06 June 2018

Android P Beta 2 brings updated system images and 157 new emojis


A month after releasing the first beta version of Android P at I/O (and right in the middle of Apple’s own developers conference), Google has just released Beta 2 of its upcoming mobile operating system. The update is available to users enrolled in Google’s developer program, who have access to a Pixel device. Those who’ve already download Beta 1 will get the new version automatically.

The latest build features new system images and tools designed to help developers create apps for the upcoming version of the mobile operating system. Adaptive Battery is on-board here, leveraging DeepMind to decide which apps should get the most system resources. App Actions helps developers make their apps more prominent in places like Search, the Google Assistant and the Google Launcher, while Slices provides a way to offer elements of an app without having to open it up. 

Also of note is the addition of 157 new emojis. The list includes two gender neutral emojis, offering awn additional options for the Family and Couple With Heart emojis, joinging last year’s addition of a gender-neutral Adult emoji.

There’s a Red Hair and Superhero emoji, both of which are available in two genders and five skin tones, a bagel with cream cheese, a llama and a lobster. Sounds like a fun crew.

A handful of existing emojis have also gotten a facelift here, including Bacon, Turtle, Cricket and Salad, which drops the egg to go full-on vegan. Google notes that the new emojis may be further updated prior to Android P’s final release.

More information on the updates for devs can be found here. 


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Android P Beta 2 brings updated system images and 157 new emojis


A month after releasing the first beta version of Android P at I/O (and right in the middle of Apple’s own developers conference), Google has just released Beta 2 of its upcoming mobile operating system. The update is available to users enrolled in Google’s developer program, who have access to a Pixel device. Those who’ve already download Beta 1 will get the new version automatically.

The latest build features new system images and tools designed to help developers create apps for the upcoming version of the mobile operating system. Adaptive Battery is on-board here, leveraging DeepMind to decide which apps should get the most system resources. App Actions helps developers make their apps more prominent in places like Search, the Google Assistant and the Google Launcher, while Slices provides a way to offer elements of an app without having to open it up. 

Also of note is the addition of 157 new emojis. The list includes two gender neutral emojis, offering awn additional options for the Family and Couple With Heart emojis, joinging last year’s addition of a gender-neutral Adult emoji.

There’s a Red Hair and Superhero emoji, both of which are available in two genders and five skin tones, a bagel with cream cheese, a llama and a lobster. Sounds like a fun crew.

A handful of existing emojis have also gotten a facelift here, including Bacon, Turtle, Cricket and Salad, which drops the egg to go full-on vegan. Google notes that the new emojis may be further updated prior to Android P’s final release.

More information on the updates for devs can be found here. 


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Four years after release of Kubernetes 1.0, it has come long way


On June 6th, 2014 Kubernetes 1.0 was released. At the time, nobody could have predicted that 4 years later that the project would become a de facto standard for container orchestration or that the biggest tech companies in the world would be backing it. That would come later.

If you think back to June 2014, containerization was just beginning to take off thanks to Docker, which was popularizing the concept with developers, but being so early there was no standard way to manage those containers.

Google had been using containers as a way to deliver applications for years and ran a tool called Borg to handle orchestration. It’s called an orchestrator because much like a conductor of an orchestra, it decides when a container is launched and when it shuts down once it’s completed its job.

At the time, two Google engineers, Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, who would later go on to start Heptio, were looking at developing an orchestration tool like Borg for companies that might not have the depth of engineering talent of Google to make it work. They wanted to spread this idea of how they develop distributed applications to other developers.

Hello world

Before that first version hit the streets, what would become Kubernetes developed out of a need for an orchestration layer that Beda and McLuckie had been considering for a long time. They were both involved in bringing Google Compute Engine, Google’s Infrastructure as a Service offering, to market, but they felt like there was something missing in the tooling that would fill in the gaps between infrastructure and platform service offerings.

“We had long thought about trying to find a way to bring a sort of a more progressive orchestrated way of running applications in production. Just based on our own experiences with Google Compute Engine, we got to see firsthand some of the challenges that the enterprise faced in moving workloads to the cloud,” McLuckie explained.

