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WhatsApp makes group calls easier, but calls still limited to four people
WhatsApp is making group calls easier with a change to the way its mobile app works. Before, users would have to start a 1:1 video call, then add participants — there wasn’t an option to begin a group call at once, the company says. Now, the design has been updated so you can start group calls with just a couple of taps.
In the new design, you can go to the group whose members you want to call, then tap on the phone icon at the top-right corner of the screen to get started. From the next screen, you’ll tap the contacts within the group you want to call, then tap the voice or video button — depending on what type of call you want to make.
The company added a new way to make group calls from the Calls tab, as well.
With the update, you can tap the new Call icon on the top-right corner of the screen, pick the contacts you want to call and again pick either the voice or video icon.
WhatsApp currently supports calling up to four people at one time.
That’s fewer than is supported on other top mobile messaging services — like Apple’s FaceTime, which was updated in October to support 32 people (up from only two people before); or Messenger, which can support up to 50 people in a call, for example. However, WhatsApp’s group call feature itself is still fairly new — it was officially rolled out at the end of July this year.
For a smaller group, it’s still a useful way to connect with friends and family without having to tap into your cellular plan’s voice minutes. Calls are also end-to-end encrypted, which makes it a good option for privacy seekers — that is, if you believe that any app owned by Facebook can fit that description.
WhatsApp warns that all members should have a good internet connection before using the group calling feature, as the quality of the call will depend on the contact with the weakest connection.
The update is available now to iPhone users and is rolling out “soon” on Android.
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Consumer advocacy groups call on FTC to investigate kids’ apps on Google Play
A coalition of 22 consumer and public health advocacy groups, led by Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), have today filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking them to investigate and sanction Google for how its Google Play Store markets apps to children. The complaint states that Google features apps designed for very young children in its Play Store’s “Family” section, many of which are violating federal children’s privacy law, exposing kids to inappropriate content and disregarding Google’s own policies by luring kids into making in-app purchases and watching ads.
Google Play ‘Family’ section
Google first introduced its “Designed for Families” program back in 2015, which gives developers of kid-friendly apps meeting certain guidelines additional visibility in the Play Store. This includes a placement in the Family section, where apps are organized by age appropriateness.
To qualify, “Family” apps must abide by specific content policies, Google’s Developer Distribution Agreement and the Designed for Families DDA Addendum. The apps also must meet the Designed for Families program requirements. Legal compliance with federal privacy laws, including COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule), are among the requirements.
COPPA is designed to protect children under the age of 13 by giving parents control over what information sites and apps can collect from their kids.
Above: Google Play store showcases children’s content in its own dedicated sections
COPPA violations
But the new FTC complaint claims that Google is not verifying COPPA compliance when it accepts these apps and, as a result, many are in continual violation of the law.
“Our research revealed a surprising number of privacy violations on Android apps for children, including sharing geolocation with third parties,” said Serge Egelman, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in a statement shared by the group. “Given Google’s assertion that Designed for Families apps must be COPPA compliant, it’s disappointing these violations still abound, even after Google was alerted to the scale of the problem,” he added.
TechCrunch asked the coalition if it had some idea about how many apps were in violation of COPPA, and were told the groups don’t know an exact number.
“From our survey — and more comprehensive analyses like the PET Study — it seems fairly prevalent,” Lindsey Barrett, Staff Attorney at Georgetown’s Institute for Public Representation, told us.
“The PET Study found that 73 percent of the kids apps in the Play store transmitted sensitive data over the internet, and we saw apps sending geolocation without notice and verifiable parental consent, and sending personal information unencrypted,” Barrett said. “Further, under COPPA, children’s PII cannot be used for behavioral advertising. Yet, many of the children’s apps we looked at were sending information to ad networks which say their services should not be used with children’s apps,” she added.
Other harms
The apps also engage in other bad behaviors, like regularly showing ads that are difficult to exit or showing those that require viewing in order to continue the current game, according to the complaint. Some apps pressure kids into making in-app purchases — in one example, the game characters were crying if the kids didn’t buy the locked items, it notes. Others show ads for alcohol and gambling, despite those being barred by Google’s Ad Policy.
