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By JACK NICAS from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2Jc065I

The internet of things, from toys to web cameras, should be more secure, the proposed legislation says. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2VBPrbi

Rappi represents a new era for Latin American technology startups. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, the on-demand delivery startup has taken the region by storm, attracting a record amount of venture capital funding in mere months. Today marks the beginning of a new round of explosive growth as SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant and prolific Silicon Valley tech investor, has confirmed a $1 billion investment in the business. The king-sized financing comes two months after SoftBank announced its Innovation Fund , a new pool of capital committed to spending billions on the growing tech ecosystem in Central and South America. VC funding in Latin America catapulted to new heights in 2018. Startups located across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and more have secured nearly $2.5 billion since the beginning of 2018, according to PitchBook, up from less than $1 billion invested in 2017. SoftBank plans to transfer the Rappi investment to the Innovation Fund “upon the fund’s establishment,”

We’ve known for a while now that Apple was going to be putting more of an emphasis on services. As the technical leaps from one iPhone/iPad/Mac generation to the next become less dramatic, product revenue has started to shrink; in response, the company is focusing on driving forward on things like the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Music and its soon-to-launch games and video offerings. This shift is already playing out in the company’s financials . While product sales dipped a bit year-over-year — down from $51.3 billion in the quarter that ran from January to March 2018 to $46.6 billion in the same quarter of 2019 — revenue from the services business climbed from $9.9 billion to $11.5 billion. In this fiscal Q2 quarter of 2018, Apple’s total revenue came in at roughly $61.1 billion; in the same quarter of 2019, it dipped to $58 billion. This works out to services accounting for 16.1% of Apple’s revenue in fiscal Q2 2018, but nearly 20% in fiscal Q2 2019. Apple CFO Luca Maestr

Spot.IM announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series D funding. We’ve written about the company’s commenting platform before, but CEO Nadav Shoval said it’s now building a broader “community platform.” That platform goes beyond commenting and moderation to also include community pages and other ways to highlight and monetize user generated content. Its customers include Hearst, Refinery29, Fox News and our corporate siblings at Engadget and AOL.com. Shoval argued that these tools are particularly important as digital media businesses models are struggling — regardless of whether those publishers are focused on advertising, subscriptions or other business model, the key is to focus on loyal users rather than “random users that come in and disappear. Spot.IM can make a big difference in this area by keeping users engaged, and by providing data to help publishers understanding the behavior and value of their users. In fact, Shoval said that for some publishers, a Spot.

Today’s big story for Apple revenue was once again focused on services . That’s likely to be the tale for the foreseeable future, as the company continues to pump billions into products offerings like Apple TV+. As predicted, hardware was more of a mixed bag for the company. The iPad, a bright spot in an otherwise stagnant tablet market also marked a key highlight the quarter, as revenue jumped 22 percent year over year. Notably, the company now offers its largest range of slates, with recent quiet refreshes to the Air and Mini following last year’s big Pro update. Revenue for Mac dipped slightly, in spite of a recent refreshes to the MacBook Pro and iMac and last year’s milestone of 100 million Macs in use. iPhones missed expectations slightly, maintaining the recent downturn in handset sales. Last quarter was a rough one for Apple devices, as iPhone revenue dropped 15 year over year. Tim Cook attempted to soften that blow with lowered guidance, pointing specifically to a less tha

Apple released earnings for its fiscal second quarter today, reporting revenue of $58 billion, a decline of 5 percent from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.46, down 10 percent. International sales accounted for 61 percent of the quarter’s revenue. The market apparently approves. Apple’s shares have jumped $10 apiece since the earnings were released, putting the company in spitting distance of the $1 trillion market cap it has been flirting with since last August. The earnings are also in line with the guidance that Apple had provided during its last earnings call. In late January, per Apple’s guidance for the second quarter, it had estimated that its revenue would fall between $55 billion and $59 billion, its gross margins between 37 and 38 percent; its operating expenses between $8.5 billion and $8.6 billion; and that it would see other income of $300 million. In a release , the company did not break out iPhone sales, which have come under press