He said that they also understood some of the limitations associated with virtual machine-based workloads and they were thinking about tooling to help with all of that. “And so we came up the idea to start a new project, which ultimately became Kubernetes.”

Let’s open source it

When Google began developing Kubernetes in March 2014, it wanted nothing less than to bring container orchestration to the masses. It was a big goal and McLuckie, Beda and teammate Brendan Burns (and later Tim Hockin) believed the only way to get there was to open source the technology and build a community around it. As it turns out, they were spot on with that assessment, but couldn’t have been 100 percent certain at the time. Nobody could have.

Photo: Cloud Native Computing Foudation

“If you look at the history, we made the decision to open source Kubernetes and make it a community-oriented project much sooner than conventional wisdom would dictate and focus on really building a community in an open and engaged fashion. And that really paid dividends as Kubernetes has accelerated and effectively become the standard for container orchestration,” McLuckie said.

The next thing they did was to create the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an umbrella organization for the project. If you think about it, this project could have gone in several directions, as current CNCF director Dan Kohn described in a recent interview.

Going cloud native

Kohn said Kubernetes was unique in a couple of ways. First of all, it was based on existing technology developed over many years at Google. “Even though Kubernetes code was new, the concepts and engineering and know-how behind it was based on 15 years at Google building Borg (And a Borg replacement called Omega that failed),” Kohn said. The other thing was that Kubernetes was designed from the beginning to be open sourced.

Photo: Swapnil Bhartiya on Flickr. Used under CC by SA 2.0 license

He pointed out that Google could have gone in a few directions with Kubernetes. It could have created a commercial product and sold it through Google Cloud. It could have open sourced it, but had a strong central lead as they did with Go. They could have gone to the Linux Foundation and said they wanted to create a stand-alone Kubernetes Foundation. But they didn’t do any of these things.

McLuckie says they decided to something entirely different and place it under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, but not as Kubernetes project. Instead they wanted to create a new framework for cloud native computing itself and the CNCF was born. “The CNCF is a really important staging ground, not just for Kubernetes, but for the technologies that needed to come together to really complete the narrative, to make Kubernetes a much more comprehensive framework,” McLuckie explained.

Getting everyone going in the same direction

Over the last few years, we have watched as Kubernetes has grown into a container orchestration standard. Last summer in quick succession  a slew of major enterprise players joined CNCF as AWSOracleMicrosoftVMware and Pivotal all joined. They came together with Red Hat, Intel, IBM Cisco and others who were already members.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Platinum members

Each these players no doubt wanted to control the orchestration layer, but they saw Kubernetes gaining momentum so rapidly, they had little choice but to go along. Kohn jokes that having all these big name players on board is like herding cats, but bringing in them in has been the goal all along. He said it just happened much faster than he thought it would.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, David Aronchick, who runs the open source Kubeflow Kubernetes machine learning project at Google, was running Kubernetes in the early days. He is shocked by how quickly it has grown. “I couldn’t have predicted it would be like this. I joined in January, 2015 and took on project management for Google Kubernetes. I was stunned at the pent up demand for this kind of thing,” he told TechCrunch.

As it has grown, it has become readily apparent that McLuckie was right about building that cloud native framework instead of a stand-alone Kubernetes foundation. Today there are dozens of adjacent projects and the organization is thriving.

Nobody is more blown away by this than McLuckie himself who says seeing Kubernetes hit these various milestones since its 1.0 release has been amazing for him and his team to watch. “It’s just been a series of these wonderful kind of moments as Kubernetes has gained a head of steam, and it’s been  so much fun to see the the community really rally around it.”


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Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is coming to Disrupt SF


Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd has always done things her own way.

Whether it’s standing up for her political beliefs, building a company with fully outsourced engineers, or avoiding the usual startup fundraising runaround, Wolfe Herd follows her own instincts in building a business. Which is why we’re super excited to announce that Whitney Wolfe Herd will join us at TC Disrupt SF 2018.

Wolfe Herd first came on to the scene as a cofounder and VP of Marketing at Tinder, where she helped grow the dating app into one of the world’s biggest dating platforms. But after a lawsuit over sexual harassment and discrimination, which was settled out of court, Wolfe Herd left the company to build an app focused on compliments and positive affirmations.

Originally, she wanted nothing to do with the dating space. But after meeting Andrey Adreev, Badoo founder and Bumble’s majority stake holder, she realized that giving women a voice in digital dating could be revolutionary. And so, Bumble was born in 2014.

The app has grown to 30 million users, and continues to grow in popularity based on a simple premise: women make the first move.

But Wolfe Herd’s ambitions don’t stop at dating. The 28-year-old founder has added new verticals to the app, letting users find friends and make professional connections via Bumble.

And all the while, Bumble’s cap table has never changed, with Wolfe Herd’s 20 percent stake as yet undiluted. Wolfe Herd was named one of Time 100’s most influential people this year, and has herself become a brand that represents authenticity and self-empowerment.

We can’t wait to talk to Wolfe Herd at Disrupt SF 2018. You can buy tickets to the show here.


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Facebook is funding news programs from CNN, Fox News, Univision and others


Facebook has unveiled its initial lineup of news programming that will be airing in a dedicated section of Watch, the original video content initiative that the social network launched last year.

While these shows are being produced by outside media organizations, it’s actually Facebook that’s funding them. In a blog post, Head of News Partnerships Campbell Brown described this as an extension of the company’s announcement in January that it would prioritize meaningful social interaction over publisher content.

While that decision took a toll on digital publishers, Brown echoes CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s rationale for the move, saying that while there will be less news in users’ feeds, what remains should be “trustworthy, informative, and local.”

Here’s how Brown describes the news initiative:

This first lineup of funded shows includes news publishers from broadcast to digital native, national and local. The shows will be hosted by award-winning journalists, as well as new faces, and the formats will vary from a mix of daily briefings, weekly deep dives, and live breaking news coverage. They’ll debut later this summer, and we’ll announce additional shows in the coming weeks. We will work closely with our publisher partners to experiment with these different formats to understand what works, and they will have full editorial control of their shows.

The shows include:

  • A daily news show from ABC News
  • “Chasing Corruption,” a series from Alabama’s Advance Local that interviews watchdog journalists
  • A weekly explainer program from ATTN:
  • CNN’s “Anderson Cooper Full Circle,” a weekday news brief featuring Cooper and guests
  • Daily updates from Fox News’ Shepard Smith and others.
  • A twice weekly show from Mic.
  • Univision’s “Real America with Jorge Ramos,” where Ramos interviews immigrants from diverse backgrounds. Univision will also air a daily news roundup in Spanish.

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Kayla Itsines’ Sweat app will rake in $77 million this year


In earlier years, fitness gurus would market their programs for getting in shape on VHS tapes and, later, DVDs. These days, it’s an app business. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week in San Jose, the company brought in one of the fitness app industry’s superstars, Kayla Itsines, co-creator of the BBG (Bikini Body Guides) and the Sweat app – which will pull in $77 million USD this year – to lead a morning workout for around 200 conference attendees.

For Apple, Kayla’s brand represents not only a good App Store success story, but also spreads the message of how its own products, like iPhone and Apple Watch, enable access to better health through their platforms.

From e-books to apps

Kayla’s fitness company was started several years ago by two personal trainers – herself and business partner Tobi Pearce. Both were using social media, including Instagram, to drive leads for their own PT sessions and bootcamps.

But Itsines’ online profile really took off and soon, people from all over the world wanted to know how they could train like her and get the same results.

WWDC Workout with Kayla Itsines

So the trainers packaged up her program materials and sold it as an e-book online starting in early 2014. Over the next year or so, the business grew, as they distributed more e-books and a broader content series.

But Kayla and Tobi wanted to reach even more people, so they turned to the App Store.

“That’s where our consumers are,” said Tobi, speaking of the company’s decision to launch a mobile app, in a conversation with TechCrunch backstage at the WWDC fitness event.

“We have mostly millennial consumers – 25 to 35 is our main market,” he continues. “Part of being a personal trainer is that you get to be there – personally – and train people in real-time. Now, obviously, you can’t do that for every person in the world, and an e-book can’t do that. But Apple allowed us to do that,” he says. “The Apple ecosystem is kind of a no-brainer.”

WWDC Workout with Kayla Itsines

The team launched the Sweat app in November 2015, but it got a big refresh – almost a full relaunch – early last year, with three to four times the amount of content.

Today, the Sweat app is a one-stop shop for fitness programs for women, featuring not only Kayla’s own content, but other trainers’ programs as well, across areas like yoga, pregnancy and gym workouts, for example.

Subscribers pay $19.99 per month to use the Sweat app, which is cheaper than the gym, or they can opt for an annual membership to save 50 percent.

However, not all of Sweat’s users are turning to the app instead of the gym – it can also be a companion for those who want the assistance of a personal trainer in a gym environment, but not want to pay the hundreds of dollars they tend to charge.

And thanks to team Kayla’s social media savvy and the team’s marketing prowess, they’ve built a community that’s happy to pay, it seems.

These days “well over a million” people use the app on a monthly basis, out of 30 million total app downloads, Tobi tells TechCrunch. And though the company’s now 70-person team is largely based in Australia, the U.S. is Sweat’s largest market.

“Since re-launching [the Sweat app], we had a really big growth year – we grew about 86 percent last year, which is pretty huge for us. And this year, we’re on track to hit about $100 million in revenue this year – that’s AUD,” Tobi clarifies.

In U.S. dollars, that’s around $76.75 million – not bad for a fitness app that never took in outside capital.

“When we first started doing the e-books, I had a few bootcamp franchises of my own, and Kayla had a small studio that she ran…I put up most of my own money, initially,” Tobi explains. “It was sort of big turning point in both of our careers because we could – you know: the Australian dream, buy your own home – or we could invest a hundred thousand dollars and hope something comes out of it.”

WWDC Workout with Kayla Itsines

What’s next: Apple TV, AR and…funding?

Part of the Sweat app’s appeal – beyond its promised results, of course – is its use of new technologies to keep people engaged.

The current app leverages Apple Watch’s visual interface to give video cues, and it added audio cues to the iOS app so the trainers can talk to you as you work out – much like an in-person trainer would. (That feature is coming to the Watch soon, so more advanced users who don’t need the videos can just listen through their headphones or AirPods to hear what to do next.)

Sweat also includes its own curated music playlist streamed through Apple Music, and, in the future, the Sweat program is expanding to Apple TV.

Tobi says they have plans to do something with augmented reality as well, but couldn’t offer more details.

“I’m not too sure yet [what we’re doing with AR], I guess we’re kind of curious,” he admits. “It’s almost part of our responsibility and obligation. We’re a market leader for women’s fitness, and if we want to continue to be that, we want to have the best technologies,” he says.

While Sweat isn’t in need of outside investment, the team isn’t ruling out the idea entirely.

“I don’t necessarily think it would be a bad idea. I think, obviously, for all businesses at any stage –  whether it be really early on with venture capital, or whether it be a different type of funding later in the lifecycle of the business – I think it always serves a purpose, honestly,” says Tobi.

“Now we’re in the cycle of trying to optimize the experience to get the best results for the user – whether it be content or features or whatever. Having a funding partner – not so much necessarily just for the capital, but also for the resources and the network – would be really handy,” he says. 


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Anker’s Spirit earbuds are wireless and waterproof


Anker, a battery maker turned accessory house, recently releases the $39 Spirit X earbuds under their Soundcore brand. Aimed at runners and other heavy sweaters, the earbuds are completely waterproof under the IPX7 rating, a classification that means it can stand up to 1 meter of submersion.

What this means is that you get a surprisingly cheap and rugged set of work-out earbuds that you’re not afraid to get a little dirty.