Above: disturbing images from TabTale apps
The coalition additionally called out some apps for containing “graphic, sexualized images” like TutoTOONS “Sweet Baby Girl Daycare 4 – Babysitting Fun,” which has more than 10 million downloads. (The game has a part where kids change a baby’s diaper, wipe their diaper area, then rub powder all over the baby’s body.) Others model harmful behavior, like TabTale’s “Crazy Eye Clinic,” which teaches children to clean their eyes with a sharp instrument, and has more than one million downloads. (The game is currently not available on Google Play and its webpage is down.)
The complaint also broadly takes issue with apps that use common SDKs like those from Unity or Flurry (disclosure: Flurry and TechCrunch share a corporate parent) to collect device identifiers from the children’s apps.
“Nearly three-quarters of the apps in the Family section transmit device identifiers to third parties,” reads the complaint. “There is no way for us to know for sure what the device identifiers are used for. Since many of the apps send device identifiers to third parties that specialize in monetizing apps and/or engaging in interest-based (behavioral) advertising, it seems unlikely that this information is being used solely to support internal operations,” it says.
Above: Strawberry Shortcake Puppy Palace was called out for aggressive monetization efforts. Strawberry tells kids to buy things to keep the puppy happy — the implication is if you don’t pay, you’re making puppies sad.
The groups say that Google has been aware of all these problems for some time, but hasn’t taken adequate steps to enforce its criteria for developers. As a result, the consumer advocacy groups are urging the FTC to investigate the Play Store’s practices.
The coalition had previously asked the FTC to investigate developers of children’s apps aimed at preschoolers who were using manipulative advertising. But today’s complaint is focused on Google.
“Google (Alphabet, Inc.) has long engaged in unethical and harmful business practices, especially when it comes to children,” explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “And the Federal Trade Commission has for too long ignored this problem, placing both children and their parents at risk over their loss of privacy, and exposing them to a powerful and manipulative marketing apparatus. As one of the world’s leading providers of content for kids online, Google continues to put the enormous profits they make from kids ahead of any concern for their welfare,” Chester said.
Apple was not similarly called out because a similar analysis has not yet been done on its app marketplace, Josh Golin, executive director at CCFC told us. In Google’s case, he explained, two major studies found widespread issues with the Play Store apps for kids. One from Berkeley researchers found widespread COPPA non-compliance; the other, by University of Michigan researchers, found children’s play experience was often completely interrupted and undermined by aggressive marketing tactics.
The complaint comes at a time where there is increased scrutiny as to how tech companies are misusing and abusing consumer data and violating privacy. Kids game have already been the subject of some concern. And this morning, an NYT investigation into Facebook revealed it had shared more of users’ personal data than disclosed with major tech companies, following a year of data scandals.
The issue of data privacy is an industry-wide problem. Tech companies’ failures on this front will likely lead to increased regulation going forward.
Not all the named developers were immediately available to comment this morning. We’ll update if comments are provided. (Update: TutoToons says they removed the inappropriate content from the app after becoming aware of the complaint. They urged parents and child advocacy groups to reach out to them directly in the future.)
Google says it’s taking the complaint seriously. It has removed thousands of apps from its Designed for Families program this year, and rejects a third of applications.
“Parents want their children to be safe online and we work hard to protect them. Apps in our Designed for Families program have to comply with strict policies on content, privacy and advertising, and we take action on any policy violations that we find,” a Google spokesperson says. “We take these issues very seriously and continue to work hard to remove any content that is inappropriately aimed at children from our platform,” they added.
The full complaint is below.
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Kahoot, a ‘Netflix for education’, launches an accelerator to tap gaming and education startups
On the back of Disney increasing its shareholding in Oslo-based Kahoot to four percent last week, Kahoot today announced a new initiative that helps to position the popular startup — which already has 60 million games and has seen over 1 billion players engage on its platform over the last year — as the “Netflix for education apps.”
It’s launching Kahoot! Ignite, a new accelerator for like-minded startups that are pushing the boundaries of education through gaming and other means.
In addition to that, Kahoot today also said it would move stock exchanges in its home market of Norway, going from the smaller OTC exchange to the Merkur Market, which CEO and co-founder Åsmund Furuseth explained in an interview is also an exchange for private companies, but one that will be able to provide more transparency to the startup’s bigger investors en route to an eventual full public listing. As of last week’s Disney news, the startup is now valued at $376 million.
