Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools

Joanna Glasner Contributor

More posts by this contributor

• Robot couriers scoop up early-stage cash
• Bots replacing office workers drive big valuations

If you have a job today, there’s a good chance you personally reached out to your employer and interviewed with other humans to get it. Now that you’ve been there a while, it’s also likely the workday feels more like a long slog than the fulfilling career move you had envisioned.

But if today’s early-stage startups have their way, your next employment experience could be quite different.

First, forget the networking and interview gauntlet. Instead, let an AI-enabled screening program reach out about a job you don’t seem obviously qualified to do. Or, rather than talk to a company’s employees, wait for them to play some online games instead. If you play similarly, they may decide to hire you.

Once you have the job, software will also make you more efficient and happier at your work.

An AI-driven software platform will deliver regular “nudges,” offering customized suggestions to make you a more effective worker. If you’re feeling burned out, head online to text or video chat with a coach or therapist. Or perhaps you’ll just be happier in your job now that your employer is delivering regular tokens of appreciation.

Those are a few of the ways early-stage startups are looking to change the status quo of job-seeking and employment. While employment is a broad category, an analysis of Crunchbase funding data for the space shows a high concentration of activity in two key areas: AI-driven hiring software and tools to improve employee engagement.

Below, we look at where the money’s going and how today’s early-stage startups could play a role in transforming the work experience of tomorrow.

Artificial intelligence

To begin, let us reflect that we are at a strange inflection point for AI and employment. Our artificially intelligent overlords are not smart enough to actually do our jobs. Nonetheless, they have strong opinions about whether we’re qualified to do them ourselves.

It is at this peculiar point that the alchemic mix of AI software, recruiting-based business models and venture capital are coming together to build startups.

In 2018, at least 43 companies applying AI or machine learning to some facet of employment have raised seed or early-stage funding, according to Crunchbase data. In the chart below, we look at a few startups that have secured rounds, along with their backers and respective business models:

At present, even AI boosters don’t tout the technology as a cure-all for troubles plaguing the talent recruitment space. While it’s true humans are biased and flawed when it comes to evaluating job candidates, artificially intelligent software suffers from many of the same bugs. For instance, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool developed in-house because it exhibited bias against women.

That said, it’s still early innings. Over the next few years, startups will be actively tweaking their software to improve performance and reduce bias.

Happiness and engagement

Once the goal of recruiting the best people is achieved, the next step is ensuring they stay and thrive.

Usually, a paycheck goes a long way to accomplishing the goal of staying. But in case that’s not enough, startups are busily devising a host of tools for employers to boost engagement and fight the scourge of burnout.

In the chart below, we look at a few of the companies that received early-stage funding this year to build out software platforms and services aimed at making people happier and more effective at work:

The most heavily funded of the early-stage crop looks to be Peakon, which offers a software platform for measuring employee engagement and collecting feedback. The Danish firm has raised $33 million to date to fund its expansion.

London-based BioBeats is another up-and-comer aimed at the “corporate wellness” market, with digital tools to help employees track stress levels and other health-related metrics. The company has raised $7 million to date to help keep those stress levels in check.

Early-stage indicators

Early-stage funding activity tends to be an indicator of areas with somewhat low adoption rates today that are poised to take off dramatically. For employment, that means we can likely expect to see AI-based recruitment and software-driven engagement tools become more widespread in the coming years.

What does that mean for job seekers and paycheck toilers? Expect to spend more of your time interfacing with intelligent software. Apparently, it’ll make you more employable, and happier, too.

Security researchers find over a dozen iPhone apps linked to Golduck malware

Security researchers say they’ve found more than a dozen iPhone apps covertly communicating with a server associated with Golduck, a historically Android-focused malware that infects popular classic game apps.

The malware has been known about for over a year, after it was first discovered by Appthority infecting classic and retro games on Google Play, by embedding backdoor code that allowed malicious payloads to be silently pushed to the device. At the time, more than 10 million users were affected by the malware, allowing hackers to run malicious commands at the highest privileges, like sending premium SMS messages from a victim’s phone to make money.

Now, the researchers say iPhone apps linked to the malware could also present a risk.

Wandera, an enterprise security firm, said it found 14 apps — all retro-style games — that were communicating with the same command and control server used by the Golduck malware.

