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Google Pay’s app adds boarding passes, tickets, p2p payments and more

Published May 10, 2018

Google Pay got a big upgrade at Google I/O this week. At a breakout session, Google announced a series of changes to its payments platform, recently rebranded from Android Pay, including support for peer-to-peer payments in the main Google Pay app; online payments support in all browsers; the ability to see all payments in a single place, instead of just those in-store; and support for tickets and boarding passes in Google Pay’s APIs, among several other things.

Some of Google Pay’s expansions were previously announced, like its planned support for more browsers and devices, for example.

However, the company detailed a host of other features at I/O that are now rolling out across the Google Pay platform.

One notable addition is support for peer-to-peer payments which is being added to the Google Pay app in the U.S. and the U.K.

And that transaction history, along with users’ other payments, will all be consolidated into one place.

“In an upcoming update of the Google Pay app, we’re going to allow you to manage all the payment methods in your Google account – not just the payment methods that you used to pay in-store,” said Gerardo Capiel, Product Management lead at Google Pay, during the session at I/O. “And even better, we’re going to provide you with a holistic view of all your transactions – whether they be on Google apps and services, such as Play and YouTube, whether they be with third-party merchants, such as Walgreens and Uber, or whether they’re transactions you’ve made to friends and families via our peer-to-peer service,” he said.

The company also said it would allow users to send and request money, manage payment info linked to their Google accounts, and see their transaction history on the web with the Google Pay iOS app, too.

And because I/O is a developer conference, many of the new additions were in the form new and updated APIs.

For starters, Google launched a new API for incorporating Google Pay into other third-party apps.

“Via our APIs, we’re going to enable these ready-to-pay users [who already have payment information stored with Google Pay] to also checkout quickly and easily in your own apps and websites,” Capiel said.

The benefit to those developers who add Google Pay support is an increase in conversion rates and faster monetization, he noted.

Plus, Google added support for tickets and boarding passes to the Google Pay APIs, where they joined the existing support for offers and loyalty cards.

This allows companies such as Urban Airship or DotDashPay to help business clients distribute and update their passes and tickets to Google Pay users.

“It shows an even stronger commitment on Google Pay’s part to make the digital wallet a priority,” Sean Arietta, founder and CEO of DotDashPay, told TechCrunch, following the presentation. “It also reinforces their focus on partners like DotDashPay to help build connections between consumers and brands. The fact that they are specifically highlighting a complete experience that starts with payments and ends with an NFC tap-to-identify, is really powerful. It makes the Google Pay story now complete,” he added.

Urban Airship was also touting the changes earlier this week, via a press release.

“We help businesses reinvent the customer experience by delivering the right information at the right time on any digital channel, and mobile wallets fill an increasingly critical role in that vision,” Brett Caine, CEO and president of Urban Airship, said in a statement. “Google Pay’s new support for tickets and boarding passes means customers will always have up-to-date information when they need it most – on the go.”

Some of Google’s early access partners on ticketing include Singapore Airlines, Eventbrite, Southwest, and FortressGB, which handles major soccer league tickets in the U.K. and elsewhere.

In terms of transit-related announcements, Google added a few more partners who will soon adopt Google Pay integration, including Vancouver, Canada and the U.K. bus system, following recent launches in Las Vegas and Portland.

The company also offered an update on Google Pay’s traction, noting the Google Pay app just passed 100 million downloads in the Google Play store, where it’s available to users in 18 markets worldwide.

Soon, Google said it will launch many of the core features and the Google Pay app globally to billions of Google users worldwide.

Dropbox beats expectations for its first quarterly check-in with Wall Street

Published May 10, 2018

Dropbox made its debut as a public company earlier this year and today passed through its first milestone of reporting its results to public investors, and it more or less beat expectations set for Wall Street on the top and bottom line.

The company reported more revenue and beat expectations for earnings that Wall Street set, bringing in $316.3 million in revenue and appearing to pick up momentum among its paying user base. It also said it had 11.5 million paying users, a jump from last year. However, the stock was largely flat in extended trading. One small negative signal — and it definitely appears to be a small one — was that its GAAP gross margin slipped slightly to 61.9% from 62.3% a year earlier. Dropbox is a software company that’s supposed to have great margins as it begins to ramp up its own hardware, but that slipping margin may end up being something that investors will zero in on going forward. Still, as the company continues to ramp up the enterprise component of its business, the calculus of its business may change over time.

