With a focus on every element that made the first season shine, Stranger Things 3 is a warm, summer hit.
Source: CNET
Today’s tech headlines involve Facebook establishing a permanent civil rights task force, MacBook Air models suffering from power faults and astronomers detecting a handful of new, unexplained deep space signals.
Source: CNET
Audio apps are flying high in China. In 2018, online listeners in the country grew 22.1% to surpass 400 million, at a rate far exceeding that of the mobile video and e-reading populations, according to market researcher iiMedia.
But the fledgling sector is taking a hit. On Friday, a total of 26 audio-focused apps were ordered to terminate, suspend services, or have talks with regulators as they were investigated and deemed to have spread “historical nihilism” and “pornography,” according to a notice posted by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC).
The clampdown has, in a way, been foreshadowed by a recent attack of user-generated audio content. Last month, Apple restricted Chinese users from accessing podcasts that aren’t hosted by its local partners, effectively preventing those with a Chinese Apple account from consuming content unchecked by Chinese censors.
It’s not uncommon for Chinese authorities to take aim at a rising media field. As short-form videos took off in 2018, the government issued similar directives demanding Douyin (TikTok for China), Kuaishou and many others to purge “illicit” content. The year before, a raft of live streaming apps were in the crosshairs.
CAC, the country’s top internet regulator, only disclosed four of the apps it’s attacking. These services are dwarfed in user size by mega-apps like WeChat or Douyin, with the most successful one — Soul — used on six million devices in May, per data from analytics firm iResearch.
Nonetheless, people reported on social media that more prominent services have also gone missing from app stores. China’s top podcast sharing app Himalaya FM and its smaller rival Lizhi FM, for example, have been pulled from certain Chinese Android markets including one operated by Xiaomi.
Himalaya FM has been pulled from a number of Chinese Android stores. Screenshot: TechCrunch
Music apps seem to be under fire as well. Searches for “NetEase Cloud Music,” a music streaming service operated by internet titan NetEase, on a few local Android stores returned the alert that the app is unavailable for download due to ongoing “maintenance”.
NetEase Cloud Music has been pulled from a number of Chinese Android stores. Screenshot: TechCrunch
As of Monday afternoon, Himalaya FM, Lizhi FM and Netease Cloud Music are still available for download via Apple’s Chinese App Store, where Beijing’s oversight has historically been slower to come.
This is hardly the first time online music platforms get scrutinized in China. The government has occasionally disavowed and censored songs, including most recently works of Li Zhi, an outspoken musician who’s reportedly gone missing ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. None of Li’s songs can be found on China’s major music streaming apps now.
Popular rock musician Li Zhi’s songs are missing from all major Chinese music streaming apps. / Screenshot: TechCrunch
Himalaya FM, Lizhi FM, and NetEase could not be reached for comment at the time of writing. We will update the story if we hear back from the companies.
China’s audio market has been left to “run rampant” for a long time and create “harmful influence” on teenagers, so measures must be taken, said the CAC. The regulator accused firms of chasing eyeballs with personalized podcasts containing content like pornography, superstition and, to some surprise, “two-dimensional culture,” a term referring to a fast-growing industry consisting of anime, comics and games inspired by Japanese pop culture.
The Communist Party is certainly on the watch for the expanding universe of imported content from a country over which it has historical grievances. Besides suppression, the party has also responded by making its own anime — one about Karl Marx — to attract the younger generations. Of course, the series was scheduled to broadcast on Bilibili, the Nasdaq-listed video-streaming platform that’s long been a favorite haven for China’s fans of 2D and youth cultures.
Source: TechCrunch
The new Pokemon games won’t include every Pokemon ever. This has some fans upset.
Source: CNET
Flux, the London fintech that offers a platform for banks and merchants to power digital receipts and rewards, has unveiled its first partnership with an online-only merchant. The London-based company has managed to sign up Just Eat, the online marketplace for takeout food and delivery.
As of today, Just Eat’s U.K. customers will be able to receive digital itemised receipts directly in their Flux-supported banking app immediately after placing an order. At launch, this will include challenger banks Starling and Monzo, with the service rolled out across Flux’s other existing bank partner, Barclays launchpad, later this year.
“We’re always looking for ways to harness innovative technology to give our customers more ease, choice and convenience,” says Fernando Fanton, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Just Eat UK, in a statement. “We’re delighted to be the first in our sector to roll out Flux digital receipts ensuring customers can see exactly what they’ve ordered from the 30,000+ restaurants we work with across the U.K., directly within their banking apps”.
Although Just Eat is the first online marketplace to partner with Flux, the online takeout marketplace joins a number of other Flux-supported food and drink brands. They include household names such as KFC, schuh, EAT.,and Costa Coffee.
