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The UK government has squeezed the timetable for domestic telcos to stop installing 5G kit from Chinese suppliers, per the BBC, which reports that the deadline for installation of kit from so-called ‘high risk’ vendors is now September.

It had already announced a ban on telcos buying kit from Huawei et al by the end of this year — acting on national security concerns attached to companies that fall under the jurisdiction of Chinese state surveillance laws. But, according to the BBC, ministers are concerned carriers could stockpile kit for near-term installation to create an optional buffer for themselves since it has allowed until 2027 for them to remove such kit from existing 5G networks. Maintaining already installed equipment will also still be allowed up til then.

A Telecommunications Security Bill which will allow the government to identify kit as a national security risk and ban its use in domestic networks is slated to be introduced to parliament tomorrow.

Digital secretary Oliver Dowden told the BBC he’s pushing for the “complete removal of high-risk vendors”.

In July the government said changes to the US sanction regime meant it could no longer manage the security risk attached to Chinese kit makers.

The move represented a major U-turn from the policy position announced in January — when the UK said it would allowed Chinese vendors to play a limited role in supplying domestic networks. However the plan faced vocal opposition from the government’s own back benches, as well as high profile pressure from the US — which has pushed allies to expel Huawei entirely.

Alongside policies to restrict the use of high risk 5G vendors the UK has said it will take steps to encourage newcomers to enter the market to tackle concerns that the resulting lack of suppliers introduces another security risk.

Publishing a supply chain diversification strategy for 5G today, Dowden warns that barring “high risk” vendors leaves the country “overly reliant on too few suppliers”.

“This 5G Diversification Strategy is a clear and ambitious plan to grow our telecoms supply chain while ensuring it is resilient to future trends and threats,” he writes. “It has three core strands: supporting incumbent suppliers; attracting new suppliers into the UK market; and accelerating the development and deployment of open-interface solutions.”

The government is putting an initial £250 million behind the 5G diversification plan to try to build momentum for increasing competition and interoperability.

“Achieving this long term vision depends on removing the barriers that prevent new market entrants from joining the supply chain, investing in R&D to support the accelerated development and deployment of interoperable deployment models, and international collaboration and policy coordination between national governments and industry,” it writes.

In the short to medium term the government says it will proritize support for existing suppliers — so the likely near term beneficiary of the strategy is Finland’s Nokia.

Though the government also says it will “seek to attract new suppliers to the UK market in order to start the process of diversification as soon as possible”.

“As part of our approach we will prioritise opportunities to build UK capability in key areas of the supply chain,” it writes, adding: “As we progress this activity we look forward to working with network operators in the UK, telecoms suppliers and international governments to achieve our shared goals of a more competitive and vibrant telecoms supply market.”

We’ve reached out to Huawei for comment on the new deadline for UK carriers to stop installing its 5G kit.

The company has continued to reject security concerns attached to its business.

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Spotify – the music streaming app – is publicly testing Snapchat-style stories. 

The new feature recently started showing on some users' phone apps. When you search for certain terms, such as "Christmas Hits," and tap one of the featured playlists, you'll get an option to "Tap to see the story," which will take you a collage of short videos with celebrities talking about their favorite Christmas songs.

Image: stan schroeder/mashable

Not everyone can see the feature, but I do have it on my iPhone, and it's essentially a direct copy of Stories as seen on Snapchat and Instagram. You can tap to get to the next part of the story, and you can also report a story, by tapping on the three dots icon in the lower right corner.  Read more...

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Food delivery apps have been a big deal this year for consumers stuck at home and unable (or unwilling) to go to restaurants or grocery stores; and for investors who are eyeing the opportunity to back rising stars to help them grow.

Today came the latest development in that story: HungryPanda, which makes a Mandarin-language app specifically targeting Chinese consumers outside of China, has raised $70 million to continue its global expansion in delivering food from Chinese restaurants and Asian grocery stores targeting the Chinese diaspora.

Estimates put the number of Chinese people living abroad (counting students and first-generation immigrants, and counting those living outside of the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau) at around 50 million, with most of them concentrated in other Asian countries, so that is a specific target for the startup. Longer term, there are tens of millions more people if you consider second-, third- and further generations of people, although that will likely see big changes to the app, including introducing other languages.

The funding comes on the back of a surge of usage of HungryPanda. It is now live in 47 cities (versus 31 in February of this year) across Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the UK — where it is was founded. Growing some 30-fold in the last three years, HungryPanda’s CEO and founder Eric Liu said in an interview that it is already profitable in its earliest markets in the UK, as well as in New York City, and is safely en route to getting into the black in other locations, too.

