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The British actor talks about being in the Pokemon movie and wrapping up You’re The Worst after five seasons.
Source: CNET
Rankwave analyzes social media users’ data for marketing.
Source: CNET
This morning, the SEC approved as the U.S.’s 14th stock exchange Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), an outfit that was conceived in 2012 by “Lean Startup” author Eric Ries as a place where public market shareholders who hold onto their shares through thick and thin would be rewarded for their loyalty.
Ries thinks such rewards are important because he believes in public markets. Among other things, by establishing a common currency, being publicly traded enables companies to more easily acquire other companies. It enables employees to more freely sell their shares. It also allows retail investors to participate in the growth of tech companies — growth from which they’ve largely been shut out in recent years as the average time a company remains private has stretched to roughly 12 years.
Indeed, Ries’s biggest issue with public market shareholders is their focus on short-term results, citing it as the primary reason that startups remain privately held for so long. After all, it’s hard to innovate when you’re being sued over disappointing earnings.
Whether LTSE can usher in rules that encourage both companies and shareholders to focus on the longer term remains to be seen. LTSE has not received approval over any kind of listings standards. It hasn’t even submitted these yet.
While ideally, the exchange wants to welcome “values-based” companies that limit executive bonuses and grant more voting power to shareholders who hang on for the ride, Ries seems to recognize that he may have to settle for less owing to some pushback, including from the Council of Institutional Investors, a group of institutions that fear long-term voting could empower company insiders at the expense of other shareholders. During a call today, he told us that LTSE won’t necessarily give more voting power to shareholders. “These rewards could be voting or other things,” he said.
Certainly, Ries will benefit if LTSE takes off. While numerous reports today note that famed VC Marc Andreessen is one of LTSE’s financial backers, the biggest shareholder right now is Ries himself, who owns 30 percent of the for-profit company, according to government filings.
Other major shareholders include John Bautista, a cofounder of Long Term Stock Exchange who is also an attorney with the law firm Orrick; Founders Fund, which owns 14 percent of the company; Collaborative Fund, which owns 7.8 percent; and Obvious Ventures, which owns 6.7 percent. The company has raised roughly $19 million altogether to date.
Ries is hardly alone wanting companies to be able to go public sooner without worrying about activist investors. We’d written about the case for tenured voting in late 2017, noting then that concept has been around for decades.
But while it resonates with founders, few others have embraced the idea. Back in the 1980s, for example, U.S. stock exchanges determined that tenured voting was unnecessarily complicated and too hard to track. Bankers don’t like the idea because anything that looks different to the market is harder to sell.
Meanwhile, another Andreessen-backed startup to make headlines this week — Carta — seems like a bet that LTSE won’t realize its vision completely. The seven-year-old, San Francisco-based startup largely helps private company investors, founders, and employees manage their equity and ownership. But it just raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $1.7 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz largely to become what Carta CEO Henry Ward describes as the world’s largest marketplace for private company shares.
Carta paints the evolution as a natural one given the needs of aging private companies, as well as the fact that so many startups and institutional investors use its platform already.
In fact, Ward, like Ries, talks about democratizing access to more of today’s up-and-coming companies on Carta’s platform. Still, Ries seems more interesting in getting shares into the hands of people who haven’t been able to access them in recent years; Carta seems more interested in more efficiently allowing startups and already wealthy institutional investors to trade shares amongst themselves, using Carta as a hub. (Carta also has exponentially more funding than LSTE, having raised $447 million altogether from VCs.)
Whether either company realizes its bold ambitions will take time to know. Much depends on external factors, like the macroeconomy, and whether outfits like SoftBank keeps showering privately held companies with funding.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to understand whether together LTSE and Carta can together create a safer, smoother, less stressful path for startups to go public, or instead the two wind up locked in a kind of battle for founders’ souls, with Carta enticing companies to stay private, while LTSE pushes for them to get onto its exchange — and out into the broader world.
Source: TechCrunch
Commentary: The Queen of the Seven Kingdoms is the best TV villain ever.
Source: CNET
Spoiler-free review: In the latest Pokemon movie, Ryan Reynolds’ electric rodent sleuth leads an entertaining romp with plenty of heart.
Source: CNET
Facebook might have another Cambridge Analytica on its hands. In a late Friday news dump, Facebook revealed that today it filed a lawsuit alleging South Korean analytics firm Rankwave abused its developer platform’s data, and has refused to cooperate with a mandatory compliance audit and request to delete the data.
Facebook’s lawsuit centers around Rankwave offering to help businesses build a Facebook authorization step into their apps so they can pass all the user data to Rankwave, which then analyzes biographic and behavioral traits to supply user contact info and ad targeting assistance to the business. Rankwave also apparently misused data sucked in by its own consumer app for checking your social media “influencer score”. That app could pull data about your Facebook activity such as location checkins, determine that you’ve checked into a baseball stadium, and then Rankwave could help its clients target you with ads for baseball tickets.
The use of a seemingly fun app to slurp up user data and repurpose it for other business goals is strikingly similar to how Cambridge Analytica’s personality quiz app tempted millions of users to provide data about themselves and their friends.
Rankwave touts its Facebook data usage in this 2014 pitch deck
TechCrunch has attained a copy of the lawsuit that alleges that Rankwave misused Facebook data outside of the apps where it was collected, purposefully delayed responding to a cease-and-desist order, claimed it didn’t violate Facebook policy, lied about not using its apps since 2018 when they were accessed in April 2019, and then refused to comply with a mandatory audit of its data practices. Facebook Platform data is not supposed to be repurposed for other business goals, only for the developer to improve their app’s user experience.