“The [Golduck] domain was on a watchlist we established due to its use in distributing a specific strain of Android malware in the past,” said Michael Covington, Wandera’s vice-president of product. “When we started seeing communication between iOS devices and the known malware domain, we investigated further.”

The apps include: Commando Metal: Classic Contra, Super Pentron Adventure: Super Hard, Classic Tank vs Super Bomber, Super Adventure of Maritron, Roy Adventure Troll Game, Trap Dungeons: Super Adventure, Bounce Classic Legend, Block Game, Classic Bomber: Super Legend, Brain It On: Stickman Physics, Bomber Game: Classic Bomberman, Classic Brick – Retro Block, The Climber Brick, and Chicken Shoot Galaxy Invaders.

According to the researchers, what they saw so far seems relatively benign — the command and control server simply pushes a list of icons in a pocket of ad space in the upper-right corner of the app. When the user opens the game, the server tells the app which icons and links it should serve to the user. They did, however, see the apps sending IP address data — and, in some cases, location data — back to the Golduck command and control server. TechCrunch verified their claims, running the apps on a clean iPhone through a proxy, allowing us to see where the data goes. Based on what we saw, the app tells the malicious Golduck server what app, version, device type, and the IP address of the device — including how many ads were displayed on the phone.

As of now, the researchers say that the apps are packed with ads — likely as a way to make a quick buck. But they expressed concern that the communication between the app and the known-to-be-malicious server could open up the app — and the device — to malicious commands down the line.

“The apps themselves are technically not compromised; while they do not contain any malicious code, the backdoor they open presents a risk for exposure that our customers do not want to take.

“A hacker could easily use the secondary advertisement space to display a link that redirects the user and dupes them into installing a provisioning profile or a new certificate that ultimately allows for a more malicious app to be installed,” said the researchers.

That could be said for any game or app, regardless of device maker or software. But the connection to a known malicious server isn’t a good look. Covington said that the company has “observed malicious content being shared from the server,” but that it wasn’t related to the games.

The implication is that if the server is sending malicious payloads to Android users, iPhone users could be next.

TechCrunch sent the list of apps to data insights firm Sensor Tower, which estimated that the 14 apps had been installed close to one million times since they were released — excluding repeated downloads or installs across different devices.

When we tried contacting the app makers, many of the App Store links pointed to dead links or to pages with boilerplate privacy policies but no contact information. The registrant on the Golduck domain appears to be fake, along with other domains associated with Golduck, which often have different names and email addresses.

Apple did not comment when reached prior to publication. The apps are appear to still be downloadable from the App Store, but all now say they are “not currently available in the U.S. store.”

Apple’s app stores may have a better rap than Google’s, which every once in a while lets malicious apps slip through the net. In reality, neither store is perfect. Earlier this year, security researchers found a top-tier app in the Mac App Store that was collecting users’ browsing history without permission, and dozens of iPhone apps that were sending user location data to advertisers without explicitly asking first.

For the average user, malicious apps remain the largest and most common threat to mobile users — even with locked down device software and the extensive vetting of apps.

If there’s one lesson, now and always: don’t download what you don’t need, or can’t trust.

Cybersecurity 101: Five simple security guides for protecting your privacy

How Trulia began paying down its technical debt

As every software company knows, over time as code ages and workarounds build on work-arounds, the code base becomes bloated. It becomes ever more difficult to get around the technical debt that you’ve built up over time. It’s really impossible to avoid this phenomenon, but at some point, companies realize that the debt is so great that it’s limiting their ability to build new functionality. That’s precisely what Trulia faced in 2017 when it began a process of paying down that debt and modernizing its architecture.

Trulia is a real estate site founded way back in 2005, an eternity ago in terms of technology. The company went public in 2012 and was acquired by Zillow in 2014 for $3.5 billion, but has continued to operate as an independent brand under the Zillow umbrella. It understood that a lot had changed technologically in the 12 years since its inception when engineering began thinking about this. The team knew it had a humongous, monolithic code base that was inhibiting the ability to update the site.

While they tried to pull out some of the newer functions as services, it didn’t really make the site any more nimble because these services always had to tie back into that monolithic central code base. The development team knew if it was to escape this coding trap, it would take a complete overhaul.

