Category: StartUps

For the past decade, telecommunications companies around the globe have been grappling with falling average revenues per user equaling stagnant growth rates.

While particularly mobile operators have enabled increasing prosperity in third-world countries, new ways of working and fueled entirely new markets, much of the wealth created has landed on the books of companies that we look upon with increasing discomfort: Google, Amazon, Alibaba, Tencent and others. And as if this was not enough, the very ingredient — ubiquitous connectivity — that has served as lubricant for the disruption of entire industries is now on the verge of being disrupted itself.

While many expect finance or healthcare to be next on the list of global serial disruptors, and technologies like wearables, blockchain and AI are cited to be the nails in the coffins of these industries, small players have cooked up the ingredients that could well marginalize today’s prevailing telco business models globally. There are three ingredients that could make that happen…

Lack of customer trust

Among the top 100 most trusted brands globally, you will find companies of almost any industry, except telco. You will find our serial disruptors, big brand consumer packaged goods, car manufacturers — even banks, payment companies and healthcare service providers. But you won’t find telcos. In their battle for growth, telcos globally have largely alienated their customers for the sake of managing yield and profitability.

Furthermore, simple customer engagement processes are often broken, and telcos have struggled to achieve a high quality of service with zero defects, high responsiveness and a great customer experience on even their most relevant customer interactions. They have broken the trust equation with their customers.

Why is that relevant? Because trust is an important ingredient in disintermediation, à la Uber or Airbnb. Uber has put trust and ease into the car-hailing business, while Airbnb has put the trust in-between guest and host. On the flip side, an existing trusted relationship is hard to disintermediate.

However, the telco-customer relationship, as global brand indicators show, is ready to be disrupted. Perhaps even more so than the bank-client or doctor-patient relationships.

Liquid infrastructure

While telcos are grappling with fixing their customer front ends, becoming more nimble and responsive to customer needs and putting “greatness” back into the overall customer experience equation, small startups (and large telco suppliers alike) are creating what is known as “liquid infrastructures.”

In today’s cloud-based world, global network traffic is exploding while traffic patterns, with globally scaled and load-balanced cloud-based back-ends, are becoming more and more fluid and less predictable. Likewise, decreasing enterprise assets actually connect to the enterprise network directly.

The internet of things (IoT) is creating massively distributed architectures with globally roaming assets that need to seamlessly blend into critical enterprise applications. So, enterprises are challenged with creating more flexible network infrastructures that not only connect their various operating sites, but also create reliable connections to public cloud service providers, while connecting remote and mobile IoT assets to the core network. And all that while accommodating massive shifts in traffic patterns depending on the day of the week, time of day or reconfigurations happening at service providers.

Liquid infrastructure promises to provide a solution for such challenges, and it’s not a concept telcos are capable of, or offering, in the market place as of now. It is players like Waltz Networks, a venture-backed startup from San Francisco, that are disrupting the market place by providing solutions for the completely self-managed, liquid infrastructure that can handle today’s network demand.

Envision such an offering as a global OTT service and you have a recipe for a serious contender to the global enterprise telco services market.

“On the fly” mobile access

Redtea Mobile is another such interesting disruptor in the telco space. Imagine your IoT assets are roaming around the world globally. Which telco would you go to in order to buy a data plan, plus device management, which enables you to provision and deprovision your devices globally and on the fly?

Telcos globally have been struggling to come up with competitive offerings that make managing such global asset bases economical and a breeze. That is firstly because none of the globally leading telcos can offer a truly global network — be it of their own or partner assets. Secondly, given multiple telcos are forced to collaborate if they want to offer a global virtual mobile data service, long-standing roaming agreements often stand in the way of economical pricing models. Telcos are not yet willing to sacrifice existing global roaming revenue at the expense of a potentially growing global IoT mobility data market opportunity.

Despite these challenges, however, the demand is increasing. While global mobile traffic was 7 exabytes in 2016, it will skyrocket 700 percent by 2021. That’s where Redtea Mobile comes into the picture. With Redtea Mobile’s technology, you could imagine someone buying regional capacity with enough associated international mobile subscriber identities (IMSI), the unique numbers assigned to mobile phone users, around the globe at wholesale prices, bundling this capacity as a global mobile IoT data service, and reselling it to enterprises globally to fuel their IoT devices.

