TCL riffs on the foldable format with a pair of prototypes

Those TCL concept phones that were set for Mobile World Congress have finally arrived in prototype form. The Chinese hardware maker showcased a pair of devices this week, including one that saw a brief unveiling during a CES event.

The usual concept caveat certainly applies here. As with concept cars, TCL is clearly gauging consumer interest in certain design elements for the product. And while I’m usually not a fan of dead-end concept devices, there’s something to be said for approaching the foldable category with the same sort of caution you would use to open and close the original Galaxy Fold.

The tri-fold is the product we caught a glimpse of back in January. The name betrays the concept a bit. The device has three screens and two folding mechanisms. That makes for a pretty massively beefy phone when closed, but a luxurious (dual-creased) 10-inch tablet when unfurled.

Images of TCL’s slide-out display smartphone surface in wake of MWC cancellation

There’s already some skepticism around how eager users will ultimately be in adopting this technology, and I don’t see effectively double the footprint (and, for that matter, the potential points of failure) as a particularly engaging solution, as nice as it might be to stick a 10-inch tablet in my pocket.

The slide-out device is nothing if not more compelling, allowing the user to essentially pull out the screen for more real estate. That addresses, certainly, hinge and crease issues, but it’s impossible to see if it’s any more robust.

TCL teases a 5G device, headset and its first foldable at CES

There’s apparently a working unit somewhere in a lab on the other side of the world, but we’re all understandably skeptical until we can get one in our hands.

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App Store Guidelines ban police-spotting apps, raises bar on dating apps and more

Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store Review Guidelines which detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management, and more, the company says.  Some of the more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps, and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.

This latter change to police spotting apps, surprisingly, didn’t get as much attention as push ads or dating apps changes — though it’s among the most notable of the new rules.

A previous version of the App Store Review Guidelines (seen in a snapshot here from January 2020) stated that apps could only display DUI checkpoints that were published by law enforcement agencies, and noted that apps shouldn’t encourage activities like “drunk driving” or “excessive speed.” These were reasonable concerns.

The revised rule (section 1.4.4.) now says that Apple will reject apps “used to commit or attempt to commit crimes of any kind by helping users evade law enforcement,” in addition to the existing language.

As you may recall, Apple last year got into hot water over its decision to reject a crowdsourced mapping app, HKmap, that was being used by Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors to evade police. Initially, the app had been approved, but was pulled a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media who said the app allowed “rioters…to go on violent acts.”

The app had allowed users to crowdsource information like the location of police, the use of tear gas, and other details about the protests, which were added to a regularly updated map. In a statement, Apple said it removed the app when it learned it was used to “target and ambush police.”

Above: Section 1.4.4, before and after

The new App Store Review Guidelines now puts Apple’s final decision over this sort of app into writing. Effectively, it bans apps that help users evade law enforcement. Arguably, avoiding police isn’t always about wanting to “commit crimes,” as the guidelines state, however. Amnesty International, for example, documented cases of police brutality including beatings and torture in police detention during the Hong Kong protests. The HKmap may have also allowed users to bypass police for their own safety.

Apple’s rule, therefore, is vague enough that it still allows the company itself to make the ultimate call over how an app is being used before deciding to reject or ban it.

Other worthy-of-note changes to the guidelines include an update (section 4.5.4) that allows app developers to send marketing messages (aka ads) in their push notifications. Before, these were banned. This change was immediately hit with user outcry, but it may not be as bad as it first seems.

Clearly, many apps were already spamming their users with ads, despite the prior ban. Now, they’re being required to get customer consent within their app’s user interface and to provide an opt-out mechanism in their app that lets users turn the push notification ads off. This change will at least force reviewers to look for mechanisms and opt-outs in apps offering in-app purchases or that rely on sales to generate revenues.

“Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges,” Apple also warns.

Another change adds “fortune-telling” and “dating” apps to the list of apps that are considered spam if they’re not providing a “unique, high-quality” experience. The relevant section (4.3) warns developers about the app categories that Apple thinks are oversaturated, and where it will be more critical with its reviews.

The guidelines also now include a new section (5.6.1) that instruct developers on how to respond to App Store reviews, reminding them to “treat customers with respect when responding to their comments” and not include irrelevant information, personal information, spam, and marketing in their messages.

And developers must now use Apple’s own API to solicit reviews, instead of other mechanisms. This will allow users to toggle off App Store review prompts across all apps from the iOS settings.

Finally, Apple reminded developers that all apps going forward, including app updates, will need to use the iOS 13 SDK as of April 30, 2020. Apps will need to support the “Sign in with Apple” login/sign-up option as of that date, too.

 

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How a miniaturized atomic clock could revolutionize space exploration | Jill Seubert

How a miniaturized atomic clock could revolutionize space exploration | Jill Seubert

Ask any deep space navigator like Jill Seubert what makes steering a spacecraft so difficult, and they'll tell you it's all about the timing; a split-second can decide a mission's success or failure. So what do you do when a spacecraft is bad at telling time? You get it a clock -- an atomic clock, to be precise. Let Seubert whisk you away with the revolutionary potential of a future where you could receive stellar, GPS-like directions -- no matter where you are in the universe.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Emma, the personal finance tracker, scores $2.5M seed led by Connect Ventures

Emma, the personal finance management app that bills itself as your best “financial friend,” has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.

Connect Ventures led the round, with participation from Ithaca Investments, Tiny.vc and existing investor, Aglaé Ventures. The fintech previously raised $700,000 in angel funding in June 2018.

Launched in the U.K. in early 2018 — and most recently expanding to the U.S. and Canada — the Emma app connects to your bank accounts (and crypto wallets) to help you budget, track spending and save money.