Brainstorming broad change

As you would expect, a process like this doesn’t happen overnight, taking months to plan and implement. It all started back in 2017 when the company held what they called an “Innovation Week” with the entire engineering team. Groups of engineers came up with ideas about how to solve this problem, but the one that got the most attention was one called Project Islands, which involved breaking out the different pieces of the site as individual coding islands that could operate independently of one another.

It sounds simple, but in practice it involved breaking down the entire code base into services. They would use Next.js and React to rebuild the front end and GraphQL, an open source graph database technology to rebuild the back end.

Deep Varma, Trulia’s VP of engineering, pointed out that as a company founded in 2005, the site was built on PHP and MySQL, two popular development technologies from that time. Varma says that whenever his engineers made a change to any part of the site, they needed to do a complete system release. This caused a major bottleneck.

What they really needed to do was move to a completely modern microservices architecture that allowed engineering teams to work independently in a continuous delivery approach without breaking any other team’s code. That’s where the concept of islands came into play.

Islands in the stream

The islands were actually microservices. Each one could communicate to a set of central common services like authentication, A/B testing, the navigation bar, the footer — all of the pieces that every mini code base would need, while allowing the teams building these islands to work independently and not require a huge rebuild every time they added a new element or changed something.

Cousine island. Seychelles. Photo: Martin Harvey/Getty Images

The harsh reality of this kind of overhaul came into focus as the teams realized they had to be writing the new pieces while the old system was still in place and running. In a video the company made describing the effort, one engineer likened it to changing the engine of a 747 in the middle of a flight.

Varma says he didn’t try to do everything at once, as he needed to see if the islands approach would work in practice first. In November 2017, he pulled the first engineering team together, and by January it had built the app shell (the common services piece) and one microservice island. When the proof of concept succeeded, Varma knew they were in business.

Building out the archipelago

It’s one thing to build a single island, but it’s another matter to build a chain of them and that would be the next step. By last April, engineering had shown enough progress that they were able to present the entire idea to senior management and get the go-ahead to move forward with a more complex project.

Photo of Rock Islands, Palau, Micronesia: J.W.Alker/Getty Images

First, it took some work with the Next.js development team to get the development framework to work the way they wanted. Varma said he brought in the Next.js team to work with his engineers. He said that they needed to figure out how to stitch the various islands together and resolve dependencies among the different services. The Next.js team actually changed its development roadmap for Trulia, speeding up delivery of these requirements, understanding that other companies would have similar issues.

By last July, the company released Neighborhoods, the first fully independent island functionality on the site. Recently, it moved off-market properties to islands. Off-market properties, as the name implies, are pages with information about properties that are no longer on the market. Varma says that these pages actually make up a significant portion of the company’s traffic.

While Varma would not say just how much of the site has been moved to islands at this point, he said the goal is to move the majority to the new platform in 2019. All of this shows that a complete overhaul of a complex site doesn’t happen overnight, but Trulia is taking steps to move off the original system it created in 2005 and move to a more modern and flexible architecture it has created with islands. It may not have paid down its technical debt in full in 2018, but it went a long way on laying the foundation to do so.

Atlassian’s two-year cloud journey

Startups Weekly: VCs celebrate the new year the only way they know how

Venture capitalists swore in the new year the only way they know how… by submitting SEC paperwork for new funds! insert party hat/confetti emoji here.

As many of us brainstormed our New Year’s resolutions and let our hangovers wear off, several firms began this week what for some is a long and arduous process of raising a VC fund and for others is as simple as a few phone calls to LPs. What else happened this week? Pokémon GO creator Niantic secured $190 million, Mary Meeker announced the name of her fund and a whole bunch of people played with Popsugar’s somewhat sketchy twinning app.

Fresh funds:

Mary Meeker will raise up to $1.5 billion for Bond, her new VC fund. Union Square Ventures raised $429 million across two new funds. Lightspeed Venture partners announced a $560 million China fund. And biotech firm Atlas Venture brought in $250 million.

AR startups are failing:

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney takes a look at struggling augmented reality startups and questions some of the larger players, from Magic Leap to Snap and Niantic. And speaking of Niantic, the Pokémon GO developer closed a $190 million funding round this week at a $3.9 billion valuation.

