The spotlight of hype has lit up many areas since autonomous driving had its own time in the sun, but progress in the technology is chugging along. It’s clear that the dream of not having to drive ourselves around is not dead, given the rising tallies of miles driven by bots, greater commercialization, and other headlines.

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There’s a lot of good news to be found. Today, Chinese technology giant Baidu revealed an interesting set of datapoints regarding Apollo Go, it’s “autonomous ride-hailing service”:

Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service, provided around 660K rides in the first quarter of 2023, up 236% year over year and 18% quarter over quarter.

The company also reminded investors that Apollo Go was the first to receive permits in Beijing to “operate ride-hailing services with no driver or safety operator in the vehicles” this March.

So if we presume an average trip of, say, two miles (3.2 kilometers), Apollo Go racked up north of one million miles in the first quarter alone. That’s a lot of autonomous driving.

Baidu’s update follows other progress reports from self-driving car outfits: Cruise a couple of months ago said it had completed “one million fully driverless miles” in the 15 months since it started offering fully driverless rides.

We also covered Cruise’s geographic expansion earlier in May:

Cruise is rolling out its self-driving cars to more cities — specifically, to Houston and Dallas as it expands its Texas-based presence. Cruise already started testing its vehicles in Austin at the end of last year, and announced plans to begin testing its Origin built-for-purpose robotaxis there earlier in 2023.

Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving effort has also expanded its own operating area:

Self-driving cars are taking ages to become a reality, but they won’t take forever by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. This morning was a fun mix of stuff that we don’t always get to, so strap in for the following:

• Stocks and cryptos are mostly higher today, meaning that most listeners of the show are now richer than they were Friday. Congratulations!
• Coinbase earnings on the horizon, but we got word today from Palantir and SoftBank. Palantir’s stock is off due to a guidance miss, while SoftBank reported massive losses from its Vision Fund efforts.
• Also, it turns out that SoftBank is of the perspective that startup founders are not yet willing to accept valuation cuts to bring the value of their startups in line with market conditions. That’s not good.
• And there was a hugevis PE deal today, Avalara being taken over by Vista Equity Partners in a $8.4 billion deal.
• What else? Self-driving cars from Baidu are now taking passengers in China, Lyft is building a media business, and India is cutting back on buying Chinese smartphones.

We are back Wednesday! Chat soon!

Shares of U.S.-listed Chinese companies, and especially technology concerns, are ripping higher this morning. Driving the day’s trading were comments from Chinese government official Liu He concerning both foreign-listed Chinese shares and the pace of reform in the country’s economy.

Yesterday, The Exchange noted that a selloff of Chinese equities had steepened in recent days; uncertainty regarding the Chinese government’s COVID-19 policies, its closeness to the increasingly ostracized Russian government, rapid-fire regulations on major tech companies, and a shift in government thinking regarding its economy — the “common prosperity” effort — had rattled investors.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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Today, however, in light of the pronouncement, things are looking up for Chinese companies, at least in valuation terms. For example, the NASDAQ Golden Dragon China Index, comprising 93 different U.S.-listed Chinese companies, shot nearly 18% higher this morning. Alibaba and Baidu are up 17% apiece, shares of Bilibili are up 30%, and so on.

What’s changing?

The comments in question — here, in Chinese — indicate, per a CNBC translation, that the “Chinese government continues to support various kinds of businesses’ overseas listings.”

For holders of foreign shares of Chinese companies, that’s a relief given market concern that companies could be forced to delist. The document also notes that regulatory work should be completed rapidly — more welcome news. Other topics were mentioned, including monetary policy, the country’s real estate market and Hong Kong.

That the Chinese government is potentially retreating from the posture it struck last year when it was busy going after Chinese tech companies’ business models, labor practices, data policies and capital sources is incredibly important. Not only for the companies directly impacted by the day’s news, but also startups looking to build in the country.

Recall that we saw an early indication yesterday that the pace of venture investment in China is slowing in the first quarter. No single factor can claim the full mantle of responsibility for that change. But many contributed to it, and if China is willing to keep open more avenues for exits — foreign IPOs — while creating more regulatory room for companies to build, well, it’s a good recipe for more startup activity.

