Month: October 2020

Twitter is testing a new way to follow accounts. The company announced today it’s rolling out a new feature, “Suggested Follows,” that will pop up a list of other accounts you may want to follow on the profile page of someone you had just followed. The feature will be tested on Android devices, for the time being.

The feature offers a tweak to how following currently works on mobile. At present, when you tap “Follow” on a user’s profile page, you’re presented with a small list of suggested accounts you may also want to follow.

Twitter explains that its accounts suggestions are based on a number of factors, and are often personalized. But in the case of suggested follows, it uses algorithms to determine what accounts may be related to the profile you’ve just visited, or if people who follow that user tend to follow certain other users.

That’s why, for example, when you follow someone whose profiles notes they work at a particular company, the Suggested follows may then include others who also work there. Or why when you follow a celebrity of some sort, you may be presented with other high-profile accounts as suggestions.

Before, however, you would have to tap on the suggestions one by one if you wanted to follow them. Twitter’s new test instead, groups a larger number of suggestions that you can follow with just one tap. You can then opt to remove those accounts you may not want to follow after first adding the full group.

This could make it easier for users to gain follows, if their account is related somehow to another account that’s seeing a high number of follows. It could also help Twitter newcomers to build out their networks, while helping existing users expand their own.

Some Twitter users may have already seen the feature in action, before today.

Twitter says the test is taking place on Android. The company didn’t note if or when the feature would expand to iOS.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

The fintech industry is on a tear. Popular consumer services like Robinhood to Coinbase and Revolut have managed to attract millions of customers, but the most interesting trend right now is embedded finance.

Tech companies that don’t necessarily provide financial services can embed services from fintech companies directly in their products. At the same time, fintech companies can find a new distribution channel by providing financial products outside of their main product. They don’t necessarily need a consumer product anymore.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, we talked about this trend and the most important changes in the fintech industry with three experts — Hope Cochran, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group (and former King CFO), Ruth Foxe Blader, a partner at Anthemis, and John Locke, a partner at Accel.

Banking as a service: Every tech company is potentially a fintech company

We started the conversation by talking about banking as a service. For entrepreneurs hoping to launch a fintech company, there are many regulatory requirements and it can take a while to set up the infrastructure.

“If the intention is to offer something else and it happens that you need fintech infrastructure, then it makes no sense to build it yourself,” Cochran said. “They should utilize the banking-as-a-service model. But maybe their intention is to create a true fintech and the secret sauce is to build it.”

Even in the latter case, it doesn’t mean that founders shouldn’t consider banking as a service for the very beginning of their company, as it can serve as a bridge before switching to their own infrastructure.

“But the problem with building it yourself is that it takes years to get it out there and get through the regulatory hurdles and you can’t see if your product and idea are actually working. So if you want to get to market much faster and iterate and see if you’ve hit upon something that will work on the market, I think banking as a service is a really important tool,” Cochran said.

Locke doubled down on that idea and described banking as a service as a massive opportunity for an entire wave of entrepreneurs, but if you don’t launch your product fast enough, another entrepreneur will find a way to enter the market more quickly.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon today disclosed that a former employee has been arrested for committing fraud against the online retailer. The company says it reported Vu Anh Nguyen to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2020 fro falsely issuing refunds for products ordered on Amazon.com to himself and his associates. The U.S. Dept. of Justice on Friday brought charges against Nguyen for federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to court filings.

Nguyen was previously employed with Amazon as a Selling Support Associate based in Tempe, Arizona. In this role, his job involved providing support for Amazon’s third-party sellers and assisting in the creation and management of seller listings using a “Spoofer” account, which allow Amazon employees to view and edit third-party seller accounts.

From these accounts, employees are able to manually authorize refunds for items ordered from third-party sellers, which is how the abuse occurred.

In the criminal complaint, Nguyen is alleged to have committed wire fraud between November 2019 and February 2020 by using his employee access to falsely and fraudulently issue $96,508.13 in refunds to himself and others. These refunds were not requested by legitimate purchasers. During the course of this scheme, Nguyen used or caused the use of interstate wires, the filing states.