“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It seems darkly funny, now, that anyone ever dared to dream that tech would be different. But we did, once. We would build new companies in new ways, was the thinking, not like the amoral industrial behemoths of old. The corporate villains of 90s cyberpunk were fresh in our imaginations. We weren’t going to be like that. We were going to show that you could get rich, do good, and treat everyone who worked for or interacted with your business with fundamental decency, all at the same time. The poster child for this was, of course, Google, whose corporate code of conduct for fifteen years famously included the motto “don’t be evil.” No longer, and the symbolism is all too apt. Since removing that phrase in 2015 , we’ve all witnessed reports of widespread sexual harassment , including 13 senior managers fired for it; Project Maven ; and Project Dragonfly . Internal backlashes and a mass walkout led to retractions and changes , c

Jude Gomila, who previously sold his mobile advertising company Heyzap to RNTS Media, is taking on a new challenge — building a “knowledge base” that can fill in Wikipedia’s blind spots, particularly when it comes to emerging technologies and startups. While Gomila is officially launching Golden today, it’s already full of content about things like the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and morphogenetic engineering . And it’s already raised $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Gigafund, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures/Joe Montana, plus a long list of individual angel investors including Gomila’s Heyzap co-founder Immad Akhund. To state the obvious: Wikipedia is an incredibly useful website, but Gomila pointed out that notable companies and technologies like SV Angel, Benchling, Lisk and Urbit don’t currently have entries. Part of the problem is what he called Wikipedia’s “arbitrary notability threshold,” where pages are deleted for not being notable enough. (Full di

Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook at a speech in San Francisco from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2DFrLsv

By MIKE ISAAC from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2UVah16

Aperture was a great application for editing photos back in the day, but it hasn’t been supported by Apple for years. You can, however, still run it on the latest Macs, should you need to. But that won’t be the case for long, the company has announced. In a support page pointed out by MacRumors , Apple explains that “for technical reasons, Aperture will not run in future versions of macOS after macOS Mojave.” What exactly those technical reasons are only Apple knows, but it isn’t hard to imagine the various file structures, architectures, libraries and so on that Aperture relied on are simply no longer compatible with the changes the company has made to the OS. macOS has come quite a distance since Aperture was abandoned in 2014, and it’s actually kind of impressive that the app still runs. Apple To Cease Development Of Aperture And Transition Users To Photos For OS X You can of course keep a machine running Mojave around if you really need to use Aperture for some reason or

Facebook’s social graph is aging, full of long-lost acquaintances and hometown friends you don’t care much about seeing in the News Feed any more. But Facebook is now testing a pivot away from its core identity of connecting you with existing friends so it can revitalize the social graph and keep people coming back. Facebook’s “Meet New Friends” lets you browse people from shared communities such as your school, workplace or city who’ve also opted in to the feature. It’s now in testing in a few markets before it’s rolled out more widely soon. Meet New Friends could give people fresh pals to follow in their News Feed, or help recently registered users grow their network until they have access to enough content to keep them busy. And eventually, Facebook could layer on monetization features similar to dating apps where users pay to be shown more prominently to potential connections. Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook’s main app, tells me Meet New Friends was based on emerging behaviors

Cable television provider Altice USA has confirmed plans to pay $200 million for the millennial-focused, digitally-native news network Cheddar in all-cash, or all- cheddar, rather, deal. The price tag comes at a 25 percent premium to the media startup’s $160 million Series D valuation. Jon Steinberg, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cheddar and former president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed, will become president of Altice News. Altice, an existing Cheddar investor, plans to leverage Cheddar’s broadcasts and CheddarU, a growing network of 1,600 screens on 600 college campuses, to expand its portfolio of news businesses. “Our goal is to make Altice News a leader in local, business, national and international news everywhere,” Steinberg said in a statement . “The Altice team and Altice Way are as entrepreneurial as it gets with amazing markets, world-class local and international news, an amazing broadband network, and a soon to launch mobile offering.” Cheddar

