Monday, July 27, 2020
Telemarketers cry foul as telcos hike bulk SMS fees by upto 30%
Government's app challenge gets nearly 7,000 entries
Vivo V19 with 32MP+8MP dual front cameras, Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 SoC gets a price cut of up to Rs 4,000
Video consultations with doctors see big rise
Google to keep most of its employees at home until July 2021
Realme Narzo 10 to Go on Sale in India Today via Flipkart, Realme.com
Vicariously mimics another person’s Twitter feed using lists, but it violates Twitter rules
That Vicariously app you might have seen pop up in your twitter feed via a little viral growth hacking has run aground on Twitter’s automation rules. We reached out about it after it started spamming my feed with ‘so and so has added you to a list’ notifications and Twitter says that the app is not in compliance.
Updates below.
To be fair, they did also say they ‘love’ it — but that it will have to find a different way to do what it does.
“We love that Vicariously uses Lists to help people find new accounts to follow and get new perspectives. However, the way the app is currently doing this is in violation of Twitter’s automation rules,” Twitter said in a statement. “We’ve reached out to them to find a way to bring the app into compliance with our rules.”
The app was made by Jake Harding, an entrepreneur who built it as a side project.
The app, which you can find here, enumerates the followers of a target account and builds a list out of the accounts that it follows. This enables you to create lists that are snapshots of the exact (minus algorithmic tweak) feed that any given user sees when they open their app. Intriguing, right?
Well, it turns out Twitter has done this themselves twice before. Once in 2011 and originally waaaay back in 2009. The product had a built in feature that allowed you to just click through and view someone’s follower graph as a feed with a tap.
I was there in 2009 when it was a thing, and I can tell you that it was just flat out cool to see someone else’s graph going by. In the early growing days it was very interesting to see who was following who or what. It sort of taught you how to ‘do’ Twitter when everyone was learning it together. I can see why Harding wanted a duplicate of this in order to re-create this feeling of ‘snapshotting’ someone else’s info apparatus.
Unfortunately, one of the big side effects of the way that Vicariously duplicates this feature using an automated ‘list builder’ is that it spams every person it adds to the list given that Twitter always notifies you when someone adds you to a list and there is no current way to alter that behavior.
So you see a lot of ‘added to their list‘ tweets and notis.
There are also other issues with the way that Vicariously works to build public lists of people’s follower graphs. There is potential for abuse here in that it could be used to target the people that a targeted account follows. One of the major reasons Twitter killed this feature twice is that the whole thing feels hyper personal. Your Twitter follower graph is something that you, theoretically, curate. Though a lot of people have become more performative with follows and instead, ironically, add the people they want to ‘follow’ to lists.
Having your graph public is something that felt exciting and connective at one point in Twitter’s life. But the world may be too big and too nasty now for something like this to feel really comfortable if it ever spreads beyond the technorati/Twitter power user crowd. We’ll see I guess.
Oh, and Twitter, it is about time you built in a ‘can not be added to lists’ feature. Otherwise, as someone reminded me via DM, you run the risk of making all of the same mistakes as Facebook.
Update July 27th 7:50PM PT. Harding posted some tweets from the official Vicariously account noting that he is adding some privacy controls to the app. He also notes that he’s hoping to work with the Twitter developer relations team to build out the product in a way that prevents abuse.
Finally, I've been overwhelmed with the feedback I've received today. Much of it positive, some of it negative, all of it appreciated.
I have a bunch of thoughts and opinions on today's opening of pandora's box, but I'll save those for my personal account
/cc @JakeHarding
— Vicariously (@getvicarious) July 28, 2020
Hong Kong-based EMQ raises $20 million for its cross-border financial settlement tech
Cross-border financial transactions are a major headache for individuals and large companies alike, who often have to deal with long wait times and high fees in order to send money to recipients in other countries. EMQ, a Hong Kong-based startup that develops network infrastructure to make international payments faster, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by WI Harper Group.
EMQ’s technology is integrated by clients, including online banks digital wallets, e-commerce and merchant settlement providers and licensed financial institutions, into their existing networks, making it easier for them to perform cross-border remittances.