The scheme involved approximately 318 unauthorized refunds for orders purchased through eight Amazon accounts belonging to Nguyen and others. These included refunds for high-value items, like computers and electronics, none of which were ever returned to Amazon.

Nguyen also operated two third-party seller accounts, Bullsy and ItemsQuest, where refunds were issued to orders he was shipping to his own home or others had access to.

Nguyen also ordered $222.04 worth of items sent to his home as a part of this scheme, the complaint alleges, then fraudulently authorized a concession refund for the items, allowing him to essentially keep the items without paying.

In addition, on Aug. 14, 2019, Nguyen committed identity theft related to the wire fraud activities by using the name and credit card information belonging to a third-party, the FBI says. This involved an order totaling just $47.80 for household items, like a drawer organizers and cabinet liners.

Nguyen had originally been hired by Amazon on March 4, 2019. His employment was terminated on March 24, 2020 after he ignored repeated attempts by Amazon to reach him about the fraudulent activity the retailer had detected.

Separately from the Amazon fraud case, Nguyen was the target of a Dept. of Justice/FBI investigation for a type of securities fraud known as “free-riding,” which had resulted in losses of approximately $695,000 across eight brokerage firms, the complaint notes. On the SEC.gov website’s post about the litigation release, however, those losses are said to have actually totalled over $1 million.

Amazon, in press release issued today, notes that it has systems in place to mitigate misuse of its tools and to monitor and detect suspicious behavior. These systems had identify the suspicious refunds, prompting its investigation. Amazon then reported the case to the FBI.

The retailer regularly pursues investigations and lawsuits aimed at tackling fraud across its platform. Recently, this included supporting wire fraud charges against four individuals who committed $19 million in a fraudulent invoicing scheme targeting Amazon’s vendor system. It also this summer launched a counterfeit crimes unit to tackle the growing problem with counterfeit products sold on its marketplace, and helped stop multiple fraudulent affiliate marketing schemes.

While many of the fraud schemes involved external parties, sometimes Amazon’s own employees are involved. In September, the U.S. Dept. of Justice charged six people with bribing Amazon employees in exchange for restoring their banned products or services, an indictment alleges, for example. In the past, Amazon employees have also been arrested for merchandise theft.

Amazon offered a brief statement on the new charges involving Nguyen.

“We thank the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation for their swift work to the hold this fraudster accountable,” a spokesperson said. “There is no place for misconduct or fraud at Amazon. We hold our employees to a high bar, have systems in place to proactively prevent fraud, continue to monitor activity, and will pursue all measures to protect our store and hold bad actors accountable.”

U.S. v. Vu Anh Nguyen by TechCrunch on Scribd

Source: Tech Crunch

Lorne Michaels is the showrunner, to use a binge term, for Saturday Night Live. The show returned for its first season under the watchful gaze of pandemic rule, and the results were thankfully successful. Last season struggled in the early days of the virus, turning into a Zoom-heavy series of audience-free college tries. We appreciated the effort, but not really the lack of comic relief. This time, things have changed.

Michaels has said he’s not sure whether the rigorous safety procedures will hold up for the next five weeks until the election. The possibility of having to shut down makes every moment count. The opening replay of the first (perhaps only) debate was exciting not just for its pairing of Jim Carrey and Alec Baldwin but for the foreshadowing jokes of the president’s hospitalization. Carrey’s careful tape measuring and repositioning of the distance between the candidates’ lecterns efficiently underlined our mistrust of everything Trump says. It felt good to see a slightly altered version of the nightmare we’ve been living.

The SNL band’s music was joyous, relief for those who long for the sound of musicians working together rather than in assembled overdubs. The individual players’ isolation baffles bridged the studio feel of the performance with a sense that this version of a new now could actually work moving forward. The band felt slimmed down somehow, but tighter and funkier in the rhythm section. Weekend Update and Chris Rock’s opening monologue delivered some edgy balance to the show’s disposable set pieces. Success here was relief, not salvation.

