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Here’s what caused yesterday’s O2 and SoftBank outages

Published December 7, 2018

It appears that most mobile carriers, including O2 and SoftBank, have recovered from yesterday’s cell phone network outage that was triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment running on their networks. That shutdown appears to have been triggered by expired software certificates on the equipment itself.

While Ericsson acknowledged in their press release yesterday that expired certificates were at the root of the problem, you may be wondering why this would cause a shutdown. It turns out that it’s likely due to a fail-safe system in place, says Tim Callan, senior fellow at Sectigo (formerly Comodo CA), a U.S. certificate-issuing authority. Callan has 15 years of experience in the industry.

He indicated that while he didn’t have specific information on this outage, it would be consistent with industry best practices to shut down the system when encountering expired certificates “We don’t have specific visibility into the Ericsson systems in question, but a typical application would require valid certificates to be in place in order to keep operating. That is to protect against breach by some kind of agent that is maliciously inserted into the network,” Callan told TechCrunch.

In fact, Callan said that in 2009 a breach at Heartland Payments was directly related to such a problem. “2009’s massive data breach of Heartland Payment Systems occurred because the network in question did NOT have such a requirement. Today it’s common practice to use certificates to avoid that same vulnerability,” he explained.

Ericsson would not get into specifics about what caused the problem.”Ericsson takes full responsibility for this technical failure. The problem has been identified and resolved. After a complete analysis Ericsson will take measures to prevent such a failure from happening again.”

Among those affected yesterday were millions of O2 customers in Great Britain and SoftBank customers in Japan. SoftBank issued an apology in the form of a press release on the company website. “We deeply apologize to our customers for all inconveniences it caused. We will strive to take all measures to prevent the same network outage.”

As for O2, they also apologized this morning after restoring service, tweeting:

Our 4G network was restored earlier this morning. Our technical teams will continue to monitor service performance closely and we’re starting the full review to understand what happened. We are really sorry for the issues yesterday.

— O2 in the UK (@O2) December 7, 2018

Netflix just had a record-breaking November on mobile

Published December 7, 2018

Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with TechCrunch. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined — a figure that’s 77 percent higher than the $49 million it generated last November. That’s a new record.

Before, the biggest month Netflix had to date was July 2018, when it grossed an estimated $84.7 million. At the time, that was the most it had made on mobile since it began monetizing on mobile in September 2015.

To date, Netflix has grossed more than $1.58 billion on mobile.

The firm didn’t speculate as to what, specifically, drove Netflix to break records again in November, but there are probably a few factors at play, including the trend toward cord cutting and shift toward streaming services for traditional “TV” viewing.

But most notably is the increasing revenue coming to Netflix from its international markets.

Sensor Tower did point out that Netflix’s U.S. app revenue grew 76 percent year-over-year in November, but other countries contributing more than $1 million in gross revenue were higher. For example, Germany grew 90 percent, Brazil was 94 percent, South Korea was 107 percent and Japan was 175 percent.

However, the U.S. still accounts for the majority of Netflix’s in-app subscription revenue, at 57 percent in November, or $49.4 million. But with Netflix’s international expansion, its share is declining. When Netflix first began offering subscriptions in fall 2015, the U.S. then accounted for 71 percent of its revenue.

Netflix in recent weeks has been doubling down on mobile. The company is now testing a mobile-only subscription aimed at making its service more affordable in Asia and other emerging markets.

In Q3, the company gained nearly 7 million new subscribers, with 5.87 million of those coming from international markets.

Image credit: Sensor Tower

Note: Post updated with corrected percentages after publication due to a Sensor Tower calculation error.

Pivotal announces new serverless framework

Published December 7, 2018

Pivotal has always been about making open-source tools for enterprise developers, but surprisingly, up until now, the arsenal has lacked a serverless component. That changed today with the alpha launch of Pivotal Function Service.