Participating in the Ignite accelerator, Furuseth said, will give Kahoot the option to invest in startups in each cohort, and if it makes sense for the startup in question, they will build content that will be usable on the Kahoot platform.
“We have close to $30 million in the bank and are in a financial market where we can get more capital,” he said. “We don’t need to invest, but if we want to, we can.”
The startup today has some 60 million games on its platform, with a good portion of those created by users themselves (making it more like a YouTube than a Netflix). The idea is that bringing in outside developers (in this case, by way of the accelerator) could inject more innovation and interesting takes on the concept of “educational gaming” — not unlike how Netflix and Amazon engage outside studios to develop originals for its platform, alongside what they develop themselves or buy in through deals with rights holders.
In addition to the carrots of investment and distribution on the Kahoot platform — which is likely to hit 100 million monthly active users this month (Furuseth said he was confident of the number today) — Kahoot is offering mentorship to potential cohorts in areas like monetization and product development. Given the fact that educational aides can come in all shapes and sizes, that might not take the form of a piece of content for the Kahoot platform.
“Putting something on Kahoot could be an outcome, but we’re also interested in ‘network products,’ which have the same desire to enable learning,” Furuseth said.
The company today has a double focus, with games for K-12 students as well as for enterprise environments. “Learning is the main topic,” he added. “We like to have the mix.”
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With trust destroyed, Facebook is haunted by old data deals
As Facebook colonized the rest of the web with its functionality in hopes of fueling user growth, it built aggressive integrations with partners that are coming under newfound scrutiny through a deeply reported New York Times investigation. Some of what Facebook did was sloppy or unsettling, including forgetting to shut down APIs when it cancelled its Instant Personalization feature for other sites in 2014, and how it used contact syncing to power friend recommendations.
But other moves aren’t as bad as they sound. Facebook did provide Spotify and Netflix the ability to access users messages, but only so people could send friends songs or movies via Facebook messages without leaving those apps. And Facebook did let Yahoo and Blackberry access people’s News Feeds, but to let users browse those feeds within social hub features inside those apps. These partners could only access data when users logged in and connected their Facebook accounts, and were only approved to use this data to provide Facebook-related functionality. That means Spotify at least wasn’t supposed to be rifling through everyone’s messages to find out what bands they talk about so it could build better curation algorithms, and there’s no evidence yet that it did.
Thankfully Facebook has ditched most of these integrations, as the dominance of iOS and Android have allowed it to build fewer, more standardized, and better safeguarded access points to its data. And it’s battened down the hatches in some ways, forcing users to shortcut from Spotify into the real Facebook Messenger rather than giving third-parties any special access to offer Facebook Messaging themselves.
The most glaring allegation Facebook hasn’t adequately responded to yet is that it used data from Amazon, Yahoo, and Huawei to improve friend suggestions through People You May Know — perhaps its creepiest feature. The company needs to accept the loss of growth hacking trade secrets and become much more transparent about how it makes so uncannily accurate recommendations of who to friend request — as Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill has documented.
In some cases, Facebook has admitted to missteps, with its Director of Developer Platforms and Programs Konstantinos Papamiltiadis writing “we shouldn’t have left the APIs in place after we shut down instant personalization.”
In others, we’ll have decide where to draw the line between what was actually dangerous and what gives us the chills at first glance. You don’t ask permission from friends to read an email from them on a certain browser or device, so should you worry if they saw your Facebook status update on a Blackberry social hub feature instead of the traditional Facebook app? Well that depends on how the access is monitored and meted out.
The underlying question is whether we trust that Facebook and these other big tech companies actually abided by rules to oversee and not to overuse data. Facebook has done plenty wrong, and after repeatedly failing to be transparent or live up to its apologies, it doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. For that reason, I don’t want it giving any developer — even ones I normally trust like Spotify — access to sensitive data protected merely by their promise of good behavior despite financial incentives for misuse.
Facebook’s former chief security officer Alex Stamos tweeted that “allowing for 3rd party clients is the kind of pro-competition move we want to see from dominant platforms. For ex, making Gmail only accessible to Android and the Gmail app would be horrible. For the NY Times to try to scandalize this kind of integration is wrong.” But countered that by noting that “integrations that are sneaky or send secret data to servers controlled by others really is wrong.”