The way Redtea Mobile’s technology works is that it can reprogram eSIMs on the fly from the cloud, so a device that operates on one mobile network in one country can be reprogrammed to another network on the fly once it crosses the border.

Both Redtea Mobile and Waltz Network enable the disintermediation of telcos, cutting out the expensive middle man. In the scenarios described above, the end-customer relationship would likely not reside with the telco, but with a service provider smartly repackaging core telco services with new technology into an over-the-top (OTT) service that completely marginalizes the telco to a pure infrastructure provider — much like the Uber drivers or the Airbnb property owners. And, as my first argument suggests, it is unlikely that many customers will bemoan the demise of global telcos as customer-facing service providers.

So what can telcos do?

Enough cases have proven already that companies are better off disrupting than being disrupted.

True, telcos have one strength that is impossible to beat — they own assets that are hard, in most markets impossible, to replicate. However, while telcos will not vanish entirely, they run the risk of being completely marginalized. To prevent that, they should drive disruptive change of their own. While small companies are innovating, telcos could be at the forefront of deploying those technologies across their infrastructure and of developing new and innovative offerings that disrupt their prevailing products and business models on top of those technologies.

Will this be enough to win? No, telcos will still have to fix the trust equation with their customers, become more responsive, etc.

But if telcos rely on their stagnant existing revenue streams and are too timid in embracing disruption, they are likely to continue their slow path toward the ultimate horror scenario of many telco executives: that of becoming a dump pipe.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook and Google were paid millions for political advertising purposes in Washington but failed for years to publish related information — such as the advertiser’s address — as required by state law, alleges a lawsuit by the state’s attorney general.

Washington law requires that “political campaign and lobbying contributions and expenditures be fully disclosed to the public and that secrecy is to be avoided.”

Specifically, “documents and books of account” must be made available for public inspection during the campaign and for three years following; these must detail the candidate, name of advertiser, address, cost and method of payment, and description services rendered.

Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging that both Facebook and Google “failed to obtain and maintain” this information. Earlier this year, Eli Sanders of Seattle’s esteemed biweekly paper The Stranger requested to view the “books of account” from both companies, and another person followed up with an in-person visit; both received unsatisfactory results.

They alerted the AG’s office to these investigations in mid-April, and here we are a month and a half later with a pair of remarkably concise lawsuits. (This appears to be separate from the Seattle Election Commission’s allegations of similar failings by Facebook in February.)

All told Facebook took in about $3.4 million over the last decade, including “$2.5 million paid through political consultants and other agents or intermediaries, and $619,861 paid directly to Facebook.” Google received about $1.5 million over the same period, almost none of which was paid directly to the company. (I’ve asked the AG’s office for more information on how these amounts are defined.)

The total yearly amounts listed in the lawsuits may be interesting to anyone curious about the scale of political payments to online platforms at the state scale, so I’m reproducing them here.

Facebook

• 2013: $129,099
• 2014: $310,165
• 2015: $147,689
• 2016: $1,153,688
• 2017: $857,893

Google

• 2013: $47,431
• 2014: $72,803
• 2015: $56,639
• 2016: $310,175
• 2017: $295,473

(Note that these don’t add up to the totals mentioned above; these are the numbers filed with the state’s Public Disclosure Committee. 2018 amounts are listed but are necessarily incomplete, so I omitted them.)

At least some of the many payments making up these results are not properly documented, and from the looks of it, this could amount to willful negligence. If a company is operating in a state and taking millions for political ads, it really can’t be unaware of that state’s disclosure laws. Yet according to the lawsuits, even basic data like names and addresses of advertisers and the amounts paid were not collected systematically, let alone made available publicly.

It’s impossible to characterize flouting the law in such a way as an innocent mistake, and certainly not when the mistake is repeated year after year. This isn’t an academic question: if the companies are found to have intentionally violated the law, the lawsuit asks that damages be tripled (technically, “trebled.”)

Neither company addressed the claims of the lawsuit directly when contacted for comment.

