Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Zoom booms as pandemic drives millions to its video conferencing service
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Workforce training app developer Poka adds strategic investor Schneider Electric
Poka, a workforce training app and software service for industrial companies, has added SE Ventures, the venture capital arm of the European energy and automation conglomerate Schneider Electric to its roster of backers.
The company has raised over $23 million in funding so far for its application and software services package that provides training and tips for workers on the factory floor.
The company said it would use the new funding to expand its global marketing through new distribution strategies and speed up its product development.
Since 2014, Poka has been selling its services to companies including Bosch, Danone, Mars, The Kraft Heinz Company, Johnson & Johnson and Stanley Black and Decker, the company said.
Previous backers of the Quebec City, Canada-based company include Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Groupe Leclerc, and CDPQ, according to the company.
For Poka, demand is driven by the combination of increasing automation and an aging workforce creating a skills gap in industrial facilities.
“Poka was designed specifically to address the challenges and needs of large global manufacturers — many of whom are clients of Schneider Electric,” said Poka chief executive Alex Leclerc in a statement. “Our partnership gives us global reach within our target markets and provides value to our joint customers by offering them a more complete path to digital transformation.”
For SE Ventures general partner Grant Allen, the replacement of aging technologies around communication and knowledge-sharing in manufacturing facilities represented an obvious investment opportunity. “The tools and systems used to communicate, capture and share knowledge in commercial production facilities are largely outdated, leaving workers without the necessary information to be effective and safe,” said Allen.
Instacart expands sick pay for workers with COVID-19 or who live with someone who tested positive, offers free telemedicine for symptomatic workers in DC pilot (Russell Brandom/The Verge)
Instacart expands sick pay for workers with COVID-19 or who live with someone who tested positive, offers free telemedicine for symptomatic workers in DC pilot — The company will also provide childcare and telemedicine benefits — Instacart will expand its COVID-19 sick pay to include …
Google removes Remove China Apps, which promised to help users rid their smartphones of Chinese apps, from the Play Store; the app had 4.7M downloads in India (Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan/Financial ...)
Google removes Remove China Apps, which promised to help users rid their smartphones of Chinese apps, from the Play Store; the app had 4.7M downloads in India — Remove China Apps reached top of Play Store in India before it was ousted on Tuesday — Google intervened on Tuesday after millions …
Foxconn, Oppo, others may go for Rs 41, 000 cr PLI sops
Facebook and PayPal invest in Southeast Asian ride-hailing giant GoJek
Facebook and PayPal have made investments in GoJek, joining Google and Tencent among other high-profile technology firms that have backed the five-year-old Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm that also offers food delivery and mobile payments.
Facebook, for which it is the first investment in an Indonesia-based firm, and PayPal did not disclose the size of their checks. GoJek told TechCrunch that Facebook and PayPal were participating in its ongoing financing round, which brings it total raise-to-date to over $3 billion.
For Facebook, which in April invested in India’s top telecom operator Reliance Jio Platforms, backing GoJek unlocks a similar opportunity: Helping millions of small businesses.
Matt Idema, chief operating officer at WhatsApp, said the company will work with “indispensable” service GoJek to “bring millions of small businesses and the customers they serve into the largest digital economy in Southeast Asia.”
“The majority of small businesses in Indonesia rely on cash to operate due to the country’s large unbanked population. Digital payments are safer than cash, both for businesses and customers. And digital payments help more people participate in the economy and give businesses access to credit which is crucial for business growth,” he wrote in a blog post.
PayPal, which last year invested in money lender Tala ahead of the startup’s launch in India, said the commercial partnership will enable the global payments giant to “significantly grow” its scope and scale in Southeast Asia.
“This new relationship is another positive step in our journey towards becoming the worldwide payments partner of choice, and helping to fuel global commerce by connecting the world’s leading marketplaces and payment networks,” PayPal said in a statement.
GoJek, which disclosed it had raised $1.2 billion in March to employees and was valued at about $10 billion, said it has amassed over 170 million users in Southeast Asia. In March, the company, which competes with Singapore-headquartered Grab, said it had raised nearly $3 billion over the years.
“We have the opportunity to achieve something truly unique as we aim to help more businesses to digitise and ensure that many millions more consumers are enjoying the benefits that the digital economy can bring,” said Andre Soelistyo, who was appointed as co-chief executive of GoJek last year, in a statement. Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim resigns his top job at the firm to join Indonesian cabinet in October last year.
More to follow…
Google pulls ‘Remove China Apps’ from Play Store
Remove China Apps, an app that gained popularity in India in recent weeks and did exactly what its name suggests, has been pulled from the Play Store.
The top trending app in India, which was downloaded more than 5 million times since late May and enabled users to detect and easily delete apps developed by Chinese firms, was pulled from Android’s marquee app store for violating Google Play Store’s Deceptive Behaviour Policy, TechCrunch has learned.
Under this policy an app on Google Play Store cannot make changes to a user’s device settings, or features outside of the app without the user’s knowledge and consent, and not it can encourage or incentivize users into removing or disabling third-party apps.
The app, developed by Indian firm OneTouch AppLabs, gained popularity in India in part because of a growing anti-China sentiment among many citizens as tension between the world’s two most populous nations has escalated in recent days over a Himalayan border dispute.
Several Indian celebrities in recent days have backed the idea of deleting Chinese apps. Yoga guru Baba Ramdev tweeted a video over the weekend that showed him deleting several apps that had affiliation with China.