This is a pretty important moment for the company, as it was a darling in Silicon Valley and rocketed to a $10 billion valuation in the early phases of the Web 2.0 era but began to face a ton of criticism as to whether it could be a robust business as larger companies started to offer cloud storage as a perk and not a business. Dropbox then found itself going up against companies like Box and Microsoft as it worked to create an enterprise business, but all this was behind closed doors — and it wasn’t clear if it was able to successfully maneuver its way into a second big business. Now the company is beholden to public shareholders and has to show all this in the open, and it serves as a good barometer of not just storage and collaboration businesses, but also some companies that are looking to drastically simplify workflow processes and convert that into a real business (like Slack, for example).

Here’s the final scorecard for the company:

Q1 revenue: $316.3 million, compared to Wall Street estimates of $308.7 million (up 28% year over year.)
Q1 earnings: 8 cents per share adjusted, compared to Wall Street estimates of 5 cents per share adjusted.
Paying users: 11.5 million, up from 9.3 million in the same period last year.
GAAP gross margin: 61.9%, down from 62.3% last year in the same period last year.
Non-GAAP gross margin: 74.2%, up from 63.5% in the same period last year.
Free cash flow: $51.9 million, down from $56.5 million in the same period last year.

(The GAAP and non-GAAP comparison is typically related to share-based compensation, which is a key component of employee compensation and retention.)

Dropbox was largely considered to be a successful IPO, rising more than 40% in its trading debut. That does mean that it may have left some money on the table, but its operating losses have been largely stable, even as it looks to woo larger enterprise customers as it — which is a bit of a taller order than its typical growth amid consumers that’s heavily driven by organic growth. Those larger enterprise customers offer more stable, and larger, revenue streams than a consumer base that faces a variety of options as many companies start to offer free storage. The company is now worth well over that original $10 billion valuation as a public company. Dropbox says it has more than 500 million users.

Since going public, the stock has had its ups and downs, but for the most part hasn’t dipped below that significant jump it saw from day one. Keeping that number propped up — and growing — is an important part of growing a business as a public company as it waves off more intense scrutiny and pressure for change from public shareholders, as well as offering competitive compensation packages for incoming employees in order to attract the best talent. It’s also good for morale as it offers a kind of grade for how the company is doing in the eyes of the public, though CEOs of companies often say they are committed toward long-term goals. The company’s shares are up around 11% since going public.

While there have been a wave of enterprise IPOs this year, including zScalar and Pluralsight’s upcoming IPO, Dropbox was largely considered to be a potential gauge of whether the IPO window was still open this year because of its hybrid nature. Dropbox started off as a consumer company based around a dead-simple approach of hosting and sharing files online, and used that to build a massive user base even as the cost of cloud storage was rapidly commoditized. But it also is building a robust enterprise-focus business, and continues to roll out a variety of tools to woo those businesses with consistent updates to products like its document tool Paper. Last month, the company started rolling out templates, as it looked to make traditional workflow processes easier and easier for companies in order to capture their interest much in the same way it captured the interest of consumers at large.

Apple invests $10M in greenhouse gas-free aluminum smelting

Published May 10, 2018

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard joined key execs from Apple and industrial manufacturers Alcoa and Rio Tinto to announce a new process for smelting aluminum that removes greenhouse gases from the equation.

Alcoa and Rio Tinto are creating a joint venture in based in Montreal called Elysis, to help mainstream the process, with plans to make it commercially available by 2024. Along with swapping carbon for oxygen as a byproduct of the production process, the technology is also expected to reduce costs by around 15 percent.

It’s easy to see why Apple jumped at investing into tech here, pumping $13 million CAD ($10 million USD) into the venture. The company has been making a big push over the past couple of years to reduce its carbon footprint across the board. This time last month, Apple announced that it had moved to 100-percent clean energy for its global facilitates.

