Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
US-China trade war has revealed China's weaknesses in developing foundational technologies, weaknesses that China can be expected to overcome in the long term — Following the twists and turns of the trade war meant that I had less time for personal writing this year, so this letter is the only piece I'll publish.
Sam Altman loses 2015 bet against a tech bubble, as 1 of the 3 portfolios failed to achieve its proposed valuation by Jan. 1, 2020, will give $100K to a charity — In 2015, Sam Altman wrote a post titled “Bubble Talk” which lamented the “boring reading” of ongoing press coverage of a bubble …
100K+ leaked Cambridge Analytica docs show the Facebook data scandal was part of a broad operation in 68 countries involving govts, intelligence agencies, more — Company's work in 68 countries laid bare with release of more than 100,000 documents — An explosive leak of tens of thousands …
The Saturday night before CES seems like a less than ideal time to drop some big smartphone news — but it appears Samsung’s hand was forced on this one. Granted, the smartphone giant has never been great about keeping big news under wraps, but this morning’s early release of a promo video through its official Vimeo channel was no doubt all the motivation it needed.
The company has just made the February 11 date officially official for the launch of its upcoming flagship. As for what the flagship will be called, well, that (among other things) leaves some room for speculation. Rumors have pointed to both the more traditional S11, along with the more fascinating jump to the S20.
I’ve collated a bunch of the rumors into an earlier post. The TLDR is even larger screens across the board, coupled with a bunch of camera upgrades and a healthy battery increase. The invite art, which matches the earlier the video, appears to confirm the existence of two separate devices, with different dimensions. That could well point to the reported followup to the Galaxy Fold. In additional to better reinforced folding (a follow up to last year’s issues), the device reportedly adopts a clamshell form factor, more akin to the newly announced Motorola Razr.
More info (and rumors) to come. As ever, we’ll be there (San Francisco) as the news breaks.
Over the past year, startup banks have proven that they have a shot at disrupting retail banking. These challengers have amassed a war chest of funding, announced some ambitious international expansion plans and attracted millions of customers.
And yet, building a bank has proven to be even harder than building a startup in general. Retail banks aren’t willing to sit back and watch startups eat their lunch. Here’s a look back at the biggest moves of the year from challenger banks, some trends you should keep an eye on and the upcoming challenges for those startups.
Due to the regulatory framework and the size of the market, it is much easier to launch a challenger bank in Europe compared to anywhere else in the world. That’s why challenger banks have been thriving in Europe.
When a company gets a full banking license from the central bank of a EU country, the startup can passport its license across all EU countries and operate across the continent.
N26 raised a ton of money in 2019: last January, the Berlin-based startup announced a $300 million funding round, raising another $170 million in July. The company is now valued at $3.5 billion.
With more than 3.5 million customers in Europe, N26 announced some ambitious expansion plans. N26 is now live in the U.S. and is already planning a launch in Brazil.
Revolut has also been aggressively expanding in order to beat its competitors to new markets. In addition to its home market in the U.K., Revolut is available across Europe. In 2019, the company expanded to Singapore and Australia and currently has at least 8 million users.
While Revolut announced that it should launch in the U.S. and Canada by the end of last year, the clock ran out on that prediction. The startup has been very transparent about its expansion plans, even though it sometimes means that you have to wait months or even years before a full rollout.
For instance, Revolut announced in September 2018 that it would launch in New Zealand, Hong Kong and Japan “in the coming months.” It later became “early 2019,” then “2019.” India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and the UAE have also all been mentioned at some point. In other words: launching a banking product in a new country is hard.
The U.S. is a tedious market as you have to get a license in all 50 states to operate across the country
Monzo has been doing well at home in the U.K. It has attracted 3 million customers and raised £113 million (~$144m) in funding last year from Y Combinator’s Continuity fund. It is expanding to the U.S., but the rollout has been slow.
Nubank is another well-funded challenger bank. Backed by Tencent, the startup has raised a $400 million Series F round from TCV. According to the WSJ, the startup has a valuation above $10 billion.
Originally from Brazil, Nubank expanded to Mexico and has plans to expand to Argentina.
Chime is increasingly looking like the bigger player in the U.S., recently raising a $500 million funding round and reached a valuation of $5.8 billion. It only operates in the U.S.
Starling Bank and Atom Bank only operate in the U.K. Bunq is based in Amsterdam with a product tailor-made for the Netherlands, but it accepts customers across Europe.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list as it’s becoming increasingly hard to cover all challenger banks.
There are a few basic features that separate challenger banks from legacy retail banks. Signing up is extremely simple and only requires a mobile app. The mobile app itself is usually much more polished than traditional banking apps.
