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Notarize, a startup that enables people to get documents notarized online, announced today that it has partnered with Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the U.S. Guaranteed Rate’s new product, called FlashClose, integrates Notarize’s real estate API and allows customers to close real estate transactions and execute mortgages online.

The service is available in all 50 states. Notarize’s products, including its consumer app, connect users to a notary public by video call to witness e-signatures and notarize documents. Its enterprise solutions include business and real estate APIs. Guaranteed Rate, which has had almost $25 billion in total loan volume this year, is now the largest lender that uses Notarize.

Notarize, which has raised $47 million in funding so far from investors, including Polaris Partners, Lennar Corporation and Realogy Holdings, currently helps customers process online each month real estate deals worth a total of about $1.5 billion. Through partnerships like the one it has with Guaranteed Rate, it has added more than 50,000 realtors and title agents as users in the last three months.

Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Notarize, tells TechCrunch that 90% of people start searching for homes online and 60% apply for mortgages online, but many real estate and lending companies still require their customers to complete the closing process on paper. Allowing them to complete the entire process online can give companies like Guaranteed Rate a major advantage over competitors.

In a prepared statement, Guaranteed Rate COO Nikolaos Athanasiou said, “We are thrilled to announce this integration with Notarize for FlashClose, which puts even more power in the hands of homebuyers — wherever and however they want to close.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Already under fire for advancing Chinese foreign policy by censoring topics like Hong Kong’s protests and pro-LGBT content, the Beijing-based video app TikTok is now further distancing itself from U.S. social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, with a ban on political ads on its app.

The company today says it will not allow political ads on TikTok, noting they don’t fit in with the experience the short-form video app aims to offer.

“Any paid ads that come into the community need to fit the standards for our platform, and the nature of paid political ads is not something we believe fits the TikTok platform experience,” says Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s VP of Global Business Solutions, who recently joined the company from Facebook.

“To that end, we will not allow paid ads that promote or oppose a candidate, current leader, political party or group or issue at the federal, state or local level — including election-related ads, advocacy ads or issue ads,” he says.

TikTok further explains that it wants to be known as a place for creative expression, and one that creates a “positive, refreshing environment” that inspires that creativity.

It will further encourage these goals through its products like its fun filters and effects, as well as its brand partnerships.

Today, TikTok offers a range of ad opportunities, including in-feed video ads, launch screen ads and other native ads like its sponsored hashtag challenges. It also more recently launched a beta version of the TikTok Creator Marketplace, which will help to connect brands with TikTok creators for their marketing campaigns.

“Throughout all of this, however, our primary focus is on creating an entertaining, genuine experience for our community,” Chandlee continues. “While we explore ways to provide value to brands, we’re intent on always staying true to why users uniquely love the TikTok platform itself: for the app’s light-hearted and irreverent feeling that makes it such a fun place to spend time,” he says.

Political ads don’t fit with this agenda, the company believes.

But running those sorts of ads also come with significant challenges, as Facebook has found.

It had to create a system to verify the credentials of political advertisers, for example, which requires them to submit identification information like their street address, phone number, business email and website matching the email, tax ID number or U.S. Federal Election Commmission ID number. It also launched a publicly searchable database of political ads, for transparency’s sake.

As a Chinese-run company, TikTok may not have the resources to run a similar operation. In fact, it seemed to be having trouble cracking down on the hate speech found on its app last year, VICE had reported.

The ban on political ads isn’t really new to TikTok, it’s more of a reiteration of the existing policy — but it’s a statement that TikTok hadn’t made before.

The company tells Techcrunch it decided to address the policy proactively in order to be transparent about its advertising policies — especially as interest in marketing opportunities continues to grow on the platform.

Source: Tech Crunch

Thousands of miles away from the U.S., where technology giants, cable networks, and studios are locked in an intense multi-billion dollar battle to court users to their video streaming services, a startup in Bangladesh has already won the local video streaming market.

And it did all of this in six years with just $10 million. And it’s also profitable.

Ahad Mohammad started Bongo in 2013. The on-demand video service began life as a channel on YouTube in 2014 before expanding as a standalone app to users a year later.

Of the 96 million people in Bangladesh who are online today, 75 million of them are subscribed to either Bongo’s YouTube channel or to its app, Mohammed said.

Bongo’s domination in Bangladesh is second to none in the nation. iFlix, which raised $50 million a few months ago to expand its presence in several Asian markets, and India’s Zee5 are among the players that Bongo competes with, though their market share remains tiny in comparison.

