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AT&T is offering free Spotify to select Unlimited subscribers

Published August 5, 2019

AT&T is sweetening the deal on its Unlimited & More Premium plan this week, with the addition of free Spotify Premium. That amounts to a $10-a-month savings for those paying the $80 a month for the wireless service. The plan offers one of seven free partner services, including HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, VRV, Pandora and now Spotify .

There’s fine print, because of course there is. The deal applies specifically to the Unlimited & More Premium plan, while other AT&T subscribers can get a six-month trial of Premium for free. After that time, things revert to the regular price.

Existing Spotify Premium subscribers, meanwhile, can keep their account but get the service for free by signing up on all of the proper places on AT&T’s site.

The deal mirrors a similar partnership between Verizon and Apple Music, the services’ largest competitors, respectively. AT&T is currently the U.S.’s largest carrier by a slight edge. Spotify, meanwhile, continues to have a sizable advantage in paid subscriber numbers at more than 100 million to Apple’s 60 million.

Huawei’s in-house OS could show up on phones this year

Published August 5, 2019

Huawei has almost certainly been working on a software contingency plan for some time now, prepping for a worst-case scenario. When the U.S. announced that it was blacklisting the Chinese hardware giant earlier this year, those plans were likely accelerated.

One of the things that’s still unclear, however, is what role the company’s Hongmeng OS will fill. Recent reports have suggested that the operating system was built for IoT and other industrial applications. However, the software may also be forked specifically to run on low-end mobile devices.

State-run media outlet Global Times this morning issued a report based on sources suggesting that Hongmeng could appear on a low-end phone later this year. The OS is clearly far less robust than Android in its current state, but could wind up on a new device priced at 2,000 yuan (~$290). The report adds that Huawei is set to reveal the operating system in full later this week at its Developer Conference in Dongguan, China.

At present, Hongmeng doesn’t appear purpose-built to replace Google’s operating system, but Huawei is getting ready for the possibility of a future that completely cuts the company off from access to U.S.-built hardware and software. For the time being, at least, the company seems focused on continuing to use Android for its high-end flagships, while potentially building out Hongmeng on more entry-level devices.

Roblox hits 100 million monthly active users

Published August 4, 2019

Roblox is big. Bigger than Minecraft big. The massively multiple online title has been around since 2006, but the game has been achieving a crazy amount of momentum of late. On Friday, it announced via blog post that it’s grown past 100 million monthly active users, pushing past Minecraft, which is currently in the (still impressive) low-90s.

Digging into the Roblox growth strategy

Here’s a recent piece detailing the service’s dizzying growth since February 2016, who it was hovering around 9 million players. That’s more than 10x growth in a three and a half year span. User-Generated content is a big part of that number, and the company notes that it has around 40 million user created experiences in the game at present.

Sources: TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Roblox

“We started Roblox over a decade ago with a vision to bring people from all over the world together through play,” founder and CEO David Baszucki said of the big new round number. “Roblox began with just 100 players and a handful of creators who inspired one another, unlocking this groundswell of creativity, collaboration, and imagination that continues to grow.”

The company behind the game has also been pumping some big money into development. It paid $30 million in 2017 and $60 million in 2018. Next week, it will be hosting hundreds of attendees at its fifth Roblox Developer Conference.

Per the new numbers, around 40 percent Roblox users are female, with players spread out across 200 countries.

TikTok-parent is getting into mobile search

Published August 1, 2019

China’s ByteDance, which owns popular video sharing app TikTok, is already working to enter the smartphone business and the music streaming space. It appears the world’s most valued startup also has ambitions about developing its own search engine. Kind of.

A company spokesperson told TechCrunch on Thursday that it has introduced a search function in ByteDance’s Toutiao news app.

“The function is in line with Toutiao’s mission of ‘information creates value.’ Users can try the function in the app and provide feedback and suggestions on the new function,” the spokesperson said.

The search function gleans information from both content on Toutiao as well as the entire world wide web, TechCrunch understands.

From the looks of it, ByteDance’s current search functionality is more alike WeChat’s in-app search function than local giant Baidu’s or Google’s offering.

On WeChat, when a person looks up a keyword, they see news articles about that topic, followed by mentions of it from their friends. This is followed by random articles about the subject. When a user clicks on any of these article or news links, WeChat serves them the page through its in-app browser, giving them no option to leave the walled-garden.

The idea is to change the way people think about — and use — a search engine altogether. And in China, where apps such as WeChat and TikTok have gained gigantic reach on mobile, it seems logical to add all new functionalities within those apps.