Indian startups start the year off strong:

Startups based in India raised more than $10 billion in 2018, per Venture Beat, a record amount of capital for the country. Already this year one company has closed a round larger than $100 million. CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round this week to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Future tech:

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

A startup disrupting the … bottled water business:

FloWater has raised $15 million for its reusable water bottle refilling stations to produce purified water. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

VC subsidized vending machines:

Vengo makes wall-mounted mini-vending machines the size of large picture frames that it then sells to vending machine distributors, asking for a small fee per month in exchange for access to its software. Now it has $7 million to build out its business.

A VC gets a second chance:

After SpaceX filed more SEC paperwork as part of its $500 million upcoming fundraise, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos noticed a familiar name on the document: Steve Jurvetson. Jurvetson is a longtime board member of both Tesla and SpaceX, but after he left DFJ, the venture capital firm he co-founded, in 2017 amid questions about his personal conduct, there was uncertainty around whether he would keep those director positions. Well, it looks like Elon Musk is standing by Jurvetson.

And finally, are you smarter than a TechCrunch reporter?

Let this test decide.

 

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Foldable display made by BOE can achieve worlds smallest dynamic bending

Foldable displays on smartphones have been talked about for many years now, but 2018 was the year when we actually saw some action in the space with the likes of  Samsung and Chinese company Royole showcasing their own versions of the foldable device. The concept of a foldable smartphone comes from the ever increasing consumer demand of more screen real estate and as video streaming gains popularity, so will large screen smartphones that were once deemed phablets. A phone that can fold out to function like a tablet is the next big step towards increasing the screen surface area on a handset and that’s where foldable phones will make their mark. In a new video spotted online, display maker BOE’s 7.65-inch foldable display can be seen folding in and out with ease. The video shows that the flexible screen folds from the centre to take the form of a smartphone. It is reported that the BOE flexible display can achieve world’s smallest dynamic bending, which is a crucial factor to note when it comes to the form factor and design of future foldable phones. In terms of specs, the WQHD display reportedly sports a  resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels with a maximum brightness of 380 nits, a response time of 1ms and a high color gamut of 118% on the NTSC scale. As per reports, the screen can bend more than 100,000 times but in the video, the screen doesn’t really flatten very well once its folded out to achieve the table form. It has been long rumoured that Apple is in talks with BOE to source flexible OLED displays for future iPhones.  According to a recent patent filing, Apple is working on a foldable phone which can be folded in front-to-front as well as back-to-back configuration. Xiaomi and Oppo are also said to be considering BOE or LG Display to source bendable displays for their own versions of foldable phones.   http://bit.ly/2AwICMe

This is how video-watching is on Sony Xperia XZ4s 21:9 display

Key Highlights: Tipster Ice universe gives us a mock demo of the video-watching experience on the Sony Xperia XZ4 The tipster also shows photos of the phone's screen protector on Twitter   Details about the upcoming Sony Xperia flagship smartphone are gradually crystallising. Only a week ago we found out that the Sony Xperia XZ4 could come with an extremely tall 21:9 display because a screen protector allegedly belonging to it was spotted in the wild. Now we’re seeing online tipster Ice universe play around with the screen protector to give us a demo of the viewing experience through it. In their most recent video that was uploaded on YouTube a couple of days ago, the tipster seems to have plastered the screen protector to a mock screen of 21:9 aspect ratio while playing a sample video, in an effort to show what watching videos on the Xperia XZ4’s display will be like. Neither the video nor its rather suggestive description conveys any unknown information about the upcoming smartphone. Apart from uploading a public video on YouTube, Ice universe also posted photos of the screen protector on Twitter, commenting that the Xperia XZ4’s display is 15.2 centimetres in length, which is nearly equal to the length of the iPhone XS Max. What’s evident from the screen protector though, is that the Xperia XZ4’s display sports no notches of any kind. Cut-outs for the earpiece, a single camera, and an LED flash can be seen on the screen protector. From what we’ve seen and heard before, the Sony Xperia XZ4 will come with a 6.5-inch OLED display. With an aspect ratio as wide as 21:9, the display could well be too tall for everyday use in portrait mode, no matter how long the user’s fingers are. That said, Sony might equip the software on it with an easy-access shortcut so elements high up on the screen can be brought to reach in the lower regions, much like the feature seen on some Apple iPhones. The Sony Xperia XZ4 is expected to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset. RAM + storage options are said to be 6GB + 64GB and 8GB + 128GB. According to a recent report, the handset got an AnTuTu benchmark score of 395721. According to other reports, the Xperia XZ4 will sport a triple rear camera and a 3,900mAh battery that supports Quick Charge 4.0. We’ll know more about Sony’s upcoming flagship smartphone when more leaks pour in.   Related Read: Sony Xperia XA3 will be priced much higher than its predecessor: Report http://bit.ly/2GTg0CC

