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Ride-sharing and transportation platform Didi Chuxing announced today that it has formed a joint venture with BP, the British gas, oil and energy supermajor. to build electric vehicle charging infrastructure in China. The charging stations will be available to Didi and non-Didi drivers.

The news of Didi and BP’s joint venture comes one week after Didi announced that it had received funding totaling $600 million from Toyota Motor Corporation. As part of that deal, Didi and Toyota Motor set up a joint venture with GAC Toyota Motor to provide vehicle-related services to Didi drivers.

BP’s first charging site in Guangzhou has already been connected to XAS (Xiaoju Automobile Solutions), which Didi spun out in April 2018 to put all its vehicle-related services into one platform.

XAS is part of Didi Chuxing’s evolution from a ride-sharing company to a mobility services platform, with its services available to other car, transportation and logistics companies. In June, Didi also opened its ride-sharing platform to other companies, enabling its users to request rides from third-party providers in a bid to better compete with apps like Meituan Dianping and AutoNavi, which aggregate several ride-hailing services on their platforms.

Didi says it now offers ride-sharing, vehicle rental and delivery services to 550 million users and covers 1,000 cities through partnerships with Grab, Lyft, Ola, 99 and Bolt (Taxify). The company also claims to be the world’s largest electric vehicle operator with more than 600,000 EVs on its platform.

It also has partnerships with automakers and other car-related companies like Toyota, FAW, Dongfeng, GAC, Volkswagen and Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi to collaborate on a platform that uses new energy, AI-based and mobility technologies.

In a press statement, Tufan Erginbilgic, the CEO of BP’s Downstream business, said “As the world’s largest EV market, China offers extraordinary opportunities to develop innovative new businesses at scale and we see this as the perfect partnership for such a fast-evolving environment. The lessons we learn here will help us further expand BP’s advanced mobility business worldwide, helping drive the energy transition and develop solutions for a low carbon world.”

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At the end of CNN's second Democratic presidential debate on Wednesday night, all the candidates ended their closing statements with their websites. 

Except Joe Biden, who got confused. He gave the number to his text line with no context instead. 

“Go to Joe 30330, and help me in this fight,” Biden said, faltering very slightly mid-sentence, possibly as he realised his mistake.

Before the candidates had even left the stage, Joe30330.com was purchased. And a moment later, it was redirecting to fellow presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg's site, PeteForAmerica.com.

But another couple of minutes later, the redirect changed again ... to joshforamerica.com.  Read more...

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Pearson, the London-based educational software maker, said today that thousands of school and university accounts, mostly in the United States, were affected by a data breach. The company added that it has notified affected users already and that the vulnerability has been fixed.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the data breach happened in November 2018 and Pearson was notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in March. The perpetrator is still unknown.

According to Pearson, unauthorized access was gained to 13,000 school and university accounts on AIMSweb, the company’s student monitoring and assessment platform. The data exposed included first and last names and, in some cases, date of birth and email addresses. Each account could potentially include information about thousands of students.

Pearson added that it has no evidence that any of the exposed information was misused. It will offer free credit monitoring services to affected users as a “precautionary measure.”

News of Pearson’s data breach comes the same week that Capital One disclosed a massive cyber attack that exposed sensitive information for about 100 million people in the U.S. and 6 million in Canada.

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In May, venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital warned in a Financial Times column that Amazon’s recent $575 million investment in the London-based delivery service Deliveroo could prove ominous for local restaurants. Wrote Moritz: “Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many dining haunts.”

Moritz was right to attract more attention to the deal. Deliveroo has begun operating shared kitchens from which it will not simply transport food to customers but eventually prepare it, too. His warning may even have played a role in the recent decision of Britain’s competition regulator to halt work on Amazon’s investment so it can first investigate whether the deal poses competitive concerns.

Moritz knows the playbook because of Sequoia’s early investment in Rebel Foods, formerly known as Faasos, a once-small Pune, India-based company that now prepares a variety of foods in its cloud kitchens. As he says in the same column, Faasos largely pioneered the trend. Still, the growth of the nine-year-old company is a bit breathtaking.

According to Bloomberg, Rebel — which this month raised $125 million in fresh capital from the Indonesian delivery service Go-jek, Coatue Management, and Goldman Sachs — now operates 235 kitchens across 20 Indian cities. And it’s processing two million orders a month. (It calls itself the “world’s largest internet restaurant company.”)

While it began life as a chain of kebab restaurants, that original concept, Faasos, is now just one of eight other brands that Rebel operates, including a tea brand called Kettle & Kegs, a Chinese concept called Mandarin Oak; a pizza brand called Oven Story; and a brand called Behrouz through which Rebel makes and sells slow-cooked rice dishes known as biryani.

Rebel Foods isn’t the only fast-moving operator using cloud kitchens to offer every kind of cuisine imaginable under one roof. Competitors of the company — which tells Bloomberg it is now valued at $525 million — include UberEats and the food delivery company Zomato, which itself has plans to open more than 100 cloud kitchens by the end of this year.

Zomato says it isn’t getting into the food preparation business — yet — but rather renting out facilities, kitchen equipment, and software to restaurants.

Still, it’s little wonder that Rebel is racing headlong into new markets as fast as it can. According to Bloomberg, the company is currently planning to build 100 cloud kitchens in Indonesia over the next 18 months with Go-Jek’s help. It also expects to open 20 cloud kitchen facilities in the United Arab Emirates by December.

Rebel was founded by Jaydeep Barman, a native of Mumbai with an MBA from INSEAD who spent nearly four years with McKinsey before joining forces with business school classmate Kallol Banerjee to launch Faasos.

Despite raising money early on from Sequoia, the company was once at risk of going out of business, in part owing to high rents and employee turnover. As Moritz tells the story, things turned around dramatically when the duo closed their restaurants and opened their first centralized kitchen.

That decision would prove pivotal. Not did Rebel survive, but today, the company tells Bloomberg, the entire operation runs the equivalent of 1,600 restaurants.

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Fintech startup Revolut is launching its stock trading feature today. It’s a Robinhood-like feature that lets you buy and sell shares without any commission. For now, the feature is limited to some Revolut customers with a Metal card.

While Robinhood has completely changed the stock trading retail market in the U.S., buying shares hasn’t changed much in Europe. Revolut wants to make it easier to invest on the stock market.

After topping up your Revolut account, you can buy and hold shares directly from the Revolut app. For now, the feature is limited to 300 U.S.-listed stocks on NASDAQ and NYSE. The company says that it plans to expand to U.K. and European stocks as well as Exchange Traded Funds.

There’s no minimum limit on transactions, which means that you can buy fractional shares for $1 for instance. You can see real-time prices in the Revolut app.

When it comes to fees, Revolut doesn’t charge any fee indeed, but with some caveats. The feature is currently limited to Revolut Metal customers for now. It currently costs £12.99 per month or €13.99 per month to become a Metal customer.

As long as you make less than 100 trades per month, you don’t pay anything other than your monthly subscription. Any trade above that limit costs £1 per trade and an annual custody fee of 0.01%.

Eventually, Revolut will roll out stock trading to other subscription tiers. Revolut Premium will get 8 commission-free trades per month and basic Revolut users will get 3 commission-free trades per month.

Behind the scene, Revolut has partnered with DriveWealth for this feature. This is a nice addition for existing Revolut users. You don’t have to open a separate account with another company and Metal customers in particular get a lot of free trades.

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Got hardware? Well then, listen up, because our search continues for boundary-pushing, early-stage hardware startups to join us in Shenzhen, China for an epic opportunity; launch your startup on a global stage and compete in Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12.

Apply here to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019. Why? It’s your chance to demo your product to the top investors and technologists in the world. Hardware Battlefield, cousin to Startup Battlefield, focuses exclusively on innovative hardware because, let’s face it, it’s the backbone of technology. From enterprise solutions to agtech advancements, medical devices to consumer product goods — hardware startups are in the international spotlight.

If you make the cut, you’ll compete against 15 of the world’s most innovative hardware makers for bragging rights, plenty of investor love, media exposure and $25,000 in equity-free cash. Just participating in a Battlefield can change the whole trajectory of your business in the best way possible.

We chose to bring our fifth Hardware Battlefield to Shenzhen because of its outstanding track record of supporting hardware startups. The city achieves this through a combination of accelerators, rapid prototyping and world-class manufacturing. What’s more, TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 takes place as part of the larger TechCrunch Shenzhen that runs November 9-12.

Creativity and innovation no know boundaries, and that’s why we’re opening this competition to any early-stage hardware startup from any country. While we’ve seen amazing hardware in previous Battlefields — like robotic arms, food testing devices, malaria diagnostic tools, smart socks for diabetics and e-motorcycles, we can’t wait to see the next generation of hardware, so bring it on!

Meet the minimum requirements listed below, and we’ll consider your startup:

• Submit your application to TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 by August 14th
• You must have a minimally viable product to demo onstage
• Your product has received little if any, press coverage to date
• Your product must have a hardware device or component

Here’s how Hardware Battlefield works. TechCrunch editors vet every qualified application and pick 15 startups to compete. Those startups receive six rigorous weeks of free coaching. Forget stage fright. You’ll be prepped and ready to step into the spotlight.

Teams have six minutes to pitch and demo their products, which is immediately followed by an in-depth Q&A with the judges. If you make it to the final round, you’ll repeat the process in front of a new set of judges.

The judges will name one outstanding startup the Hardware Battlefield champion. Hoist the Battlefield Cup, claim those bragging rights and the $25,000. This nerve-wracking thrill-ride takes place in front of a live audience, and we capture the entire event on video and post it to our global audience on TechCrunch.

Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen takes place on November 11-12. Don’t hide your hardware or miss your chance to show us — and the entire tech world — your startup magic. Apply to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019, and join us in Shenzhen!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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As our beloved and recently unveiled narrator tells us at the top of Jane the Virgin's final episode, everything ends. Stories end, friendships end, relationships end, and we must come to terms with it.

Yet so often in real life – outside of telenovelas and the CW shows that honor them – things don't end. Chapters of our own lives draw to a close, but then things go on. You learn to live without the thing that ended, or with the new change. The endings we experience in letting go of television are unique because rarely in life do we have to let go of so many beloved people and places at once, never to hear from them again. Read more...

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Despite the FTC pushing people away from an Equifax cash payout, there's a good chance you'll get all $125. Eventually.


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If Indonesia's capital can’t find a way to hydrate its people without overexploiting groundwater, it’ll keep sinking, pulling that new sea wall down with it.


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In Dale Beran’s aggrandizing telling, 4chan’s crescendo of furious nihilism delivers President Trump to America.


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Visa is pitching a new way for startups in the fintech space to get to market faster by using its rails and a group of pre-approved partners.

The Fast Track program, a variant of an investment commitment and ecosystem of services the company has already launched in other geographies around the world, comes to the U.S. without an investment commitment, but with a pre-defined list of partners that will help new financial services startups launch more quickly, the company said.

Chiefly, the process makes it easier to integrate with Visa. It’s an attempt to put the payment processor’s network, VisaNet, at the center of a vast array of services ranging from payroll to business to business payments and online banking, online lending, and even digital wallets.

“There’s about $17 trillion in cash and checks today that hasn’t gone digital and $20 trillion in business to business that’s happening over wires and check… those are all opportunities for Visa,” says Terry Angelos, a former fintech entrepreneur who now serves as an senior vice president at Visa and the company’s global head of fintech. 

“To some degree Visa has been the original fintech,” says Angelos. “Today, you would  pitch it as a SAAS platform for payment and commerce.”

For its new service, Visa has come up with a list of partners to provide the array of compliance services and infrastructure that a startup in the financial services space would need to get up and running quickly.

“These are vetted partners that are providing a fast track process and a concierge service so we can track the companies in the program,” says Angelos. 

What the program won’t include, Angelos said, is a commitment to invest in startups in the U.S. that would be equivalent to the $100 million investment fund the company has carved out for European investments as part of the fast track program there.

“We have investments that are happening that are in parallel,” Angelos says. “We don’t have a separate fund.”

Companies that are partnering with Visa on this program represent a different service offering for the ecosystem including: Alloy, BBVA Open Platform, Cross River Bank, Galileo, Green Dot, Marqeta, Netspend (TSYS’ Consumer Segment), Stripe, TabaPay, TSYS, Q2, and Very Good Security. The company said its debit processing service will support some of the partners’ participation in the program.   

Last year, fintech companies raised $39.5 billion from investors globally, up 120% from the previous year, according to data provided by Visa. And as part of their outreach to this startup community, Visa is pre-qualifying portfolio companies from investment firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Ribbit Capital and Trinity Ventures for its program. 

“We see many entrepreneurs with big ideas that can add real value and solve problems in the global payments system; the problem can be the difficulty of distribution and connectivity to the essential infrastructure,” said Hans Morris, Managing Partner, Nyca Ventures, in a statement. “Fast Track solves for this, enabling some of our best companies to start working with Visa right away.”

Many of the firms’ portfolio companies are already partnering with Visa in some capacity. The company has already announced agreements (of an undefined and undisclosed nature) with startups like Currencycloud, Flutterwave, Ininal, N26, PayActiv, Rappi, Razer and Remitly. 

Visa has also invested in startups. In 2019 alone, the company added Anchorage, Bankable, Branch, Finix, Minna Technologies and Paymate to its stable of startups. 

The main thing that startups would get from the Visa Fast Track program is mentorship and access to the company’s experts in payments and fintech. And its effort to tie itself more closely to a financial services ecosystem comes as Visa finds itself under threat from some of the very startup technologies that the company may look to co-opt.

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies offer the possibility of alternative payment mechanisms that don’t rely on the traditional money transfer systems developed decades ago by companies like Visa and Mastercard and can offer potentially faster transaction times and charge lower fees.

To combat that threat, Visa has been aligning with some of the largest technology companies to head off challengers at the pass. The company (along with its largest rival, Mastercard) is collaborating with Facebook on its controversial proposed cryptocurrency, Libra, in an effort to head off any challengers with a new transaction system of its own.

Angelos insists that there’s nothing nefarious in Visa’s efforts to engage with startups and says that the company is merely another actor supporting the movement of trillions of dollars into a digital economy.

“If you look at what’s happening in the fintech ecosystem… Fintechs are reducing friction and adding consumers that are underbanked,” Angelos says. “They can work on any payment rails they choose. [But] all those fintechs… are choosing to build at least part of their products on top of the rails that we built… if you look around the world, fintechs are probably leveraging the existing payment  rails to provide a lot of innovation and remove friction.”

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Facetune, a photo editing app that empowers users to cover their gray hairs, refine their jaw lines, and reshape their noses, was first introduced around six years ago, and it quickly climbed to the top of the download charts, becoming Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017. Despite stiff competition, it has remaining highly popular, too.

That staying power hasn’t been lost Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Insight Partners or ClalTech, which just gave Facetune’s parent company, Lightricks, $135 million in Series C funding at a post-money valuation of $1 billion.

The investment firms — two of which led a $60 million round in the company less than a year ago —  are getting much more than Facetune in the deal.

Lightricks, based in Tel Aviv, has 260 employees supporting six products across three divisions, including Facetune, whose second version was rolled out this year; Enlight, a line of mobile photography and editing tools that aims to make photo editing more accessible to amateurs; and the startup’s newest, enterprise-focused brand, Swish, a marketing video editor that helps companies tell their story with video ads.

The separate divisions each come with meaningful mind share. According to cofounder and CEO Zeev Farbman, Lightricks has seen 180 million downloads across it paid apps, which generally cost $3.99 to download. Since the company began offering subscription layers to users who want premium bells and whistles in 2017, it has amassed a respectable number of subscribers, as well. According to Farbman, Facetune now has more than 1 million subscribers; Enlight has roughly 1 million subscribers, and Swish’s subscribers brings the total to roughly 3 million subscribers altogether.

More subscription-based content-creation apps are on the way, says Farbman, who hints they may be coming shortly. (Other developments might take a while, he adds, explaining that Lightworks, originally founded by five PhDs, is “constantly working on things that will be out two or three years down the line.”)

Reshaping features

If it it has been mostly smooth sailing for the company, there have been headwinds from time to time.

Facetune has been accused of taking photo brushing too far, for example, with celebrity model Chrissy Teigen tweeting about the app last year, “I don’t know what real skin looks like anymore . . . everyone looks like an oil painting.”

Asked what he thought of the body image debate the app had prompted, Farbman says the company sees itself as “democratizing retouching, and [educating users about] how powerful image processing can be.

“If you go back 10 years,” he notes, before mobile image processing software was available to everyone, “people didn’t understand that the people they were seeing on magazine covers had undergone the photoshopping process.”

Facetune users have also long grumbled about the second release of the app, not realizing that when they update the app, they lose some of the features that were previously available to them. (You have to subscribe in order to continue using them.)

 

Clearly, Lightricks and its backers — and one million users — think the company’s products are worth the monthly expense, which ranges depending on the features a user wants to unlock.

A team that includes experts across a number of relevant domains is the reason, says Farbman, who himself previously spent most of his time in academia, studying computer graphics, computer vision, and computational photography.

After the photo editing app Snapseed made its debut and was quickly scooped up by Google, he and four PhD friends “realized that nobody is becoming a great platform for content creation.” They quickly got to work developing their first product — Facetune — and by 2015, the bootstrapped company, which had also by then introduced Enlight, was seeing $10 million in annual revenue.

Still, we “thought we could do better,” says Farbman. Toward that end, Lightricks raised money, and we “started to grow way faster as a company,” he recalls.

It also began rolling out its subscription offerings, and despite continued complaints from some corners (Facetune 2 came out in 2016), Farbman says more people are signing up — and agreeing to pay more — than he initially imagined would be the case.

It makes sense to him now, he suggests. “Our founding team includes PhDs who were at the top of their fields, which allowed us to attract a strong team at the beginning. And once you’re hiring the best people, you’re probably going to build the best software. And if you’re building the best software, you can charge premium prices for that.”

Lightricks’s latest financing brings its total funding to $205 million to date. The new funding will be used to crate more tools, says Farbman. He adds that his team also plans to begin acquiring companies strategically.

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Washington disputes get the headlines, but much US telecom policy is determined by states and cities. A nonprofit has catalogued the rules and put them online.


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When it comes to summer tunes, what do you prefer — a classic ballad or an upbeat bop?

Well, here to settle the argument once and for all are John Legend and James Corden.

In a segment on The Late Late Show, the two go head-to-head in an a capella riff-off, with Legend fighting for ballads and Corden defending the bops.

There's an entertaining version of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy," a slowed down "All of Me," and the whole thing finishes with a rousing duet of Lewis Capaldi's "Someone You Loved."

Needless to say, the harmonies are on point. Read more...

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TL;DR: Snag a lifetime subscription to the immersive Babbel app in the Mashable Shop for $149. Typically $299, you save $150 with this deal.

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Learning a new language offers you so much more than just bilingual street cred. It’s your gateway to exploring new cultures, beefing up your résumé, romancing a foreigner (we can dream, right?), and even potentially reducing your risk for diseases such as Alzheimers. 

Given the fact that we live in the digital age, an easy and effective way to start your learning journey is via a language app. The right one allows you to practice your comprehension, listening, and speaking skills from pretty much anywhere in the world and at any given moment. But with so many different app options out there, how do you decipher which ones are actually très bon?  Read more...