I tested a pair and found them quite nice for running. The rubber ear hooks kept them in place and the sound quality was not horrible, especially compared to my previous pair of Philips corded headphones. The sound quality, while a bit muffled, is what you’d expect from a standard pair of sports headphones and the rubber earbuds stayed in place quite nicely. The company claims that the headphones have a 12 hour battery life which is about right – I used them for a few days and saw little change in the battery level.

A small flap on the bottom of the control bar hides a micro USB port for charging and there are three buttons – volume up, track advance, and volume down. There are no voice prompts but there is a built-in microphone for calls.

These are not swimming headphones. The IPX7 rating means they’ll stand up to sweat and rain but not a few dozen laps in the pool. A aqua-phobic nano-coating keeps the drops out of the inside of the headphones and should let you keep trucking long after other headphones have rusted out.

Long thought of as a bargain Amazon brand, Anker is expanding its reach and understanding of the market. By building inexpensive gear for those who don’t mind a slight trade-off in audio quality they’ve hit an interesting spot in the headphone market. While this won’t beat your high-end over-ear headphones with all the trimmings, sometimes a $40 pair of daily wear earbuds is all you need.


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Facebook introduces new bidding support for in-app ads


Facebook is expanding its support for header bidding, a technology that allows publishers to auction off ad impressions through real-time bidding between ad networks.

The company announced its support for header bidding on the mobile web last year. Today, it’s adding something similar for in-app advertising.

That means app publishers who use header bidding can include ads from Facebook’s Audience Network in their auctions. To enable this, Facebook is partnering with Fyber, MAX and Twitter’s MoPub.

Here’s how Facebook’s Vijay Balan laid out the benefits of the new approach:

Currently, ad networks are called one-by-one until an app ad is filled, determined by historical average CPMs rather than which buyer is willing to pay the most. This method often overlooks a network willing to pay more for an impression because it is lower in the chain.

App bidding enables app publishers and developers to establish an impartial and open auction over their ad inventory. All advertising networks are called simultaneously and the highest bidder for the placement wins, thereby providing publishers with opportunities to earn more. Publishers can maximize their access to high value advertisers, fueling the creation of sustainable ad businesses that help ensure people continue to enjoy access to high quality free content.

Balan said Facebook has already been testing this with publishers who have their own ad-serving technology, including Rovio, Talefun and GameInsight. Those early tests have seen revenue gains of up to 20 percent.


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Facebook introduces new bidding support for in-app ads


Facebook is expanding its support for header bidding, a technology that allows publishers to auction off ad impressions through real-time bidding between ad networks.

The company announced its support for header bidding on the mobile web last year. Today, it’s adding something similar for in-app advertising.

That means app publishers who use header bidding can include ads from Facebook’s Audience Network in their auctions. To enable this, Facebook is partnering with Fyber, MAX and Twitter’s MoPub.

Here’s how Facebook’s Vijay Balan laid out the benefits of the new approach:

Currently, ad networks are called one-by-one until an app ad is filled, determined by historical average CPMs rather than which buyer is willing to pay the most. This method often overlooks a network willing to pay more for an impression because it is lower in the chain.

App bidding enables app publishers and developers to establish an impartial and open auction over their ad inventory. All advertising networks are called simultaneously and the highest bidder for the placement wins, thereby providing publishers with opportunities to earn more. Publishers can maximize their access to high value advertisers, fueling the creation of sustainable ad businesses that help ensure people continue to enjoy access to high quality free content.

Balan said Facebook has already been testing this with publishers who have their own ad-serving technology, including Rovio, Talefun and GameInsight. Those early tests have seen revenue gains of up to 20 percent.


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Motorola’s Z3 Play modular handset arrives this summer for $499


At an event in Brazil this morning, Lenovo announced the latest addition to its line of modular handsets. The Moto Z3 doesn’t represent a big leap for the line, but it does introduce a slight change in approach for a company hoping to make a bigger splash on the modular side of the question.

Like its predecessor, the Z3 Play will be priced at an extremely reasonable $499. That includes some upgrades, such as a slight redesign with a glass back (Gorilla Glass 3 on both sides) and a screen that’s been extended to six inches (a 2160 x 1080 resolution at 18:9), courtesy of thinner bezels and fingerprint reader that’s been moved around to the side of the devices.