Glovo , the Spain-headquartered on-demand delivery app that has similarities to Postmates in the U.S., has raised $169 million (€150m) in Series D funding. Lakestar led the round alongside Drake, owner of global pizza franchise Papa John’s. Idinvest Partners and Korelya Capital also participated, bringing total raised to approximately $322 million. The company last raised funding ten months ago: a $134 million Series C round from Seaya Ventures, Cathay Innovation and Rakuten Capital. Founded in January 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, Glovo offers a ‘shop on your behalf’ app that promises to let you order anything locally on-demand and have it delivered “within minutes”. This includes food items — the company is known for its McDonald’s deliveries in Spain — and non-takeout food and other verticals, such as groceries and pharmaceuticals. The fast-growing company claims more than 5.5 million unique users and 16,000 associated partners, and now operates in 124 cities across 21

The Working Assembly began as a side hustle. Jolene Delisle and Lawrence O’Toole juggled full-time jobs while collaborating on projects for startup clients, and they eventually realized there was an opportunity to help companies with branding, marketing, and advertising. In the past four years, TWA has grown from a team of two to a team of twenty in NYC’s Flatiron district. We spoke with Creative Director and Partner Jolene Delisle about their start, their new initiative 24-Hour Assembly—a branding program for minority and women founders, what makes an ideal TWA client, and why she’s excited about the new frontier of experiential and immersive branding.    On common founder mistakes: “Clients often come to us and say, “I love the branding of this.” And we’re like, “Well, that’s not really your target. It doesn’t really make sense for you as a brand.” And I think it can be hard for founders to separate their own personal aesthetic from what is actually going to be most effective for

Out-of-network ATM fees. Monthly service fees. Card replacement fees. Foreign exchange fees. Wire transfer fees. Overdraft fees. Check fees. Fees, fees, fees, fees, fees. Oh and interest, of course. Banking used to be built on a simple economic premise: tuck money away from customers into deposit accounts that pay interest, and then lend that money back out as loans at a higher interest rate. Today though, the modern bank — much like the airline industry — thrives on fees tacked on to basic services. JP Morgan Chase made about $77.44 billion on interest income, but $50 billion on non-interest income (i.e. fees), according to MarketWatch. As the pressure builds on banks to increase that income, consumers can be bamboozled into paying all kinds of fees they didn’t even know they were expected to pay. That’s where Cushion comes in. The San Francisco-based fintech startup offers a consumer app that sucks in the transaction history from its users’ bank accounts, determines what fees h

Anki, the company behind Cozmo and Vector, is facing financial difficulties. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2Y1twIh

Fabletics , the digital-first activewear brand founded by Kate Hudson, Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler, has recently opened up a physical store in Soho as part of its 2019 expansion plans. The company has plans to open up 12 new permanent retail stores over the course of this year alongside the Soho pop up shop, all of which will include a heavy tech element. For one, Fabletics has built its own POS system that connects offline and online sales. The system, called OmniShop, allows Fabletics to track the conversion of every item that goes into a dressing room, by size color and style all the way down to each individual customer. Co-CEO and cofounder Adam Goldenberg said that the company invested more than $150 million in OmniShop. But the system doesn’t just make the product easier to buy; it actually informs the product itself. The system allows Fabletics to see when a certain size of a particular SKU isn’t converting well and investigate if there is a fit/sizing issue. “From a c

Every drone and model aircraft owner could be charged £16.50 a year under plans by the regulator. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2WjUudK

The TV can pivot from a horizontal to a vertical position, to better display smartphone content. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2ISENqS

Facebook’s yearly developer conference kicks off today. The keynote starts at 1PM / 10AM with opening remarks from Facebook’s chief Mark Zuckerberg. As in past years, the event will last several hours and feature updates from various Facebook departments. This year’s event comes as Facebook is attempting an ambitious transition to a privacy-focused messaging platform. It’s a tough sell given the company’s recent history and a consumer base increasingly becoming jaded to Facebook’s data-harvesting ways. But the show must go on. We’ll be onsite but you can follow along with Facebook’s official video feed here or through Oculus Venues , Facebook’s VR live platform. from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2J3JZY5

But there are claims that "a lot of songwriters are making less than minimum wage". from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2vvW1kM

Mobile phone sales worldwide are declining but is our love affair with them over? from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2PDPtKm

Vulnerabilities in Italy could have given the Chinese firm access to people's home networks. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2ZOSrAz

It's the third year in a row that the broadband provider has come bottom of Ofcom's customer survey. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2PCZVBZ