“By filing the lawsuit, we are sending a message to developers that Facebook is serious about enforcing our policies, including requiring developers to cooperate with us during an investigation” Facebook’s director of platform enforcement and litigation Jessica Romero wrote. Facebook tells TechCrunch that “To date Rankwave has not participated in our investigation and we are trying to get more info from them to determine if there was any misuse of Pages data.” We’ve reached out to Rankwave for its response.
Facebook’s lawsuit details that “Rankwave used the Facebook data associated with Rankwave’s apps to create and sell advertising and marketing analytics and models — which violated Facebook’s policies and terms” and that it “failed to comply with Facebook’s requests for proof of Rankwave’s compliance with Facebook policies, including an audit.” Rankwave apparently accessed data from over thirty apps, including those created by its clients.
Specifically, Facebook cites that its “Platform Policies largely restrict Developers from using Facebook data outside of the environment of the app, for any purpose other than enhancing the app users’ experience on the app.” But Rankwave allegedly used Facebook data outside those apps.
Rankwave describes how it extracts contact info and ad targeting data from Facebook data
Facebook’s suit claims that “Rankwave’s B2B apps were installed and used by businesses to track and analyze activity on their Facebook Pages . . . Rankwave operated a consumer app called the ‘Rankwave App.’ This consumer app was designed to measure the app user’s popularity on Facebook by analyzing the level of interaction that other users had with the app user’s Facebook posts. On its website, Rankwave claimed that this app calculated a user’s ‘Social influence score’ by ‘evaluating your social activities’ and receiving ‘responses from your friends.’”
TechCrunch has found that Rankwave still offers an Android app that asks for you to login with Facebook so it can assess the popularity of your posts and give you a “Social Influencer Score”. Until 2015 when Facebook tightened its policies, this kind of app could ingest not only a user’s own data but that about their Facebook friends. As with Cambridge Analytica, this likely massively compounded Rankwave’s total data access.
Rankwave’s Android app asks for users’ Facebook data in exchange for providing them a Social Influencer Score
Founded in 2012 by Sungwha Shim, Rankwave came into Facebook’s crosshairs in June 2018 after it was sold to a Korean entertainment company in May 2017. Facebook assesses that the value of its data at the time of the buyout was $9.8 million.
Worryingly, Facebook didn’t reach out to Rankwave until January 2019 for information proving it complied with the social network’s policies. After receiving no response, Facebook issued a cease-and-desist order in February, which Rankwave replied to seeking more time because it’s CTO had resigned, which Facebook calls “false representations”. Later that month, Rankwave denied violating Facebook’s policies but refused to provide proof. Facebook gave it more time to provide proof, but Rankwave didn’t respond. Facebook has now shut down Rankwave’s apps.
Rankwave claims to be able to extract a wide array of ad targeting data from Facebook data
Now Facebook is seeking money to cover the $9.8 million value of the data, additional monetary damages and legal fees, plus injunctive relief restraining Rankwave from accessing the Facebook Platform, requiring it to comply with Facebook’s audit, requiring that it delete all Facebook data.
The fact that Rankwave was openly promoting these services that blatantly violate Facebook’s policies casts further doubt on how the social network was policing its platform. And the six month delay between Facebook identifying a potential issue with Rankwave and it even reaching out for information, plus another several months before it blocked Rankwave’s app shows a failure to move swiftly to enforce its policies. These blunders might explain why Facebook buried the news by announcing it on a Friday afternoon when many reporters and readers have already signed off for the weekend.
For now there’s no evidence of wholesale transfer of Rankwave’s data to other parties or its misuse for especially nefarious purposes like influencing an election as with Cambridge Analytica. The lawsuit merely alleges data was wrongly harnessed to make money, which may not spur the same level of backlash. But the case further proves that Facebook was too busy growing itself thanks to the platform to properly safeguard it against abuse.
You can learn more about Rankwave’s analytics practices from this 2014 presentation.
Source: TechCrunch
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
We are back, as promised. Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm re-convened today to discuss the latest from the Uber IPO. Namely that it opened down, and then kept falling.
A few questions spring to mind. Why did Uber lose ground? Was it the company’s fault? Was it simply the macro market? Was it something else altogether? What we do know is that Uber’s pricing wasn’t what we were expecting and its first day was not smooth.
There are a whole bunch of reasons why Uber went out the way it did. Firstly, the stock market has had a rough week. That, coupled with rising U.S.-China tensions made this week one of the worst of the year for Uber’s monstrous IPO.
But, to make all that clear, we ran back through some history, recalled some key Lyft stats, and more.
We don’t know what’s next but we will be keeping a close watch, specifically on the next cohort of unicorn companies ready to IPO (Postmates, hi!).
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
Source: TechCrunch
Catch up on the most important news today in 2 minutes or less.
Source: Wired
The city that was the birthplace of the Audi brand and then the home of Trabant will now be the birthplace for the VW Group’s electric vehicles.
Source: CNET
The XPS 13 is an excellent Ultrabook and it just got more affordable with Dell’s $339 discount. With a compact footprint and updated design that moves the webcam to the top, you’ll look even more flattering on your Skype calls.
The post Take $339 off the newest XPS 13 laptop with Dell’s latest promo appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends