Chrome and Firefox extensions with up to 4M installs leaked sensitive data, including names and passwords, to marketing intelligence service Nacho Analytics — As many as 4 million people have Web browser extensions that sell their every click. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Adam Neumann, the co-founder and chief executive of the international real estate co-working startup, WeWork, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of its initial public offering.
The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, is unusual considering that founders typically wait until after a company holds its public offering to liquidate their holdings.
Despite the loans and sales of stock, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Neumann remains the single largest shareholder in the company.
According to the Journal’s reporting, Neumann has already set up a family office to invest the proceeds and begun to hire financial professionals to run it.
He’s also made significant investments in real estate in New York and San Francisco, including four homes in the greater New York metropolitan area, and a $21 million 13,000 square-foot house in the Bay Area complete with a guitar shaped room (I guess a fiddle would be too on the nose). In all, Neumann reportedly spent $80 million on real estate.
Neumann has also invested in commercial real estate (the kind that WeWork leases to provide workspace with more flexible leases for companies and entrepreneurs), including properties in San Joes, Calif. and New York. Indeed four of Neumann’s properties are leased to WeWork — to the tune of several million dollars in rent. According to the Journal, Neumann will transfer those property holdings to a WeWork-controlled fund.
The WeWork chief executive has also invested in startups in recent years. He’s got an equity stake in seven companies including: Hometalk, Intercure, EquityBee, Selina, Tunity, Feature.fm, and Pins, according to CrunchBase.
The rewards that Neumann is reaping from the loans and stock sales are among the highest recorded by a private company executive. In recent years, Evan Spiegel sold $8 million in stock and borrowed $20 million from Snap before its 2017 public offering and Slack Technologies chief executive Stewart Butterfieldsold $3.2 million of stock before Slack’s public offering in June.
The only liquidation of stock and other payouts that have been disclosed which come close to Neumann’s payouts are the $300 million that GroupOn co-founder Eric Lefkofksy’s sold before his company’s IPO and the over $100 million that Mark Pincus took off the table ahead of Zynga’s offering.
WeWork declined to comment for this article.
The final hours for China’s Tiangong-2 space station are at hand, as the 8-ton piece of hardware will fall to earth, or rather sea, some time in the next 20 hours or so in a controlled deorbit manuever. But unlike with its predecessor, it isn’t a mystery where this particular piece of space debris is going to fall.
Tiangong-2 is a small space station that was put into orbit in 2016 to test a number of China’s orbital technologies; it was originally planned to stay up there for two years, but as many a well-engineered piece of space kit has done, it greatly exceeded its expected lifespan and has been operational for more than a thousand days now.
Chinese Taikonauts have visited the station to perform experiments, test tools, orbital refueling, and all that sort of thing. But it’s not nearly as well equipped as the International Space Station, nor as spacious — and that’s saying something — so they only stayed a month, and even that must have been pretty grueling.
The time has come, however, for Tiangong-2 to be deorbited and, naturally, destroyed in the process. The China National Space Administration indicated that the 18-meter-wide station and solar panels will mostly burn up during reentry, but that a small amount of debris may fall “in a safe area in the South Pacific,” specifying a rather large area that does technically include quite a bit of New Zealand. (160-190°W long by 30-45°S lat)
They did not specify when exactly it would be coming down, except that it would be during July 19 Beijing time (it’s already morning there at the time of publishing). It should produce a visible streak but not anything you’ll see if you aren’t looking for it. This visualization from The Aerospace Company shows how the previous, very similar station would break up:
It’ll be different this time around but you get a general idea.
That’s much better than Tiangong-1, which stopped responding to its operators after several years and as such could not be deliberately guided into a safe reentry path. Instead it just slowly drifted down until people were pretty sure it would be reentering sometime in the following few days — and it did.
There was never any real danger that the bus-sized station would land on anyone, but it’s just fundamentally a little unnerving not knowing where the thing would be coming down.
This isn’t the last Tiangong; Tiangong-3 is planned for a 2020 launch, and will further inform the Chinese engineers and astronauts in their development of a more full-featured space station planned for a couple years down the line.
Controlled deorbit is the responsible thing to do, not to mention just plain polite, and the CNSA is doing the right thing here. All the same, Kiwis should probably carry umbrellas tomorrow.
US Treasury's FinCEN says scammers tried to steal an average of $301M per month via business email compromise scams in 2018, up from $110M per month in 2016 — The frequency of business email compromise (BEC) scams has increased year over year and so did the value of attempted thefts …
Redmi’s new entry-level phone, the Redmi 7A, was launched in India on July 4. It went on sale for the first time last week, and now, the phone will be up for grabs again. The sale will be conducted at 12pm on Flipkart and Mi.com. Manu Kumar Jain, Xiaomi India MD, claimed that the phone had gone out of stock within seconds on both Flipkart and Mi.com. Therefore, now the company is further ''increasing its production and more quantity'' and will be made available today.