The Series C is being led by Kinnevik (a prolific backer of e-commerce startups), with participation also from 83North and Felix Capital (which backed HungryPanda in its last round of $20 million earlier this year), and Piton Capital and Burda Principal Investment.

HungryPanda is not disclosing its valuation right now, but it’s notable that most of its four-year life has been spent bootstrapped — it has raised only $90 million to date, all of it this year.

Food apps have come into their own this year. Already popular with consumers who like the convenience of using a phone or website to browse and order food to be brought to their door, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many services were stretched to capacity in cities where people were being ordered to shelter in place and restaurants were closed.

E-marketer estimates that in the US alone, usage went up by more than 25%. It all still came at a cost, though. For example, the increased measures that needed to be taken to ensure social distancing meant higher costs for the companies, which are often already stretched in their unit economics.

In that sea of apps, however, you might be hard-pressed to distinguish one from another. At one point in the UK, for example, even the delivery bags and logos of two big rivals, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, looked the same.

HungryPanda is a very different bird compared to these. For starters, the whole app is in Mandarin. And it focuses primarily (in most cases, only) on Chinese food. If you want pizza or a burger, or if you want to read the menu in English, go somewhere else.

The app was founded four years ago by Liu, who was an international student in computer science student at the University of Nottingham. Coming over from China, even though there are indeed a number of Chinese restaurants in the city, he and other Chinese students found it nearly impossible to order from them.

The reasons? All of the menus were in English, and the names of dishes, as they were translated, had no meaning for them; and in any case they were all essentially filtered and altered for local (read: British) palates. This was a bigger deal than it might be for some: Chinese people prefer to eat “traditional” food, said Liu, and they take the business of eating very seriously.

His solution was to build an app that provided all the information to students like him in a format that they could actually use, including items that typically might only be offered on side menus to Chinese customers in Mandarin, if at all.

What’s interesting is that while food delivery unit economics can be very challenging in a sprawling city, the same does not apply typically to HungryPanda. Typically, at a company like Deliveroo, the rule of thumb has been to be slightly above two deliveries per hour per driver to make that hour profitable. That is not always possible, however, in the real world. (And that’s before counting all of the other costs around marketing, and so on.)

HungryPanda, however, was delivering to students who were in dormitories, and often ordering in groups to eat “family style”. It meant that HungryPanda was mitigating a lot of the typical unit economics, said Antoine Nussenbaum, the co-founder of Felix Capital.

“This made the efficiency of delivering much higher,” he added.

The same has gone for grocery delivery. Panwen Chen, the global VP of strategy and an early employee of the company, was also a student at Nottingham and said, considering that even students don’t want to eat out all that time, getting groceries was next to impossible for him and others like him.

“I didn’t have a car, and so getting to the Chinese grocery in Nottingham meant taking two buses or 50-60 minute walk,” he said. “Before you know it, you’re struggling with very heavy bags of groceries. It’s not a nice experience. We then started working with groceries, and what we found was that with food delivery we already had the infrastructure, so it was a natural extension of what we do, especially since the community was the same. That helped us to understand also what they wanted.”

He added that takeaway ready-made food is still majority of the startup’s business, both growing very fast.

Loading in one, then two functions into the app sets up HungryPanda for how it might grow further in the future. Asia has been a pioneer on that front, with apps like WeChat, and more specifically those focused around delivery services like Grab, really carving out a place for themselves as “super apps,” providing users with a vast array of services beyond the core, original purpose of those apps.

Consumers and businesses in the wider network are accustomed to the existence of “super apps”, and they are well-used. In a world where some of the homegrown Chinese apps have found it harder to break into international markets (and in some cases like the USA, they may be downright challenged to do so) this gives HungryPanda, which is a UK app, an interesting position, potentially as a partner or as a strong competitor in those markets.

Indeed it already provides a wide range of offers to users from partner organizations, which stretch well beyond basic food ordering.

HungryPanda started for Liu as a side project to school, and his plan was to go on to the London School of Economics for post-graduate work after getting his Nottingham degree. The business took off, though, and so he deferred for two years. Last year, he got the reminder from the LSE to nudge him on what happens next, and he said he ended up deferring indefinitely for now.

“I feel it’s been not just a good experience for me, but for the Chinese community that uses us,” he said. He now lives in New York City, building the business in the US.

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We are now into the all-important holiday sales period, and new numbers from Gartner point to some recovery underway for the smartphone market as vendors roll out a raft of new 5G handsets.