Oops ISS astronaut accidentally dials 911 from space

Key Highlights: Dutch astronaut André Kuipers dials 911 from space by mistake NASA security team on Earth frantically looks for signs of trouble Kuipers confesses his mistake in a radio show the next day   Can you imagine what the security team at NASA's Johnson Space Center must've felt when they came to know that an astronaut aboard  the International Space Station had just dialled 911? That's exactly what happened a couple of days ago when Dutch astronaut André Kuipers dialled the American emergency services number by accident from space. The security team at NASA raced to the room through which his call had connected only to find out nothing had happened. The sixty-year-old astronaut later explained himself in a radio programme by Dutch broadcasting network Nederlandse Omroep Stichting, "First you dial the 9 for an outside line, and then 011 for an international line. I made a mistake, and the next day I received an email message: Did you call 911?" Kuipers even quipped that he was a little disappointed that no one had come up to the space station to check. The phone system aboard the International Space Station uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to allow astronauts on-board to place calls the way we would on Earth with Skype. The system has been around for a decade now, said Wayne Hale to National Public Radio. "A capability that was built into the ISS, with the rise of Internet phone calls, is the ability for the astronauts in the space station to just dial up anybody that they might want to," Hale had said. "Many people have gotten calls from space." This isn't the first time an astronaut has misdialled from space. Some three years ago, British astronaut tweeted to apologise to a woman he had apparently called by mistake during his voyage aboard the International Space Station. Though it's possible to call any number from the space station, the converse isn't; you can't make a call to an astronaut on the space station.   Related Read: ISS astronaut unearths old NASA floppy disks in space http://bit.ly/2CQZHT1

Honor View 20 with 48MP camera, Link Turbo tech launching in India on January 29

Highlights: Honor V20 features a 48MP rear camera. It has a punch-hole display. It also features Link Turbo technology to boost internet connectivity.   Huawei has just sent out media invites for the launch of the Honor View 20 in India. The smartphone was launched in China just last month and is now headed to India with its first ever 48MP rear camera, a punch-hole display and a new technology called Link Turbo. The View 20 from Honor is a flagship grade smartphone and could be expected to cost somewhere between Rs 35,000 - Rs 45,000, depending on different storage variants. In terms of specs, the Honor View 20 features a 6.4-inch Full HD+ All-View display with a resolution of 2310x1080 pixels. The All-View display has a punch-hole in it to incorporate a selfie camera, similar to Samsung’s Infinity-O displays. The punch-hole is placed at the top left corner of the screen and measures 4.5mm in diameter. At the back, the phone is covered in glass which gets a V-shaped pattern under it signifying the View 20 moniker. At the heart of the View 20 lies Huawei’s flagship octa-core Kirin 980 chipset manufactured using the 7nm process. The processor has also been used on Huawei’s Mate 20 Pro flagship smartphone and so is the company’s GPU Turbo 2.0 performance and graphics boosting tech which also makes its way into the View 20. There is also a liquid cooling system to keep CPU temperatures in check. When it comes to the camera, the View 20’s 48MP rear camera is an industry first and get Sony’s IMX586 CMOS sensor with a pixel size of 0.8 μm, making it possible to pack 48 megapixels onto a 8.0 mm diagonal unit. One can expect the camera to account for good quality low light images with low noise. Minimal highlight blowouts or loss of detail in shadows can also be expected from the camera, but all depends on how well it has been optimised for the phone. The second sensor of the dual rear camera is used to capture depth. The punch-hole in the display houses a 25MP selfie shooter with f/2.0 aperture. The View 20 also gets a sizeable 4,000mAh battery with super fast charge support. Link Turbo tech in the phone is said to enable faster download speeds by leveraging both Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity at the same time. The phone runs on the latest Android 9 Pie OS with Magic UI 2.0 layered on top. Further, Honor View 20 comes in two variants - 6GB RAM + 128GB Storage and 8GB RAM + 128GB storage. In China, the 6GB variant of the phone is priced at CNY 2999 (approximately Rs 30,000) and the 8GB RAM version costs CNY 3499 (approximately Rs 35,500). Honor has also launched a special Moschino Edition of the View 20 with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage for CNY 3999 (approximately Rs 40,000). It is unknown which variants of the device will be launched in India. Related Read: Honor View 20 Maserati Edition Samsung Galaxy A8s launched with Infinity-O display http://bit.ly/2RAmRFa