Users receive a Mastercard or Visa debit card that communicates with the company’s server for each transaction. This way, users can receive instant notifications, block and unblock their cards and turn off some features, such as foreign payments, ATM withdrawals and online transactions.
Challenger banks usually customers promise no markup fees on transactions in foreign currencies, but there are sometimes some limits on this feature.
So how do these companies make money? When you pay with your card, banks generate a tiny, tiny interchange fee of money on each transaction. It’s really small, but it could become serious revenue at scale with tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users.
Challenger banks also offer other financial services like insurance products, foreign exchange or consumer credit. Some challenger banks develop those features in house, but many of those features are actually managed by external fintech partners. Challenger banks generate a commission on those products.
But the most promising product is premium subscriptions. While challenger banks started with free accounts and low, transparent fees, they have been selling premium subscriptions for a fixed monthly fee.
Challenger banks have become a software-as-a-service industry with a freemium component
For example, Revolut offers premium accounts for €7.99 per month with higher limits, some insurance benefits that you’d expect from a premium card and access to advanced features, such as cryptocurrencies and disposable virtual cards. There’s a super premium product for €13.99 called Metal with a metal card design, cashback on card payments and access to a concierge feature.
This seems a bit counterintuitive, but premium subscriptions have been performing well, according to discussions with people working in the industry. You pay a lot in subscription fees in order to avoid small transactional fees. (And you also get a cool card.)
Challenger banks have become a software-as-a-service industry with a freemium component. It leads to a premium positioning and high expectations from customers.
Revolut’s fees top out at €13.99/month.
Walmart launches a self-serve ad platform to let advertisers buy on-site search and sponsored product ads on Walmart.com — Walmart claims its programmatic advertising platform and ads API are ready for primetime. — On Friday, Walmart Media Group (WMG), the retail giant's advertising arm …
Sometimes, in venture capital, it pays to specialize. The latest indicator is a Kansas City, Mo.-based venture firm that’s focused on seed-stage startups that are based anywhere from “Park City to Kansas City.” According to an SEC filing, it just closed on $16.4 million in capital commitments. It’s the third fund for the outfit, Royal Street Ventures, which was founded several years ago by two Kansas City natives — Laura Brady and Jeffrey Stowell.
It’s an interesting piece of geography to be so focused on, partly because, well, it leaves out a lot of opportunities elsewhere.
At the same time, the firm is hardly the first to plant a flag in an underserved area, then get to work. It’s hard to remember now, but when Foundry Group opened its doors in 2007 in Boulder, Colorado, it didn’t have many, if any, competitors kicking the tires of local startups — or bidding up valuations. Similarly, former Sequoia Capital investors Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen hightailed it to Columbus, Ohio, in 2013 based on a hunch that there were plenty of savvy founders in the Midwest who investors on both coasts were missing.
Certainly, Brady and Stowell, who previously worked for a bank and the innovation center out of which Royal Street sprang, aren’t having trouble putting money to work. They’ve written checks to at least 40 Midwestern and Western U.S. startups since the firm’s launch in 2013, including an organic snack company in Park City called Allgood Provisions; a Kansas City company called BacklotCars that’s building marketplace for the wholesale automotive industry; and a weather data company in Overland Park, Ks., called Main Street Data.
They’re also making the occasional investment in a startup off the beaten path. Blueboard, for example, an employee recognition and incentives program, is based in San Francisco.
Either way, the team is part of a growing tendency on the part of limited partners to make bets on parts of the U.S. that are on the rise, thanks partly to soaring costs in places like the Bay Area and New York, as well as competition for talent in such tech hubs — a constant tug-of-war can hobble a startup before it gains meaningful momentum.
Among the highest-profile advocates for the trend, of course, is AOL founder Steve Case, who has been banging the drum about startups in underserved areas all over the U.S. in recent years. Case has also been helping to raise investing capital for them through seed funds dubbed Rise of the Rest, the second of which was announced back in October.
Odds are Samsung didn’t plan to leak news about its upcoming handsets the weekend before CES. But honestly, who knows at this point? A little early publicity never hurt. This one comes courtesy of a teaser video that got teased a little earlier than planned by way of the company’s official Vimeo channel. The leak was spotted by this individual on Twitter and posted to XDA Developers.
The video appears to be a promo for Unpacked, where Samsung is set to unveil its latest flagship, be it the Galaxy S11 or the Galaxy S20, depending which early reports you believe. The February 11 date lines up with some rumors (not to mention the synergy of 11), though others have had the company announcing the devices exactly a week later.
If past years are any indication, the event is likely set for San Francisco, keeping with the relatively recent trend of getting out in front of the Mobile World Congress news deluge by a couple of weeks.