ByteDance’s interest in a search engine became public on Wednesday after it published a recruitment post on its WeChat account. The startup said its “search engine” is aimed at “hundreds of millions of mobile users in China.”

“We will build a universal search engine with a better user experience from 0 to 1. Only you don’t want to search, there is no [info] you can’t find, because we can search the whole network,” the company said in the post.

According to the description in the listing, ByteDance has already hired people from other search engines such as Google, Baidu, Bing and 360.

An analysis of LinkedIn listings by TechCrunch found more than 100 people from Google, Microsoft and Baidu, many of whom worked around search divisions at the previous companies, have joined ByteDance in recent quarters.

ByteDance following Tencent’s WeChat model to create its alternate search business may add more worries to Baidu, which currently holds more than 75% of the search engine market in China, according to third-party web service StatCounter Global Stat. Microsoft’s Bing is also operational in the country, though its market share remains in the low-single digits. Google currently does not offer its search feature in China — though it has attempted to change that in recent months to no luck.

Aspire raises $32.5M to help SMEs secure fast finance in Southeast Asia

Published July 31, 2019

Aspire, a Singapore-based startup that helps SMEs secure working capital, has raised $32.5 million in a new financing round to expand its presence in several Southeast Asian markets.

The Series A round for the one-and-a-half-year-old startup was funded by MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia. Arc Labs and existing investors Y Combinator — Aspire graduated from YC last year — Hummingbird and Picus Capital also participated in the round. Aspire has raised about $41.5 million to date.

Aspire operates a neo-banking-like platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) quickly and easily secure working capital of up to about $70,000. AspireAccount, the startup’s flagship product, provides merchants and startups with instant credit limit for daily business expenses, as well as a business-to-business acceptance and other tools to help them manage their cash flow.

Co-founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli tells TechCrunch that about 1,000 business accounts are opened each month on Aspire and that the company plans to continue focusing on Southeast Asia, where he says there are about 78 million small businesses, leaving plenty of room to scale (applications can be made through Aspire’s mobile app and are reviewed using a proprietary risk assessment engine before getting final approval from a human). Aspire claims it has seen 30% month-over-month growth since it was founded in January 2018 and expects to open more than 100,000 business accounts by next year.

Baronchelli, who served as a CMO for Alibaba’s Lazada platform for four years, says Aspire launched to close the gap left by the traditional banking industry’s focus on consumer services or businesses that make more than $10 million in revenue a year. As a result, smaller businesses in Southeast Asia, including online vendors and startups, often lack access to credit lines, accounts and other financial services tailored to their needs.

Aspire currently operates in Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. The startup said it will use the fresh capital to scale its footprints in those markets. Additionally, Aspire is building a scalable marketplace banking infrastructure that will use third-party financial service providers to “create a unique digital banking experience for its SME customers.”

Baronchelli adds that “the bank of the future will probably be a marketplace,” so Aspire’s goal is to provide a place where SMEs can not only open accounts and credit cards, but also pick from different services like point of sale systems. It is currently in talks with potential partners. The startup is also working on a business credit card that will be linked to each business account by as early as this year.

Southeast Asia’s digital economy is slated to grow more than six-fold to reach more than $200 billion per year, according to a report co-authored by Google. But for many emerging startups and businesses, getting financial services from a bank and securing working capital have become major pain points.

A growing number of startups are beginning to address these SMEs’ needs. In India, for instance, NiYo Bank and Open have amassed millions of businesses through their neo-banking platforms. Both of these startups have raised tens of millions of dollars in recent months. Drip Capital, which helps businesses in developing markets secure working capital, raised $25 million last week.

Facebook and YouTube’s moderation failure is an opportunity to deplatform the platforms

Published July 29, 2019

Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have failed their task of monitoring and moderating the content that appears on their sites; what’s more, they failed to do so well before they knew it was a problem. But their incidental cultivation of fringe views is an opportunity to recast their role as the services they should be rather than the platforms they have tried so hard to become.

The struggles of these juggernauts should be a spur to innovation elsewhere: While the major platforms reap the bitter harvest of years of ignoring the issue, startups can pick up where they left off. There’s no better time to pass someone up as when they’re standing still.

Asymmetrical warfare: Is there a way forward?

At the heart of the content moderation issue is a simple cost imbalance that rewards aggression by bad actors while punishing the platforms themselves.

To begin with, there is the problem of defining bad actors in the first place. This is a cost that must be borne from the outset by the platform: With the exception of certain situations where they can punt (definitions of hate speech or groups for instance), they are responsible for setting the rules on their own turf.

That’s a reasonable enough expectation. But carrying it out is far from trivial; you can’t just say “here’s the line; don’t cross it or you’re out.” It is becoming increasingly clear that these platforms have put themselves in an uncomfortable lose-lose situation.