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Are You Afraid Of The Dark isn't just a classic piece of television history that defined a generation, it's a legitimate concern. The dark is a scary place, especially when exploring the great outdoors. Before you head out on your next camping adventure, grab one of these flashlights or lanterns to keep it lit. Everything on this list is on sale in the Mashable Shop for a limited time.

1. Bell + Howell Taclight Flashlight and Lantern Bundle

Why settle for a flashlight or lantern when you can get both? With this bundle, you'll get a taclight flashlight, which is great for emergencies or finding your way through the dark. It features five light modes, including a built-in strobe to stun potential attackers and an SOS mode for emergencies. You'll also get a collapsible lantern that shrinks down to the size of your smartphone. Read more...

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If you know one thing about Mindy Kaling, the co-creator of Hulu's Four Weddings and a Funeral reboot along with The Mindy Project co-conspirators Matt Warburton and Tracey Wigfield, you know that she loves romantic comedies. It takes minimal exposure to Kaling's work with Hulu to understand that she'd happily live in this world if she could, and that almost every piece of media she offers us is supposed to provide us the same escape.

Four Weddings and a Funeral, like the team's last project, is by no means a brilliant addition to its genre. It features a promising cast and established writing team, all unfairly burdened with delivering a revelatory rom-com they were never going to make. What they did make is perfectly fun and fine, a breezy way to pass the evenings as summer winds wearily toward winter. Read more...

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TL;DR: July 31 is National Orgasm Day and sales at Lelo, Lovehoney, Ella Paradis, and Babeland can save you up to 54% on vibrators, dildos, cock rings, and more.

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Twitter likely alerted you that National Chicken Wing Day was this week, but there's another holiday that's garnering even more excitement: July 31 is National Orgasm Day.

Now, we don't need an official holiday to fire up that warm and fuzzy feeling, but it's nice to call some attention to the importance of the Big O. 

Orgasms release oxytocin, the anti-stress hormone that gives you butterflies while cuddling, and dopamine, the neurotransmitter that regulates sleep. Whether you got laid or achieved the fireworks via your own handy work, orgasms are a self-care tool that we all deserve to experience. Read more...

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The following article contains spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a purposefully fantastical rewriting of the infamous Manson Family murders. So it's ironic that this alternate history is also one of the more honest depictions of America's favorite true-crime legend, revealing the perception of Charles Manson as evil incarnate to be more sensationalized myth than fact.

When people learned the premise of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood revolved around the Manson murders, it raised some eyebrows. Tarantino himself expressed the care he took to avoid yet another distasteful scavenging of Sharon Tate's tragic death to sell movie tickets — even managing to convince Tate's sister that his approach would be unlike any other.  Read more...

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New college students have a general checklist to get ready for life outside the nest: towels, a laptop, bed sheets, and some Bob Marley posters. You're all set right? 

Well if you value your online privacy and freedom as much as your meal pass, then you need to add a virtual private network, or VPN, to that list.

We've already covered some of the best VPN services and their benefits. For college students, they allow you to access social media or torrent sites that might be blocked on your school's Wi-Fi networks. They can also help you access censored or region-locked content if you plan to study abroad. And at the very least, they provide you an extra layer of security when you study for midterms in coffee shops with unsecure Wi-Fi.  Read more...

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Station F is the world’s biggest startup campus and it’s based in Paris. Director Roxanne Varza first unveiled Station F at TechCrunch Disrupt back in December 2016. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Station F director Roxanne Varza is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to give us an update and tell us about future plans.

If you aren’t familiar with Station F, it starts with a beautiful building. Originally built in 1929, it is now classified as a historical monument. But now, it’s also a high-tech building and a cornerstone of the French tech ecosystem.

Varza has managed to create a community of entrepreneurs, VC funds and big tech companies that work, share knowledge and collaborate. In addition to Station F’s own Founders Program and Fighters Program, you can become a Station F member by joining a partner program.

Facebook, Naver (Line), Ubisoft, Microsoft and plenty of others all run their own incubator from Station F. And it’s been working really well as there are over one thousand startups based at Station F.

Station F is also a great signal for the international tech community. If you head over to its Instagram account, you can see that plenty of head of states and major tech CEOs come to Station F whenever they visit Paris, from Jack Dorsey to newly elected president of Ukraine Vlodomyr Zelensky. Around one third of Station F startups come from abroad and 600 members don’t even speak French.

More recently, Station F unveiled Flatmates, a co-living space for Station F members. Station F is creating a lifestyle and has become a cultural phenomenon for Paris. And I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Roxanne Varza is Director of STATION F, the biggest startup campus in the world with more than 1.000 startups, located in Paris. She is originally from Silicon Valley. Before joining STATION F, she led Microsoft Ventures Paris and TechCrunch France. She also worked for several London-based startups and cofounded StarHer, Tech.eu and Failcon France.