That’s a 79 percent screen-to-body ratio, by Motorola’s count, but no embrace yet of the nearly ubiquitous top notch. The company, it seems, is saving that for the upcoming Motorola Power One, its upcoming iPhone X-like flagship. The Z3 Play, for all of the flashiness of modularity, is still a mid-tier handset, as evidenced by (among other things), the octa-core Snapdragon 636 inside.

One of the key differentiators here, however, is how the company is selling the device. Bundles make a lot of sense with a device for which accessories are a key selling point. A number of third parties have offered some version of this, discounting mods with the purchase of the phone. Now, however, the bundles are being offered from the get-go, included as part of that $499 price point.

The Z3 will ship with either Motorola’s first-party speaker or battery pack. Availability will depend on the country. Here in the States, for example, it seems we’ll only be getting access to the battery version, which augments the handset’s solid 3000 mAh “all day” battery. It is, understandably, the best-selling Moto Mod — the speaker, meanwhile, is in second place. The availability of said bundles will be dependent on the popularity of those devices in a given location.

Motorola’s given out these numbers before, but they bear repeating: one-third of those who purchase a Moto Z device end up picking up a Mod. Roughly 60 percent of that number, meanwhile, buy two or more. Those numbers are surprisingly low, given that Mods seems like such a central selling point for the product.

After all, the company has made some sacrifices for such modularity. Chief among these are the fact that there’s really not a lot of wiggle room with regard to device footprint. As long as the company wants to continue making the devices backward-compatible with Mods, the phones are going to have remain roughly the same size.

Motorola squeezes a little more screen out of the device through the above-mentioned methods, and while it tells me that it’s confident there’s still space to work with on future devices, it does seem to have painted itself in a corner here. For all of Essential’s seeming struggles, the device’s connector allowed for a broader range of sizes and shapes.

The company’s no doubt hoping these bundles will kickstart interest in Mods. Until one comes along that really excites the fan base, however, it’s easy to see how making the two most popular Mods available essentially for free could ultimately eat into potential sales.

Meantime, the device will be arriving at Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Fry’s and B&H Photo this summer. It will also be available through Amazon’s Prime Exclusive program.


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Order-ahead app Ritual picks up $70M to rethink the social office lunch break


While DoorDash, Postmates and other apps are looking to reimagine what the food delivery experience looks like, Ray Reddy says he wants to figure out what the next generation of a food court looks like. Sort of.

Reddy’s startup, Ritual, aims to remake the whole process of leaving your office and walking around five minutes to a nearby deli or cafe to pick up food for lunch. But Reddy and his founders Larry Stinson and Robert Kim wanted to focus first on getting that experience right for a single building that leaves to go pick up coffee or food — and has that daily ritual of getting lunch with the team, or something along those lines. The whole process boils down to an app for consumers to order food or drinks as well as have coworkers piggyback onto that order to create a more socialized experience around getting up and going around the corner for a snack. Ritual said it has raised a new $70 million round led by Georgian Partners, with existing investors Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, and Mistral Venture Partners all participating.

“If we [couldn’t] build something that is compelling for the 300 people who work at this single building, it’s not gonna work period,” Redddy said. “That helped us define the problem narrowly. We thought, here are the 12 or 14 spots within a five minute walk of this building, let’s focus on simulating what would happen. Let’s not worry about financials or economics, let’s prove this works. Just like Uber’s a remote control for the real world, we viewed this in a similar way where ultimately the app is a remote control for a real world experience.”

Ritual’s main flow is probably something the typical user is accustomed to at this point when it comes to food. They pick a place they like, place an order for food (or coffee), and then go pick it up. But the whole background process involves not only getting restaurants on board with the specific things they want while still trying to calibrate a consistent experience that users at this point expect when it comes to ordering something online after being trained on that simplicity for years by Postmates, DoorDash, or even apps by companies like Starbucks.