“Pivotal Function Service is a Kubernetes-based, multi-cloud function service. It’s part of the broader Pivotal vision of offering you a single platform for all your workloads on any cloud,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new service.

What’s interesting about Pivotal’s flavor of serverless, besides the fact that it’s based on open source, is that it has been designed to work both on-prem and in the cloud in a cloud native fashion, hence the Kubernetes-based aspect of it. This is unusual to say the least.

The idea up until now has been that the large-scale cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft could dial up whatever infrastructure your functions require, then dial them down when you’re finished without you ever having to think about the underlying infrastructure. The cloud provider deals with whatever compute, storage and memory you need to run the function, and no more.

Pivotal wants to take that same idea and make it available in the cloud across any cloud service. It also wants to make it available on-prem, which may seem curious at first, but Pivotal’s Onsi Fakhouri says customers want that same abilities both on-prem and in the cloud. “One of the key values that you often hear about serverless is that it will run down to zero and there is less utilization, but at the same time there are customers who want to explore and embrace the serverless programming paradigm on-prem,” Fakhouri said. Of course, then it is up to IT to ensure that there are sufficient resources to meet the demands of the serverless programs.

The new package includes several key components for developers, including an environment for building, deploying and managing your functions, a native eventing ability that provides a way to build rich event triggers to call whatever functionality you require and the ability to do this within a Kubernetes-based environment. This is particularly important as companies embrace a hybrid use case to manage the events across on-prem and cloud in a seamless way.

One of the advantages of Pivotal’s approach is that Pivotal can work on any cloud as an open product. This is in contrast to the cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which provide similar services that run exclusively on their clouds. Pivotal is not the first to build an open-source Function as a Service, but they are attempting to package it in a way that makes it easier to use.

Serverless doesn’t actually mean there are no underlying servers. Instead, it means that developers don’t have to point to any servers because the cloud provider takes care of whatever infrastructure is required. In an on-prem scenario, IT has to make those resources available.

2 Milly files a lawsuit against Fortnite maker Epic Games over dance move

Published December 7, 2018

Rapper 2 Milly is suing Epic Games over Fortnite’s use of his dance move, the Milly Rock.

The lawsuit claims direct infringement of copyright, contributory infringement of copyright and violation of the Right of Publicity under California Common Law, among other things.

From the filing:

Defendants capitalized on the Milly Rock’s popularity, particularly with its younger fans, by selling the Milly Rock dance as an in-game purchase in Fortnite under the name “Swipe It,” which players can buy to customize their avatars for use in the game. This dance was immediately recognized by players and media worldwide as the Milly Rock. Although identical to the dance created, popularized, and demonstrated by Ferguson, Epic did not credit Ferguson nor seek his consent to use, display, reproduce, sell, or create a derivative work based upon Ferguson’s Milly Rock dance or likeness.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve seen the Milly Rock. Rock dwellers can check it out below:

On Fortnite, the dance is called the Swipe It, and it looks like this:

Back in July, around the time that Fortnite unveiled the Swipe It dance, Chance the Rapper pointed out that Epic Games tends to use in the game dance moves popularized by famous artists. These emotes cost money, and heavily contribute to the hundreds of millions in revenue that Epic Games pulls in on a monthly basis via its free-to-play game.

Fortnite should put the actual rap songs behind the dances that make so much money as Emotes. Black creatives created and popularized these dances but never monetized them. Imagine the money people are spending on these Emotes being shared with the artists that made them

— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) July 13, 2018

Moreover, the default emote on Fortnite is the relatively famous little routine from actor Donald Faison on the show Scrubs.

Dear fortnite… I’m flattered? Though part of me thinks I should talk to a lawyer…

— Donald Faison (@donald_faison) April 1, 2018

This lawsuit is particularly complicated considering that it’s over a dance move, which is difficult to lock down with copyright. The Verge reported that this lawsuit is the first of its kind, in that it challenges the gaming industry’s use of pop culture as for-profit virtual items. NPR reports that the U.S. Copyright Office “can’t register short dance routines consisting of only a few movements or steps with minor linear or spatial variations, even if a routine is novel or distinctive.”