Research finds Facebook tracks even those Android phones who dont have the app

Highlights: Facebook tracks even those Android phones who don't have the app, says research At least 61% of the tested apps were found to automatically transfer data to Facebook In what could make things worse for Facebook, a new research has found that the social media giant tracks the data of even those Android users who do not use the company app. The findings of the research, conducted by UK-based charity Privacy International, once again raises questions on how the social media companies attack the privacy of its users as well as those who are indirectly connected to them. Facebook routinely tracks users, non users and logged out users outside its platform, said the study by UK-based charity Privacy International (via IANS). The findings showed that the app developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. According to the study, at least 61 percent of apps that were tested automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app. “This happens whether people have a Facebook account or not, or whether they are logged into Facebook or not. In our analysis, apps that automatically transmit data to Facebook share this data together with a unique identifier, the Google advertising ID (AAID),” the research said. For the study, Privacy International said that it examined 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from at least 10 million to a maximum of 500 million. The apps included language-learning tool Duolingo, travel and restaurant website TripAdvisor, job database Indeed and flight search engine Skyscanner, among others, the research said. All apps were tested between August and December 2018. In a response to the findings, Facebook reportedly said that sharing data is “common practice for many companies” and is useful for both users and the companies involved. “This information is important for helping developers understand how to improve their apps and for helping people receive relevant advertising in a privacy-protective way,” The Independent quoted Facebook as saying. “We do this in a transparent manner by explaining the practice through our Data Policy and Cookies Policy, and by using Google's advertising identifier, which can be controlled centrally by people using their device settings,” the social media giant was cited as saying. Facebook got embroiled in a scandal wherein a British data firm called Cambridge Analytica was found to be improperly gathering information of 87 million users. Related Read: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologises to US Congress for data leaks affecting 87 million users http://bit.ly/2SKhr7K

Frustrated man puts up anti-Google banners against companys alleged poor aftersales service

Highlights: Haryana man puts up anti-Google banners in Delhi Man claims the service centre did not rectify issues with his Pixel device What would you do when you are dissatisfied by a company’s service? The first idea that comes to our minds is to ‘shame’ the company on social media by listing our problems. This has been the trend lately but what if, the social media rant is not as fruitful as you thought it would be? In what could be called a bizarre incident, a Haryana man, frustrated by Google’s after sales service, resorted to a new idea to slam the company after it allegedly failed to rectify the problems in his Pixel smartphone. He put up posters in country’s Capital blaming the company of “Manipulations.”   The whole scenario is a year old but media outlets started to pick this up recently. Several photos of anti-Google posters are now making rounds on the internet in which people are being advised to refrain from buying Google Pixel phones. As claimed, Manu Aggarwal from Haryana purchased a Pixel smartphone in early 2017 and started facing issues in the phone last year. As a normal person would do, he contacted the Google's customer service for repairs. According to his tweets, his Pixel device went through several rounds of repairs but he was not satisfied with the service. Aggarwal claims that instead of working fine, his phone developed even more snags than before. Frustrated with the persistent problems, Aggarwal chose Twitter to express his anger about the issue. In reply, Google reached out to him with a promise of fixing his smartphone. However, the issue never seemed to be sorted out. On Twitter, Aggarwal even uploaded screenshots of his conversations with the customer care executives terming those over two-hour long calls as “mental harassment.” Not only just tweeting to Google, he tagged Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in most of his tweets in a bid to get the intervention so that his problems can be addressed quickly. When things didn’t turn out as expected, he apparently chose to make this issue get more eyeballs. Aggarwal got some anti-Google banners printed and went around places in Delhi to put up banners slamming Google’s alleged poor after sales service. The banners urged people to not buy Google phones. The banners were put up in places like Connaught Place, a frenetic business and financial hub in Central Delhi. The banners even had a QR code that linked back to his tweet. He even placed a placard on his car bashing Google for unsatisfactory service. It is not known whether his problems have been addressed or not but when we went to his profile, we could only see anti-Google tweets till May 28. Aggarwal had replied to an anti-Google tweet made by US President Donald Trump. He has also made an “eye opening” video titled, “Revolution for All Gadget Problems - Case Study of Google Pixel Fraud” in a bid to spread “awareness” about the “cheating and fraud by big brands.” Related Read: Google Pixel 3 launch http://bit.ly/2SI7KHi