But over the past year or so, the company has increasingly tuned itself to employees jumping aboard the same order when considering what to pick up for a snack or a meal. The whole process aims at emulating that experience of figuring out where you want to eat in a Slack channel or arguing over a Seamless order, and in the end whoever has time to run out and grab something will be able to bring things back for teammates (or, of course, everyone can leave at the same time). That whole process is called “piggybacking,” a feature the company introduced around 18 months ago. The company has around 44,500 teams using the app, Reddy said.

 

All this is aimed to help restaurants adapt to the same changes in user behavior that retail has seen in the past decade, Reddy said. Amazon trained users to buy things online, forcing retailers to shift their strategies, just as Postmates and DoorDash have trained users to order food delivery through apps and immediately have access to a ton of options. With all that comes more and more data, which has helped those industries slowly tune their models over time and try to keep up with the increase in demand that has come with reducing friction around the whole experience.

“What restaurants are seeing are right now the same challenges retailers saw 10 years ago,” Reddy said. “What does it mean to become omni-channel, how do you go from one customer segment to dealing with walk-ins plus digital orders. Retailers faced a lot of those challenges 10 years ago, they faced challenges around pricing, fulfillment, and how do they build new capabilities. They are dealing with a new source of demand, and fundamentally the problem was a lot of stores weren’t designed for accepting multi-channel origins.”

While an order-ahead app might be one way to connect online users to a physical location, there’s still plenty of work to do as most restaurants, coffee shops or typical stores aren’t tuned for a digital-first experience, Reddy said. That extends to even not having enough counter space to hold coffee cups that customers have ordered ahead of time, much less including things like NFC readers or QR codes — the latter of which has proved wildly popular and effective throughout Asia thanks to services like Alipay and WeChat. And that’s largely a result of iOS and Android, the main platforms in North America, not really doing a lot with QR codes for a very long time. Reddy said that North America was making some progress, especially when it came to NFC, but for now the company still has to figure out unique ways to connect users to those restaurants.

That can take a lot of different forms. While Ritual has to figure out how to create a seamless experience that covers a lot of different restaurants or shops, Reddy said the startup still has to offer those same stores some kind of control over the experience. That means giving those customers some value proposition beyond just telling them to sign up for another order-ahead app. Ritual, for example, lets restaurants who onboard Ritual customers themselves keep the full transaction for a purchase, while it takes a small slice off other transactions. That, in addition to other marketing options, helps restaurants control their own destiny, he said.

Of course, at its heart, it’s an order-ahead app — even with that social experience on top of it. And if you’ve ever looked at where to eat nearby with coworkers, you’ve probably checked Yelp or a few other places, and possibly even settled the argument with a giant order on an online ordering platform like DoorDash or Seamless. All these have already tapped that user experience, and it’s not clear if Ritual would be able to clear enough room should any one of them go after a similar experience while already having that customer and user relationship, in addition to being the spot customers go already. In the end, Reddy says that it’ll come down to users having a few apps, and hopes that by offering restaurants flexibility and focusing on the hyper-local idea of just a single office building will help build up that moat.

“The way that things have played out in Asia [with platforms like WeChat] is exactly striking the right balance between a platform and giving stores control,” Reddy said. “When you think of the consumer view, people — for the same reason you don’t have 10 retail apps — don’t have 10 food apps. You’re not gonna download an app for every neighborhood spot. It’s not that these apps are bad or don’t work well, people are just not gonna download 10 apps. There’s gonna be a handful of platforms people are going to use to access their neighborhoods. We have to have a unified platform, but give restaurant partners enough control, not only over being able to speak with their customers, but control for the look and feel of their storefront. That’s the middle ground we’re looking to find, which we think is a win for customers and our storefronts.”


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Europe to cap intra-EU call fees as part of overhaul to telecoms rules


European Union institutions have reached a political agreement over an update to the bloc’s telecoms rules that’s rattled the cages of incumbent telcos.

Agreement was secured late yesterday after months of negotiations between the EU parliament and Council, with the former pushing for and securing a price cap on international calls within the bloc — of no more than 19 cents per minute. Texts will also be capped at a maximum of 6 cents each, Reuters reports.