That doesn’t mean there is no way to protect choreographic works. Those works, however, must be defined as “a series of dance movements or patterns organized into an integrated, coherent, and expressive compositional whole,” according to NPR.

Concluding the 22-page filing is a request for injunctive relief, which would bar Epic Games from using 2 Milly’s likeness in the game, as well as financial compensation for the use of the Milly Rock dance.

We reached out to Epic Games and will update the story if/when we hear back.

IBM selling Lotus Notes/Domino business to HCL for $1.8B

Published December 7, 2018

IBM announced last night that it is selling the final components from its 1995 acquisition of Lotus to Indian firm HCL for $1.8 billion.

IBM paid $3.5 billion for Lotus back in the day. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a big part of IBM’s enterprise business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to pull away, selling the development part to HCL, while maintaining control of sales and marketing.

This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house.

As for HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business, and it’s seizing it with this purchase. “The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets,” C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research who keeps close watch on the enterprise collaboration space, says the sale could represent a fresh start for software that IBM hasn’t really been paying close attention to for some time. “HCL is far more interested in Notes/Domino than IBM has been for a decade. They are investing heavily, trying to rejuvenate the brand,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

While this software may feel long in the tooth, Notes and Domino are still in use in many corners of the enterprise, and this is especially true in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and AP (Asia Pacific), Lepofsky said.

He added that IBM appears to be completely exiting the collaboration space with this sale. “It appears that IBM is done with collaboration, out of the game,” he said.

This move makes sense for IBM, which is moving in a different direction as it develops its cloud business. The Red Hat acquisition in October, in particular, shows that the company wants to embrace private and hybrid cloud deployments, and older software like Lotus Notes and Domino don’t really play a role in that world.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval processes, is expected to close in the middle of next year.

Nigerian logistics startup Kobo360 raises $6M, expands in Africa

Published December 7, 2018

Jake Bright
Contributor

Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa.

MoviePass announces new pricing plans for 2019

Published December 6, 2018

It’s been a rocky year for MoviePass, something that CEO Mitch Lowe acknowledged in an interview this week with Variety.

“We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees, and our partners. We believe we’re doing everything that we possibly can to deliver a great service and we’re in the process of fixing all the things that went wrong.”

To that end, the company is launching a new pricing structure that will take effect in January. If you like paying $9.95, don’t worry: You’ll still be able to do that (at least in some geographies). If, on the other hand, you’re willing to pay a little more, you’ll no longer be limited by the ever-changing list of movies that MoviePass is supporting on a given day.

So there are now three tiers, each of them offering three movie tickets each month. There’s Select, which will cost between $9.95 and $14.95 per month (depending on geography), and will only allow viewers to watch certain movies on certain days; All Access, which costs between $14.95 and $19.95 and allows you to go to any standard screening; and Red Carpet, which costs between $19.95 and $24.95 and includes one IMAX, 3D or other large-format screening each month.

The company says that this new structure will allow it to break even on the tickets it’s selling — a key step to making the business model work.

MoviePass fans will likely remember that the company appeared to be running out of money over the summer, leading it to announce a price increase, only to back away from the price hike in favor of adding limitations on how many movies and which movies subscribers could see.

Meanwhile, the New York attorney general’s office said it was investigating MoviePass for possible securities fraud, and parent company Helios and Matheson said it would spin off MoviePass into a separate company. (TechCrunch’s parent company has a stake in MoviePass.)

The competition is growing. And app store intelligence company Sensor Tower says MoviePass only added 12,000 new users to its mobile app last month, down 97 percent from the growth it was seeing at its high point in January.

In addition to rethinking its pricing, MoviePass is also making organizational changes. The company told The New York Times that although Lowe will remain CEO, he’ll be handing over responsibility for day-to-day operations to Executive Vice President Khalid Itum.

