonstrates how a responsibly curated site can provide a safe space for people with shared interests,” Rimer wrote in a statement. “Rather than throwing raw content at you, like Facebook, it provides a shared experience for you and your friends. We’ll come to appreciate that Discord does for social conversation what Slack has done for professional conversation.”

Apparently, investors are doubling down on that assessment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Instagram is developing a new product, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), that will allow people to start conversations with businesses or creators’ accounts by tapping on a commonly asked question within a chat. Those who already have the feature available report they’re able to create set of up to four questions which can optionally be displayed at the beginning of a conversation with other users.

The feature could be useful for businesses that are often responding to customer inquiries about their products or services, or for creators who receive a number of inbound requests from fans or brands interested in collaborations, for example.

Image Credits: @thenezvm (opens in a new window)

The product’s introduction highlights the extent that Instagram’s messaging platform now overlaps with Facebook Messenger, following the recent launch of the new Instagram messaging experience. In September, Facebook announced Instagram users would have the option to upgrade to a new inbox that now offers a number of Messenger-inspired features — like the ability to change your chat color, react with any emoji, set messages to disappear, and more. The upgrade also introduced cross-app communication between Instagram and Messenger’s platforms.

With these changes, it appears Facebook is paving a road towards making the Instagram messaging experience more on par with Messenger.

Image Credits: @thenezvm (opens in a new window)

Today, the Messenger app offers a similar FAQ option for Facebook Page owners under the Automated Responses section in Messenger’s settings. Here, Page owners or admins can set up a series of frequently asked questions and their responses to those questions which can be presented at the beginning of conversations with their Page — just like this new Instagram feature offers.

The Instagram FAQ option had been spotted earlier this year while in development, but seemed to be only for Business accounts, according to the app’s code.

However, new reports and screenshots from one Instagram user with access to the feature indicate the FAQ will be available for creator accounts, in addition to businesses.

The feature was spotted on Monday by social media consultant Matt Navarra, who credited @thenezvm for the new discovery.

Given that @thenezvm has access to the feature now, as the above credited screenshots show, the FAQ option could either be in early testing or starting to roll out more broadly.

It’s likely the former, however, as Instagram declined to comment or provide details, when TechCrunch asked for more information.

Source: Tech Crunch