Meanwhile, television and social notifications continue to joust for control of the horizontal. Reality shows like the Supreme Court Nominee pageant in the Rose Garden opened the week with the musical question “Is that really safe?” and ended with the thunderous “No!” of Thursday and Friday. Inevitably, the media began to stir as the Walter Reed press conferences betrayed more in unanswered questions than medical details. And so the question begets: how will we triage the final 30 days of the campaign?

A rolling set of experiments in how to fashion a new normal. Regardless of who wins the actual election, the country seems united on what to trust as a workable strategy for surviving this toxic political moment. The actual mechanics of the vote and the relative margin of the victory seem within a range of too close to call for a week minimum, and a 4-5 % margin for Biden. That presupposes no October surprise, or not any more. A court challenge seems likely, but how seriously it will be prosecuted seems unlikely given how fed up the population has become.

For the hybrid cable/online audience that will decide the election, it’s no longer about undecided, which have fallen to lower levels than typical for this time in the campaign. The only real question left is whether there is still a hidden Trump vote that will materialize 2016-style, or a 2018-style change wave that will sweep the Senate majority as well. The good news is that we’re 30 days from beginning to count that vote.

That means four more Saturday Night Lives in a row, and whether the virus will permit it. This isn’t about whether we can do this nationally, expand the NBA bubble coast to coast. Not as long as the campaign mandates conflict about the very procedures needed to make a real difference. The Rose Garden wave of infections makes it much more difficult to ignore masks, social distancing and contact tracing, but real change will likely wait on the end of, if not the results of, the election. Either way, the trend will be toward limiting the spread by controlling super-spreader events.

Even if back to school measures are rolled back, some SNL-like strategies will work to produce hybrid solutions. Efficient testing will combine with distancing, behavior and tracing to localize the data and interact with the results of down-ballot elections. The November surprise may be that the power of partisan politics is reduced by practical mitigation, successful therapies and a less heated preparation for vaccine distribution. A leading indicator of this trend can be seen in the streaming studios as they go back into adjusted production scenarios for the delayed fall season.

In that context, the successful SNL reboot included a healthy dose of advertising production values in its full roster of ads. With the holidays teed up, the move toward stay-sheltered e-commerce and food delivery will blend with the marketing campaigns of streaming network realignments like the one Chris Rock was promoting with his FX/Hulu Fargo project. As he channeled James Baldwin at the end of the monologue: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, October 2, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the notification feed here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

For the past four years, Swedish startup Einride has captured interest, investment and even a few customer contracts for its unusual-looking pods — electric and autonomous vehicles that are designed to carry freight. But progress in developing, testing and validating autonomous vehicles — particularly ones that don’t even have space for a driver and rely on teleoperations — is an expensive and time-consuming task.

The company has made some progress with its T-Pod vehicles; four of them are on public roads today and even carry freight for customer Oatly, the Swedish food producer. Now, a year after raising $25 million, the company said it has another $10 million coming in from its existing investors.

The announcement comes ahead of a new vehicle the Einride will unveil October 8. Not much is known about the vehicle; Einride has only supplied a short and obscure teaser video.

Einride said the $10 million in new funding was led by impact fund Norrsken VC and included participation from  EQT Ventures fund, Nordic Ninja VC and Ericsson Ventures. Norrsken VC is also joining Einride’s advisory board.

The capital will be used to fast track the official launch of its Einride Pods, the company said. Einride acknowledged that startups in AI and robotics were upended, and even shuttered altogether, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company contests that demand for contactless delivery options — not coincidentally the kind it hopes to provide — has grown because of COVID-19. Einride said it’s maintained a “strong stream of new partnerships,” including onboarding partners Oatly and supermarket chain Lidl as well as launching a freight mobility platform designed to give customers information on shipping volume, distance driven and associated emissions and help pick the most efficient routes.