MoviePass parent company to spin off MoviePass

Ericsson software problem has been causing widespread cell phone outages

Published December 6, 2018

A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world, including O2 users in Great Britain and SoftBank users in Japan, according to a report in the Financial Times earlier today.

Ericsson took blame for the outage in a press release. It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment used on the affected company’s mobile networks. While Ericsson indicated it involved multiple countries, it appeared to try to minimize the impact by stating it involved “network disturbances for a limited number of customers.” The FT report indicated that it was actually affecting millions of mobile customers worldwide.

Regardless, the company said that an initial analysis attributed the problem to an expired software certificate on the affected equipment. Börje Ekholm, Ericsson president and CEO, said they were working to restore the service as soon as possible, which probably isn’t soon enough for people who don’t have a working cell phone at the moment.

“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” Ekholm said in a statement.

While the press release went on to say they are working to restore the service throughout the day, as of publishing this article, the O2 outage maps still showed problems in the London area and throughout Great Britain.

The AT&T and Verizon outage pages are also currently showing outages in the U.S, but Ericsson reports that these are unrelated to today’s issues with their equipment, which are only affecting customers outside of the US.

(Note that Verizon owns this publication.)

Contentful raises $33.5M for its headless CMS platform

Published December 6, 2018

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.

It’s been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”

The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”

In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.

Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.

Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.

What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.

Contentful, a Stripe for content management, raises $28M led by General Catalyst

FB QVC? Facebook tries Live video shopping

Published December 6, 2018

Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app.

Facebook confirms the new shopping feature is currently in testing with a limited set of Pages in Thailand, which has been a testbed for shopping features. The option was first spotted by social media and reputation manager Jeff Higgins, and re-shared by Matt Navarra and Social Media Today. But now Facebook is confirming the test’s existence and providing additional details.

The company tells me it had heard feedback from the community in Thailand that Live video helped sellers demonstrate how items could be used or worn, and provided richer understanding than just using photos. Users also told Facebook that Live’s interactivity let customers instantly ask questions and get answers about product specifications and details. Facebook has looked to Thailand to test new commerce experiences like home rentals in Marketplace, as the country’s citizens were quick to prove how Facebook Groups could be used for peer-to-peer shopping. “Thailand is one of our most active Marketplace communities” says Mayank Yadav, Facebook product manager for Marketplace.

Now it’s running the Live shopping test, which allows Pages to notify fans that they’re broadcasting to “showcase products and connect with your customers.” Merchants can take reservations and request payments through Messenger. Facebook tells me it doesn’t currently have plans to add new partners or expand the feature. But some sellers without access are being invited to join a waitlist for the feature. It also says it’s working closely with its test partners to gather feedback and iterate on the live video shopping experience, which would seem to indicate it’s interested in opening the feature more widely if it performs well.

Facebook doesn’t take a cut of payments through Messenger, but the feature could still help earn the company money at a time when it’s seeking revenue streams beyond News Feed ads as it runs out of space there, Stories take over as the top media form and user growth plateaus. Hooking people on video viewing helps Facebook show lucrative video ads. The more that Facebook can train users to buy and sell things on its app, the better the conversion rates will be for businesses, and the more they’ll be willing to spend on ads. Facebook could also convince sellers who broadcast Live to buy its new Marketplace ad units to promote their wares. And Facebook is happy to snatch any use case from the rest of the internet, whether it’s long-form video viewing or job applications or shopping to boost time on site and subsequent ad views.

Increasingly, Facebook is setting its sights on Craigslist, Etsy and eBay. Those commerce platforms have failed to keep up with new technologies like video and lack the trust generated by Facebook’s real-name policy and social graph. A few years ago, selling something online meant typing up a generic description and maybe uploading a photo. Soon it could mean starring in your own infomercial.

[PostScript: And a Facebook home shopping network could work perfectly on its new countertop smart display Portal.]