“Apple is committed to advancing technologies that are good for the planet and help protect it for generations to come,” Tim Cook said in a release tied to today’s news. “We are proud to be part of this ambitious new project, and look forward to one day being able to use aluminum produced without direct greenhouse gas emissions in the manufacturing of our products.”

Those companies, along with the Governments of Canada and Quebec have combined to invest a full $188 million CAD in the forward looking tech. While the new business will be headquartered in Montreal, U.S. manufacturing will also get a piece of the pie. Alcoa has been smelting metal through the process at a smaller scale in a plant outside of Pittsburgh since 2009.

Necto looks to help individuals get their own local ISP businesses off the ground

Published May 10, 2018

If you live in a city, you’re probably deciding between a handful of major broadband or wireless carriers — maybe something like Comcast or AT&T. But there’s a good chance that there are a bunch of local carriers that are looking to get off the ground, and Benjamin Huang wants to help make sure there are even more options/.

That’s the idea behind Necto, a startup looking to create a sort of ISP school to help people get started with their own internet service provider founded by Huang and Adam Montgomery. Typically that’s a pretty tall order, but Necto works with individuals to learn how to build a network, get the right equipment, and deploy it in order to get consumers access to a new internet service provider that’s an alternative to the larger carriers. There are already emerging providers like Sonic in San Francisco, which aims to offer quick internet for a cheaper price, but there’s a whole group of individuals waiting in the wings that are trying to build their own ISP and the associated business behind it, Huang said. Necto is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter 2018 class.

“Ultimately, we want to see so many ISPs that net neutrality isn’t an issue,” Montgomery said. “It’s cheaper than ever and easier to start an internet service provider. People didn’t know they could do this, and networking engineering is the highest cost. You have to have a lot of stuff to build out. We remove that and bundle it as an ISP starter kit service. We give guidance to the operators, these are the customers you have, this is the equipment you need buy, here’s how to construct them. It’s more like constructing Ikea furniture. The hard part we remove which is automatically configuring these routers.”

Necto started off as its own attempt at an internet service provider, but Huang and Montgomery found that trying to get wholesale fiber was a high barrier to entry. The pair started looking into wholesale wireless, and Huang said that technology is getting to the point where it’s just as fast as typical broadband and an option for resale. The challenge then is getting the equipment into the hands of individuals that want to ramp up their own ISP and showing them how to get started. Then, they’re off to the races and work to build a business around that, including customer service and other facets of it.

Necto essentially charges for the guidance of how to start an ISP, including a class that individuals go through in order to get one off the ground. Then the company continues to ship software to ensure that it’s not as difficult to keep the equipment up and running, as well as provide ongoing support for those individuals. The equipment is all off the shelf, Huang said, in order to lower the barrier to entry for these providers.

The challenge here, however, will be ensuring that not only individuals know they can get an ISP off the ground, but getting their — and consumers’ — attention in the first place. Necto hopes to take a hyper-local strategy, Montgomery said, like traveling to farmers’ markets and working with local operators to ensure they can track down the right people that are looking to build a business around ISPs. There are still going to be plenty of challenges as it continues to work with wholesale wireless providers in order to get these businesses off the ground.

For ScopeAR, the market is finally catching up with the technology

Published May 10, 2018

ScopeAR, a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2015 class, came to the augmented reality game very early, launching in 2011 when there was very little hardware and most people didn’t understand the technology. But it has managed to hang around long enough for the market and the hardware to finally catch with the founders’ vision of using AR as an advanced training tool in the enterprise.

Today, the company offers a pair of tools. First of all, there is RemoteAR, which CEO and company co-founder Scott Montgomerie describes as “Facetime with AR on top of it.” It allows a technician to virtually look over the shoulder at what a local person is seeing and provide directions and feedback in real time remotely. For example, the expert could circle the cover the technician needs to remove and point to the screws with two virtual arrows.

This could have great utility in any situation where you have an experienced person in the office, who doesn’t want to go on the road on anymore, but can still provide detailed instructions to a novice, acting as a trainer and helper. This is an actual problem in many industries with aging workforces.