It aims to let you understand how much money you have left to spend until payday, track and find wasteful subscriptions or alert you when you are paying over the odds on utility bills, and preemptively help you avoid going into your bank’s overdraft.

For those who like to be more hands-on with tracking their finances, Emma also offers a paid subscription version of its app dubbed “Emma Pro”. It lets you do additional things like create custom categories, add emojis to custom categories, export your data between specified time ranges, create manual accounts in any currency, create manual transactions, and split transactions,

“In a world where 70% of mental health issues are derived by financial problems, Emma is defining a new category, financial therapy,” says Emma founder and CEO Edoardo Moreni. “Our mission is to remove anxiety regarding money matters and bring instant gratification whenever our users interact with money regardless of their financial situation”.

Noteworthy, Connect Ventures is also an investor in open banking platform TrueLayer, which Emma uses to power its account aggregation in the U.K. (it uses Plaid in the U.S.). Describing TrueLayer as the “infrastructure layer,” Connect’s Rory Stirling says Emma represents investing in the “application layer” – perhaps as it is just the kind of app open banking promised.

“The team at Emma have built a product people love and as a result they have the highest engagement and retention we’ve seen in this category,” he says in a statement. “That’s really exciting to us – better tools for financial education and empowerment are only valuable if people engage with them”. (Users open the app on average five times a week, twice a day).

“We have about 200,000 users now and are growing pretty fast in the U.S., Canada and U.K.,” Moreni tells me. “We’ll be launching in every english speaking country and we’ll raise our Series A in the next 12 months. If you think about it, every single generation in history had a tracker. At Emma, we want to become the abacus for the modern world”.

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Bluecrew launches a mobile app to help businesses manage a flexible workforce

Bluecrew, a flexible staffing business owned by holding company IAC, is launching a new mobile app called Bluecrew Manager.

Rather than relying on a network of independent contractors, Bluecrew hires its own W-2 employees, who in turn have the option to accept hourly jobs from Bluecrew customers.

The company already offered web-based management tools for those customers, but CEO Adam Roston said the mobile app is designed to help them accomplish “the stuff you need to do right now, while you’re on-the-go.”

For example, he said that a warehouse manager spends most of their day “running around the floor,” so if they’re visiting the pick-and-pack department and need to see who’s on the team that day, they can open the app and see pictures of everyone who’s supposed to be working. And if they see that someone forgot to check in, they can adjust their time clock directly from the app.

Other features include the ability to request more workers and to “favorite” a worker, making it more likely that they’ll be assigned to the same company for future jobs.

Bluecrew says it has been testing out the Manager app (which is available for free to all customers) for the past month. In the launch announcement, Eduardo Medrano, cafe manager at hospitality company Eurest, said the app “is completely changing how I approach staffing” because it allows him “to make adjustments and check who will be there right on my phone.”

The company says that since its acquisition by IAC in 2018, its client base has nearly quadrupled, with growth in industries like logistics and manufacturing, hospitality/culinary and warehousing.

Roston also pointed to California’s new AB-5 law (which limits the ways that companies can classify workers as independent contractors) as a sign that Bluecrew has taken the right approach to combining flexibility and worker protections.

“When [co-founder and CTO Gino Rooney] started the company five years ago, it seemed a little bit crazy to be doing this with W-2 employees,” Roston said. “Over the last year. the landscape has just shifted … The reality, is most companies in the country are already following labor laws and have been at W-2 for years. But we’ve seen some increased momentum from AB-5, and we would expect to see it elsewhere.”

IAC acquires nursing marketplace NurseFly for $15M

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Google Cloud goes after the telco business with Anthos for Telecom and its Global Mobile Edge Cloud

Google Cloud today announced a new solution for its telecom customers: Anthos for Telecom. You can think of this as a specialized edition of Google’s container-based Anthos multi-cloud platform for both modernizing existing applications and building new ones on top of Kubernetes. The announcement, which was originally slated for MWC, doesn’t come as a major surprise, given Google Cloud’s focus on offering very targeted services to its enterprise customers in a number of different verticals.

Given the rise of edge computing and, in the telco business, 5G, Anthos for Telecom makes for an interesting play in what could potentially be a very lucrative market for Google. This is also the market where the open-source OpenStack project has remained the strongest.

What’s maybe even more important here is that Google is also launching a new service called the Global Mobile Edge Cloud (GMEC). With this, telco companies will be able to run their applications not just in Google’s 20+ data center regions, but also in Google’s more than 130 edge locations around the world.

“We’re basically giving you compute power on our edge, where previously it was only for Google use, through the Anthos platform,” explained Eyal Manor, the VP of Engineering for Anthos. “The edge is very powerful and I think we will now see substantially more innovation happening for applications that are latency-sensitive. We’ve been investing in edge compute and edge networking for a long time in Google over the years for the internal services. And we think it’s a fairly unique capability now to open it up for third-party customers.”

For now, Google is only making this available to its teleco partners, with AT&T being the launch customers, but over time, Manor said, it’ll likely open its edge cloud to other verticals, as well. Google also expects to be able to announce other partners in the near future.

As for Anthos for Telecom, Manor notes that this is very much what its customers are asking for, especially now that so many of their new applications are containerized.

“[Anthos] brings the best of cloud-as-a-service to our customers, wherever they are, in multiple environments and provide the lock-in free environment with the latest cloud tools,” explained Manor. “The goal is really to empower developers and operators to move faster in a consistent way, so regardless of where you are, you don’t have to train your technical staff. It works on-premise, it works on GCP and on other clouds. And that’s what we hear from customers — customers really like choice.”

In the telecom industry, those customers also want to get higher up the stack and get consistency between their data centers and the edge — and all of that, of course, is meant to bring down the cost of running these networks and services.