Q3 smartphone figures from the analysts published today showed that smartphone unit sales were 366 million units, a decline of 5.7% globally compared to the same period last year. Yes, it’s a drop; but it is still a clear improvement on the first half of this year, when sales slumped by 20% in each quarter, due largely to the effects of Covid-19 on spending and consumer confidence overall.

That confidence is being further bolstered by some other signals. We are coming out of a relatively strong string of sales days over the Thanksgiving weekend, traditionally the “opening” of the holiday sales cycle. While sales on Thursday and Black Friday were at the lower end of predicted estimates, they still set records over previous years. With a lot of tech like smartphones often bought online, this could point to stronger numbers for smartphone sales as well.

On top of that, last week IDC — which also tracks and analyses smartphones sales — published a report predicting that sales would grow 2.4% in Q4 compared to 2019’s Q4. Its take is that while 5G smartphones will drive buying, prices still need to come down on these newer generation handsets to really see them hit with wider audiences. The average selling price for a 5G-enabled smartphone in 2020 is $611, said IDC, but it thinkgs that by 2024 that will come down to $453, likely driven by Android-powered handsets, which have collectively dominated smartphone sales for years.

Indeed, in terms of brands, Samsung, with its Android devices, continued to lead the pack in terms of overall units, with 80.8 million units, and a 22% market share. In fact, the Korean handset maker and China’s Xiaomi were the only two in the top five to see growth in their sales in the quarter, respectively at 2.2% and 34.9%. Xiaomi’s numbers were strong enough to see it overtake Apple for the quarter to become the number-three slot in terms of overall sales rankings. Huawei just about held on to number two. See the full chart further down in this story with more detail.

Also worth noting: overall mobile sales — a figure that includes both smartphones and feature phones — were down 8.7% 401 million units. That underscores not just how few feature phones are selling at the moment (smartphones can often even be cheaper to buy, depending on the brands involved or the carrier bundles), but also that those less sophisticated devices are seeing even more sales pressure than more advanced models.

Smartphone slump: it’s not just Covid-19

It’s worth remembering that even before the global health pandemic, smartphone sales were facing slowing growth. The reasons: after a period of huge enthusiasm from consumers to pick up devices, many countries reached market penetration. And then, the latest features were too incremental to spur people to sell up and pay a premium on newer models.

In that context, the big hope from the industry has been 5G, which has been marketed by both carriers and handset makers as having more data efficiency and speed than older technologies. Yet when you look at the wider roadmap for 5G, rollout has remained patchy, and consumers by and large are still not fully convinced they need it.

Notably, in this past quarter, there is still some evidence that emerging/developing markets continue to have an impact on growth — in contrast to new features being drivers in penetrated markets.

“Early signs of recovery can be seen in a few markets, including parts of mature Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Near normal conditions in China improved smartphone production to fill in the supply gap in the third quarter which benefited sales to some extent,” said Anshul Gupta, senior research director at Gartner, in a statement. “For the first time this year, smartphone sales to end users in three of the top five markets i.e., India, Indonesia and Brazil increased, growing 9.3%, 8.5% and 3.3%, respectively.”

The more positive Q3 figures coincide with a period this summer that saw new Covid-19 cases slowing down in many places and the relaxation of many restrictions, so now all eyes are on this coming holiday period, at a time when Covid-19 cases have picked up with a vengeance, and with no rollout (yet) of large-scale vaccination or therapeutic programs. That is having an inevitable drag on the economy.

“Consumers are limiting their discretionary spend even as some lockdown conditions have started to improve,” said Gupta of the Q3 numbers. “Global smartphone sales experienced moderate growth from the second quarter of 2020 to the third quarter. This was due to pent-up demand from previous quarters.”

Digging into the numbers, Samsung has held on to its top spot, although its growth was significantly less strong in the quarter. Even with that slump, Samsung is still a long way ahead.

That is in part because number-two Huawei, with 51.8 million units sold, was down by more than 21% since last year. It has been having a hard time in the wake of a public relations crisis after sanctions in the US and UK, due to accusations that its equipment is used by China for spying. (Those UK sanctions, indeed, have been brought up in timing, just as of last night.)

That also led Huawei earlier this month to confirm the long-rumored plan to sell off its Honor smartphone division. That deal will involve selling the division, reportedly valued at around $15 billion, to a consortium of companies.

It will be interesting to see how Apple’s small decline of 0.6% to 40.6 million units to Xiaomi’s 44.4 million, will shift in the next quarter, on the back of the company launching a new raft of iPhone 12 devices.