Responding to a tweet from an Indian actor deleting TikTok from his phone, Nupur Sharma, a spokeswoman for India’s ruling party BJP, said it was “great to see concerned citizens setting an example” and “we ought to hit them where it hurts most.”
Citing an industry source, Chinese state-run Global Times news outlet reported on Tuesday that if the Indian government allows the “irrational anti-China sentiment” to continue it risks ruining bilateral relations that is “likely to draw tit-for-tat punishment from Beijing.”
The report added that some users in China ridiculed Remove China Apps and urged Indians to “throw away” their smartphones, referring to Chinese smartphone makers’ dominance in India’s smartphone market.
If the sentiment from India persists, it could mean bad news for several Chinese firms such as ByteDance and UC Browser that count India as their biggest overseas market. TikTok, which weeks ago was grappling with content moderation efforts in India, sparked a new debate over the weekend after a popular creator claimed that a video she posted on TikTok was pulled by the Chinese firm.
The video was critical of the Chinese government, she said. In a statement to TechCrunch, a TikTok spokesperson said the platform welcomes diversity of users and viewpoints and said it had implemented a more rigorous review process and reinstated the video.
In April, India amended its foreign direct investment policy to enforce tougher scrutiny on Chinese investors looking to cut checks to firms in the world’s second largest internet market. New Delhi, which maintains a similar stand for investors from several other neighboring nations, said the measure was introduced to “curb the opportunistic takeover” of Indian firms going through distress because of the global pandemic.
India’s Prime Minister Modi has also aggressively promoted the idea of boycotting goods made by foreign firms and advised the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens to look for local alternatives as part of his push to make India “self-reliant” and revive the slowing economy.
Redmi Note 9 Pro Max to Go on Sale in India Today via Amazon, Mi.com
A look at indie game publishing in the 1990s at Apogee, GodGames, id, and Epic, which used a shareware-style model that became a foundation of modern publishing (Jessica Conditt/Engadget)
A look at indie game publishing in the 1990s at Apogee, GodGames, id, and Epic, which used a shareware-style model that became a foundation of modern publishing — Apogee, GodGames, id and Epic laid the foundation for modern publishing. — 7m ago — Publishing deals in the video game industry …
Monday, June 1, 2020
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A service that detects ‘China apps’ goes viral in India
The app’s name says it all: Remove China Apps.
Developed by a self-proclaimed “Indian startup” named OneTouch AppLabs, Remove China Apps crossed 1 million downloads within 10 days of launch in May. Its overnight success came amid rising China-Indian tensions over the countries’ disputed border in the Himalayas.
Most of the app’s installs are found in India, although analytics data from App Annie shows that it has been gaining momentum in Australia in the last few days, rising to No.5 among Android tools apps.
The app is straightforward to use: Click scan and it will either congratulates one on having no Chinese apps or displays a list of those that are determined to be of Chinese origin — like TikTok.
India is one of the top overseas destinations for Chinese tech companies. Xiaomi and Oppo have dominated mobile sales there for some time and a significant number of top Android apps in the country are developed by Chinese companies, as my former colleague Jon Russell acutely pointed out.
On Android, Remove China Apps has a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5 stars rating from nearly 180,000 reviews. It claims it can identify an app’s country of origin based on market research, while it does not guarantee the result’s accuracy. It leaves the choice to users to remove the apps it flags, saying it provides the service for non-commercial purposes.
Despite its instant popularity, the app’s background is cryptic. The company website is a simple WordPress-based site and Remove China Apps is, in its own word, its first product. This is an underwhelming achievement in contrast to its grandiose statement claiming it has “experience of 8+ years in mobile and web application design, development and management.”
It’s also unclear how the developer defines “China apps.” For instance, will apps developed by overseas Chinese sound an alarm? How about a Chinese subsidiary that operates a fully localized team abroad? User tests show that it flags the U.S. video conferencing giant Zoom. Does the fact that its founder Eric Yuan, an American citizen born in China, makes Zoom a “China app”? Meanwhile, it misses some obvious targets, like Chinese apps that come bundled with smartphones.
As of the writing, we haven’t heard back from the company regarding the methodologies it uses to spot “China apps.” It does, however, disclose online what information it collects from users, including one’s device model, the language set for the device system, the device manufacturer and app-specific information such as the version code of apps, the version name of apps, and the package name of apps.
The app has prompted heated debate among Chinese developers targeting international markets. Baijing, or Beluga Whale, a popular online community for China’s app exporters, wrote (in Chinese) that Remove China Apps is “a form of market disruption” and called on Chinese developers to report the app to Google.
Many are wary of rising anti-China sentiment overseas. As the founder of a major app exporter said to me: “I think what happens in India will happen in other countries in the future, so this is a long-term impact that should factor into Chinese developers’ calculation.”
There’s perhaps some assurance for Chinese developers. While users of the detection app applaud its mission, a few complain that there are no immediate replacements of certain Chinese apps. One of the top indigenous alternatives recommended by users is Jio Platforms, the well-funded Reliance subsidiary that operates a wide range of mobile apps.
OpenAI says its non-profit arm would receive shares in the new public benefit corporation at a valuation determined by independent financial advisors (Cade Metz/New York Times)
Cade Metz / New York Times : OpenAI says its non-profit arm would receive shares in the new public benefit corporation at a valuation det...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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