Even if Spotify and Netflix didn’t abuse the access Facebook provided, there’s always eventually a Cambridge Analytica. Tech companies have proven their word can’t necessarily be trusted. The best way to protect users is to properly lock down the platforms with ample vetting, limits, and oversight so there won’t be gray areas that require us to put our faith in the kindness of businesses.
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Bumble now lets you filter potential matches on Bumble Date, Bizz and BFF
Bumble has come up with a new way for its dating app and related businesses to generate revenue. The company this week launched filters — a way to sift through potential matches by a set of specific criteria. For example, Bumble Date users can now filter matches by astrological sign or relationship type, among other things, while those on Bumble BFF or Bumble Bizz can filter matches by interests or industry, respectively.
The new feature is meant to save users time by limiting their selection of potential matches to those who are more relevant to their own interests.
A dating app user may want to filter out those who are only looking for casual situations, while a business user may want to filter matches based on whether they’re looking for a job, mentor or collaborator, Bumble explains. And on Bumble’s friend-finding platform, Bumble BFF, people may want to filter for people who enjoy the same things they do — like fitness or photography.
“We’ve been working internally and with our users to create just the right mix of filters that allow for deeper, more meaningful connections and we’re very pleased with what we’ve developed,” said Alexandra Williamson, Bumble chief of brand, in a statement about the launch. “Whether you’re looking for a new job in media, a new mom friend or a date with a Sagittarius who loves live music, Bumble Filters enable you to tailor your experience in a way that ultimately gives you more control of the kinds of relationships you’re looking to build,” she said.
Filtering matches by specific criteria isn’t anything new to dating apps. Other more traditional dating sites, like Match and OkCupid, have offered ways to filter matches, too. But Bumble’s more direct rival Tinder has focused less on filtering and more on speed of moving through matches. It doesn’t let users specify preferences beyond some basics — like location, distance, gender and age.
Whether or not filtering actually helps in delivering a good match, however, is less clear. But it’s certainly something people want.
Today, many women on dating apps ask men for their height, for instance — so often, in fact, that men began volunteering this information on their profiles, even if the profile doesn’t have a field for height. Often, sober people don’t want to match with people who say they drink regularly. Non-smokers generally want to date the same. And so on. But over-filtering could lead to users missing out — after all, how important is the star sign, really, or whether they have pets? (Allergies notwithstanding, of course.)
On the dating side of Bumble, the new filters include height, exercise, star sign, education, drinking, smoking, pets, relationship type, family plans, religion and political leaning.
Bumble BFFs can filter for drinking, smoking, exercise and pets, too, as well as type of friendship, relationship status, whether they have kids or if they’re new to the area.
And Bumble Bizz users can filter by industry, networking relationship type, education and years of experience.
Bumble hopes filters will be an additional stream of revenue for its business, which it said in September was on track for a revenue run rate to $200 million per year. Bumble now claims 46 million users.
The company says all users will receive two free filters in Bumble Date, Bumble BFF and Bumble Bizz, but additional filters will have to be purchased through Bumble Boost — the premium upgrade that also allows you to see who liked you, extend your matches and rematch expired connections. (Boost’s pricing varies based on the time frame — a week, a month, etc. Its weekly plan is $8.99/week, currently.)
Bumble’s filters are available on both iOS and Android.
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Twitter bug leaks phone number country codes
Twitter accidentally exposed the ability to pull an account’s phone number country code and whether the account had been locked by Twitter. The concern here is that malicious actors could have used the security flaw to figure out in which countries accounts were based, which could have ramifications for whistleblowers or political dissidents.
The issue came through one of Twitter’s support forms for contacting the company, and the company found that a large number of inquiries through the form came from IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia. Twitter writes, “While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors.” We’ve requested more info on why it’s suggesting that. Attribution in these situations can be murky, and naming specific countries or suggesting state actors could be involved carries heavy implications.
Twitter began working on the issue on November 15th and fixed it on November 16th. Twitter tells TechCrunch that it has notified the European Union’s Data Protection Commissioner, as EU citizens may have been impacted. However, as country codes aren’t necessarily considered sensitive personal information, the leak may not trigger any GDPR enforcement or fines. Twitter tells us it has also updated the FTC and other regulatory organizations about the issue, though we’ve asked when it informed these different regulators.