The funding, which also included participation from AppWorks, Abu Dhabi Capital, DG Ventures, Intudo Ventures, VS Partners, January Capital, Hard Yaka, Vectr Fintech Partners, Quest Ventures and Sparklabs, will be used for expanding EMQ’s international business, product development and licensing in key markets. Along with a Series A announced back in December 2017, its newest round brings EMQ’s total raised to $26.5 million.
EMQ is already licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and registered as a Money Service Business in Canada. It has also been accepted into the regulatory sandbox launched by Taiwan’s Financial Supervisory Commission to encourage innovation by financial tech companies.
The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Max Liu told TechCrunch that EMQ will focus on scaling its operations, especially for business remittances, in China, followed by India and Japan. EMQ’s tech is already used to process business payments in 80 countries.
Until recently, the majority of transactions facilitated by EMQ were between consumers. Then in May, the company launched its enterprise payment solution for companies. Liu said EMQ now expects business-to-business transactions to account for half of its gross transaction volume in 2021.
According to Juniper Research, cross-border B2B transactions are expected to exceed $218 trillion by 2022, up from $150 trillion in 2018, thanks in large part to the adoption of new technology. Other fintech companies that also provide tech, including APIs, for cross-border transactions include Currencycloud, Payoneer and Transferwise.
Liu said EMQ’s main selling point is that it is focused on building a flexible infrastructure that can handle a large range of use cases in different countries, including e-commerce, merchant settlement, procurement, remittance and payroll.
He added that EMQ can be integrated into a client’s existing tech infrastructure with as little as two API calls. EMQ gives clients a fully-functional sandbox environment, which mimics real transactions, and allows them to experiment with its tech and work with EMQ’s customer support team before it is formally deployed. Liu said it usually takes clients between two weeks to two months, depending on a company’s size and requirements, to fully integrate EMQ into their business operations.
In a press statement about the investment, Edward Liu, a partner at WI Harper Group, said, “As digital transformation intensifies globally, enterprises today are increasingly international in scale and they will require a network infrastructure like EMQ with greater speed, more certainty, increased flexibility and transparency, to expand their business in Asia and beyond. We are excited to partner with the EMQ team to expand its market-leading position in cross-border business payments globally.”
Cannabis VC Karan Wadhera on why the industry, which took a hit last year, is now quietly blazing
Early last year, excitement over the burgeoning cannabis industry was palpable in Silicon Valley, with a small number of venture firms writing their first checks to cannabis-related startups. Among them is the cross-border venture firm DCM, which even hosted an “inaugural” cannabis “tech summit” in May 2019 that drew so many investors that finding a seat was difficult.
Yet the buzz began to fade soon after, owing to a confluence of events, including a bubble in publicly traded cannabis companies; legalization that moved more slowly than hoped in certain states like New York; and an outbreak of lung injuries tied to vaping last fall.
The industry is still navigating around some of these trends, but it’s also proving more durable than outsiders might imagine, according to Karen Wadhera, a managing partner at Casa Verde Capital, the cannabis-focused venture firm founded by Snoop Dogg back in 2016. “Four plus months into COVID, cannabis has really proved itself to be a non-cyclical industry,” he said in a chat late last week, where we talked about what went so wrong, what’s happening right now, and whether he ever worries that Casa Verde might be too early to the cannabis party. Parts of that chat, edited for length, follow.
TC: The last time I saw you in person, last year, there was a lot of interest in cannabis. Since then, the headlines have pretty consistently been bad. What’s going on?
KW: What happened to the public perception of the cannabis industry is not too dissimilar to the dotcom bubble of the late ’90s, where there was a lot of hype — a lot of it driven by public companies — and a lot ofspeculative trading and valuations that weren’t really founded in reality. [We’re talking about] projections multiple years out into the future, and then crazy revenue multiples on top of that. Things just got really frothy, and that eventually burst, and last April or May was sort of apex of that of that moment. It’s when things started to trade off. And it’s been those names, the public names in particular, that have been hit particularly hard.
TC: Why?