Technician working with RemoteAR. Photo: ScopeAR

The second product, called WorkLink, lets you import a 3D CAD model, then associate that model with real equipment. When you put on hardware like Microsoft Hololens, you can see the 3D representation of the equipment and follow along with instructions on how to repair it. It also works with iOS, Android and Windows devices.

One big change since the company was established in 2011 is the variety of platforms you can use for augmented reality. “Last year was the thing where AR took off. Apple got into it with ARKit and Google with ARCore and awareness happened and people saw it was viable,” Montgomerie said.

By creating enterprise use cases like remote assistance and work instructions, the company has been gaining momentum over the last year, and reports tripling its revenue in 2017. Although they aren’t sharing a specific number, it’s fair to say they are growing quickly.

They developed an augmented reality training product early on that resonated with a mining company, and that along with consulting working with the likes of NASA, Boeing and Toyota, helped them stay afloat until things began to really click around AR in recent years, Montgomerie explained.

They also took some time to be part of the Y Combinator Summer 2015 class, and even scored a spot on TechCrunch’s list of favorite Demo Day 2 startups. During the YC experience, they developed the first version of RemoteAR. WorkLink followed a year later.

So far the company has taken on a fairly modest amount of investment with Montgomerie reporting three seed rounds including $2 million right after Y Combinator, $1.7 million last May and another $2 million this past December. If the company continues to grow at this rate, it’s a good bet they will be looking for a Series A at some point to help scale the company further.

Free stock trading app Robinhood rockets to a $5.6B valuation with new funding round

Published May 10, 2018

Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrency, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it.

And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating a next generation way of trading assets and cryptocurrency that is now sending Robinhood to a $5.6 billion valuation in a new financing round that the company is announcing today. Robinhood says it’s closed a $363 million Series D financing round; DST Global led this new round and Iconiq, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Capital G participated. Robinhood had a $1.3 billion valuation last year when it had around 2 million users, and the company says it now has 4 million users and has passed $150 billion in transaction volume.

“It’s the only place right now where you can trade crypto, stocks, and options all in one place,” CEO Vlad Tenev said. “For us to construct an experience that feels seamless and natural for customers, that for example want to sell an equity and use the proceeds to buy crypto, seamlessly, that’s been challenging not just from a product and design standpoint, but also infrastructure standpoint. There’s complexity under the hood, and our goal is to make it as seamless as possible in the process and make that complexity go away.”

Those 4 million users — and that valuation — indicates that Robinhood has clearly exposed a lot of demand for an easier way for users to dip their toes into financial services without having to work with firms that have trading fees like Scottrade or E*Trade. And while there are a lot of services that offer robo-advisory services like Betterment and Wealthront, which make it easier to start investing small amounts of money, Robinhood offers users the opportunity to do these things at a more granular level.

And, of course, there’s the cryptocurrency aspect that is clearly spurring a lot of interest in the company. At the time, 1 million users waitlisted for access in just the five days after Robinhood Crypto was announced. Robinhood has premium services like Robinhood Gold, where the company can find additional ways to generate revenue that offset the requirements of running a system that allows users to trade stocks for free. Robinhood has raised $539 million to date, as diving into financial services can be an expensive prospect, as well as getting enough users on board to the point that it can scale to a level that the business starts to increasingly make sense.

Robinhood’s crypto trading service came out in February and by today, the company says it’s available in 10 states. The company also rolled out a web version and stock option trading, trying to become a more robust financial services company that’s still tuned to a younger generation that wants an easier way to get into investing without needing a big balance to invest. Most of Robinhood’s users, too, aren’t so-called “day traders” and are instead holding stocks for a while after they buy them.

“If you look at the data and the statistics, people that are active day traders are actually a very small percentage of our space,” Tenev said. “People that are actually transacting on that cadence are the minority of our customers. Most of our customers engage in more of these buy and hold accumulation strategies. We really see a lot of unique things because we don’t charge trading commissions. There are customers that deposit money regularly twice or once a month and then buy stocks as soon as those deposits come in. We don’t see a lot of customers that are doing rapid buying and selling.”