“We don’t want to manage the [technology] we previously invested in for many years because the upgrades were terribly expensive and slow for that. I hear that consistently. And please Google, make this seem like a service in the cloud for us,” Manor said.

For developers, Anthos also promises to provide the same development experience, no matter where the application is deployed — and Google now has an established network of partners that provides both solutions to developers as well as operators around Anthos. To this effect, Google is also launching new partnerships with the Amdocs customer experience platform and Netcracker today.

“We’re excited to unveil a new strategy today to help telecommunications companies innovate and accelerate their digital transformation through Google Cloud,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in today’s announcement. “By collaborating closely with leading telecoms, partners and customers, we can transform the industry together and create better overall experiences for our users globally.”

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5G is now live in 24 markets, GSMA predicts it’ll be 20% of global connections by 2025 — and eyes a big tech break-up

The next-gen flavor of mobile connectivity, 5G, is now live in 24 markets globally, per global mobile industry association the GSMA — which has just published its annual state of the global mobile economy report.

The cutting edge network tech is capable of supporting speeds up to 100x faster than LTE/4G and delivering latency of just a few milliseconds, as well as being able to connect many more devices per cell site — which means that, as it rolls out, it’s expected to underpin a new wave of ‘smarter’ digital services which bake in real-time AI assistance and help drive the digitization of legacy industries.

In last year’s report the carrier association didn’t break out a firm figure for markets where 5G is live — but dubbed the tech “a reality” after commercial launches in the US and South Korea towards the end of 2018. It also said it was expecting 16 more “major countries” to have launched 5G networks by the end of 2019.

It’s now touting “significant traction” for 5G — saying 79 operators across a further 39 markets had announced plans to launch commercial 5G services as of January 20, 2020. 

As it stands actual 5G connections remain a fraction of the connectivity pie vs current (4G) and previous gen cellular favors. Per the report, 4G became the dominant mobile tech globally in 2019 — with over 4BN connections, accounting for 52% of total connections (excluding licensed cellular IoT).

The GSMA expects 4G connections to continue to grow for the next few years, peaking at just under 60% of global connections by 2023.

For 5G its forecast is that it will account for a fifth (20%) of global connections by 2025, with the carrier association expecting “particularly strong” take-up across developed Asia, North America and Europe.

(For wider context, almost half of the global population (3.8BN people) are now users of the mobile internet as a whole (2G-5G), per the report — which is forecast to grow to 61% (5BN people) by 2025.)

It’s worth emphasizing that the presence of 5G in a market does not mean universal coverage.

On the contrary, 5G rollouts have tended to be targeted on urban centers. Which means 5G availability in the 24 markets that have launched commercial networks so far is likely highly limited vs population. There are also still relatively few 5G smartphones vs non-5G handsets (though since this time last year more are being unboxed; Sony, for example, just announced its first 5G handsets).

Perhaps, most importantly, consumer demand for the next-gen flavor of connectivity has yet to be robustly stood up. The GSMA’s report poses the (existential, for telcos) question of: “Will they pay for it?”

“The number of live 5G markets is increasing by the day and consumers’ awareness of the technology is also growing as hype makes way for reality. However, there is wide variation across the globe in terms of intentions to upgrade to 5G and the willingness to pay more for it,” it concedes.

“In general, consumers in South Korea and China – having witnessed some of the earliest launches – appear to be the most excited by the prospect of upgrading to 5G, while those in the US, Europe and Japan seem more content with 4G for the time being,” the GSMA adds, before striking an upbeat note: “5G is still in its infancy though; as more tangible use cases are deployed, more consumers will appreciate the benefits of 5G.”

Aka, 5G needs a killer app. But one has yet to emerge. (Edit note: A global pandemic that triggers a mass transition to remote working and virtualized socializing could have potential though. After all, concerns about the corona virus did force the GSMA to cancel its own annual shindig, MWC, just last month.)

Despite the report’s prediction that consumers will, down the line, be sold on 5G’s “benefits” another graphic in the report maps out the current reality — that “awareness of 5G does not necessarily translate into an intention to upgrade”.

It shows adults in markets including the UK, Australia, Spain and Italy having high awareness of the tech but low intent to pay for 5G, with less than 35% saying they want to upgrade. The US market also has a similarly high level of awareness of 5G — and only a slightly higher intention to upgrade (~40%+). 

The GSMA writes that more needs to be done by carriers to “raise awareness” of other “benefits” than just higher data speeds, touting claimed advantages such as “improved mobile service coverage”, “innovative new services” and “connectivity for previously unconnected devices” as having 5G marketing potential.

However, on the latter point at least, the report also chronicles variable and often low appetite — certainly outside China — for a range of ‘smart’ devices…

Still, the GSMA predicts billions more IoT devices will be coming on stream over the next five years — saying that between 2019 and 2025 the number of global IoT connections will more than double to almost 25 billion, while it expects global IoT revenue to more than triple to $1.1 trillion.

Another segment of the report deals with the perennial issue of stagnant operator revenue growth vs Internet companies, with the GSMA noting telcos continue to lag tech giants and major device makers.

“For many operators, revenue growth as a percentage is in the low single digits, if that,” it writes. “As core telecoms revenue stagnates, a common strategy now for major operator groups is to seek revenue growth from adjacent services. Pay TV, media, IoT, enterprise solutions and the broader array of digital services still only account for a minor share of operator revenues (10–20% for most), although there are a few notable exceptions, largely enabled by M&A activity.”

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that top of the GSMA’s 2025 prediction/wish-list is a bold one that one of the GAFA companies (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) will be broken up. (It makes not suggestion of which — though plenty of American eyes are now on Google.)