“There is both a lot of excitement and a lot of uncertainty about autonomous trucking, but the fact remains: this is one of the largest business opportunities in the history of mankind,” said Einride CEO Robert Falck said in a statement, who added that the company expects to see the autonomous transport industry expand exponentially in the coming years, especially in the wake of a global pandemic.

Source: Tech Crunch

“Away,” a new drama on Netflix, tells the story of the first manned expedition to Mars — Emma Green (played by Hilary Swank) leads an international team of astronauts on the three-year mission, while her husband Matt (Josh Charles) is part of the support team back on Earth.

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the show starts a bit slowly, and its space sequences (particularly an early space walk) aren’t quite as thrilling as we’d hoped.

But “Away” excels at creating compelling human drama — there’s believable tension on the spaceship and in mission control, and pain and guilt on both sides as the astronauts are separated from their loved ones for the long journey to-and-from Mars.

Anthony admitted that before watching, he worried that the show might be a bit too weepy and melodramatic. Instead, he was impressed by the way it made all the storylines feel natural and important, no matter how high or low the stakes. And we also appreciated how the astronauts’ backstories are filled in via flashbacks — the third episode, focused on Chinese astronaut Lu Wang (Vivian Lu), was an early highlight.

In addition to reviewing “Away,” we also caught up on what we’ve been up to since the last regular episode two weeks ago, and we discussed a new Disney+ co-watching feature called GroupWatch.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro/catch-up
5:55 Disney+ discussion
9:19 “Away” review
41:41 “Away” spoiler discussion

Source: Tech Crunch

The other week TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch Live series sat down with Accel VCs Sonali De Rycker and Andrew Braccia to chat about the state of the global startup investing ecosystem. Given their firm’s broad geographic footprint, we wanted to know what was going on in different startup markets, and inside a number of business-model varietals that we are tracking, like API-focused startups and low-code work.

As with all Extra Crunch Live episodes, we’ve included the full video below, along with a number of favorite quotes from the conversation.

Above the paywall, I wanted to share what De Rycker said about the European startup ecosystem: It’s been stuck in my head for the last day, because her comments points to a future where there is no single center of startup gravity.

Instead, considering her bullishness on her local scene, we’re going to see at least three major hubs, namely North America with a locus in the United States, Asia with a possible capital in India, and Europe, with a somewhat distributed layout.

Here’s De Rycker from our chat, responding to my question about how active the European venture and startup scene is today (transcript has been lightly edited for clarity):

What has surprised me even more [than change in the European startup scene over time] is the acceleration in the last couple of years. And I think it’s continued in the last few months, despite the COVID environment.

And that’s really because Europe isn’t just one location, right? It’s a collection of different ecosystems, different locations, different hubs. At any point in time there are 15 to 20 cities that are relevant, and they’ve all sort of reached this tipping point. And together, Europe is at this inflection point, in terms of the quality of entrepreneurs, [and] the number of opportunities. And it feels like it’s all come together with the digitization that’s going on that we’re all, you know, very much believing in right now. And the fact that there’s a ton of capital around. So I would say that we’re seeing a pretty frenetic pace, more than, candidly, pre-COVID, which is not something we expected. […]

But I would say that overall, Europe is incredibly active [regarding] deal pace, deal count, I wouldn’t say it’s very different from what I understand to be the situation in the U.S.

Undergirding what De Rycker said above, TechCrunch recently reported on the financial results of TransferWise, a European fintech unicorn that grew 70% in the last year, to £302.6 million in revenue. Toss in Adyen’s epic run as a public European tech company and there’s lots to celebrate from the continent, even if we don’t read enough about here in the States.

Extra Crunch Live continues with some really damn fun stuff coming up (including a few more that I am hosting). So, make sure you’re in and ready for the next edition as we dig deeper into season two.

Hit the jump for the full chat and some further bits from the transcript.

Sonali De Rycker and Andrew Braccia

Here’s the full video:

Source: Tech Crunch