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Good news: Apple now allows you to download bigger apps over a cellular connection than it used to. Bad news: there’s still a cap, and you still can’t bypass it. As noticed by 9to5Mac , the iOS App Store now lets you download apps up to 200 MB in size while on a cell network; anything bigger than that, and you’ll need to connect to WiFi. Before this change, the cap was 150 MB. And if you’ve got an unlimited (be it actually unlimited or cough-cough-‘unlimited’) plan, or if you know you’ve got enough monthly data left to cover a big download, or you just really, really need a certain big app and WiFi just isn’t available? You’re still out of luck. That 200 MB cap hits everyone. People have found tricky, fleeting workarounds to bypass the cap over the years, but there’s no official “Yeah, yeah, the app is huge, I know.” button to click or power user setting to toggle. The App Store being cautious about file size isn’t inherently a bad thing; with many users only getting an allotment

By DAVID STREITFELD and DON CLARK from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2HNIL2f

On this week's podcast, we ask whether people will pay a premium for the benefits 5G promises. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2I9xHv3

When serial entrepreneur Eric Lefkofsky grows a company, he puts the pedal to the metal. When in 2011 his last company, the Chicago-based coupons site Groupon, raised $950 million from investors, it was the largest amount raised by a start-up, ever. It was just over three years old at the time, and it went public later that same year. Lefkofsky seems to be stealing a page from the same playbook for his newest company Tempus . The Chicago-based genomic testing and data analysis company was founded a little more than three years ago, yet it has already hired nearly 700 employees and raised more than $500 million — including through a new $ 200 million round that values the company at $3.1 billion. According to the Chicago Tribune, that new valuation makes it — as Groupon once was — one of Chicago’s most highly valued privately held companies. So why all the fuss? As the Tribune explains it, Tempus has built a platform to collect, structure and analyze the clinical data that’s ofte

Jumia may be the first startup you’ve heard of from Africa. But the e-commerce venture that recently listed on the NYSE is definitely not the first or last word in African tech. The continent has an expansive digital innovation scene, the components of which are intersecting rapidly across Africa’s 54 countries and 1.2 billion people. When measured by monetary values, Africa’s tech ecosystem is tiny by Shenzen or Silicon Valley standards. But when you look at volumes and year over year expansion in VC, startup formation, and tech hubs, it’s one of the fastest growing tech markets in the world. In 2017, the continent also saw the l argest global increase in internet users—20 percent. If you’re a VC or founder in London, Bangalore, or San Francisco, you’ll likely interact with some part of Africa’s tech landscape for the first time—or more—in the near future. That’s why TechCrunch put together this Extra-Crunch deep-dive on Africa’s technology sector. Tech Hubs A foundation for

After a decade in the peculiar world of venture capital, Andreessen Horowitz managing director Scott Kupor has seen it all when it comes to the do’s and dont’s for dealing with Valley VCs and company building. In his new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road (available on June 3rd), Scott offers up an updated guide on what VCs actually do, how they think and how founders should engage with them. TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos will be sitting down with Scott for an exclusive conversation on Tuesday, June 4th at 11:00 am PT . Scott, Connie and Extra Crunch members will be digging into the key takeaways from Scott’s book, his experience in the Valley, and the opportunities that excite him most today. Tune in to join the conversation and for the opportunity to ask Scott and Connie any and all things venture. To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch.  Learn more and try it for free. from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.c

After weeks of sporting “Coming Soon” screens, the New York City MTA’s OMNY pilot finally launched today. The system augments the city’s MetroCard swipes with new contactless screens that work with contactless prepaid credit and debit cards and a variety of different smart devices. We’ve highlighted the latter already . For starters, the system will work with Apple, Google, Samsung and Fitbit Pay, which means it will be open to a large range of smartphones and wearables. Contactless cards are those with NFC chips sporting a four-bar wave symbol that are already available from a number of big banks and credit card companies. Per the MTA’s site, the list of partners includes Chase, Visa, Mastercard and American Express, which should cover a majority of card holders, one way or another. That’s a big no for Diners Club, Japan Credit Bureau and China UnionPay. Also, PIN-protected cards don’t currently work, nor do gift cards and non-reloadable cards. Another important restriction in al