I don’t know if it was driven purely by scarcity value, but there was definitely an incentive to go public. So you had a lot of companies go public well before they were prepared to. And then you’ve had a lot of companies, which are just, quite frankly, poorly run, with poor management teams, and some with even real ethical concerns [regarding] how they ran their businesses. So I think that all started to come to a head and led to a pretty serious implosion.
It was pretty painful, for sure. But what’s so interesting is that even though that has been the public perception based on these stocks, the reality is the macro has continued to improve. Sitting here today, four-plus months into COVID, cannabis has really proved itself to be a non-cyclical industry. Cannabis has been deemed an essential business everywhere across the U.S. We had record sales in March, April, and May, and the trend has has continued. And now that we are getting into an environment where governments are going to be looking for additional sources of tax revenue, the potential urgency around cannabis legalization is going to be there, which is going to be massively positive for the industry.
TC: I thought the governor of Massachusetts was concerned about people bringing COVID into the state, but I guess he reversed course on dispensaries as essential businesses?
KW: Yeah, he was the one outlier, and he reversed course. What’s been interesting is first, as you can imagine in a moment where people are especially anxious, cannabis has been something many people have been turning to. Then, beyond that, what’s also been interesting is that like many other areas of the economy, we’ve seen e-commerce really [take off]. One of our businesses, Dutchie, which enables retailers to launch their own e-commerce and have their own delivery and pickup, has seen its gross merchandise value increase by like 600% [since March].
TC: You’re also an investor in [the same-day delivery startup] Eaze, where former executives were accounting for consumer sales as if they were transactions made to third party vendors. What do you think of that situation?
KW: It’s certainly in the past, but as you know, there’s always been a massive issue with the cannabis business [in that it] can’t really access traditional banking like other industries can, and one of the big issues there is credit card processing. So it sounds that an issue earlier in Eaze’s history was that it was able to process credit card payments potentially by not fully disclosing what was actually being transacted. I don’t know a ton of the details and where that lies currently, but I know that’s not anything that Eaze is involved in anymore.
TC: Bigger picture, does it tarnish the industry and make it harder for everyone to raise money? What are you seeing? Are new investors coming to the table? Are early investors still believers in this opportunity?
KW: It’s been fascinating for sure. The conversations have changed dramatically from when I first entered the industry to today. Initially, we [as a venture firm] were unable to get in front of a lot of pensions and endowments to have those conversations. Now, we’re at least having those conversations and they’re interested to hear about what we’re doing. I’m not quite sure if they’re ready to pull the trigger, but certainly even just the fact that they’re interested in understanding the industry better is a huge change.
TC: What are the biggest pockets of opportunity you see in cannabis investing right now?
KW: We have two main areas of focus. We love the ancillary tech-lead opportunities for businesses that are going to benefit from the overall macro theme of legalization and globalization of the cannabis industry, whether it’s software for retailers or manufacturers, or ancillary services like staffing and financial services. One of our businesses is Bespoke Financial, which helps with short-term financing for the industry. So we still see a lot of development in those areas.
We’re also very interested in consumer-facing brands. For a long time, cannabis sales were driven by potency and price. To use the alcohol equivalent, it would be as if every consumer made their decisions by walking into a liquor store and asking what’s the highest-proof vodka for the best price. We know that’s not how decisions are made.
TC: You and I talked before about precision dosing, soon after you’d invested in a vaping company that made it easier to understand how you’ll be impacted by what you’re ingesting.
KW: So that is business called Indose, which has created a medical-grade device that [enables users to] dial in the exact amount that they’re taking in . . . It’s much more of a business that’s going to be working with other consumer brands and allow them to use its technology to have that precision.
TC: How are these consumer-brands reaching customers? Do they have to be more . . . careful?
KW: Yeah, I mean, again, with cannabis businesses, that’s another huge restriction that a lot of them face. You can’t use a lot of the traditional channels that would be available to to non-cannabis businesses, so no Facebook ads, no Instagram, no Google AdWords, things like that, which is now a lot of the new brands’ playbook. So you have to be creative. There’s a lot of marketing happening in store within the dispensaries. You can rent billboards. Experiential marketing, pre COVID, was something that was people were very actively doing. There is also influencer influential marketing online that can still happen through Instagram channels or [channels] that a brand may own. But oftentimes those get get shut down as well. So yeah, it’s a tricky world from a marketing perspective for cannabis businesses.