Redmi 7A price in India, discount, and offersThe 2GB RAM + 16GB storage variant is priced at Rs 5,999, which can be purchased for Rs 5,799 during the sale as Redmi is offering a Rs 200 discount if you purchase the phone this month. Coming to the sale offers, if you purchase the phone from Flipkart, you can avail an additional 5-percent discount using an Axis Bank Buzz credit card. However, if you decide to buy the phone from Mi.com, you will get an exchange discount as well as 125GB additional 4G data and Rs. 2,200 cashback from Reliance Jio.
Redmi 7A specificationsRedmi 7A features a 5.45-inch HD+ (720x1440 pixels) display with an aspect ratio of 18:9. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 439 chipset, and comes with 2GB RAM and up to 32GB storage. The phone runs on MIUI 10, based on Android 9 Pie. It packs a 4000mAh battery that supports 10W charging.
On the optics front, the Redmi 7A has a 12MP Sony IMX486 sensor at the back along with an LED flash and PDAF lens. At the front, the smartphone sports a 5MP selfie camera, which also supports AI Face Unlock.
In the connectivity department, the phone has 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth v4.0, GPS/ A-GPS, FM radio, Micro-USB, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Besides, it also features a microSD card slot that supports up to 256GB of storage.
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If information circulating the internet is to be believed, then Honor is working on launching a smart TV in August 2019. This TV will run on Huawei’s own Harmony OS, more commonly known as the HongMeng OS in China. The TV will be a 55-inch unit and there is no information on when this TV will reach India. It is said that the TV will work as a hub for Huawei’s smart home devices apart from working as a TV. According to the report, the Chinese users have moved away from watching TV and have started using their phone for entertainment and smart appliance controls. According to the source, “Chinese people watch less and less TV as the average daily usage of TV sets dropped in three years from 70 per cent to 30 per cent while the profits of TV manufacturers decreased in tandem each year.”
Huawei has been working on its own Harmony OS since 2012, before the company's US ban. The OS is said to be compatible with Android apps. How that works is something we will know when we get our hands on the OS.
Using a smart TV as an entertainment device and a console to control your smart appliances is nothing new. In 2019, LG launched its new line-up of TVs powered by the Alpha 9 gen 2 processor that brings with it Google Assistant and Alexa built-in. These capabilities also help users control smart home appliances that are compatible with the Google Assistant or Alexa from the comfort of the living room. The LG TVs have a hub for controlling smart devices and run on the company’s own WebOS.
Sony, on the other hand, has Android-powered TVs with Google Assistant built-in and if you have any smart appliances that are compatible with the Google Assistant, then you can use your TV to control those as well.
Put simply, if you have a smart camera at the entrance of your house and when your doorbell rings, you can see who's outside without leaving the comfort of your couch. You can also control your smart lights and to ensure the right mood is set for movie night without leaving the comfort of your couch, ensuring you are a happier couch potato.
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Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in SE Asia, has been acquired by cloud-based conferencing solutions provider 8x8 in a deal worth ~$125M — Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in Southeast Asia, announced today that it has been acquired by 8×8 in a deal worth about $125 million.
The above image is a shot of Georgia Tech’s latest robot posed next to a penny. The 3D printed bot is roughly two millimeters in length — or about the size of the world’s smallest ants, per the school. The tiny devices are designed to move using vibration from a variety of sources, ranging from ultrasound to more traditional speakers.
With the proper source, the bristles allow them to move four times their own size in roughly a second by moving the legs up and down. Different sized legs react differently, responding to a variety of different frequencies The actuators that generate the vibration are outside of the robot, however, since batteries small enough to be housed on their bodies simply don’t exist.
The research team believes robots of this size could ultimately prove useful for a variety of different tasks, ranging from environmental sensing to human body repair. For now, however, we’re just dealing with some tiny prototypes.
“We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind,” assistantships professor Azadeh Ansari said in a release tied to the news. “We are working at the intersection of mechanics, electronics, biology and physics. It’s a very rich area and there’s a lot of room for multidisciplinary concepts.”
Fintech startup N26 is raising $170 million a few months after raising $300 million. While it’s technically structured as a new round, the company considers today’s new funding as an extension of the Series D round.
N26 has only reached out to existing investors. All the investors in the Series D round are investing again, as well as a few investors that have been around for a while. So that’s Insight Venture Partners, GIC (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund), Tencent, Allianz X, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital and Greyhound Capital.