“The truth is online merchants have never been the focus for us because we thought the value gap was smaller than it is,” Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa tells me. “When we reflected on how to break into the market, the clear win was with offline merchants who are constantly seeking ways to build a digital link to their customers and provide them with better experiences. Meeting Just Eat at the end of April opened our eyes to the different value that we can bring to online merchants starting with more convenient experiences for customers trying to remember what they bought”.
With that said, Barbosa cautions me not to expect a flood of online marketplaces signing up to Flux just yet. “Our current focus is to offer customers a diverse set of retail partnerships,” she says. “That’s also why after Costa or KFC we didn’t stop everything to focus on coffee shops or fast food chains. Having said that, we learnt a lot with Just Eat on how to provide value for online merchants and are really excited to on-board other pure online players before year end”.
Eventually Flux wants to work with all U.K. merchants but in the short term the company maintains it needs to continue proving to the market that a solution like Flux can add value to “all verticals and businesses”.
“The conversation has moved on a lot from the early days,” says Barbosa. “Just 6 months ago, Tier 1 merchants thought Flux was a vision, valuable for smaller players but hard to execute at scale. The progress we’ve been making with the biggest banks and merchants moved the conversation from ‘are you sure this is possible’ to ‘tell me what you did for KFC and how it applies to me’.
“Sales cycles can be challenging but we’re proud to be constantly improving our metrics from first conversation to live, but it’s no small feat. Now that we’ve grown the team more, we’ve had the time to focus on an exciting interface we’re calling Marvin that will help merchants of all sizes on-board faster which we’ll be beta testing soon”.
Meanwhile, although the current focus remains building receipt infrastructure and on-boarding merchants, Flux’s long term vision is much broader. By bridging the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up in your bank statement or mobile banking app, the startup can offer new types of experiences for consumers that go beyond loyalty schemes, and card-linked offers.
In the future this might include letting you easily track your eating out habits, right down to item-level rather than just merchant category, as part of your general health goals. It is in this context that on-boarding Just Eat starts to look a little more interesting.
Source: TechCrunch
The rise of streamed video has seen the market for licensing streamed music boom in the last few years, with not only consumers using video as a medium to listen to tracks but video creators also extensively using music as part of their own productions. Today, a startup that has built a platform to capitalise on the latter of those two uses is expanding its business.
Epidemic Sound, a startup out of Sweden that lets video producers — creators for social media platforms, advertising folks, film producers and more — search for music and then license it to use as soundtracks on their videos, has raised $20 million in funding at what we understand is a $370 million valuation.
Its music licensing customers include people broadcasting on a lot of popular social platforms, from YouTubers and creators on Instagram, TikTok and the rest, to big agencies, and popular premium streaming video destinations like Netflix.
On the musician side, however, this is not the place to find a Taylor Swift track (not yet, at least): it’s a lot of mostly anonymous names who are professional jobbing musicians who are either doing this for supplementary income until they do hit the big time, or as an end in itself, with the biggest creators making “tens of thousands of dollars per month” on Epidemic, said Oscar Hoglund, Epidemic’s co-founder and CEO.
(Epidemic itself has been growing revenues 100% year-over-year, Hoglund told me.)
Investors in this round include Korean firm DS Asset Management and Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB), a Swedish financial group that is providing debt financing. Other investors in Epidemic include Creandum, EQT Mid-Market and Atwater Capital. (Creandum, the Swedish VC firm that recently closed a new fund, is a notable investor in the Swedish music tech world, with its portfolio also including Spotify, Soundtrack Your Brand, which used to be called Spotify for Business, and headphone maker Jays.)
DS Asset Management’s investment is strategic here: Epidemic plans to use the funding to move into Asia specifically by setting up shop in Korea, which Hoglund (who co-founded the startup with Peer Ã…ström, David Stenmarck, Hjalmar Winbladh and Jan Zachrisson) notes is something of a lynchpin for video creation in the region, fuelled by the huge popularity for K-Pop and other trends.
“South Korea is the cultural hotspot right now for the region,” he said in an interview. “It’s a net exporter for content. Music is consumed and played there, but licensing to creators there means it will travel elsewhere in the region, too.”
The “music wars” that marked the growth of digital music — where tracks were used, shared and downloaded across various platforms with little thought or ability of paying royalties or licensing fees — are becoming increasingly rare, with a number of technologies and businesses (such as another Swedish entity, Kobalt) emerging that have been built to help track usage and to collect money for that, and platforms themselves increasingly reluctant to face labels and other rights holders both in the court of law, and the court of public opinion.
Epidemic has arisen as one of the benefactors of that wave by making it easier for creators to find the legal content that they need. Those who are in need of a particular kind of music for their soundtracks go to Epidemic’s search engine and select what they want to use by genre, mood, energy level and beats per minute (for faster or slower-paced tunes). You can listen to each item and then quickly pick out what you want to use and download it. Those who use the platform regularly will in turn get more accurate results attuned to their general tastes, not unlike how many music-streaming platforms learn your tastes.