Still, as it tries to further expand — especially into products like crypto and new regions — it’s going to increasingly find itself trying to jump hurdles that financial services companies find when going abroad. And there’s always a chance that the trading platforms will try to become a little more competitive (and companies like Square are even getting into Bitcoin trading). That’s going to require a robust amount of funding to try to outmaneuver well-capitalized companies that might already have those relationships in place to more easily expand.

“The political climate is uncertain, it sort of affects everyone, it doesn’t affect us uniquely,” Tenev said. “We’re a crypto business now. Not a lot of people have a ton of clarity on what that’s gonna look like in the future, it’s a new space that’s evolving really rapidly. I think that we’re confident we can adapt and evolve, and we’re operating the business in a responsible way. There’s only so much you can do, but I feel like we’ve done a lot to address any concerns.”

Nintendo’s $20 charging stand finally fixes the Switch’s kickstand problem

Published May 10, 2018

Versatility has also been on of the Switch’s best features. The latest Nintendo system is a fascinating hybrid device that skirts the line between home and portable gaming. Still, there are some in-between scenarios the console didn’t get quite right out of the box.

The kickstand problem has plagued the otherwise well-received device since its earliest days. It falls over often, it’s puts the device at a weird angle, and worst of all, the charging port is on the bottom, so you can’t play the system in table top mode while it’s plugged it.

Just ahead of E3, the company’s showing off a $20 solution. The simply named Adjustable Charging Stand props the system, while keeping it plugged in, via an AC adapter port on the side.

An adjustable kickstand on the back, meanwhile, means you can change the viewing angle, depending on the height of the surface it’s on. That’s good news for those times when you don’t have a TV set to plug into, but still want to pull out the Joy-Cons to get the full experience — be it on a desk or an airport tray table.

The peripheral hits stores July 13.

Tailor Brands raises $15.5M for AI-driven logo creation and more

Published May 9, 2018

Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced this morning that it has raised $15.5 million in Series B funding.

CEO Yali Saar has said the company sits at the intersection of design and machine learning. The idea is to create technology that understands the best practices of logo design, copywriting and social media strategy.

It’s the automated design that’s most immediately eye-catching, and that’s the big feature highlighted on the Tailor Brands website. You’ll need to pay to get access to high-quality image files, but before that, you can actually try creating a logo for free, just by entering some basic information about your company and identifying the designs you prefer.

Related: What do you guys think of the new TechCrunch logo?

techcrunch tailor brands

Tailor Brands, which launched at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2014, said the technology has already been used to create 45 million logos. The company says it had 3.86 million customers last year, and is adding half a million new businesses to the platform each month.

The new funding was led by Pitango Venture Capital Growth Fund and British Armat Group, with participation from Disruptive Technologies and Mangrove Capital Partners. The company has now raised a total of $20.6 million and says it will use the money to expand globally, add more languages and introduce more tools to its full branding suite.

MoviePass parent drops another 46%

Published May 9, 2018

There’s been another bomb at the box office, and it isn’t a movie.

MoviePass parent Helios & Matheson lost nearly half of its remaining value today as investors continued to flee the cash-burning movie service. That drop followed a 31 percent dive yesterday, after the company filed a statement with the SEC warning that it would have to sell equity in the coming weeks for it to remain solvent. Since Thursday’s opening bell last week, the stock has moved from $2.13 to $0.79, a drop of 63 percent. The company’s market cap is now $51.44 million.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said in a written statement that “Our burn rate has been slashed by 35-40% by the implementations and abuse prevention measures we have put in place over the last few weeks. We have always known, from when MoviePass took off in August, that it was going to be a high cash burn business model. We are not changing our guidance on 5 million subscribers by the end of this year – which should make us profitable/cash flow positive according to our business model. We have access in capital markets to over $300 million. So there is plenty of cash available to sustain the subscriber growth and movie-going habits of our users.”

Those are the facts as we know them, but let’s consider some of the options the company has now.

Even if you believe the market demand for Helios’ stock (I, for one, find them incredulous), there is an enormous challenge of converting that money into equity now. The envelope math looks like this: A month ago when the stock closed at $4.21, buying 20 percent of the company would have cost roughly $55 million. At the company’s current average burn rate of $21.7 million per month, that cash would have lasted approximately 2.5 months.