Twitter has directly contacted users impacted by the issue, and says full phone numbers were not leaked and users don’t have to do anything in response. Users can contact Twitter here for more info. We’ve asked how many accounts were impacted, but Twitter told us that it doesn’t have more data to share as its investigation continues.
A Twitter spokesperson pointed us to a previous statement:
It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease. These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed — they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge. For our part, we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation.
Sloppy security on the part of tech companies can make it dangerous for political dissidents or others at odds with their governments. Twitter explains that it locks accounts if it suspects they’ve been compromised by hackers or violate “Twitter’s Rules,” which includes “unlawful use” that depends greatly on what national governments deem illegal. What’s worrisome is that attackers with IP addresses in China or Saudi Arabia might have been able to use the exploit to confirm that certain accounts belonged to users in their countries and whether they’ve been locked. That information could be used to hunt down the people who own these accounts.
The company apologized, writing that “We recognize and appreciate the trust you place in us, and are committed to earning that trust every day. We are sorry this happened.” But that echoes other apologies from big tech companies that consistently ring hollow. Here, in particular, it fails to acknowledge how the leak could harm people and how it will prevent this kind of thing from happening again. With these companies judged quarterly by their user growth and business, they’re incentivized to cut corners on security, privacy and societal impact as they chase the favor of Wall Street.
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B-Social raises £3.2M seed round to begin building a ‘social’ bank
B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a “social finance” app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in seed-round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social wants to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social interactions.
As it exists today, the B-Social app and accompanying card enables users to have control over everyday spending, track expenditures and create groups between friends to split bills and record settlements. It’s currently in the hands of a limited number of beta testers, spanning employees, investors, friends and family, with plans for a wider U.K. launch in February next year.
“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed tells me. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world.”
The idea was born in part out of Valimahomed’s own frustrations and is informed by his belief that individuals are often a bank themselves, lending and borrowing to friends and family by making shared purchases and then getting paid back.
“A simple example might be that you pay for flights for two or more people and then get paid back individually,” he says. “For multiple transactions, this becomes complex, often resulting in the trip organiser having to create a spreadsheet to work out what people owe across multiple transactions.”
To simplify this problem, B-Social wants to let you to make purchases with your card, which are flagged as an expense on behalf of a group of individuals. From here the bank to be will enable all members of a group — and where groups can be ad hoc and temporary or more long-term — to continuously see who is owed how much and to get paid back easily within the app and record settlements.
Dubbing this future proposition as the seeds of a “social bank,” the B-Social CEO cites competitors as traditional high-street banks that currently dominate the U.K. consumer market (the so-called big 5 have around 87 percent market share in the U.K.).
“We are aiming at winning a part of their market share by targeting customers looking for a bank as social as they are that offers a unique digital experience in order to help change the banking ecosystem forever,” Valimahomed tells me, although he also concedes that challengers such as Monzo, N26, Starling and Revolut have also built some basic social features into their apps.
“Our entire technology and product focus is to build a bank from scratch through a social lens,” he says.
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K Health raises $25M for its AI-powered primary care platform
K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in Series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, BoxGroup and Max Ventures — all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds. Other previous investors include Primary Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.
“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so — where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache versus other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”
K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.
Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years — compiled from doctors’ notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data — K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis.
With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or, what Bloch calls “Dr. Google,” which often produce broad, downright frightening and inaccurate diagnoses.
Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians
Users are able to see cases and diagnoses that had symptoms similar to their own, with K Health notifying users with serious conditions when to consider seeking immediate care. (K Health Press Image / K Health / https://www.khealth.ai)
In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.
K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and, in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation.
Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1,000 people in the U.S., primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.
K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases, where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.
The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.
With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising, with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.
Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes
With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.
Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.
The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy co-pays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.
Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps — such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.
The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-10 years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.
By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.
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The limits of coworking
It feels like there’s a WeWork on every street nowadays. Take a walk through midtown Manhattan (please don’t actually) and it might even seem like there are more WeWorks than office buildings.
Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.