Facebook said in a statement that “Attorney General Ferguson has raised important questions and we look forward to resolving this matter with his office quickly.” The company also noted that it has taken several steps to improve transparency in political spending, such as its planned political ad archive and an API for requesting this type of data.

Google said only that it is “currently reviewing the complaint and will be engaging with the Attorney General’s office” and asserted that it is “committed” to transparency and disclosure, although evidently not in the manner Washington requires.

The case likely will not result in significant monetary penalties for the companies in question; even if fines and damages totaled tens of millions it would be a drop in the bucket for the tech giants. But deliberately skirting laws governing political spending and public disclosure is rather a bad look for companies under especial scrutiny for systematic dishonesty — primarily Facebook.

If the AG’s suit goes forward and the companies are found to have intentionally avoided doing what the law required, they (and others like them) would be under serious pressure to do so in the future, not just in Washington, but in other states where similar negligence may have taken place. AG Ferguson seems clearly to want to set a precedent and perhaps inspire others to take action.

I’ve asked the AG’s office for some clarifications and additional info, and will update this post if I hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch

Here’s a heartfelt gift for all you procrastinating early-stage startup founders who haven’t gotten your act together to apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. You’re strapped for time, we get it. So, we’re extending the application deadline by one week.

You now have until June 13 — that’s seven days to collect your team and take your shot at winning $100,000. Yup, we doubled the prize money this year because we’re supersizing Disrupt SF. We’ve moved to Moscone Center West, which offers three times the floor space. That’ll make it much more comfortable for the more than 10,000 attendees, 1,200 exhibitors and more than 400 media outlets we expect to take in all that Disrupt has to offer.

Like, for example, Startup Battlefield — humanity’s best launching pad for early-stage startups. Seriously, winning this gig can have life-altering implications. Consider New York-based chore wizard Hello Alfred, which won Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF back in 2014. The company — founded by Jessica Beck and Marcela Sapone — is ready to scale having just scored $40 million in a Series B round of funding. That’s what we call a good ROI.

In case you’re wondering how well other Battlefield competitors have fared, listen up. The Startup Battlefield alumni community consists of more than 800 companies and has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. The networking opportunities alone make applying worth your time.

And let’s not forget all the press and investor interest. The competition takes place on the Disrupt Main Stage in front of a live audience that numbers in the thousands. The funding you seek is no doubt sitting in that audience. If you make the cut, experienced TechCrunch editors will coach you on the finer points of startup-pitching, so you’ll make the best impression possible.

We live-stream the entire event around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later, on demand. Remember, applying and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. Where else will you find media and investor exposure at that price?

Battlefield competitors also get to exhibit their company in Startup Alley for all three days of the show — for free. Remember all those attendees and media outlets? They spend a lot of time combing the Alley for the next big thing. Competing in the Battlefield is the gift that keeps on giving.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have one extra week to get your application to us. Don’t delay any longer. Apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

Source: Tech Crunch

The Oculus Connect developer conference is back for its fifth year of chasing the VR dream.

Facebook VP or VR Hugo Barra announced that the company’s virtual reality-centric conference would be returning to San Jose on September 26 and 27. In past years, Oculus has used the conference to reveal its latest prototype hardware and to announce new software upgrades. This year, VR took center stage at Facebook’s F8 developer conference with the company using the event to launch the $199 Oculus Go standalone headset while also showcasing its latest prototype “Half Dome”.

It will be interesting to see what VR announcements are saved for Oculus at its own developer centric event and whether they use the opportunity to talk more about prototypes like its positionally-tracked “Santa Cruz” standalone which they have discussed the development of for the past two years.

Registration details for OC5 aren’t available yet but the application has typically gone live in mid-summer.

Source: Tech Crunch

We already knew that veteran venture capitalist Fred Destin had teamed up with podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings to raise a fund of their own, but now more details have emerged, including that the new VC firm has reportedly achieved its first closing.

According to my sources, Stride.VC — as the VC is to be called — has already closed £40 million, with a final target of £50 million or more. I’m told that LPs include a number of notable U.K. founders, although I’ve yet to peg who, along with the usual mix of institutional VC investors and family offices.