TC: From a 20,000-foot level, one of the limitations of investing in cannabis would seem to be exit opportunities. There aren’t a whole lot of companies that are in a position to buy a cannabis business because of legal issues in part. How do you address that?
KW: There are a few ways to look at that. I think for ancillary, periphery businesses, there will be a lot of acquisition opportunities in the future from strategics that decide that they want exposure to the cannabis industry and may get it by buying a point-of-sale business or an e-commerce player or a financial services businesses, because that’s less directly touching the plant.
It’s going to be a question of how comfortable you are on the risk curve. Until we see kind of full-scale legalization, or until we see at least some of the the current bills in front of Congress passed or the rescheduling of cannabis from schedule 1 to schedule 2 or lower [by the Drug Enforcement Agency], some companies are going to be concerned about jumping into the space. But that’s the opportunity, as well, and as long-term investors, that’s how we see it.
In the meantime, we’ve had a couple of exits driven mainly by follow-on investors who want portions of our business, [including] a private equity firm that’s pursuing the roll-up of a particular category, and [to] a financial investor.
TC: Do you see the climate changing around acquisitions and legalization with a Biden administration?
KW: I think regardless of who’s in office, we’re going to see we’re going to see a lot of progress in the next four years. And that’s because this is no longer purely a partisan issue. I think Biden will be very helpful. He has laid out many of the things that he wants, and [while] he isn’t taking it as far as full-scale legalization, he’s certainly in favor of full-scale decriminalization, [meaning] letting states have full authority over what happens with their businesses, and also the rescheduling of cannabis down from the current schedule 1 level. So all of that will be incredibly helpful and will bring a lot more players who will feel comfortable investing in the space and potentially acquiring some of these businesses, as well.
To listen to this interview in its entirety, you can find it in podcast form here.
Bitcoin bulls are running, as prices spike above $11K
The bitcoin bulls are back in town.
The price of bitcoin surged today by $1,268.19, reaching a six-month high of $11,203.90, or a one-day gain of 12.73%. It’s another indication of the resurgence of both investor interest in the technology and renewed confidence in its long-term prospects after a rough year of regulatory scrutiny and declining value in the major cryptocurrencies.
For cryptocurrency investors like Alyse Killeen, an advisor to Mantis VC (the investment firm launched by the celebrity music duo The Chainsmokers), the climb in Bitcoin prices reflects the increased stability of the infrastructure that undergirds Bitcoin specifically, and distributed ledger technologies more broadly.
“Bitcoin has much more intrinsic value today than it did a year ago just from an infrastructure perspective,” Killeen wrote in a direct message. “[The] Lightning network is working, sidechains are working. And so you can do more with bitcoin today than you could last year.”
The Lightning network is a second-layer technology for bitcoin that scales the blockchain’s ability to conduct transactions and it’s increasing people’s ability to actually use the network.
It’s more than just increasing capacity driving the surge in investor interest and prices, Killeen wrote. There’s also the decreased supply of available bitcoin — a function of the halving of coins in circulation which happened earlier this year.
Moreover, financial institutions are now holding cryptocurrencies — giving investors more confidence in the security and fungibility of the assets, Killeen wrote.
Some blockchain experts, like Willy Woo, who is an analyst now working at Lvl to launch Bitcoin banking services even called the timing for the most recent bull run.
One month update on this model for predictive timing of macro bull runs, this should be it
.
Bullishness returning
.
Alts frothy, ETH getting a DeFi tailwind, volatility returning, BTC mempool peaking, BTC txs clogging, this is all great signs for the months ahead. https://t.co/w7GisIruTC pic.twitter.com/nXVHI7YY3R
— Willy Woo (@woonomic) July 26, 2020
Killeen also expected the markets to rise in the third quarter or early fourth quarter thanks to the increasing infrastructure to support transactions and activity on the blockchain, the increasing amount of bitcoin in circulation, and a response to the halving of currency in circulation.