But this isn’t a massive, scale-wins-all marketplace, Hoglund points out. While any and all creators are welcome to join and use the music (payments for them are in two tiers, depending on whether you are a creator or a professional, and how much you stream the music) — and there are now millions of them using Epidemic — on the content side, Epidemic intentionally curates the mix of music and number of tracks so that the quality remains consistent, and its algorithm doesn’t get too overwhelmed and stays accurate in what it provides in search results.
The music creatives, meanwhile, receive an upfront payment for each track Epidemic buys, with payment varying depending on the track. Subsequent to that, it splits the revenue from music streaming platforms where the music might later alongside its use in the video tracks (Spotify, Apple, Deezer, etc.) 50/50 with musicians.
“The way we see it and our mission is that we are looking for create success all music, both for those who make it and have a need for it,” said Hoglund. “We’re not a marketplace in the sense that YouTube is one, where anyone can upload and consume something. We’re more like Netflix, where we have a more curated and selective approach.” This means that the number of artists on Epidemic numbers in the thousands, he said, “not the hundreds of thousands.”
The company has a lot of competition in the market, from the likes of other companies that have made a business out of providing soundtrack music, such as Muzak, through to platforms providing music themselves (for example YouTube), and potentially music streaming platforms that you could imagine would want to make a move into an area like this as another way to help music makers monetise their work. I asked about whether Epidemic had ever been approached by Spotify, for example, Hoglund told me with a short laugh that he would decline to answer but that this wasn’t something that was being pursued or even considered by Epidemic.
One of the reasons is because, by being platform-agnostic, it has the option of working with everyone with no strings attached. He said that currently Epidemic’s music is played for 250 million hours/month on YouTube on average, making it the most popular platform, with numbers two and three Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Facebook itself, with a growing amount of traction also now on TikTok. While premium streaming customers will be less prolific users of Epidemic, they bring in much larger revenues per user typically.
Prior to this round, 10 year-old Epidemic Sound had only disclosed about $6 million in funding, at about a $45 million valuation, according to Pitchbook data. Hoglund said that there was another “small round” in addition to that (which might have been the €40 million it raised last year reportedly at a €100 million valuation), making this new round and valuation a mark of what investors expect of this company and its tech.
Source: TechCrunch
Thirty-three-year-old founder of personalized medicine company DotLab, Heather Bowerman, wants to shake up the women’s health industry with what she believes to be a better, cheaper, less painful test for endometriosis.
Her company has just completed a Yale University -led validation study and raised $10 million in Series A funding from CooperSurgical, TigerGlobal Management, Luxor Capital Group and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to bring a new, non-invasive diagnostic test to market.
Endometriosis is an often painful disorder in which tissue begins to grow outside of the uterus and into a woman’s ovaries, fallopian tubes and pelvis. The disease may affect up to one in 10 women of childbearing years and about half of all women who experience infertility, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
However, even with clear symptoms of the disease, doctors often try to test for endometriosis as a last resort. The only way currently to test for it is through an invasive laparoscopic procedure, which comes with risks like internal bleeding, infections and hernia.
Called DotEndo the new DotLab test eliminates that risk with a simple diagnostic test. “The rationale for using our test is to test as early as possible and also to use it non-invasively,” Bowerman told TechCrunch.
The CEO was also quick to point out DotEndo is not a genetic test, as there are plenty of tests out on the market helping women discover possible genetic markers around fertility. Rather, it’s a physician-ordered diagnostic test you would take through a lab to find out if you have this specific disease.
“The revolutionary technology behind DotLab’s endometriosis test could improve the lives of the hundreds of millions of women affected by this debilitating disease which has been under-researched and deprioritized for too long,” Bowerman said in a statement.
While there has been some innovation in the space lately — U.S. regulators just approved a new pill to treat endometriosis pain — Bowerman is right in that we definitely still have a long way to go in diagnosing and curing the disease and that will take a lot more capital from investors in the future.
Meanwhile, the next step for DotLab will be to get its test into the hands of physicians, with the hope they recommend DotEndo right off the bat to patients exhibiting symptoms.
Source: TechCrunch
Apple has reportedly launched a free logic board replacement program for certain 2018 MacBook Air units. According to documents, affected laptops are suffering a “power” issue from the faulty components.
Source: Digital trends
COO Sheryl Sandberg will chair the group.
Source: CNET
Para el CEO de la farmacéutica Almirall, Peter Guenter, no hay duda en que la medicina personalizada es la gran prioridad de su industria. Para lograrlo, confÃa en el ‘big data’ y la IA, y en colaborar con ‘start-ups’ para aprender de sus hallazgos y su forma de innovar
Source: MIT