According to the startups at Factory Berlin , it’s not just another coworking space. After all, the company took its name from Andy Warhol’s famous factory in New York City, and it describes itself as “Europe’s largest club for startups.” Late last year, we toured Factory Berlin’s five-story, 14,000 square meter location in Görlitzer Park. Yes, it’s a building where startups can rent workspace, but as part of the tour, we had a chance to talk to several entrepreneurs, and everyone described it as a real community. “Being part of the community, to us, means not isolating ourselves from the outer world,” said Code University founder Tom Bachem. “Or especially in Berlin, from the great startup ecosystem that we have — but instead, really deeply integrating into it.” Similarly, Neel Popat of Donut pointed to the Factory’s blockchain events and showcases as a major benefit, while Kip Carter of New School said his team has used Factory messaging app to find experts who can work with

For a cybersecurity company, Bugcrowd relies much more on people than it does on technology. For as long as humans are writing software, developers and programmers are going to make mistakes, said Casey Ellis, the company’s founder and chief technology officer in an interview TechCrunch from his San Francisco headquarters. “Cybersecurity is fundamentally a people problem,” he said. “Humans are actually the root of the problem,” he said. And when humans made coding mistakes that turn into bugs or vulnerabilities that be exploited, that’s where Bugcrowd comes in — by trying to mitigate the fallout before they can be maliciously exploited. Founded in 2011, Bugcrowd is one of the largest bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure companies on the internet today. The company relies on bug finders, hackers, and security researchers to find and privately report security flaws that could damage systems or putting user data at risk. Bugcrowd acts as an intermediary by passing the bug to the c

Extinction Rebellion says it will stage a 10-day demonstration unless expansion plans are cancelled. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2I8cO3w

By JAMIE CONDLIFFE from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2WdvEAc

Kitty Knowles looks at some of the week's best technology stories. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2XdfrHw

Fakes on dating websites use emotional language, analysis of thousands of dating profiles reveals. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2EKAWrX

Images on the encyclopaedia were swapped to feature North Face clothing as an advertising stunt. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2QyLCyK

Some shareholders wanted Facebook's chairman and chief executive to step down from one of his roles. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2YVo5ej

Foursquare just made its first acquisition. The location tech company has acquired Placed from Snap Inc on the heels of a fresh $150 million investment led by the Raine Group. The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Placed founder and CEO David Shim will become President of Foursquare. Placed is the biggest competitor to Foursquare’s Attribution product, which allows brands to track the physical impact (foot traffic to store) of a digital campaign or ad. Up until now, Placed and Attribution by Foursquare combined have measured over $3 billion in ad-to-store visits. Placed launched in 2011 and raised $13.4 million (according to Crunchbase) before being acquired by Snap Inc. in 2017. As part of the deal with Foursquare, the company’s Attribution product will henceforth be known as Placed powered by Foursquare. The acquisition also means that Placed powered by Foursquare will have more than 450 measureable media partners, including Twitter, Snap, Pandora, and Waze. Moreover, m

For more than 25 years the founders of Thrive Earlier Detection have been researching ways to improve the accuracy of liquid biopsy tests. The fruits of that labor from Dr. Bert Vogelstein, Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and Dr. Nickolas Papadopoulos — all professors and researchers at Johns Hopkins University — is CancerSEEK, a liquid biopsy test that has demonstrated specificity of over 99% in a retrospective study published by Science. By minimizing false positives in cancer screening tools and providing a test with proven accuracy, doctors can take treatment actions earlier, which can lead to better survival rates for cancer patients. Now, with FDA approval for its tests for pancreatic and ovarian cancer and a new study underway with a large healthcare provider, CancerSEEK is being rolled out to market through Thrive Earlier Detection with the help of a new $110 million round of funding. Thrive works by analyzing highly targeted sets of DNA and proteins in the blood to detect cancer. “O

By KATE CONGER from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2I8a3iM

Last year’s WWDC was a rare step away from hardware for the company, without a single device announcement. In fact, Apple’s gadget lines have largely been the subject of quiet releases over the past year. Ahead of the big Apple TV unveil, the company issued several press releases highlighting minor updates to flagship lines. Just last week , it did the same for the MacBook, with a quiet announcement around the latest attempt to resolve longstanding issues with the malfunctioning keyboards. Next week’s developer show, on the other hand, is shaping up to be something altogether different. All signs point to a load of big announcements, including, potentially, some Pro hardware. After a fairly slow I/O and Build, Apple could really make a splash here. The company’s not immune from larger industry trends, and is at a kind of crossroads at the moment. Its last financial call highlighted a shifting focus away from hardware, toward services and content. It makes sense — after all, smartpho