“What’s happening now is that larger institutions are offering purchase facilitation and custody (e.g. Fidelity),” Killeen wrote. “This is bullish for Bitcoin AND self-custody. With ‘real banks’ holding bitcoin for their customers, the average person will view bitcoin more like money, and [the] differentiation of being your own bank becomes even more clear.”
Sources: India is examining an additional 275 Chinese apps, including PubG, AliExpress, and Resso, for a potential ban citing national security and user privacy (The Economic Times)
Sources: India is examining an additional 275 Chinese apps, including PubG, AliExpress, and Resso, for a potential ban citing national security and user privacy — List includes Tencent-backed gaming app PubG, Xiaomi's Zili and AliExpress from Alibaba Group.
Analytics service Waydev says hackers breached it earlier this month and stole GitHub, GitLab OAuth tokens, likely pivoting to attack other companies like Dave (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Analytics service Waydev says hackers breached it earlier this month and stole GitHub, GitLab OAuth tokens, likely pivoting to attack other companies like Dave — OAuth tokens have been abused for intrusions at least two other companies, Dave.com and Flood.io.
As the House antitrust hearing looms, lawmakers discuss potential lines of inquiry, including evidence of a "copy-acquire-kill" strategy to subdue rivals (Tony Romm/Washington Post)
As the House antitrust hearing looms, lawmakers discuss potential lines of inquiry, including evidence of a “copy-acquire-kill” strategy to subdue rivals — Congress brought the country's big banks to heel after the financial crisis, cowed a tobacco industry for imperiling public health …
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Seoul-based Riiid, which uses AI to offer personalized study plans to students in its test prep app Santa, raises $41.8M, bringing its total raised to $70.2M (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
Seoul-based Riiid, which uses AI to offer personalized study plans to students in its test prep app Santa, raises $41.8M, bringing its total raised to $70.2M — Riiid, a Seoul, South Korea-based startup developing AI test prep solutions, today closed a $41.8 million pre-series D financing round …
Zee5 launches new annual subscription plan for Rs 365
In a bid to move television viewers to more digital viewing habits, Zee5 has just launched a new annual plan called Zee5 Club. The plan offers Zee Zindagi shows, a ton of movies and even 90 plus live channels. All this for the price of Rs 365. Currently, the Zee5 annual subscription rate is priced at Rs 999 so clearly, this plan is something that users looking to save some money could look into. Just remember that this plan gives you access to some, but not all of Zee5’s content. Zee5 exclusives and ALTBalaji shows are not included in this plan,
The Rs 365 annual plan is essentially an OTT entertainment pack. The Zee5 All Access plan, on the other hand, gives users access to all the content that can be found on the platform. You can avail the Zee5 All Access plan for Rs 999, annually, or you could shell out Rs 99 for a monthly subscription. You can also opt for a quarterly subscription for Rs 299 and a half-yearly subscription for Rs 599. So, if you’re not willing to commit to the platform for an entire year, Zee5 gives you the option to choose which subscription is the best for your needs.
Zee5 launches new annual subscription plan for Rs 365Also, the Zee5 Club and All Access subscriptions will allow you to consume content across 5 different screens at the same time. IF you feel like the Zee5 Club plan isn’t doing it for you, you can opt for the All Access plan by just paying the difference Zee5 website or app.
In a bid to move audiences away from network television and into a more digital realm, companies like Netlfix, Prime Video and Disney+Hotstar also have their affordable plans. In fact, Netlfix is now testing out its Mobile+ Rs 349 per month plan. You can read more about that here. For Jio users, the company is now offering a one-year Disney+hotstar subscription for its prepaid customer and you can read more about that here. And finally, you can also avail a yearly subscription of Prime Video by purchasing Amazon Prime, which not only nets you zero delivery charges but gives you access to Prime Video, Amazon Music and more. You can also create 6 users profiles on Amazon Prime Video if you live in a large household.
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Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times)
Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