Other near-term hopes on the GSMA’s list are that “AR eye glasses reach the mass market with a form factor from at least one global OEM”; health wearables become “part of the solution to overburdened public health systems”; and “private enterprise networks explode and become a battleground between telcos and cloud companies” (we don’t think they mean explode literally). 

There’s also another 2025 prediction for 5G — that the technology becomes “the first generation in the history of mobile to have a bigger impact on enterprise than consumers”.

Which is certainly one way to silver-line a low-demand ‘cloud’ and hedge (hopefully) for business buy-in to make up for lacklustre consumer desire to pay more to do the same stuff slightly faster* (*depending on network conditions). 

“Governments and regulators must play their part to help propel 5G into commercial use by implementing policies that encourage advanced technologies (e.g. AI and IoT) to be applied across all economic sectors,” the GSMA writes elsewhere in the report — a call to action that aligns exactly with policy priorities recently set out by the new European Commission, suggesting telco lobbying in Brussels has borne fruit. 

Thierry Breton, the Commissioner for internal market — who’s now driving a pan-EU strategy to encourage the pooling and reuse of industrial data that leans heavily on the deployment of what’s he’s called “critical” 5G networks — is also a former chairman and CEO of France Telecom.

You can download the full GSMA report here.

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Anyone Can Create a Professional Website in Minutes With Page Builder Pro

According to freelance marketplace 99designs, hiring a professional designer to create a website can cost anything from $500 to over $5,000. If you run a small business, your budget might not stretch that far. Page Builder Pro offers an affordable alternative. This online platform allows you to build a stunning website using simple drag-and-drop controls. Right now, you can get lifetime service for just $49.99 at MakeUseOf Deals.

Zero Code

Unless you happen to be a designer, coding a website from scratch is a pretty daunting task. Thankfully, there are other options. With Page Builder Pro, you can design your perfect site without writing a single line of code.

This platform lets you choose from a range of beautiful, mobile-friendly templates. You can customize these designs with your own colors and fonts, before adding content. Page Builder Pro lets you work with thousands of pre-designed elements, from live chat to pop-up forms.

When you are happy with your site, you simply hit publish. Your subscription includes hosting with unlimited bandwidth, and all the templates are SEO-friendly.

Lifetime Service for $49.99

You would normally pay $745 for a lifetime subscription, but you can get Page Builder Pro now for just $49.99.

Read the full article: Anyone Can Create a Professional Website in Minutes With Page Builder Pro

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Anthony Levandowski ordered to pay $179 million to Google

Anthony Levandowski, the engineer and autonomous vehicle startup founder who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has been ordered to pay $179 million to end a contract dispute over his departure from Google.

Reuters was the first to report the court order.

An arbitration panel ruled in December that Levandowski and Lior Ron had engaged in unfair competition and breached their contract with Google when they left the company to start a rival autonomous vehicle company focused on trucking, called Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2017. A San Francisco County court confirmed Wednesday the panel’s decision.

Ron settled last month with Google for $9.7 million. However, Levandowski, had disputed the ruling. The San Francisco County Superior Court denied his petition today, granting Google’s petition to hold Levandowski to the arbitration agreement under which he was liable.

Levandowski himself may not have to pay the money personally, as this sort of liability may fall to his employer depending on his contract or other legal quirks. However, Levandowski personally filed today for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, stating that the presumptive $179M debt quite exceeds his assets, which he estimates at somewhere between $50M and $100M.

A representative for Levandowski declined comment for this story.

Devin Coldewey contributed to this story.

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Judge rejects Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘free speech’ lawsuit against Google

Last July, Hawaii representative and longshot Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of violating her First Amendment rights to free speech when it briefly suspended her campaign’s ad account. On Wednesday, California’s Central District Court rejected the suit outright.

Gabbard’s campaign, Tulsi Now, Inc., asked for $50 million in damages from Google for “serious and continuing violations of Tulsi’s right to free speech.” In the suit, her campaign claimed that Google “helps to run elections” through political advertising and search results — an argument District Judge Stephen Wilson firmly rejected.

Tulsi Gabbard sues Google over suspended ads

In dismissing the case, Wilson writes that what Gabbard “fails to establish is how Google’s regulation of its own platform is in any way equivalent to a governmental regulation of an election.” When it comes to Google, “an undisputedly private company,” the First Amendment’s free speech protections do not apply. A week ago, another California court reached the same conclusion in a case that right-wing group PragerU brought against YouTube.

In a case of poor timing, Gabbard’s account was suspended for an interval of time following the first presidential debate as viewers sought information about the unfamiliar candidate. In the lawsuit, Gabbard noted that Google took her advertising account offline “in the thick of the critical post-debate period.”

TULSI2020: In the hours following the 1st debate, while millions of Americans searched for info about Tulsi, Google suspended her search ad account w/o explanation. It is vital to our democracy that big tech companies can’t affect the outcome of elections https://t.co/n7Y7y2dQZ9

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) July 25, 2019

“Since at least June 2019, Google has used its control over online political speech to silence Tulsi Gabbard, a candidate millions of Americans want to hear from,” the suit stated.

Echoing unfounded conservative complaints of tech censorship, Gabbard characterized paid political advertising as free speech, language that Facebook itself would later adopt in defending its lax position on policing political ads.

“This is a threat to free speech, fair elections, and to our democracy, and I intend to fight back on behalf of all Americans,” Gabbard said in a statement at the time.

Gabbard also decried Google’s dominance of the search business, echoing the anti-monopolist tech sentiments expressed by other Democratic candidates. Political figures in both parties have seized on anti-tech sentiment in recent years, and the Hawaii representative’s lawsuit is just one example of politically expedient posturing against major tech platforms.

After the incident, a Google representative explained that the platform automatically flagged Gabbard’s account for unusual activity, a mistake it corrected a short time later.