Prior to her current role, Roxanne was the lead for Microsoft’s start-up activities in France, running both Bizspark and Microsoft Ventures programs for 3 years. She was also Editor of TechCrunch France from 2010-2011 and has written for several publications including Business Insider and The Telegraph. In April 2013, Business Insider listed her as one of the top 30 women under 30 in tech. She has also been listed in additional rankings by Business Insider, Vanity Fair and Le Figaro, The Evening Standard and more.

Roxanne also co-founded StartHer (ex Girls in Tech Paris) and is the co-organizer of the Failcon Paris conference. More recently, she co-founded Tech.eu, a European tech media backed by Dave McClure, Adeo Ressi, Daniel Waterhouse and more.

Prior to TechCrunch, Roxanne worked for the French government’s foreign direct investment agency helping fast-growing startups develop their activities in France. Roxanne has spoken, moderated, mentored and judged numerous startup events and programs throughout Europe and also helps European startups with content and communications. Roxanne is trilingual and holds degrees from UCLA, Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics. She is also an epilepsy advocate.

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You're used to the cast of Queer Eye making you cry, but there are no emotional Karamo monologues here — just a squirming Antoni Porowski, laughing so much he can barely tell a story.

During their appearance on The Tonight Show on Tuesday, Jimmy Fallon had the queer quintet play "Know Your Fab Five": Each took turns wearing a set of noise-cancelling headphones while the other four answered a question about them, to see if they'd all agree on Tan's dumbest moment or JVN's crankiness "tell".

But the only one they all agreed on was the time Antoni laughed the hardest during the fourth season — and it was all Jonathan's fault.  Read more...

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Jaybird’s latest sweat-proof fully wireless earbuds feel almost weightless, and hold an impressive charge.


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Nairobi based internet hardware and service startup BRCK and Egyptian ride-hail venture Swvl are partnering to bring WiFI and online entertainment to on-demand bus service in Kenya.

BRCK will install its routers on Swvl vehicles in Kenya and run its Moja service, which offers free public WiFi—internet, music, and entertainment—subsidized by commercial partners.

Founded in Cairo in 2017, Swvl is a mass transit service that has positioned itself as an Uber for shared buses. “Think ride hailing, but with a bus…and instead of the vehicle coming to you…you go to the bus, and the bus picks you up at a certain point and time,” Swvl’s general manager for Kenya, Shivachi Muleji, told TechCrunch via email.

The company raised a $42 million Series B round in June, with intent to expand in Africa, Swvl CEO Mostafa Kandil said in an interview.

In Kenya, BRCK has installed 15 of its units in Swvl buses and looks to offer its Moja WiFi service in 700 by 2020, BRCK’s chief operating officer Nivi Sharma told TechCrunch.  Swvl pays a monthly fee for the routers and for maintenance of the routers, Swvl confirmed.

Both BRCK and Swvl see a solid fit in pairing up their product offerings. “SWVL’s objectives to provide an alternative in the transportation industry line up nicely with BRCK’s objectives of providing connectivity to commuters,” said BRCK COO Nivi Sharma.

Backed by $10 million from investors including Steve Case’s Revolution VC fund, BRCK built its platform around providing internet solutions in East Africa. Founder Erik Hersman has described Africa’s internet challenges—mainly the lowest penetration rates in the world—as shifting toward more of an affordability than availability problem.

“The demand on internet in Africa is largely driven by the 10 to 15 percent who can afford it. The real massive opportunity is trying to connect the 70 to 80 percent of the people who can’t,” Hersman told TechCrunch in 2017.

To that end, BRCK paired up its Africa specific WiFi routers to its Moja service to offer free internet and content supported by commercial partners. Users can access Moja on their mobile phones, tablets, or laptops on public transportation or in public areas. They earn points from their browsing to apply to faster connectivity or premium content.

In 2018, BRCK began offering SupaBRCK devices to drivers of Nairobi’s highly-used Matatu buses for Kenyan commuters to access Moja. In February, the startup acquired Nairobi based internet provide Surf and its network of hotspots.

BRCK currently has 445,000 unique monthly active users on its Matatu based Moja mobile network in Kenya and Rwanda and 150,000 unique monthly active users on its fixed network—including users connecting at cafes, barbershops, and marketplaces, according to company data.

BRCK and Swvl wouldn’t confirm plans on expanding their mobile internet partnership to additional countries outside of Kenya.

Ride-hail markets in Africa have become an active sector for VC investment and global and local startups. The big players such as Uber  and Bolt are competing in Kampala and Nairobi—where in addition to car-service—they offer rickshaw taxis.

On-demand motorcycle startups are multiplying and piloting EVs with funds from international partners. And many ride-hail companies in Africa are adapting unique product solutions to local transit needs. The collective startup activity is making the continent home to a number of fresh mobility use-cases, including the BRCK and Svl WiFi partnership.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

via Tingle Tech

When Rad Konieczny first saw a screenshot of the video, he felt physically sick.