The video animation also appears to point to a pair of devices. There’s a standard rectangle, likely representing the flagship device and a squarer foldable successor to last year’s troubled Galaxy Fold. Here are a bunch of rumors about the former. As for the latter, early speculation has pointed to a cheaper device, with a classic phone clamshell folding mechanism, akin to the recently announced Motorola Razr.
Notably, Samsung also recently announced a pair of “Lite” versions of its its flagship S10 and Note 10 devices.
It’s no secret that I hate predictions — not least because the security field changes rapidly, making it difficult to know what’s next. But given what we know about the past year, we can make some best-guesses at what’s to come.
File-encrypting malware that demands money for the decryption key, known as ransomware, has plagued local and state governments in the past year. There have been a near-constant stream of attacks in the past year — Pensacola, Florida and Jackson County, Georgia to name a few. Governments and local authorities are particularly vulnerable as they’re often underfunded, unresourced and unable to protect their systems from many major threats. Worse, many are without cybersecurity insurance, which often doesn’t pay out anyway.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said ransomware is designed to “inflict fear and uncertainty, disrupt vital services, and sow distrust in public institutions.”
“While often viewed as basic digital extortion, ransomware has had materially adverse impacts on markets, social services like education, water, and power, and on healthcare delivery, as we have seen in a number of states and municipalities across the United States,” he said earlier this year.
As these kinds of cyberattacks increase and victims feel compelled to pay to get their files back, expect hackers to continue to carry on attacking smaller, less prepared targets.
On January 1, California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) began protecting the state’s 40 million residents. The law, which has similarities to Europe’s GDPR, aims to put much of a consumer’s data back in their control. The law gives consumers a right to know what information companies have on them, a right to have that information deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information.
But many companies are worried — so much so that they’re lobbying for a weaker but overarching federal law to supersede California’s new privacy law. The CCPA’s enforcement provisions will kick in some six months later, starting in July. Many companies are not prepared and it’s unclear exactly what impact the CCPA will have.
One thing is clear: expect penalties. Under GDPR, companies can be fined up to 4% of their global annual revenue. California’s law works on a sliding scale of fines, but the law also allows class action suits that could range into the high millions against infringing companies.
If you’ve read any of my stories over the past year, you’ll know that data exposures are as bad, if not worse than data breaches. Exposures, where people or companies inadvertently leave unsecured information online rather than an external breach by a hacker, are often caused by human error.
The problem became so bad that Amazon has tried to stem the flow of leaks by providing tools that detect inadvertently public data. Those tools will only go so far. Education and awareness can go far further. Expect more data exposures over the next year, as companies — and staff — continue to make mistakes with their users’ data.
A new Illinois law, which went into effect on Jan.1, requires employers to notify and obtain consent from job applicants for using AI to grade video interviews — A first-of-its-kind law might give employment candidates more insight into the algorithms that analyze their interviews, but they shouldn't expect much to change.
Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party in India, has been accused of running a highly deceptive Twitter campaign to trick citizens into supporting a controversial law.
First, some background: The Indian government passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) last month that eases the path of non-Muslim minorities from the neighboring Muslim-majority nations of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to gain Indian citizenship.
But, combined with a proposed national register of citizens, critics have cautioned that it discriminates against minority Muslims in India and chips away at India’s secular traditions.
Over the past few weeks, tens of thousands of people in the country — if not more — have participated in peaceful protests across the nation against the law. The Indian government, which has temporarily cut down internet access and mobile communications in many parts of India to contain the protests, has so far shown no signs of withdrawing the law.
On Saturday, it may have found a new way to gain support for it, however.
India’s Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday tweeted a phone number, urging citizens to place a call to that number in “support of the CAA law.”
Thousands of people in India today, many affiliated with the BJP party, began circulating that phone number on Twitter with the promise that anyone who places a call would be offered job opportunities, free mobile data, Netflix credentials, and even company with “lonely women.”
Huffington Post India called the move latest “BJP ploy” to win support for its controversial law. BoomLive, a fact checking organization based in India, reported the affiliation of many of these people to the ruling party.
We have reached out to a BJP spokesperson and Twitter spokespeople for comment.
If the allegations are true, this won’t be the first time BJP has used Twitter to aggressively promote its views. In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that a number of political hashtags that appeared in the top 10 Twitter’s trends column in India were the result of organized campaigns.
Pratik Sinha, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt News, last year demonstrated how easy it was to manipulate many politicians in the country to tweet certain things after he gained accessed to a Google document of prepared statements and tinkered with the content.
Last month, snowfall in Kashmir, a highly sensitive region that hasn’t had internet connection for more than four months, began trending on Twitter in the U.S. It mysteriously disappeared after many journalists questioned how it made it to the list.
When we reached out, a Twitter spokesperson in India pointed TechCrunch to an FAQ article that explained how Trending Topics work. Nothing in the FAQ article addressed the question.