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Art that reveals how technology frames reality | Jiabao Li

Art that reveals how technology frames reality | Jiabao Li

In a talk that could change how you see things, designer and artist Jiabao Li introduces her conceptual projects that expose the inherent bias of digital media. From a helmet that makes you "allergic" to the color red to a browser plug-in that filters the internet in an unexpected way, Li's creations uncover how technology mediates the way we perceive reality.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

VSCO’s new editing tool Montage lets you edit and layer both photos and video

VSCO, a popular photo editing app (and Gen Z meme), is continuing to shift its focus to video. Last month, the company finally gave its creators the ability to publish their video edits to the VSCO feed alongside their photos. And today VSCO is rolling out a more powerful and complex video editing tool called Montage.

Already, VSCO allowed users to apply photo-like edits to their videos by doing things like applying filters or adjusting the exposure, for example. But Montage is an entirely different sort of video editing experience. Now, users will be able to tell longer video stories involving scenes, where they can even stack and layer one or more videos, photos, colors, and shapes in order to create a collage-like finished product, VSCO explains.

The new feature is available from VSCO Studio, which is where all VSCO projects begin. To get started, users will pick an aspect ratio (e.g. square, landscape, portrait) as the canvas, then begin adding their multiple photos and videos from their Camera Roll to create their scenes.

As you create your “Montage,” you can also adjust the opacity of the images you add in the various layers, VSCO notes. There’s no limit to the number of scenes you add to the video, but only videos two minutes or less can be posted to the VSCO feed. The end results can also be shared outside Vimeo, if you choose.

VSCO’s investments in video come at a time when the company has seen video editing double, reflecting the younger generation’s increasing interest in video-sharing across social media, as with Instagram Stories or newly popular apps like TikTok and Byte.

Last year, VSCO signaled its intention to shift more of its energy into video when it acquired the video technology company Rylo.

The app’s new video features, including Montage, are intended to help VSCO grow its paying subscriber base. In December, VSCO said it was on pace to surpass 4 million paying users sometime in 2020 and was approaching $80 million in annual revenue, thanks to the app’s $19.99 annual subscription. In total, VSCO sees more than 20 million active users per week, 2+ million who are paying members.

Free VSCO users will be able to play with Montage, but to save and post a finished video, you’ll need to subscribe. Montage rolls out on iOS and Android, starting today.

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Tilting Point acquires mobile game Star Trek Timelines

Tilting Point announced this morning that it has acquired Star Trek Timelines, a free-to-play character collection game, from the game’s developer Disruptor Beam. It’s also hired Disruptor Beam team members to create a new studio, Wicked Realm Games.

This follows Disruptor Beam‘s shuttering of its other titles, Game of Thrones Ascent and The Walking Dead: March to War. Moving forward, the company says it will be focused on its Disruptor Engine tools for mobile game development and operations.

Tilting Point, meanwhile, had previously acquired the game Languinis and the monetization startup Gondola, but President Samir El Agili told me that this is the first time the company has acquired both a game and the development team behind it. CEO Kevin Segalla described this as an extension of Tilting Point’s “progressive publishing” model, where the company first works with developers on user acquisition, then develops a deeper business relationship over time.

In fact, Timelines — which Tilting Point says has been downloaded 8 million times and earned over $100 million — was one of the first games supported by the company’s user acquisition fund. And through those efforts, the Tilting Point team came to believe that there’s still plenty of opportunity for growth.

“We spent a good amount of time over the past year-and-a-half to two years helping the team scale the game to success, helping them bring a user to the game using our ability to do user acquisition, as well as improving the game itself in terms of our operations,” El Agili said. “What we have seen over this time is that Star Trek Timelines is a very impressive game, its users are very sticky.”

He noted that Tilting Point is increasing the size of the team working on Timelines from nine at Disruptor Beam to 19 at Wicked Realm Games, which will be led by Disruptor Beam’s former CTO David Cham.

The studio, El Agili said, will be “100 percent integrated from a financial standpoint, but they’re still going to be very independent way in the way they operate.” And while Wicked Realm will be focused on Timelines for the near future, there are “more ideas that we can build with them.”

Segalla also said that as a result of the deal, Tilting Point is essentially becoming the first Disruptor Engine customer.

“Tilting Point has been a great partner to us and have proven that they care about the game and its community and there’s no one better to take Star Trek Timelines to the next level,” said Disruptor Beam CEO Jon Radoff in a statement. “We are also excited that Tilting Point will be one of our first live customers for our live-ops technology and that we will be continuing our working relationship.”

Tilting Point acquires game monetization startup Gondola

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Bookshlf launches an app to curate and share your favorite digital content

Bookshlf has created a new way for people to recommend media — whether it’s music, videos, articles, podcasts or even tweets — to their friends and to the rest of the world.

The New York-based startup is officially launching its web and iOS app this week and announcing that David A. Steinberg, co-founder and CEO of marketing company Zeta Global, has signed on as both an investor and advisor.

The big emphasis here is curation. It’s a word that comes up a lot in the media industry, but President Andrew Boggs — who previously worked in business development at Zeta, then founded Bookshlf with Mike Abend and Justin Cadelago — argued that the major internet platforms aren’t actually designed for real curation.

“A lot of the legacy platforms have focused on quantity over quality,” Boggs said. “There’s also the nature of things being really fleeting there … For example, if you are sharing stuff about music, I have to sift through your feed to find that information.”

It sounds like this idea resonated with Steinberg, who argued, “The big social media platforms do not make a living by building small groups of very interesting people. They think, ‘How do we get as much volume as possible?'”

In Bookshlf, on the other hand, users can organize their recommendations into different “shelves” based on topic, and then easily add links using the iOS Share menu (or by just adding them directly in the app). You can also share links to your shelves via social media.