Upcoming Redmi phone could feature USB type-C connectivity: Reports

Highlights Founder and CEO of Xiaom, Lei Jun took to Weibo to ask his followers about USB type-C connectivity on a Redmi smartphone. It is possible that the upcoming Redmi phone has USB-C connectivity. It is also possible that the phone could house a 48MP camera. The only thing constant in life is change. When the change from micro USB to USB-C came, it was presumed that all smartphones and accessories would change to USB-C by the end of 2018. However, that isn’t the case. There are a lot of devices still functioning on micro USB connectivity including Redmi devices. However, Founder and CEO of Xiaom, Lei Jun posted comments on Chinese microblogging website Weibo asking his followers whether they would like to see a USB-C port on Redmi phones. There is no information whether the upcoming Redmi phone will feature USB-C so it is safe to assume that the upcoming device could move to USB-C connectivity. Adding USB-C connectivity instead of micro USB could increase the cost of the device, so it will be interesting to see how the smartphone is priced moving forward.  Redmi has confirmed the phone with a 48MP rear camera saying that the launch event will be on January 10. It is assumed that this device will come with USB C. Except the date, there is no official information about the upcoming device. There are conflicting reports which claim that the phone will either be the Xiaomi Redmi Pro 2 or the Redmi 7. The company has teased an image which has “Redmi” written on it, alongside the date and time of the launch. A shadow in the image reads 48, possible implying the 48MP camera setup on the device. According to a previous report, the 48MP sensor could be a part of the triple camera setup on the back panel of the phone. Apart from this, this Redmi phone could have a punch-hole in the display to incorporate the selfie camera. Just like the Samsung Galaxy A8s and Honor View 20, this Redmi smartphone is expected to have an LCD panel.  Also read Xiaomi CEO confirms Redmi will be a separate brand Xiaomi's POCO teases launch of 'New Poco' smartphone   http://bit.ly/2CRny50

Xiaomi Redmi Pro 2 official renders leaked, TENAA listing shows 63-inch display, 3900 mAh battery

Highlights: Redmi Pro 2 to sport 6.3-inch display The phone to house 3900mAh battery It is expected to launch on January 10 Recently, it was announced that Xiaomi is all set to launch a Redmi device on January 10. Although, it was not confirmed what smartphone would the company launch but latest leaks and listing suggest that it could be the Redmi Pro 2. The official renders of the smartphone were spotted online and the the device has also been seen listed on TENAA. The Redmi Pro 2 will be the first device from Redmi as an independent entity after it got separated from parent brand Xiaomi. The Xiaomi Redmi Pro 2 surfaced on Chinese Certification Agency TENAA confirming the rear dual camera setup with LED flash and a fingerprint sensor. The image also shows the device sporting “Redmi” branding on the bottom of the rear panel, instead of the regular “Mi” attesting to the fact that Redmi is now a separate brand from Xiaomi. On the front, the phone is seen sporting a waterdrop notch, the power button and volume rocker buttons can be seen on the right edge of the device. The TENAA listing also reveals that the device in question will feature a 6.3-inch display and will be backed by a 3900 mAh battery. Apart from this, no other information on the hardware front was revealed. Allegedly, the Redmi Pro 2 will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 675. It is expected to feature a Sony IMX576 24MP selfie camera and a dual camera setup with 48MP + 5MP sensors on the back. It could run on Xiaomi MIUI 10 based on Android Pie 9.0. As mentioned above, the smartphone would be Redmi’s first device after being an independent brand. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun confirmed the development saying that the move would help the company focus more on the “Mi” brand and help in generating more revenue from it. After this split, Xiaomi will have three different brands under it: Redmi for budget phones, Poco for ‘affordable premium’ phones and Mi for premium phones. Related Read: Xiaomi may launch a Redmi device with 48MP camera on January 10 Smartphones expected to appear in 2019 Image courtesy: Android Pure http://bit.ly/2F7KgrU