“Apple sold 40.5 million units in the third quarter of 2020, a decline of 0.6% as compared to 2019,” said Annette Zimmermann, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “The slight decrease was mainly due to Apple’s delayed shipment start of its new 2020 iPhone generation, which in previous years would always start mid/end September. This year, the launch event and shipment start began 4 weeks later than usual.”

Oppo, which is still not available through carriers or retail partners in the US, rounded out the top five sellers with just under 30 million phones sold. The fact that it and Xiaomi do so well despite not really having a phone presence in the US is an interesting testament to what kind of role the US plays in the global smartphone market: huge in terms of perception, but perhaps less so when the chips are down.

“Others” — that category that can take in the long tail of players who make phones, continues to be a huge force, accounting for more sales than any one of the top five. That underscores the fragmentation in the Android-based smartphone industry, but all the same, its collective numbers were in decline, a sign that consumers are indeed slowly continuing to consolidate around a smaller group of trusted brands.

 

Vendor	3Q20 Units	3Q20 Market Share (%)	3Q19 Units	3Q19 Market Share (%)	3Q20-3Q19 Growth (%)
Samsung	80,816.0	22.0	79,056.7	20.3	2.2
Huawei	51,830.9	14.1	65,822.0	16.9	-21.3
Xiaomi	44,405.4	12.1	32,927.9	8.5	34.9
Apple	40,598.4	11.1	40,833.0	10.5	-0.6
OPPO	29,890.4	8.2	30,581.4	7.9	-2.3
Others	119,117.4	32.5	139,586.7	35.9	-14.7
Total	366,658.6	100.0	388,807.7	100.0	-5.7

Source: Gartner (November 2020)

 

 

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In the latest video from YouTubers The Slow Mo Guys, curious camera operator and host Gavin Free used a defenceless apple and a 150psi air compressor to demonstrate the Coandă effect. This is when a moving fluid which comes in contact with a convex surface follows its curve, rather than continuing on its initial path.

"As the jet of air bounces off one side of the apple, it creates an area of low pressure between the air and the curved surface," explained Free. "This area of low pressure effectively pulls in the airflow, allowing it to follow the curve of the apple. At this point, as the curved surface of the apple is putting a force on the air, the air exerts an equal and opposite force upward on the apple." Read more...

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SMIC, one of largest chip makers in the world, is among several companies that the Department of Defense plans to designate as being owned or controlled by the Chinese military, reports Reuters. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, set to go into effect on January 11, that would bar U.S. investors from buying securities from companies on the defense blacklist.

In a statement to Reuters, SMIC said it continues “to engage constructively and openly with the U.S. government” and that it “has no relationship with the Chinese military and does not manufacture for military end-users or end-uses.”

The largest semiconductor maker in China, SMIC holds about 4% of the worldwide foundry market, estimates market research firm TrendForce. Its U.S. customers have included Qualcomm, Broadcom and Texas Instruments.

There are currently 31 companies on the defense blacklist. SMIC is one of four new companies that the Department of Defense plans to add, according to Reuters. The others are China Construction Technology, China International Engineering Consulting Corp and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC).

The company delisted from NYSE in May 2019, but it said that the decision was prompted by the limited trading volume and high administrative costs, not the U.S.-China trade war or the U.S. government’s blacklisting of Huawei and other Chinese tech companies.

SMIC has already been impacted by export restrictions that prevent them from purchasing key equipment from American suppliers. At the beginning of October, it told shareholders that export restrictions set by the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security could have “material adverse effects” on its production.

The executive order, and the possible addition of new companies to the defense blacklist, is in-line with the Trump administration’s hard stance against Chinese tech companies, including Huawei, ZTE and ByteDance, that it claims are a potential national security threat through their alleged ties to the Chinese government and military. But the future of a lot of the current administration’s policies after the Joe Biden assumes the presidency on January 20 is uncertain.

TechCrunch has contacted SMIC for comment.

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Save $100: The Ninja® Foodi™ TenderCrisp 9-in-1 8-Quart Deluxe XL pressure cooker is on sale at Walmart for $149 as of Nov. 30. 

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Thanksgiving may have passed, but the delicious home cooking doesn't have to end. 

Don't worry, we're not completely delusional. We know everyday can't be exactly like Thanksgiving and that cooking for the entire family is a lot of work. That's why we're here to make sure you don't miss this Ninja Foodi deal in the sea of endless Cyber Monday sales. 

The Ninja® Foodi™ TenderCrisp 9-in-1 8-Quart Deluxe XL pressure cooker can serve up to 10 people with its eight-quart pot and five-quart Cook & Crisp basket. Plus, the included Deluxe Reversible Rack can be used to cook more protein at once and utilize every bit of space.  Read more...

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