Co-working has permeated cities around the world at an astronomical rate. The rise has been so remarkable that even the headline-dominating SoftBank seems willing to bet the success of its colossal Vision Fund on the shift continuing, having poured billions into WeWork – including a recent $4.4 billion top-up that saw the co-working king’s valuation spike to $45 billion.
And there are no signs of the trend slowing down. With growing frequency, new startups are popping up across cities looking to turn under-utilized brick-and-mortar or commercial space into low-cost co-working options.
It’s a strategy spreading through every type of business from retail – where companies like Workbar have helped retailers offer up portions of their stores – to more niche verticals like parking lots – where companies like Campsyte are transforming empty lots into spaces for outdoor co-working and corporate off-sites. Restaurants and bars might even prove most popular for co-working, with startups like Spacious and KettleSpace turning restaurants that are closed during the day into private co-working space during their off-hours.
Before you know it, a startup will be strapping an Aeron chair to the top of a telephone pole and calling it “WirelessWorking”.
But is there a limit to how far co-working can go? Are all of the storefronts, restaurants and open spaces that line city streets going to be filled with MacBooks, cappuccinos and Moleskine notebooks? That might be too tall a task, even for the movement taking over skyscrapers.
The co-working of everything…
Photo: Vasyl Dolmatov / iStock via Getty Images
So why is everyone trying to turn your favorite neighborhood dinner spot into a part-time WeWork in the first place? Co-working offers a particularly compelling use case for under-utilized space.
First, co-working falls under the same general commercial zoning categories as most independent businesses and very little additional infrastructure – outside of a few extra power outlets and some decent WiFi – is required to turn a space into an effective replacement for the often crowded and distracting coffee shops used by price-sensitive, lean, remote, or nomadic workers that make up a growing portion of the workforce.
Thus, businesses can list their space at little-to-no cost, without having to deal with structural layout changes that are more likely to arise when dealing with pop-up solutions or event rentals.
On the supply side, these co-working networks don’t have to purchase leases or make capital improvements to convert each space, and so they’re able to offer more square footage per member at a much lower rate than traditional co-working spaces. Spacious, for example, charges a monthly membership fee of $99-$129 dollars for access to its network of vetted restaurants, which is cheap compared to a WeWork desk, which can cost anywhere from $300-$800 per month in New York City.
Customers realize more affordable co-working alternatives, while tight-margin businesses facing increasing rents for under-utilized property are able to pool resources into a network and access a completely new revenue stream at very little cost. The value proposition is proving to be seriously convincing in initial cities – Spacious told the New York Times, that so many restaurants were applying to join the network on their own volition that only five percent of total applicants were ultimately getting accepted.
Basically, the business model here checks a lot of the boxes for successful marketplaces: Acquisition and transaction friction is low for both customers and suppliers, with both seeing real value that didn’t exist previously. Unit economics seem strong, and vetting on both sides of the market creates trust and community. Finally, there’s an observable network effect whereby suppliers benefit from higher occupancy as more customers join the network, while customers benefit from added flexibility as more locations join the network.
… Or just the co-working of some things…
Photo: Caiaimage / Robert Daly via Getty Images
So is this the way of the future? The strategy is really compelling, with a creative solution that offers tremendous value to businesses and workers in major cities. But concerns around the scalability of demand make it difficult to picture this phenomenon becoming ubiquitous across cities or something that reaches the scale of a WeWork or large conventional co-working player.
All these companies seem to be competing for a similar demographic, not only with one another, but also with coffee shops, free workspaces, and other flexible co-working options like Croissant, which provides members with access to unused desks and offices in traditional co-working spaces. Like Spacious and KettleSpace, the spaces on Croissant own the property leases and are already built for co-working, so Croissant can still offer comparatively attractive rates.
The offer seems most compelling for someone that is able to work without a stable location and without the amenities offered in traditional co-working or office spaces, and is also price sensitive enough where they would trade those benefits for a lower price. Yet at the same time, they can’t be too price sensitive, where they would prefer working out of free – or close to free – coffee shops instead of paying a monthly membership fee to avoid the frictions that can come with them.
And it seems unclear whether the problem or solution is as poignant outside of high-density cities – let alone outside of high-density areas of high-density cities.