Boggs, for example, has shelves tied to topics like electronic music, humor, tech/media news and even the best burgers in New York. Steinberg, meanwhile, said, “I don’t believe people primarily go to Facebook or Instagram to consume business information,” so it’s not surprising his shelves are focused on artificial intelligence, DARPA and Zeta itself.

The paradigm of a shelf of content might seem a little quaint — Boggs compared it to the shelves of DVDs or albums that you might have shown off in the past. But in his view, the model makes sense for these kinds of recommendations, because it allows people to focus on what they’re actually interested in: “Because the shelves are a curated selection, you can jump to your profile, and if you have a music shelf, I can jump right into that.”

While it remains to be seen how people will actually use Bookshlf, Boggs said there’s a likely to be a minority of core users who are doing the most active curation and sharing. These are the kinds of people who are probably already doing a lot of sharing — whether that’s on social media or just over a group chat — and “love to send you interesting articles and interesting podcasts.” At the same time, other users will simply browse the app for interesting recommendations, and they can also use the shelves to save links for themselves.

It sounds like the Bookshlf team isn’t focused on monetization yet, but Boggs suggested that there are a number of interesting opportunities, including targeted advertising, sponsored shelves, micropayments for content and selling data about broader trends in the audience interest.

In addition to Steinberg, Bookshlf has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from CAIVIS Acquisition Corp, Dalton Partners and Cambridge Way Ventures.

Marketing tech company Zeta Global raises $140M at a $1.3B valuation

 

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Bookshlf launches an app to curate and share your favorite digital content

Bookshlf has created a new way for people to recommend media — whether it’s music, videos, articles, podcasts or even tweets — to their friends and to the rest of the world.

The New York-based startup is officially launching its web and iOS app this week and announcing that David A. Steinberg, co-founder and CEO of marketing company Zeta Global, has signed on as both an investor and advisor.

The big emphasis here is curation. It’s a word that comes up a lot in the media industry, but President Andrew Boggs — who previously worked in business development at zeta, then founded Bookshlf with Mike Abend and Justin Cadelago — argued that the major internet platforms aren’t actually designed for real curation.

“A lot of the legacy platforms have focused on quantity over quality,” Boggs said. “There’s also the nature of things being really fleeting there … For example, if you are sharing stuff about music, I have to sift through your feed to find that information.”

It sounds like this idea resonated with Steinberg, who argued, “The big social media platforms do not make a living by building small groups of very interesting people. They think, ‘How do we get as much volume as possible?'”

In Bookshlf, on the other hand, users can organize their recommendations into different “shelves” based on topic, and then easily add links using the iOS Share menu (or by just adding them directly in the app). You can also share links to your shelves via social media.

Boggs, for example, has shelves tied to topics like electronic music, humor, tech/media news and even the best burgers in New York. Steinberg, meanwhile, said, “I don’t believe people primarily go to Facebook or Instagram to consume business information,” so it’s not surprising his shelves are focused on artificial intelligence, DARPA and Zeta itself.

The paradigm of a shelf of content might seem a little quaint — Boggs compared it to the shelves of DVDs or albums that you might have shown off in the past. But in his view, the model makes sense for these kinds of recommendations, because it allows people to focus on what they’re actually interested in: “Because the shelves are a curated selection, you can jump to your profile, and if you have a music shelf, I can jump right into that.”

While it remains to be seen how people will actually use Bookshlf, Boggs said there’s a likely to be a minority of core users who are doing the most active curation and sharing. These are the kinds of people who are probably already doing a lot of sharing — whether that’s on social media or just over a group chat — and “love to send you interesting articles and interesting podcasts.” At the same time, other users will simply browse the app for interesting recommendations, and they can also use the shelves to save links for themselves.

It sounds like the Bookshlf team isn’t focused on monetization yet, but Boggs suggested that there are a number of interesting opportunities, including targeted advertising, sponsored shelves, micropayments for content and selling data about broader trends in the audience interest.

In addition to Steinberg, Bookshlf has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from CAIVIS Acquisition Corp, Dalton Partners and Cambridge Way Ventures.

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Resso, ByteDance’s music streaming app, officially launches in India, sans Tencent-backed Universal Music

TikTok, the hugely popular social media app, found a lot of early traction by giving users a way to create funny lip-synced versions of clips from well-known songs and then share them with friends (its predecessor in the West was even called Musically). Now at long last, TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance, is doubling down on the music connection with the release of its first standalone full music streaming app, starting first in India.

Today, the company is launching Resso, which describes itself as a “social music streaming app”: users are encouraged to share lyrics, comments and other user-generated content with each other, alongside full-length tracks of music that they can consume and also share with others. And the music begins to auto-play as soon as you open the app.

Resso is not disclosing how many tracks are on the service at launch, but it notes that it has secured licensing deals with Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Merlin and Beggars Group, as well as big publishers specifically in the Indian market, including T-Series, Saregama, Zee Music, YRF Music, Times Music, Tips, Venus and Shemaroo, as well as Speed Records, Anand Audio, Lahiri Music, Divo and Muzik 247.

You might have clocked one notable holdout in that list: Universal Music, one of the “big three” global music publishers. Resso would not comment on why it has yet to ink a deal with Universal, but it’s notable that one of biggest investors in the music company is Tencent — an arch competitor to ByteDance in China that took a 10% stake in Universal at the end of last year that is valued at around $3.4 billion.

Unlike its sister app TikTok, which is free to use and is built on an ad-based model, Resso is following the freemium route that a number of other big music apps, such as Spotify, have taken. A free tier includes ads and limits streaming quality to 128 Kbps; a premium, ad-free tier boosts streaming to 256 Kbps, includes downloads and the ability to skip tracks and costs INR 99/month ($1.35/month) on Android and INR 119/month ($1.62) on iOS. Resso is not commenting on why the iOS price is higher.