While roaming charges for EU travelers were abolished across the bloc last summer, the parliament was concerned that charges for calls and texts between EU Member States is often disproportionately high — hence pushing for the cap, which was not in the original EC proposal.

The Commission proposed a new European Electronic Communications Code back in 2016, to modernize telecoms rules that had stood since 2009 — to take account of technology and market shifts, and align the rules with its wider Digital Single Market strategy.

The proposal broadly focused on pushing for consistency in spectrum policy and management; reducing regulatory fragmentation; ensuring a level playing field for market players and protections for consumers; and incentivizing investment in high-speed broadband networks.

And on the incentivization front, the new rules agreed yesterday update the powers of national regulators to act against dominant players — such as by being able to impose access to their network.

For a case study on why such interventions might be necessary you could look at the fiber investment and network-access foot-dragging of a former incumbent telco such as BT in the UK, for example, which has long favored eking out copper. While its network infrastructure division OpenReach was last year ordered to be legally separated — around a decade after it was functionally separated by the regulator. Yet complaints over BT’s lack of investment in broadband infrastructure and access for rivals to its networks have, nonetheless, persisted.

On the consumer front, the new EU telecoms Code also includes measures intended to make it easier to change service provider and keep the same phone number; measures around tariff transparency to make it easier for people to compare contractual offers, and the ability to terminate a contract without incurring additional costs; as well as additional protections around bundled services.

For operators there are deregulation measures for co-investments — intended to promote “risk sharing in the deployment of very high capacity networks”. And the Code sets wireless spectrum licenses at at least 20 years — also intended to give carriers the “predictability” they need to speed up 5G and fiber deployments.

Though this is shorter than operators had hoped, and the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) — whose membership is made up of incumbent telcos such as BT — has been quick to voice its displeasure, describing the code as a “missed opportunity“, and complaining that it adds extra complexity while also failing to incentivize investment.

“The Code will not ignite the much needed rush to invest in 5G and fibre networks and it will add complexity to an already burdensome system,” it writes. “The agreed law foresees only limited progress on spectrum policy, a complex and watered down compromise on incentivising fibre investment, uncertain triggers for imposing regulatory remedies and no fair playing field for digital services users and providers.”

Smaller, fiber-to-the-home broadband players are sounding much happier though…

ETNO also criticizes what it describes as “the unfortunate decision to regulate intra-EU calls” — arguing this is an unjustified, populist measure, and sniping that it creates legal uncertainty by setting what it couches as “a highly dangerous precedent for all other European industries”.

That’s not the view of the European Consumer Organization, BEUC, which describes the measure as “a good next step towards a real single market for consumers”.

“Consumers should no longer have to worry about excessive costs when calling another EU country from home. The end of roaming charges was a big first step, but it did not deal with the high costs of phone calls to another EU country when at home,” its director general, Monique Goyens, told us in a statement.

“Market concentration is bad for prices and consumer choice. A small group of players should not be able to take control of the market. Thanks to what has been agreed, national regulators can take measures to intervene and maintain a healthy level of competition,” she added.

“Telecom services regularly rank among the top most complained-about markets. This new law upgrades some important consumer protection measures. Telecom clients will for instance be able to end their contract early and choose a better deal.”

And of course the Commission is putting a positive spin on the outcome, two years on from its proposal to modernize the rules.

In a statement welcoming the end of the negotiations, Andrus Ansip, the VP in charge of the Digital Single Market, said: “This agreement is essential to meet Europeans’ growing connectivity needs and boost Europe’s competitiveness. We are laying the groundwork for the deployment of 5G across Europe.”

In another supporting statement, Mariya Gabriel, commissioner for digital economy and society, described the new rules as “bold and balanced” — saying they would provide “faster access to radio spectrum, better services and more protection for consumers, as well as greater investment in very high speed networks”.

While political accord on the new telecoms code has indeed been reached between the EU institutions, members of the EU parliament and Council still need to vote to adopt it — after which the bloc’s Member States will have two years to transpose it into their national laws.


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