If they have simple rules, they spend all their time adjudicating borderline cases, exceptions, and misplaced outrage. If they have more granular ones, there is no upper limit on the complexity and they spend all their time defining it to fractal levels of detail.

Both solutions require constant attention and an enormous, highly-organized and informed moderation corps, working in every language and region. No company has shown any real intention to take this on — Facebook famously contracts the responsibility out to shabby operations that cut corners and produce mediocre results (at huge human and monetary cost); YouTube simply waits for disasters to happen and then quibbles unconvincingly.

WhatsApp reaches 400 million users in India, its biggest market

Published July 26, 2019

WhatsApp has amassed more than 400 million users in India, the instant messaging app confirmed today, reaffirming its gigantic reach in its biggest market.

Amitabh Kant, CEO of highly influential local think-tank NITI Aayog, revealed the new stat at a press conference held by WhatsApp in New Delhi on Thursday. A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed that the platform indeed had more than 400 million monthly active users in the country.

The remarkable revelation comes more than two years after WhatsApp said it had hit 200 million users in India. WhatsApp — or Facebook — did not share any India-specific users count in the period in between.

The public disclosure today should help Facebook reaffirm its dominance in India, where it appears to be used by nearly every smartphone user. According to research firm Counterpoint, India has about 450 million smartphone users. (Some other research firms peg the number to be lower.)

It’s worth pointing out that WhatsApp also supports KaiOS — a mobile operating system for feature phones. Millions of KaiOS-powered JioPhone handsets have shipped in India. Additionally, there are about 500 million internet users, according to several industry estimates.

As WhatsApp becomes ubiquitous in the nation, the service is increasingly mutating to serve additional needs. Businesses such as social-commerce app Meesho have been built on top of WhatsApp. Facebook backed Meesho recently in what was its first investment of this kind in an Indian startup. Then, of course, WhatsApp has also come under hot water for its role in the spread of false information in the nation.

As ByteDance and others aggressively expand their businesses in India, Facebook’s perceived dominance in the country has come under attack in recent months. ByteDance’s TikTok, which has amassed 120 million users in India, has been heralded by many as the top competitor of Facebook.

A WhatsApp spokesperson also told TechCrunch that India remains WhatsApp’s biggest market. In 2017, Facebook said its marquee service had about 250 million users in India — a figure it has not updated in the years since.

WhatsApp, which has about 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide, does not really have any major competitor in India. The closest to a competitor it has in the country is Messenger, another platform owned by Facebook, and Hike, which millions of users check everyday. Times Internet — an internet conglomerate in India that runs several news outlets, entertainment services and more — claims to reach 450 million users in the country each month.

At the aforementioned press conference, WhatsApp global chief Will Cathcart said WhatsApp also plans to roll out WhatsApp Pay, its payment service, to all its users toward the end of the year — something TechCrunch reported earlier.

Its arrival in India’s burgeoning payments space could create serious tension for Google Pay, Flipkart’s PhonePe and Paytm. For Facebook, WhatsApp Pay’s success is even more crucial as the company currently has no plans to bring cryptocurrency wallet Calibra to the country, it told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Libra and Calibra unveil.

In a series of announcements this week, WhatsApp also unveiled a tie-up with NITI Aayog to promote women’s entrepreneurship. “By launching ‘gateway to a billion opportunities’ and our digital skills training program, we hope to shine a light on the amazing work already happening and build the next generation of entrepreneurs and change makers,” said Cathcart.

At a conference in Mumbai on Wednesday, Cathcart announced a partnership with the Indian School of Public Policy — India’s first program in the theory and practice of public policy, product design and management — to bring a series of privacy design workshops to future policy makers. These workshops will explore “the importance and practice of privacy-centric design to help technology make a positive impact on society,” the Facebook-owned platform said.

What lower Netflix pricing tells us about competing in India

Published July 24, 2019

At a conference in New Delhi early last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was confronted with a question that his company has been asked many times over the years. Would he consider lowering the subscription cost in India?

It’s a tactic that most Silicon Valley companies have adapted to in the country over the years. Uber rides aren’t as costly in India as they are elsewhere. Spotify and Apple Music cost less than $2 per month to users in the country. YouTube Premium as well as subscriptions to U.S. news outlets such as WSJ and New York Times are also priced significantly lower compared to the prices they charge in their home turf.

Hastings had also come prepared: He acknowledged that the entertainment viewing industry in India is very different from other parts of the world. To be sure, much of the pay-TV in India is supported by ads and the access fee remains too low ($5). But that was not going to change how Netflix likes to roll, he said.