Without density, is the competition for space or traffic in coffee shops and free workspaces still high enough where it’s worth paying a membership fee for? Would the desire for a private working environment, or for a working community, be enough to incentivize membership alone? And in less-dense and more-sprawl oriented cities, members could also face the risk of having to travel significant distances if space isn’t available in nearby locations.
While the emerging workforce is trending towards more remote, agile and nomadic workers that can do more with less, it’s less certain how many will actually fit the profile that opts out of both more costly but stable traditional workspaces, as well as potentially frustrating but free alternatives. And if the lack of density does prove to be an issue, how many of those workers will live in hyper-dense areas, especially if they are price-sensitive and can work and live anywhere?
To be clear, I’m not saying the companies won’t see significant growth – in fact, I think they will. But will the trend of monetizing unused space through co-working come to permeate cities everywhere and do so with meaningful occupancy? Maybe not. That said, there is still a sizable and growing demographic that need these solutions and the value proposition is significant in many major urban areas.
The companies are creating real value, creating more efficient use of wasted space, and fixing a supply-demand issue. And the cultural value of even modestly helping independent businesses keep the lights on seems to outweigh the cultural “damage” some may fear in turning them into part-time co-working spaces.
And lastly, some reading while in transit:
- The Grim Future of Urban Warfare – The Atlantic, Darran Anderson
- New York’s New Wage Law for Uber Drivers is a Lesson for Cities Around the World – MIT Technology Review, Erin Winick
- Can New Home Building Tech Help Solve the Affordability Crisis? – FastCompany, Adele Peters
- Homelessness Rises More Quickly Where Rent Exceeds a Third of Income – Zillow Research, Chris Glynn & Alexander Casey
- Vote on Temescal to Test Core Values – StreetsblogSF, Roger Rudick
- L.A. Approves New Rules for Airbnb-Type Rentals After Years of Debate – Los Angeles Times, Emily Alpert Reyes
- Can France Revive its Industrial Heartland? – FT, Harriet Agnew
- Why Communities Across America Are Pushing to Close Waste Incinerators – CityLab, Rebecca Stoner
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Tony Hawk goes mobile
For three years, Tony Hawk has been conspicuously absent from the video store shelves. For most game developers, that’s little more than a blip between titles. When your name and face are attached to 16 titles in 15 years, however, everyone starts to notice when you’re gone.
“It’s usually the first topic of discussion with me,” Hawk laughs. The first, that is, once the world’s most famous skateboarder’s identity has been firmly established.
That question was finally answered this week with the arrival of Skate Jam, the first of Hawk’s titles created exclusively for a mobile platform. The game also marks the skater’s first collaboration with mobile app acquisition group Maple Media — marking a split with longtime publisher Activision.
It was a partnership that ended with a whimper, with the arrival of 2015’s Tony Hawk Pro Skater 5. The final installation of the beloved series was heavily criticized for being uninspired and rushed, and Hawk ultimately opted to move on from a relationship that helped turn his name into a $250 million a year brand at its peak.
The unceremonious end of the Activision deal left the future of the franchise in jeopardy, with Hawk exploring his options. “My contract with Activision ended, and I was exploring a few options, including some VR stuff,” he tells TechCrunch. While he says he’s still open to a future Tony Hawk virtual reality title, the medium ultimately proved too tricky for the first skater to land a 900. “It’s a pretty daunting task to figure out how to make skateboarding work in VR without people getting sick.”
Advances in mobile platforms, on the other hand, have made a smartphone version far more appealing than it would have been at the height of the franchise’s success. “Maple Media came and said they would like to expand on their skate games,” says Hawk. “When I played their most recent engine, I felt there was something there, akin to what I felt when I first played the THPS engine. I felt that, with my input and expertise, we could make something that would be truly authentic for gamers and skaters alike, for a new generation.”
As far as whether Skate Jam’s release portends the rebirth of the franchise, Hawk is ultimately a bit more cagey. He explains that the team is more focused on building out the current title than committing to Pro Skater’s annual release schedule.
“We’re going to see a lot more development in terms of growing this title,” Hawk says. “It’s much more streamlined and we can do it on a regular basis. We’re not planning to develop a new title, per se, but are planning to grow and develop this one.”
Skate Jam is now available for Android and iOS.
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