One name that has surfaced, however (via a Companies House regulatory filing) is Delin Capital, the investment vehicle of Russian-born entrepreneur Igor Linshits. He previously backed Mail.ru alongside Yuri Milner of DST fame, amongst many other investments spanning petrochemical, commodities trading, and tech. According to Wikipedia, he immigrated to the U.K. in 2009, where he became a British citizen and founded Delin Capital.

Delin’s core businesses are DCAM, one of Europe’s leading e-commerce logistics real estate players, and Delin Ventures, which supports emerging venture fund managers and makes direct investments in early-stage companies.

People with knowledge of Stride.VC’s strategy and investment remit say the new firm is targeting seed stage startups with a strong focus on the U.K., where both Destin and Stebbings are based. It will remain “sector agnostic,” however, and is looking to partner with “contrarian entrepreneurs” who are attempting to reshape various industries.

Destin has always maintained that at the earliest of stages it is less about a company’s strategy — which at seed is based on limited data and clearly subject to change — and more about a team’s conviction and determination. It is perhaps why a number of VCs and founders I talk to have always thought he was an odd fit at Accel in London, where he was most recently a Partner. Accel typically doesn’t invest in seed and is known to be extremely data-driven.

However, although it wouldn’t normally come as a surprise to see a VC with Destin’s experience and track record raise a fund of his own — having previously backed successful companies such as Zoopla, Secret Escapes, Carwow, Deliveroo, DailyMotion, Integral Ad Science, and Pillpack — it was reported by Bloomberg last July that Stride.VC’s fund-raising efforts were facing additional scrutiny after an accusation of inappropriate behaviour by Destin towards a female founder at a conference in 2013.

In a subsequent report in Business Insider, Destin issued a statement saying that he had “on occasion acted without awareness at parties and been flirty” and that if he had “offended anyone or made anyone feel uncomfortable in any way, I am truly sorry”. He also told BI that he had never used his position as a VC inappropriately.

Meanwhile, although only 21 years old, Stebbings has already packed a lot in for such a short career. He is best known as the founder and host of the popular “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast, which he still publishes. He was also most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Atomico, the VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, and has no doubt built up an impressive network in the U.K. and across the pond.

As I previously reported, the two met when Destin was interviewed by Stebbings on one of the earlier episodes of “The Twenty Minute VC” and after the show had finished being recorded, the two continued to chat. This led to Destin agreeing to be Stebbings’ VC mentor. They have since become close friends, including getting to know each other and their respective families outside of work, and this eventually resulted in the idea of doing a fund together.

Lastly, Stride.VC may have already written its first cheque, backing a yet-to-launch London fintech startup. Who that is, I haven’t been able to confirm, although if my information is correct it broadly plays in the home financing space.

Source: Tech Crunch

The weekend provided no rest to news-wary reporters, with major announcements coming from Xiaomi, SoftBank, and the Chinese government the past few days that will continue to change the global tech landscape.

Xiaomi Chinese Depository Receipts

One of the most important yet underreported stories of 2018 has been the development of Chinese Depository Receipts (known as CDRs). I wrote a comprehensive primer on the investment mechanism a few weeks ago, but the summary is that CDRs will give mainland Chinese investors access to overseas-listed stocks that setup the right custodian accounts. Due to domestic capital controls and relatively weak stock exchange rules in China, many Chinese tech giants are listed on overseas stock exchanges in New York and Hong Kong.

Beijing-based Xiaomi, which produces a line of phones and offers mobile software services, is launching one of most anticipated IPOs of the year, with a valuation expected to top tens of billions of dollars. In its official filing, the company targeted a fundraise of $10 billion. While Xiaomi is a sterling example of the potential success of Chinese entrepreneurs, local retail buyers would likely have had no access to buy the stock, which will be listed in Hong Kong.

Fiona Liu and Julie Zhu at Reuters are now reporting that Xiaomi could be one of the first companies to take advantage of the new CDR mechanism, potentially reserving 30% of its new issue for CDR buyers. That would be about $3 billion if the assumptions of the fundraise play out.