TechCrunch caught up with Mohammed to get an insight into the early days of building Bongo and what holds next for the “Netflix of Bangladesh” as it increasingly expands to international markets.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s hardware season, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn to deliver the goods. The company will be holding its big Surface event bright and early tomorrow morning in New York. If past years’ events are any precedent (and they generally are), there’s going to be a lot of stuff shown off in the Big Apple this week.

This time last year, Microsoft introduced a new version of the Surface Pro, Laptop and Studio and adding over-ear headphones to the lineup. This time out, we’ve already seen a number of leaks that point to additional refreshes and a couple of big “surprises” (in as much as rumored products can truly be a surprise).

The Surface Pro and Laptop are both said to be getting refreshes this year. The Surface Pro 7 is getting a smattering of upgrades — likely the most underwhelming of the event, including a new Intel processor and a USB-C port, dragging it kicking and screaming in 2019. The Surface Laptop 3, meanwhile, gets two size options: a 13- and 15-inch inch model, along with, potentially, a new AMD processor.

As for fully new stuff, Microsoft is believed to finally be embracing the ARM for Windows 10 platform with its Surface line. Rumors have it launching an ARM-powered two-in-one at the event. Among the benefits are a smaller footprint and far improved battery life — both marked benefits for any portable.

The biggest reveal of the show, however, is expected to be the long awaited addition of a dual-screen Surface. A decade after abandoning Courier, Microsoft is expected to announced a new form factor for the line. The rumor, which includes a bespoke version of Windows 10 (the somewhat confusingly named Windows 10 X), also point to a potential launch for the device some time later this year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren has responded publicly to a leaked attack on her by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying she won’t be bullied out of taking big tech to task for anticompetitive practices.

Warren’s subtweeting of the Facebook founder follows a leak in which the Verge obtained two hours of audio from an internal Q&A session with Zuckerberg — publishing a series of snippets today.

In one snippet the Facebook leader can be heard opining on how Warren’s plan to break up big tech would “suck”.

“You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies … if she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” he can be heard saying. “Does that still suck for us? Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to have a major lawsuit against our own government. … But look, at the end of the day, if someone’s going to try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you fight.”

Warren responded soon after publication with a pithy zinger, writing on Twitter: “What would really ‘suck’ is if we don’t fix a corrupt system that lets giant companies like Facebook engage in illegal anticompetitive practices, stomp on consumer privacy rights, and repeatedly fumble their responsibility to protect our democracy.”

In a follow up tweet she added that she would not be afraid to “hold Big Tech companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon accountable”.

The Verge claims it did not obtain the leaked audio from Facebook’s PR machine. But in a public Facebook post following its publication of the audio snippets Zuckerberg links to their article — and doesn’t exactly sound mad to have what he calls his “unfiltered” views put right out there…

Whether the audio was leaked intentionally or not, as many commentators have been quick to point out — Warren principal among them — the fact that a company has gotten so vastly powerful it feels able to threaten to fight and defeat its own government should give pause for civilized thought.

Someone high up in Facebook’s PR department might want to pull Zuckerberg aside and make a major wincing gesture right in his face.

In another of the audio snippets Zuckerberg extends the threat — arguing that breaking up tech giants would threaten the integrity of elections.

“It’s just that breaking up these companies, whether it’s Facebook or Google or Amazon, is not actually going to solve the issues,” he is heard saying. “And, you know, it doesn’t make election interference less likely. It makes it more likely because now the companies can’t coordinate and work together.”

Elections such as the one Warren hopes to be running in as a US presidential candidate… so er… again this argument is a very strange one to be making when the critics you’re railing against are calling you an overbearing, oversized democracy-denting beast.

Zuckerberg’s remarks also contain the implied threat that a failure to properly police elections, by Facebook, could result in someone like Warren not actually getting elected in the first place.

Given, y’know, the vast power Facebook wields with its content-shaping algorithms which amplify narratives and shape public opinion at cheap, factory farm scale.

Reading between the lines, then, presidential hopefuls should be really careful what they say about important technology companies — or, er, else!

How times change.

Just a few short years ago Zuckerberg was the guy telling everyone that election interference via algorithmically amplified social media fakes was “a pretty crazy idea”.

Now he’s saying only tech behemoths like Facebook can save democracy from, uh, tech behemoths like Facebook…

For more on where Zuckerberg’s self-servingly circular logic leads, let’s refer to another of his public talking points: That only Facebook’s continued use of powerful, privacy-hostile AI technologies such as facial recognition can save Western society from a Chinese-style state dystopia in which the presence of your face broadcasts a social credit score for others to determine what you get to access.

This equally uncompelling piece of ‘Zuckerlogic’ sums to: ‘Don’t regulate our privacy hostile shit — or China will get to do worse shit before we can!’

So um… yeah but no.

Source: Tech Crunch