Vault Platform , a London-based startup that has built software to “re-imagine” workplace misconduct reporting, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Kindred Capital, with participation from Angular Ventures, System.One, Jane VC, and ex-Mosaic Ventures Partner Mike Chalfen. Founded in 2018 by Neta Meidav and Rotem Hayoun-Meidav, Vault is attempting to create a new and better way for company employees to report misconduct, such as workplace bullying or harassment, and in turn replace existing “hotline” systems, which it reckons are underused and often ineffective. The so-called “TrustTech” offering lets employees easily record incidents in a diary-like space, with the option to only action those complaints when others also come forward. The SaaS consists of an employee app, corporate case management hub, and data and analytics. The latter claims to be able to help enterprises identify repeat problems and manage issues internally before they escalate. “It’s und

Perkbox , the London-based startup now calling itself an “employee experience platform,” has raised a further £13.5 million in funding. The round is led by existing investor Draper Esprit, alongside a number of previous Perkbox angels. Prior to this, the company, which launched in 2015, had raised £11 million. Targeting companies of all sizes, from SMEs to larger businesses, Perkbox’s platform lets employers give employees a number of benefits and rewards to enrich their work and personal life. The broader aim, of course, is to improve retention and staff well-being. The offering now spans several products beyond its “perks” origins , including card-linked loyalty and medical provision. In addition, Perkbox enables companies to measure employee sentiment to help break down silos between management and teams, and to let employees give recognition to one another. This can either be peer-to-peer or top down from management. “With this new suite of products, we transitioned from an emp

Intelligence sharing will be at risk if countries use the firm to build 5G networks, official says. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2UJwKhr

The government's plan to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is too tame, its advisers will say. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2XTHj3o

Young people on either side of a decades-old conflict seldom meet, but tech is building bridges. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2vrILxN

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2ZIV8n1

With news that the We Company (formerly known as WeWork) has officially  filed to go public confidentially with the SEC today, there’s a big question on everyone’s mind: Is this the next massive startup win or a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the glare of the public markets? No company I follow has as much polarized opinion as the We Company. And while the company will have to reveal at least some of its hand in its official S-1, my guess is that the polarization around the company will not be alleviated until well after it goes public, if ever. The challenge with understanding its business is how much the details of each of its leases, real estate markets and tenants matter to its bottom line. We already know the top line numbers : the company had revenue of $1.8 billion in 2018, and a net loss of $1.9 billion that year. That led to the received opinion that the company has an extraordinarily weak business. As Crunchbase News editor Alex Wilhelm put it : from Startups

Shares in the internet giant tumble nearly 7% after its sales growth falls short of forecasts. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2VFF1aQ

Mobile marketing company ManyChat has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The startup, co-founded by CEO Mikael Yang, is currently focused on Facebook Messenger. It offers tools for creating a bot on Messenger while also supporting live human chatting (ManyChat says its approach is a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach”), and additional options like advertising to get more users to engage with with your messaging channels. ManyChat is just one of several  startups hoping to build a business around Facebook Messenger bots , but this sounds like a product that businesses are actually using. The company says more than 1 million accounts have been created on the platform, with customers coming from e-commerce, traditional retail, gyms, beauty salons restaurants and more. Those customers have collectively enlisted 350 million Messenger subscribers, and there are 7 billion messages sent on the platform each month. Plus, with an average open rate of 80 percent, these mes

Menlo Ventures was founded in 1976 but it took 35 years for the venture capital firm to hit the jackpot. Since the dot-com boom, Menlo Ventures has teetered between good and great. A prolific Silicon Valley investor, it’s never quite reached the heights of Accel or Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), or established the level of name recognition as Benchmark or Sequoia, firms that struck gold with bets on Facebook, Instagram and Snap. But where others missed the boat entirely on one of the most valuable tech startups of all time, Menlo Ventures gnawed its way into an early deal at the last possible moment. In 2011, the firm led a $32 million Series B funding in a fledgling on-demand car service called Uber, agreeing to value the startup at a colossal $322 million after the company’s first-choice investor, a16z, failed to accept Uber’s sky-high terms. Menlo would go on to invest a total of $66.5 million in the company on expected total returns of up to $3.1 billion. “I wouldn’t have dared