A friend of a friend was the first to spot it. They told the 24-year-old set/costume designer that there was a tweet out there with him in it, but it wasn't until later that evening — when people started messaging him en masse — that Konieczny actually saw it.

"I knew it was meant in a bad way, I just knew," he told Mashable. "When you’re bullied for years you sense these things." 

The now-deleted video was taken at a bar in London. It showed Konieczny facing away from the camera, talking to a group of friends. He was wearing a pair of cut-off denim shorts, and the person taking the video was laughing at his outfit. Read more...

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As it forecast earlier this month, Samsung reported a steep drop in its second-quarter earnings due to lower market demand for chips and smartphones. The company said its second-quarter operating profit fell 55.6% year-over-year to 6.6 trillion won (about $5.6 billion), on consolidated revenue of 56.13 trillion won, slightly above the guidance it issued three weeks ago.

Last quarter, Samsung also reported that its operating profit had dropped by more than half. The same issues that hit its earnings during the first quarter of this year have continued, including lower memory prices as major datacenter customers adjust their inventory, meaning they are currently buying less chips (the weak market also impacted competing semiconductor maker SK Hynix’s quarterly earnings).

Samsung reported that its chip business saw second-quarter operating profit drop 71% year-over-year to 3.4 trillion won, on consolidated revenue of 16.09 trillion won. In the second half of the year, the company expects to continue dealing with market uncertainty, but says demand for chips will increase “on strong seasonality and adoption of higher-density products.”

Meanwhile, Samsung’s mobile business reported a 42% drop in operating profit from a year ago to 1.56 trillion won, on 25.86 trillion won in consolidated revenue. The company said its smartphone shipments increased quarter-over-quarter thanks to strong sales of its budget Galaxy A series. But sales of flagship models fell, due to “weak sales momentum for the Galaxy S10 and stagnant demand for premium products.”

Samsung expects the mobile market to remain lackluster, but it will continue adding to both its flagship and mass-market lineups. It is expected to unveil the Note 10 next month and a new release date for the delayed Galaxy Fold, along with new A series models in the second half of the year.

“The company will promptly respond to the changing business environment, and step up efforts to secure profitability by enhancing efficiency across development, manufacturing and marketing operations,” Samsung said in its earnings release.

It’s not just market demand that’s impacting Samsung’s earnings. Along with other tech companies, Samsung is steeling itself for the long-term impact of a trade dispute between Japan and South Korea. Last month, Japan announced that it is placing export restrictions on some materials used in chips and smartphones. Samsung said it still has stores of those materials, but it is also looking for alternatives since it is unclear how long the dispute between the two countries may last (and it could last for a long time).

via Tingle Tech

There’s a double standard when it comes to the sexualities of men versus women, trans and gender non-conforming folks. Unbound and Dame Products, two sex tech startups, have teamed up to bring attention to the issue.

By launching a website, “Approved, Not Approved” and staging a protest outside Facebook’s NYC headquarters, the two startups hope to bring more awareness to the company’s advertising guidelines that seem to favor products that cater to cisgender men. The point of the digital campaign is to show how ads for sex toys and products geared toward men are more likely to be approved than those for women, trans or gender non-conforming people.

“For so long, advertisements have been how we continue to reinforce the status quo of what we view as societally desirable and validating,” Dame Products CEO Alexandra Fine told TechCrunch. “Since we’re in a category that’s often denied, we wanted to create an experience that illuminates the disparity.”

On Facebook, for example, it’s prohibitive to promote the sale or use of adult products or services except for ads that pertain to family planning and contraception. The policy also requires that ads for contraceptives cannot focus on sexual pleasure or sexual enhancement, and have to be targeted to people 18 years or older.

“They’re never going to view sexual pleasure as necessary — only functionality as necessary,” Fine said. “And since the functioning only matters for one sex, then we’re just encouraging shitty sex or at least one-sided sex. Healthy sex should be pleasurable sex. That’s really what I think is important.”

Facebook, however, clearly disagrees since it explicitly bans ads relating to sexual pleasure.

“We have had open lines of communication with both companies about our policies and are always taking feedback,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are working to further clarify our policies in this space in the near future.”

Unfortunately, there is no telling if and when Facebook and other platforms will change their advertising policies to enable companies like Dame Products and Unbound to reach potential customers through ads.

“I think a lot of us feel like we’ve been silenced by these platforms and they control so much,” Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez told TechCrunch. “Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest — these are the channels startups live and die by. Not being able to advertise on them is a big deal because, in addition to the policies being biased and genders, it prevents those founders from being able to reach potential customers.”

In addition to missing out on potential customers, an inability to advertise can have a detrimental effect on a business in terms of raising venture funding.

“I think one of the most frustrating things is trying to raise a round and getting pushback around where you’ll spend the money,” Rodriguez said. “It’s just tough because it’s this vicious cycle where we could be growing at the same rate as a Him or a Roman. It’s definitely in the tens of millions of dollars in terms of foregone profits.”