“We want to be sensitive to great stories and to fund those great stories by investing in local content,” he said. “So yes, our strategy is to build up the local content — and of course we have got the global content — and try to uplevel the industry,” he said, identifying movie-goers who spend about Rs 500 ($7.25) or more on tickets each month as Netflix’s potential customers.

Indian commuters walking below a poster of “Sacred Games”, an original show produced by Netflix (Image: INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images)

Less than a year and a half later, Netflix has had a change of heart. The company today rolled out a lower-priced subscription plan in India, a first for the company. The monthly plan, which restricts usage of the service to mobile devices only, is priced at Rs 199 ($2.8) — a third of the least expensive plan in the U.S.

At a press conference in New Delhi today, Netflix executives said that the lower-priced subscription tier is aimed at expanding the reach of its service in the country. “We want to really broaden the audience for Netflix, want to make it more accessible, and we knew just how mobile-centric India has been,” said Ajay Arora, Director of Product Innovation at Netflix.

The move comes at a time when Netflix has raised its subscription prices in the U.S. by up to 18% and in the UK by up to 20%.

Netflix’s strategy shift in India illustrates a bigger challenge that Silicon Valley companies have been facing in the country for years. If you want to succeed in the country, either make most of your revenue from ads, or heavily subsidize your costs.

But whether finding users in India is a success is also debatable.

Tinder’s new personal security feature can protect LGBTQ+ users in hostile nations

Published July 24, 2019

A new security feature rolling out on Tinder will help protect LBGTQ+ users who travel to dozens of nations that still criminalize same-sex acts or relationships.

As part of the update, users who identify on the app as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer will no longer automatically appear on Tinder when they arrive in an oppressive state. This feature, which Tinder dubs the Traveler Alert, relies on your phone’s network connection to determine its location. From there it will give users the choice to keep their location private. If users opt-in to make their profile public again, Tinder will hide their sexual orientation or gender identity from their profile to safeguard the information from law enforcement and others who may target them, the company said.

Once a user leaves the country or changes their location, their profile will become visible again.

“The purpose of this is to protect users who could be persecuted for their identity in these countries,” a spokesperson said.

The dating app maker, which has tens of millions of users in 190 countries, said the update will warn users when they travel to a country where same-sex relationships are punished under law to help keep “all its users safe.”

“It is unthinkable that, in 2019, there are still countries with legislation in place that deprives people of this basic right,” said Elie Seidman, Tinder’s chief executive.

Seidman said it was part of the company’s belief that “everyone should be able to love who they want to love.”

Tinder’s new Traveler Alert feature (Image: supplied)

When traveling internationally, foreign nationals have to abide by the laws of their host country — no matter how different or abhorrent the rules may be. Although LGBTQ+ rights have come a long way in recent years in many Western countries, dozens of less-progressive countries consider same-sex acts or relationships illegal.

In March, the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) found 69 countries considered same-sex acts illegal — the number of countries included in the Traveler Alert — sans Botswana, which recently decriminalized same-sex relationships.

Nine of the countries, including Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia — a major U.S. ally in the Middle East — allow for prosecutors to pursue the death penalty against same-sex acts and relationships.

Despite a slow but promising push for equal rights, several countries have reversed course and doubled down on their laws, despite international condemnation. One such nation — Brunei, a small south Asian absolute monarchy — was forced to back down from its plans to sentence those who had gay sex to be stoned to death amid outcry from several major companies and celebrities who threatened to boycott the country.

ILGA’s executive director André du Plessis praised Tinder’s effort to warn its users.

“We work hard to change practices, laws and attitudes that put LGBTQ people at risk — including the use of dating apps to target our community — but in the meantime, the safety of our communities also depends on supporting their digital safety,” he said.

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Google intros Gallery Go offline photo editor

Published July 24, 2019

At an event this week in Nigeria, Google introduced Gallery Go, a photo management and editing tool designed for offline use. The new offering joins a suite of Google apps created specifically for users in developing markets, where solid online connections aren’t always a given.

Gallery Go works with devices running Android 8.1 (Oreo) and newer, taking up just 10 MB of storage space on a mobile device. The app uses similar machine learning tools as Google Photos to organize and manage images, but does so without requiring a constant connection. Users can create folders and access images directly from an SD card with the app.

There are a handful of simple editing tools on board as well here, including filters, auto enhance for quick fixes, rotate and crop. The app joins similar offerings from companies like Facebook, designed to open services to users in areas where handsets are prevalent computing devices, but mobile connections tend to be a bit more spotty.

It’s available now through the Play Store and will be available as the default gallery app on select devices starting next month.