By KATE CONGER from NYT Technology https://nyti.ms/2WboVXr

This morning’s Moto Z4 news was good cause to go back and reassess the state of the modular phone. Three years after the line launched, the concept hasn’t exactly ignited the market — in fact, there are really just a handful of scattered competitors to show for it. Essential is among the most prominent, with the PH-1’s clever two-pin connector. By sheer coincidence, it turns out today is the two-year anniversary of the company’s debut. Founder Andy Rubin took to the stage at Code 2017 with big ideas and two products. One, the PH-1, has come and gone, launching a couple of months late in August 2017 before being discontinued late last year. The other, the Essential Home hub , never appeared at all. The day the products were announced, then COO Niccolo de Masi (who appears to have since moved on to Honeywell spin-off Resideo), spoke of the company’s 10-year plan. It was an acknowledgement that it had a tough road ahead, as it planned to take on big names like Apple and Samsung. Bu

Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada. Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work. To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after the acquisition. Together, they would build Tiny Speck, the company behind an artful, non-combat massively multiplayer online game. Years later, Butterfield would pull off a pivot more massive than his last. Slack, born from the ashes of his fantastical game, would lead a shift toward online productivity tools that fundamentally change the way people work. Glitch is born In mid-2009, form

The pace of malicious hacks and security breaches is showing no signs of slowing down, and spend among enterprises to guard against that is  set to reach $124 billion this year . That’s also having a knock-on effect on the most innovative cybersecurity startups, which continue to raise big money to grow and meet that demand. In the latest development, a New York startup called BlueVoyant — which provides managed security, professional services and most recently threat intelligence — has picked up $82.5 million in a Series B round of funding at a valuation in excess of $430 million. The funding is coming from a range of new and existing investors that includes Fiserv, the fintech giant that’s acquiring First Data for $22 billion . (The startup is not disclosing any other names at this time, it said.) It has raised $207.5 million to date. BlueVoyant has a notable pedigree that goes some way also to explaining how the idea for the startup first germinated. Co-founder and CEO Jim Ro

Written in his company’s handbook, there’s one rule for working at Dragos. “Don’t be an asshole.” “The first key to our success is our people and that we hire good people,” said Robert Lee, the company’s founder and chief executive, in an interview with TechCrunch. “I think building a successful team is about having a standard and saying that I expect you all to be adults and not need a million HR policies,” he said. Lee’s management approach revolves around his company’s greatest asset — his staff. With 125 employees, the company has seen rapid growth since its founding in 2016 but puts great importance on maintaining the company’s relaxed but productive culture. Lee said he doesn’t want to change its culture dynamics by growing too fast, micromanaging, or burdening his staff with strict expense policies. “If you’re stuck laid over at night, but you see there’s one seat left on a redeye and it’s a first class seat that’s going to cost six times more but it gets you home — go for it

Chinese tech giant Alibaba is doubling down on India’s burgeoning video market, looking to fight back local rival ByteDance, Google, and Disney to gain its foothold in the nation. The company said today that it is pumping $100 million into Vmate, a three-year-old social video app owned by subsidiary UC Web. Vmate was launched as a video streaming and sharing app in 2016. But in the years since, it has added features such as video downloads and 3-dimensional face emojis to expand its use cases. It has amassed 30 million users globally, and will use the capital to scale its business in India, the company told TechCrunch. Alibaba Group did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about its ownership of the app. The move comes as Alibaba revives its attempts to take on the growing social video apps market, something it has missed out completely in China. Vmate could potentially help it fill the gap in India. Many of the features Vmate offers are similar to those by ByteDance’s TikTok, whi

OpenAI’s co-founders Greg Brockman and Sam Altman aren’t afraid of Terminator robots. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF in October, they’ll tell our audience why it’s the more subtle repercussions of artificial general intelligence like its impact on employment, cyberwarfare, and concentration of power that shake the duo. But the epic potential for the technology to generate widescale abundance for humanity led Altman to leave his gig as the head of iconic accelerator Y Combinator to become CEO of OpenAI . “I really do believe that the work we’re doing at OpenAI…will not only far eclipse the work I did at YC but the work that anyone in the tech industry does,” Altman said recently . Brockman and Altman will join us on stage at Disrupt to talk about why they’re building potentially the most lucrative startup of all time, yet plan to cap returns for investors at 100X and donate the rest. They’ll reveal the challenges of hiring and raising capital when OpenAI has no idea how it will earn mon

XFactor , the pre-seed and seed-stage VC out of FlyBridge Capital, has today announced that it has raised a second fund of $8.5 million. XFactor first came on the scene in 2017 with $3 million. FlyBridge Capital partner Chuck Hazard started the fund alongside several female founders who were interested in getting into investment. The idea is not just to fund startups led by at least one female, but also to give female founders a path into investing. With Fund 2, XFactor is able to not only increase its check size from $100K to $150K, but it also makes room for more partners at the firm. From Fund 1, XFactor has grown from 9 investment partners to 23, operating in cities like LA, Seattle and Denver alongside original markets of Boston, NY, and SF. Collectively, this group of women has raised more than $550 million in venture capital for their own businesses. Some notable investments from Fund 1 include Chief, The Riveter, Choosy, CourtBuddy, and MixLab, which today raised an $8.5 m

The Valley’s rocky history with clean tech investing has been well-documented . Startups focused on non-emitting generation resources were once lauded as the next big cash cow, but the sector’s hype quickly got away from reality. Complex underlying science, severe capital intensity, slow-moving customers, and high-cost business models outside the comfort zones of typical venture capital, ultimately caused a swath of venture-backed companies and investors in the clean tech boom to fall flat . Yet, decarbonization and sustainability are issues that only seem to grow more dire and more galvanizing for founders and investors by the day, and more company builders are searching for new ways to promote environmental resilience. While funding for clean tech startups can be hard to find nowadays, over time we’ve seen clean tech startups shift down the stack away from hardware-focused generation plays towards vertical-focused downstream software. A far cry from past waves of venture-backed

Entering into the world of Anthemis is a bit like stepping into the frame of a Wes Anderson film. Eclectic, offbeat people situated in colorful interiors? Check. A muse in the form of a renowned British-Venezuelan economist ? Check. A design-forward media platform to provoke deep thought? Check. An annual summer retreat ensconced in the French Alps? Bien sûr. Sitting atop this most unusual fintech(ish) VC is its ponytailed founder and chairman Sean Park, whose difficult-to-place accent and Philosophy professor aura belie his extensive fixed income capital markets experience. He’s joined by founder and CEO Amy Nauiokas, who in addition to being one of Fintech’s most prominent female investors also owns a high-minded film and television production company. When Arman Tabatabai and I recently sat down with Park and Nauiokas in their New York office, the firm’s leaders were in an upbeat mood, having blown past the temporary perception-setback associated with the abrupt resignation las

Firefly , a startup that allows ridehail drivers to make money from advertising, has raised $30 million in Series A funding. The company is about to launch in New York City, where it’s also acquiring the digital operations of advertising company Strong Outdoor . Co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay said this will allow Firefly to start working with traditional taxis in a big way. “It’s essentially locking in the largest taxi advertising contract, partnering with the largest taxi trade organization in the United States,” Gunay said. Firefly already operates in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it works with drivers for Uber, Lyft and other services to install a “digital smart screen” that can run targeted, geofenced advertising from companies like Brex, Segment, Caviar and Zumper. And although the startup is starting to work with taxis too, Gunay said it won’t be ignoring ridehail drivers: “Firefly is for everyone.” The new funding comes just six months after Firefly announced a big se

The journalist shared the news after TV viewers noticed a hand tremor during a report on new 5G technology. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2MkdGHH

Businesses need to keep the content flowing on social media, so a startup called soona says it’s developed a new way to provide those photos and video. The company was founded by CEO Elizabeth Giorgi and Chief Creative Officer Hayley Anderson. Giorgi told me they both worked in production (Anderson as an animator, Giorgi as the founder of her own video production company), and they “kept finding ourselves saying no to projects that needed to be done quickly — we could never find a way to make production move fast enough.” At the same time, they saw a growing need, as small and medium businesses increasingly rely on email and social marketing to promote themselves, which means they either “go to a stock content site and buy something that isn’t even relevant to their brand, or they can do a DIY solution.” With soona, customers can get the photos and videos they need within 24 hours, and at a relatively affordable price. Giorgi compared the company’s approach to Kinko’s, which “turne

The tech giants are among 47 organisations to hit out at a plan to look at encrypted messages. from BBC News - Technology https://bbc.in/2HMnuWB

Weights & Biases , a startup building development tools for machine learning, has raised $15 million in its second round of funding. The company was started by CrowdFlower founders Lukas Biewald and Chris van Pelt, along with former Google engineer Shawn Lewis. (Under its new name Figure Eight, CrowdFlower was acquired by Appen for up to $300 million in March.) When Weights & Biases launched last year , Biewald (who I’ve known since college) said he wanted to create the tools needed to “build and deploy great deep learning models.” Its initial product allows companies to monitor those models as they develop and train them. “When people build machine learning models they need to track everything that happens — the code that went into the model, the hyperparameters that go into the model and then basically how well the model does,” Biewald told me this week. “You add a couple lines of code to your … training code and then every time your model runs, it reports what happens t