In addition to the protest, Fine is suing New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority alleging it’s in violation of Dame’s First Amendment rights, the due process clause of the 14th Amendment and the state’s constitutional rights regarding freedom of speech. The lawsuit came in light of the MTA preventing Dame from running its ads on the subway.

Still, despite efforts to squash it, sex tech may finally be getting its moment in the sun. Earlier this month, the sex tech industry had a big win when the organizer of the Consumer Electronics Show finally decided to allow sex tech companies to exhibit and participate in its competition. That came after the Consumer Technology Association, the organizer of CES, royally messed up with sex tech company Lora DiCarlo last year. The CTA revoked an innovation award from the company, which is developing a hands-free device that uses biomimicry and robotics to help women achieve a blended orgasm by simultaneously stimulating the G-spot and the clitoris. In May, CTA re-awarded the company and apologized.

“It’s so rare you see a victory like that and it was because of the press,” Rodriguez said. “It was because it takes. It’s unfortunate these companies don’t do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. They do the right thing when enough people speak out about it.”

via Tingle Tech

You might not be able to pick John Delaney out of a lineup, but he'll go down in history in at least one way: as the first 2020 presidential candidate to drop dead during a live televised debate.

OK, not really, but for awhile there, Wikipedia said so. His Wikipedia page was edited mid-debate to list his date of death as Tuesday, July 30, at the hands of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. 

Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland, tried to position himself as a realist, saying he wanted to avoid "impossible promises" and "run on things that are workable, not fairytale economics." 

And to that, Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, had this to say: Read more...

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Snapchat is finally growing again, and it's using that momentum to engage in some (not so) subtle trolling of its biggest rival: Instagram.

Snap introduced a new ad campaign that's all about promoting Snapchat as the home for "real friends." The implications, of course, being that other platforms aren't about "real friends." Think that's too subtle? Well, just in case there was any question of what they really meant, Snap kicked off the campaign. on none other than Instagram. 

Snap doesn't have its own presence on Instagram, so it worked with dozens of "quotefluencers" — high-profile accounts that primarily post inspirational quotes. Together, these accounts flooded Instagram with cheery quotes about friends using the "#realfriends" and "#friendshipquotes" hashtags. The posts were all on a yellow background, complete with Snapchat's ghost logo and "brought to you by Snapchat" captions. Read more...

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A serious crash by a delivery drone in Switzerland have grounded the fleet and put a partnership on ice. Within a stone’s throw of a school, the incident raised grim possibilities for the possibilities of catastrophic failure of payload-bearing autonomous aerial vehicles.

The drones were operated by Matternet as part of a partnership with the Swiss Post (i.e. the postal service), which was using the craft to dispatch lab samples from one medical center for priority cases. As far as potential applications of drone delivery, it’s a home run — but twice now the craft have crashed, first with a soft landing and the second time a very hard one.

The first incident, in January, was the result of a GPS hardware error; the drone entered a planned failback state and deployed its emergency parachute, falling slowly to the ground. Measures were taken to improve the GPS systems.

The second failure in May, however, led to the drone attempting to deploy its parachute again, only to sever the line somehow and plummet to earth, crashing into the ground some 150 feet from a bunch of kindergartners. No one was hit but this narrowly avoided being a worst-case scenario for the service: not just a craft failing, but the emergency systems failing as well, and over not just a populated area but immediately over a bunch of children. The incident was documented last month but not widely reported.

Falling from a few hundred feet, the 12-kilogram (about 26 pounds) drone and payload could easily have seriously injured or even killed someone — this is why there are very strict regulations about flying over populated areas and crowds.

Obviously they grounded the fleet following this incident and will not spin up again until Matternet addresses the various issues involved. How was it even possible, for instance, that the parachute line was capable of being cut by something on the drone?

In a statement to IEEE Spectrum, which recently noted the news stateside, Matternet said that it “had never seen a failure like that in the past, neither in our expensive (sic) testing nor in commercial operations.” (Presumably they meant extensive.) The company issued a slightly different statement to TechCrunch:

This is the first time ever that our vehicle parachute system has failed. As stated in the report, the flight termination system was triggered nominally per the drone’s specification, but the parachute cord was severed during the parachute deployment.

At Matternet, we take the safety of our technology and operations extremely seriously. A failure of the parachute safety mechanism system is unacceptable and we are taking all the appropriate measures to address it.

Swiss Post and Matternet reacted to the incident immediately by grounding all the operations involving this vehicle type. Our experts analyzed the incident and proposed the appropriate mitigations which are being evaluated by FOCA. We will restart operations once Matternet and Swiss Post, FOCA and our hospital customers in Switzerland are satisfied that the appropriate mitigations have been applied.

Drone delivery is a promising field, but situations like this one don’t do it any favors when regulators take a look. Despite sunny predictions from the industry, there is a huge amount of work yet to be done in terms of flight proving the technology, and although 2 failures out of some 3,000 may not sound like a lot, if one of those failures is an uncontrolled fall that nearly takes out some kids, that could set the entire industry back.

via Tingle Tech