If the CDR mechanism works as expected, Chinese companies and potentially many others could suddenly tap a vast new pool of capital, either in the IPO process or more generally. That could push valuations for many of these issues higher than they might otherwise go, since Chinese mainland investors have limited ability to invest in overseas stocks due to capital controls. A valuation that might cause a New York-based money manager to flee might be more than palatable to a Chinese investor.

While Chinese tech giants are likely to quickly offer CDR options to take advantage of their local brand power and increase upward pressure on their stock prices, the bigger question in my mind is how long it will take overseas companies to offer similar measures and get access to this capital market. While companies like Facebook and Google are blocked or mostly blocked from mainland China, other companies like Apple have strong brand presence in the country, and could theoretically offer a CDR as it strives for a $1 trillion valuation. There are huge legal and policy roadblocks to overcome of course, but such a debut would be a major milestone in China’s financial development.

SoftBank executive changes

Japan’s Softbank Group, which owns a set of major tech and finance companies, announced a new group of senior execs late on Friday that sets up something of a leadership contest to succeed the group’s founder, Masayoshi Son.

Several years ago, Son had indicated that Nikesh Arora, who had spent a decade at Google and eventually rose to be the company’s chief business officer, would succeed him. Arora became president and chief operating officer of SoftBank, but would last less than two years before heading out from the role. As a sort of coda to that chapter, we learned late last week that Arora has joined Palo Alto Networks as its CEO.

Now, SoftBank has announced that three people will take leadership roles in the company, and all three will join its board of directors. Rajeev Misra, who runs the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, will become an executive vice president (EVP) while maintaining his duties to the fund.

Katsunori Sago, who until recently was the chief investment officer of Japan Post, Japan’s largest savings bank with a $1.9 trillion portfolio, will join SoftBank as an EVP and chief strategy officer. Sago had been rumored to be considering leaving Japan Post just a few weeks ago. Finally, former Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure was named an EVP and SoftBank’s new chief operating officer. Claure was elevated to executive chairman of Sprint last month, while stepping down as CEO.

Each of the three are positioned around the key tentpoles of SoftBank. SoftBank’s core business remains telecom, which Claure will presumably spend signifiant time on. The group’s financial interests, which includes a 100% stake in Fortress Investment Group, will likely get significant attention from Sago. And the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has received splashy headlines with its massive investments in global unicorn startups, is obviously a key future pillar of the company, giving Misra a powerful perch in the group.

Masayoshi Son is 60 years old today. While retirement seems to be the least likely course of action for the energetic entrepreneur, clearly he is starting to think through succession in a more robust way than he did before with Arora. That should make SoftBank investors far more content, and also provide a little bit of a competitive dynamic at the top of the organization to drive the group’s results in the years to come.

China initiates investigation into Samsung and other chip companies

The chip wars between China and the rest of the world continue to heat up. Now, it looks like Samsung, the world’s largest chipmaker, is in the crosshairs of Beijing according to a Wall Street Journal report by Yoko Kubota. In addition to Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix were also ensnared in the investigation.

China has made building a strong indigenous chip industry a core pillar of its economic development strategy. In addition to a comprehensive plan known as Made in China 2025, the country has also been attempting to put together the world’s largest semiconductor venture capital investment fund, which in aggregate could have tens of billions of dollars in capital at its disposal.

The investigations against the Samsung and the two chipmakers comes at the same time that China has also once again delayed the close of Qualcomm’s acquisition of NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm has been waiting for months to get Beijing’s approval on that deal, which would provide the company a fresh source of revenue and a renewed product mix in strategic areas like automotive.

The use of economic investigations to help and hurt Chinese companies and their competitors is starting to become a mainstay. The United States used the negative conclusions of its investigation into Chinese telecommunications company ZTE in order to cut off its export licenses, practically killing the company. While the U.S. has now started to walk back that threat by floating the option of a large fine, it is clear that these sorts of tit-for-tat investigations are going to continue into the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

At Disrupt SF (Sept. 5-7), TechCrunch is running two big stages and doubling the amount of programming compared to past years. The goal is to cover more of the ever expanding startup ecosystem, including those amazing founders aiming to get off planet earth and tap the vast domain of space (Yes, the final frontier!)