“It’s a raise in valuation of about 30%. It’s only existing investors that participated. We didn’t go external as it is also quite quickly after the round that we did earlier this year,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “But I think it’s a good testament of the development of the company over the last couple of months.”
With this new influx of funding, N26 has now reached a post-money valuation of $3.5 billion. The company has raised $670 million in total. And N26 says that it is now the highest valued German startup and one of the highest valued fintech startups in the world.
N26 has been building a retail bank that works better. The company lets you sign up from your phone, get a card that you can control from your phone and make purchases all around the world without any foreign transaction fee. And the company has managed to attract 3.5 million customers all around Europe.
More recently, N26 launched its challenger bank in the U.S. The company plans to expand to Brazil in the coming months and launch more products to make it easier to manage your money. Many features will be based on Spaces, which are sub-accounts that let you separate your money in multiple pools and eventually share Spaces with other people.
I chatted with N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf about the future of N26. Here’s our interview, which was edited for clarity and brevity.
TechCrunch: You announced N26 You already. What’s the idea behind it?
Valentin Stalf: We launched it yesterday or the day before yesterday. There are different card colors and we’re differentiating our premium tier [N26 Metal] a little bit more from the mid tier [N26 You]. I think it was a little bit similar.
But now, N26 You is more individual. And then it’ll come together in a couple of weeks when we launch additional cards for one account. You can have different colors. And then, with Spaces, I think we're trying to build the most flexible bank account to live and think your way.
And then, in the next quarter we’ll do an app update with a transaction-based timeline.
TC: Does it mean that because of the new colors, people will get multiple cards and attach one card to one Space for instance?
Stalf: In the end, you’ll be able to attach the cards freely to different Spaces. It’s not even that important that you attach one card to one Space. Sometimes, people want to have multiple cards. But if you only use one card, then you can swap a transaction to a different Space.
TC: Now that you’re bringing perks from N26 Metal to N26 You, what does it mean for Metal customers? Do you just get a different card?
Stalf: I think with Metal, we’ll go more and more in the premium direction.
We also mentioned that we’ll be relaunching our insurance packages. The new package will be based on traveling but also mobility. You’ll have a lot of things in the mobility space including scooter riding.
TC: Let’s talk about product. You talked about Shared Spaces and multiple cards. There’s a redesign that is coming out in the next few months, what will it look like?
Stalf: With the app update that we’re doing, it’s not just a design update of the front end, it’s really an update of the way we talk to our customers and how we present transactions. We’ll be changing what you see in the app timeline.
We want to give you more context and we cant to make it smarter. We’ll integrate customer support interactions, we’ll integrate transactions that didn’t work… These features will launch over time.
We’re launching the infrastructure and then we’re launching each of the features. For instance, you’ll have the opportunity to start a customer service interaction directly from a transaction, straight to live chat.
And it’s coming together with Shared Spaces. It’s also something that needs to be reflected in the timeline in a smart way. Some of the transactions that might show up in your timeline might not be done by yourself but maybe by someone else.
Depending on which transaction you do, we move more details into the timeline directly based on what we think is important. So let’s say it’s a transaction in a new country, you might want to see the exchange rate in the timeline directly. If it’s rent, sending the same amount every month, you don’t need to see more details. It just needs to say rent — okay fine.
TC: What did you promise when you raised some more money? New countries, user numbers, improved monthly transaction volume?
Stalf: We have an opportunity that we build a bank that has more than 50 million users around the globe. Today, we only have 3.5 million users but we’re accelerating.
From a country perspective, we have agreed already that we go to Brazil. There’s no plan after Brazil yet. Now let’s focus on the U.S., then on Brazil, then next year we’ll find out what’s the feedback from these two markets.
Wavecell, a cloud-communications platform for companies in Southeast Asia, announced today that it has been acquired by 8×8 in a deal worth about $125 million. The acquisition will help San Jose, California-based 8×8 expand in Asia, where Wavecell already has offices in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.
Wavecell’s cloud API platform, which includes SMS, chat, video and voice messaging, is used by companies such as Paidy, Lalamove and Tokopedia. It has relationships with 192 network operators and partners like WhatsApp and claims its infrastructure is used to share more than two billion messages each year.
The terms of the deal includes $69 million in cash and about $56 million in 8×8 common shares. Founded in 2010, Wavecell’s investors included Qualgro VC, Wavemaker Partners and MDI Ventures.
In a prepared statement, 8×8 CEO Vik Verma said “8×8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native, technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact center delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs. We’re excited to welcome the Wavecell employees to the 8×8 family. We now have a significant market presence in Asia and expect to continue to expand in the region and globally in order to meet evolving customer requirements.”
Billy Perrigo / Time : An in-depth look at the UK's AI Safety Institute, whose researchers test AI systems for risks and for capabili...