The launch comes about two months after Resso opened up for testing in two markets, India and Indonesia (it remains in test mode in the latter). The choice to focus first on India was to tap into the country’s massive, youthful population of mobile users.

“India has the largest population of GenZ as compared to any other country globally,” Hari Nair, Head of Music Content & Partnership, Resso India, told TechCrunch. “With the core of Resso’s target audience being GenZ, it is only logical for Resso to make its debut in India. We will discuss additional markets when appropriate.”

Resso’s Nair at a briefing with media in New Delhi

India is music to ByteDance’s ears

TikTok is already huge in India — around 200 million users as of last October and expects to add another 100 million this year. But even without a clear TikTok connection — the app is published by “Moon Video” on Google Play, for example, and there are no obvious pushes to prioritise TikTok shares on the app — the test version has already seen some traction.

Resso has been installed by approximately 1 million App Store and Google Play users to date in India and Indonesia, research firm SensorTower told TechCrunch, with 600,000 of these installs in India, and 400,000 in Indonesia.

“All our marketing efforts are focused towards building a strong community of passionate music fans,” Nair said. “The idea is to have a digital first approach where in we identify the right set of audience groups and reach out to them.”

The market for music streaming is very competitive in India — where Resso will compete against not just Spotify, but Gaana, JioSaavn, Apple Music and YouTube Music, among others. Even so, partly because of the success of TikTok, Resso was highly anticipated. It comes after months of rumors stretching back almost a year, as well as a number of music licensing deals to expand the catalog — critical not just for Resso itself but for sister app TikTok, whose existing deals last year approached expiration.

While a lot of the currently streaming services in India offer near identical catalogs, Resso is banking on its ability to convince users to “express and engage.”

The app, by default, rolls somewhat relevant videos in the background whenever a song is playing. Users can comment and also read lyrics of songs. Resso’s user interface is designed to persuade users to share lyrics directly on other platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and of course, TikTok.

And alongside more social features wrapped around the music listening experience, Resso’s other differentiating feature is to push genre-based discovery more prominently, organising its music library by names that it says “address the tastes of today’s generation of music enthusiasts,” such as alternative, experimental, fusion, post rock and indie rock as well as more specific categories like popgaze, bow pop (I had to look this one up), indie psych pop and ambient.

As with services like Spotify aiming to build features also for artists in a two-sided marketplace, Resso is also dabbling in this area, noting that it “empowers artists to reinvent their catalog by providing a fresh way for fans to engage with their music and introduces them to new listeners.”

On the flip side, ByteDance may soon find out just how difficult it is to get Indians to pay for content. Resso’s pricing in India is in line with those of Apple Music, YouTube Music, Spotify, Times Internet-owned Gaana, and Reliance Jio’s JioSaavn.

Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at research firm Convergence Catalyst, said there still is a big room for growth for music streaming services in India. “More than half of internet users in the country are yet to join this bandwagon,” he said.

But none of these services have made significant inroads in their search for paying subscribers. Bloomberg reported in December that YouTube Music / Premium, had amassed over 800,000 subscribers in India, more than any other music streaming service.

And on top of this, according to one estimate, there is not a ton of money to be made in India currently. According to research firm Statista, music streaming services in India will clock about $244 million in revenue this year, compared to the much mature U.S. market, where they are estimated to generate $4.5 billion this year

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Buying True Wireless In-Ear Headphones? 5 Features You’ll Want

If you’re looking for a pair of true wireless in-ear headphones, you will have noticed that there are a wealth of choices available. This can make choosing the right pair for your needs (and your wallet) a daunting task.

Whether you’re buying your first pair or upgrading, there are several things to consider before you splash the cash. We have put together a guide to help you make the right choice, covering everything from comfort to sound quality.

1. The Perfect Fit for Comfort

If you listen to a lot of music, then comfort while you do so is important. How your wireless headphones sit within your ear is going to have an effect on how you enjoy your listening experience. Poorly fitting headphones, be they too tight or too loose, are not going to make for a pleasant listening session.

It is important that the headphones that you choose come with a range of customizable options. If you have several size ear-tips included in the box, then you’re off to a good start. You can maximize your comfort by swapping out the ear tips to suit the size of your ear canal. This means they won’t put too much pressure on the inside of your ear as you listen.

Some wireless in-ear headphones also come with a securing loop. They can take several forms. For example, the Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro earbuds come with several pairs of “ear wings”. This is essentially a rubber loop that sits behind the folds in your outer ear. These need to be comfortable too; you need to be able to customize the size of securing loops, so this is also a consideration.

2. Snug In-Ear Security

A great pair of in-ear headphones is likely to be a fairly sizeable investment. With this in mind, you aren’t going to want your headphones diving for the nearest puddle with every minor turn of your head. The “ear wings” we mentioned earlier assist with keeping your headphones in place—and so do the ear-tips.

A secure fit may also be provided by ear hooks. Instead of sitting inside the folds of the ear, these loop over the top, keeping them in position. The Powerbeats Pro in-ear headphones boast this feature; good job, given the $249.99 price-tag Dre has whacked on them! The hooks with these headphones are adjustable too, for maximum comfort.

You can eliminate the security issue another way. If you plump for a pair of Apple’s Airpod Pro headphones, then MinusK offers a strap to make your wireless headphones, erm, wired…

3. Battery Life

Without the benefit of a wire to deliver power, wireless headphones need to power themselves. Each headphone does this by packing its own rechargeable battery. You’ll want to use the headphones for prolonged periods of time, so battery life is a factor. Fortunately, most true wireless headphones come with a carry case that, more often than not, also charges them.