Space startups will also have a dedicated section of Startup Alley. (Founder tip: TechCrunch is offering five free exhibition spots in the space section of Startup Alley as part of our Top Picks program. Apply here – applications are open until June 29. Or lock in your spot in Startup Alley spot now.)

We have enlisted great speakers to talk space, and we’re especially excited to announce Alan Stern, co-author of of the recently released “Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,” and also an engineer and planetary scientist, who has held executive roles at NASA and now leads New Horizons, NASA’s mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. He has served as a consultant to private space exploration projects, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and he is a co-founder of Worldview Enterprises, which has raised $42 million to provide an accessible, affordable way to access nearspace with high-altitude balloons.

In addition to a fireside chat on stage, Stern will also participate in a separate Q&A session and sign copies of his new book.

We’re also very pleased to announce three speakers who are building the ecosystem of companies and technologies to reach and exploit the earth’s orbit and beyond, a play investors are betting will become a big business in the years ahead.

Natalya Bailey is co-founder and CEO of Accion Systems, a startup spun out of MIT’s Space Propulsion Laboratory has developed an ion propulsion system that is size of a postage stamp and is designed to power small satellites. The company has raised a total of $12.5M in 2016 in an A-round led by Shasta Ventures. Bailey earned her PhD in AeroAstro at MIT.

Peter Beck is CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, which is a New Zealand-based startup that delivers “complete rocket systems and technologies for fast and low-cost payload deployment.”  Beck’s passion for rockets goes back to his youth, when he built a rocket to power his bicycle, a feat he somehow survived. In 2009, Beck lead the development and launch of Atea 1, the first rocket to reach space from the Southern Hemisphere. Rocket Lab has raised $75 million in rounds led by Data Collective and Bessemer Venture Partners, and its first commercial satellite launch is slated for this summer.

Will Marshall is co-founder and CEO of Planet, a company  that “builds small satellites and delivers information about the changing planet.” Marshall was a Scientist at NASA/USRA where he was Deputy Systems Engineer on lunar orbiter mission “LADEE”,  and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oxford. ZPlanet has raised over $183 million in rounds led by DFJ, International Finance Corporation, and Data Collective.

You’ll also be able to continue the conversation with these panelists as they will be taking attendee questions on our intimate Q&A Stage after their Main Stage panel discussion.

You don’t want to miss all this as well as Disrupt SF’s many other features, including 13 tracks of content across four stages, ranging from AI to new retail to robots, CrunchMatch, Startup Battlefield and much more. Get your early bird tickets today.

Source: Tech Crunch

Apple is rolling out a redesign of the Mac App Store to bring it more in line with some of the experiences it’s focused on with the iOS App Store, which the company showed at its annual developer conference this year.

Apple is following-up on a redesign of the App Store on the iPhone, which changed the approach a little bit to highlight Apps with some editorial components and stories. The company says it is bringing over a lot of features and learnings from the iOS App Store, including whether an app was named editor’s choice or the app’s ranking. All this includes a new API to make it easier to leave reviews for the apps to try to spin up that feedback loop that helps surface the most popular or useful apps.

The UI is getting a complete redesign, with a new discovery tab to find editorial content around Mac apps, including stories and collections. You’ll also be able to see what’s popular in the top charts. Apps are bucketed together in some new tabs like work and developers. All this helps Apple figure out where to bucket all these apps to tailor to what people are looking for when they enter the App Store — whether that’s just generally clicking around or looking for new developer tools

Discovery has always been a critical problem for developers, and as the iOS App Store was flooded with millions of apps, it can become more and more difficult to stand out. Apple has iterated a lot of the iOS App Store, and it makes enough sense that it’s trying to port the parts of that experience that work over to the Mac App Store it launched a few years ago. It also offers Apple a playground to test new ideas that it could turn around and apply to to the iOS App Store.

While the Mac occupies a small slice of the company’s actual business, shipping a few million units a quarter, it still represents an important component of its user base. The Mac helps keep users locked into Apple’s ecosystem which branches beyond just phones and laptops, creating a continuous tissue between all those devices and keeping them on the Apple refresh cycle. Apple said it’s written more than 4,000 stories for the new Today tab for the iOS App Store.

Source: Tech Crunch