Now though, with the stock price so low, getting cash on the balance sheet today is a much harder proposition. That same $55 million that bought an investor a fifth of the company last month would be a complete buyout today. Buying 20 percent only costs a bit more than $10 million now, or roughly two weeks of burn.

So what’s the trick here that will save the company?

The obvious option is to radically control burn. The company could offer pricier tiers for heavy users of MoviePass, and could put a ceiling on the number of films a customer can watch per month as it did temporarily a few weeks ago. Lowe seems deeply committed to overall subscriber growth though, and that makes any sort of constraints on the product unlikely. The reason is that subscribers are the leverage Lowe needs to negotiate better partnership arrangements with theater chains, so he has to keep trying to grow users rapidly.

One theory is that the company could be negotiating equity deals with theater chains like AMC, which could be enticed by the low price of the stock to “buy in” to MoviePass’ popularity. Such media equity partnerships are not unusual — Sony, for instance, was a major shareholder in Spotify, as was Warner Music group, although both have since sold off large percentages of their holdings. Given the reliance of MoviePass on theater chains, building an equity partnership could prove to be the service’s savior.

A well-publicized partnership — including discounted movie tickets for MoviePass — could boost the stock significantly since the cost savings would improve the company’s burn rate. That could be an enticing proposition for the chains, since they could realize an almost immediate gain on their investment, plus the ongoing proceeds of a partnership going forward.

The other tactic would be to sign up more MoviePass subscribers who watch limited films. This is what might be called the “gym membership model” of trying to identify customers who want to buy a membership as an aspirational purchase, but who won’t actually use the facilities often. The challenge, beyond the incredibly short time period to try to build that marketing funnel, is that MoviePass appears to lose money on the very first ticket a customer purchases. The question isn’t how much revenue each customer generates, but how much the losses can be minimized.

The situation is a high-wire act, and the company will either hit the ground in the next few weeks, or it will right the ship, limit expenses and get enough equity investors to give it some cash to burn and keep on growing. I’d say use your MoviePass while you have it, but then again, that’s exactly why the company is faltering to begin with.

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, now lets you pay ‘Nearby Friends’

Published May 9, 2018

Monzo, one of a plethora of U.K. fintech startups aiming to re-invent current account banking, has launched a new feature that makes it even more frictionless to transfer money to friends. Dubbed ‘Nearby Friends’, the new geolocation functionality uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

One of the ways Monzo has increased its virality from the get-go is by making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends. The idea, as Monzo co-founder often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.

Revolut has a similar feature called ‘Near Me’

“Thanks to the magic of Bluetooth, you can see anyone else that uses Monzo nearby. To protect people’s privacy, you’ll only find people who also have the feature open at the same time. With just a couple of taps, you can send people money, without the need to swap numbers or do any other admin,” writes Andy Smart, iOS Platform Lead at Monzo, on the company’s blog.

Under the hood, Monzo’s ‘Nearby Friends’ uses Google Nearby, Google’s peer-to-peer networking API that allows apps to “easily discover, connect to, and exchange data with nearby devices in real-time, regardless of network connectivity”. Specifically, here is how Monzo says its implementation works:

When you open Nearby Friends, we send an anonymous token (a random string of text) to Google

That token is broadcast via Bluetooth to devices nearby

At the same time, your Monzo app starts searching for other devices near you

When your Monzo app discovers a device nearby, it receives the device’s token. Using the Monzo API, it exchanges that token for your friend’s name and profile picture

We also receive an identifier which we can use to work out who to make the payment to

The token does not identify you personally outside of Monzo’s systems, which means we don’t share any of your personal information with third parties during the process. The token we send to Google expires after a short period of time, meaning your personal data is unidentifiable.

Meanwhile, competitor Revolut recently — and relatively quietly by its standards — rolled out a very similar feature, as it is wont to do. Called ‘Near Me’, I understand it will be formally unannounced in a company blog post as soon as tomorrow and is another clear sign of how fast the $1.7B valued banking startup is moving.