The advantage of a charging case is that even long journeys or extended use isn’t a significant problem. Lypertek’s Tevi ear-buds boast an astounding 70-hour battery life with the case. You won’t need to worry about the battery fizzing out if you’re about to jet off on a long-haul flight if you’re rocking a pair of these. You’ll probably get the return journey out of them, too!

Lypertek Tevi True Wireless Earbuds Lypertek Tevi True Wireless Earbuds Buy Now On Amazon $89.90

Even without a case, though, you want to get plenty of juice out of your fully charged headphones. Apple’s Airpod Pro, for example, store up to five hours of energy in the on-board battery. Sennheiser’s Momentum headphones offer a meager four hours of playback. If you have some prolonged headphone use ahead, consider something with a little more gas in the tank. The Klipsch T5 headphones offer a whopping eight hours of battery life.

4. Noise Cancelation

When you’re listening to music, you don’t want external noise interrupting your favorite track. Other people’s conversation, traffic noise, and many other sources of sound can spoil your listening experience. This is why noise cancellation is important. With this feature, your headphones will filter out any background sound. This will leave you with much better quality audio that isn’t muddied by the sound in your immediate environment.

Similarly, if you want to take a call, you don’t want to only be hearing half of the conversation—that’s no use to anybody. Noise cancellation ensures that you can hear exactly what your conversation partner is saying, and vice-versa. Very important when it comes to ordering in your favorite takeaway food! The Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro earbuds offer a noise-canceling feature, thanks to the built-in mics and Qualcomm tech.

Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro True Wireless Earbuds Soundcore Liberty 2 Pro True Wireless Earbuds Buy Now On Amazon $129.99

5. Sound Quality

This is a pretty obvious one, right? Well, you would think so, but a lot of people are led astray by a lower price tag. While it isn’t always the case, investing more cash in your headphones will ensure that you receive great sound in return. Never buy a pair of headphones just because Travis Scott prints his signature on the side.

Drivers

One tell-tale sound-quality give away is the size of the drivers the housing contains. You will generally find the size of the drivers (in millimeters) within the specifications of the headphones you are looking at. A bigger driver delivers a nice, fat bass sound, which shouldn’t sound muffled or—worse still—non-existent.

Frequency Response

The term frequency response should also feature in any specs. The frequency response refers to the range of frequencies that the headphones can deliver. Most headphones operate at a range of 20Hz to 20kHz, which just so happens to be what the average human ear is capable of hearing. This doesn’t necessarily denote high-quality sound, but it can help you. If you struggle to hear certain frequencies, a pair of headphones that boosts those frequencies will deliver a more balanced sound to your ear.

Sound Pressure Level

Sound Pressure Level is another factor to be wary of. The value you see next to the SPL is a great indication of the volume your headphones can reach. It stands to reason that “the louder the better” is not a plus-point when buying headphones. However, you do want to be able to actually hear the music, so opt for something that sits around the 85-90dB mark and you shouldn’t have any volume problems.

Distortion

Finally, distortion. A specification sheet will list this as THD, or Total Harmonic Distortion. This is basically the value given to the level of distortion in relation to the volume. A value of anything less than 1% will be perfect for listening to music and watching movies. This means that a sudden volume increase, an explosion in a movie, for example, won’t result in the overall sound being distorted.

Anything Else to Consider?

Modern in-ear headphones come with plenty of additional features that can improve the quality of the sound you hear. Apps containing equalizers can allow you to customize the sound to your own ears; let’s face it, nobody hears anything the same as the next person.

If you’re stuck on what headphones are best for your needs, at a price that suits you, then check out our guide to the best wireless headphones for any budget.

Read the full article: Buying True Wireless In-Ear Headphones? 5 Features You’ll Want

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The New Facebook Messenger Is Smaller and Faster

Facebook has released a new version of the Messenger app, and it’s both smaller to download and faster to load. The social network has managed this feat by rebuilding Messenger from the ground up, simplifying the app in an effort called Project LightSpeed.

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Facebook detailed the new Messenger in a post on Facebook Newsroom. The company admits that due to the demands for more features, since its launch in 2011, Messenger became “harder to navigate and the architecture became increasingly complex.”

Facebook Redesigns Messenger From the Ground Up

This inspired Facebook to redesign Messenger from the ground up. This began after the release of Messenger 4, and the new Messenger app is now available on iOS. The app is one-quarter of its original size, and will, according to Facebook, load twice as fast.

The three principles of the new Messenger are that it’s faster, smaller, and simpler. The speed will make a huge difference to people who open Messenger multiple times a day, while the smaller size of the app will help people who use older devices.

Introducing a Faster, Smaller and Simpler Messenger https://t.co/QrLM1QCZ85 pic.twitter.com/yhagtXzcAS

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) March 2, 2020

Simplifying Messenger will help all users. The core code has been reduced by 84 percent, dropping from 1.7 million lines to 360,000 lines. This does mean some features will be temporarily unavailable, but Facebook promises to bring them back in future updates.

Those who want to delve deeper into the inner workings of the new Messenger should read this post on Facebook Engineering. The new Messenger should be available via an update over the next couple of weeks. There’s no word yet on a new version for Android.

Merging Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram

The new Messenger is smaller, faster, and much simpler to use. All of which are positives for an app that was previously bloated, slow to load, and unnecessarily busy. Let’s just hope Facebook can resist bringing back the bloat in future updates.

This is the first stage in Facebook’s ambitious plan to merge Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. The idea is to allow Facebook’s three big apps operate in the same space together. Which would be difficult without rebuilding them from the ground up.

Read the full article: The New Facebook Messenger Is Smaller and Faster

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