The Chinese venture capital market once challenged the United States’ VC market in activity terms. Those days are now years past. But leading status or not, there are a lot of folks who want to build in China, so we’re tracking their fortunes.

Most database startups avoid building relational databases, since that market is dominated by a few goliaths. Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have embedded themselves into the technical fabric of large- and medium-size companies going back decades. These established companies have a lot of market share and a lot of money to quash the competition.

So rather than trying to compete in the relational database market, over the past decade, many database startups focused on alternative architectures such as document-centric databases (like MongoDB), key-value stores (like Redis) and graph databases (like Neo4J). But Cockroach Labs went against conventional wisdom with CockroachDB: It intentionally competed in the relational database market with its relational database product.

While it did face an uphill battle to penetrate the market, Cockroach Labs saw a surprising benefit: It didn’t have to invent a market. All it needed to do was grab a share of a market that also happened to be growing rapidly.

In previous parts of this EC-1, I looked at the origins of CockroachDB, presented an in-depth technical description of its product as well as an analysis of the company’s developer relations and cloud service, CockroachCloud. In this final installment, we’ll look at the future of the company, the competitive landscape within the relational database market, its ability to retain talent as it looks toward a potential IPO or acquisition, and the risks it faces.

CockroachDB’s success is not guaranteed. It has to overcome significant hurdles to secure a profitable place for itself among a set of well-established database technologies that are owned by companies with very deep pockets.

It’s not impossible, though. We’ll first look at MongoDB as an example of how a company can break through the barriers for database startups competing with incumbents.

When life gives you Mongos, make MongoDB

Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB CEO, rings the Nasdaq Stock Market Opening Bell. Image Credits: Nasdaq, Inc

MongoDB is a good example of the risks that come with trying to invent a new database market. The company started out as a purely document-centric database at a time when that approach was the exception rather than the rule.

Web developers like document-centric databases because they address a number of common use cases in their work. For example, a document-centric database works well for storing comments to a blog post or a customer’s entire order history and profile.

If you want to know what the future of finance looks like, head east, where it’s already been laid down in China. Digital payments through mobile phones are ubiquitous, and there is incredible innovation around lending, investments and digital currencies that are at the vanguard of global financial innovation.

Take the cover photo of this article: At Alibaba, facial recognition software identifies customers at the employee cafeteria, while visual AI identifies foods on their tray and calculates a total bill — all pretty much instantly.

Given some of the big news stories emanating out of the sector the past two weeks, I wanted to get a deeper view on what’s happening in China’s fintech market and what that portends for the rest of the world moving forward. So I called up Martin Chorzempa, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who is writing a book on the development of China’s fintech sector to get his take on what’s happening and what it all means.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

TechCrunch: Why don’t we start with the big news from earlier this month about Ant Group and how its world-record shattering IPO was pulled at the last minute by Chinese financial regulators. What was your take and why were so many people trying to pile into the IPO?

Martin Chorzempa: I think there’s been surprise at how much interest there is in the company, and I think that’s just really an indication of the market for fintech in China. It’s certainly the world’s largest market for financial technology, and even though in the payments space things look pretty saturated between Ant and Tencent’s WeChat, there are so many areas that they’re expanding into, like credit and insurance, where there’s still a lot of room to run for these kinds of financial technologies to take over a much larger share of the financial system than they do now.

So even just considering the domestic market, it’s huge and it’s just going to get larger. Then, the big question mark is expanding abroad and whether these companies can become truly global financial technology giants. Today, nobody except Chinese people outside of China uses Alipay or WeChat Pay to pay for anything. So that’s a big unexplored side that I think is going to come into a lot of geopolitical risks.

So on globalization, who do these companies need to globalize? China has 1.3 billion people — isn’t that enough of a market to stay focused on?

Well, I don’t think anything’s ever enough for firms this ambitious. And if you think about it, if you have this really unique experience and data, that has a lot of applicability to other countries. So at the very least, it would be kind of a deadweight loss not to have that technology and experience applied to building out digital financial solutions in other countries.

Prior to the pandemic, Chinese people were going abroad in large numbers. So if you want to keep serving even the domestic market you have to have your payment methods accepted abroad.

Plus, if you want to facilitate and grow with China’s e-commerce businesses and other kinds of international trade, then having networks of merchants abroad and being able to use Alipay, for example, is something that could be really important to future growth. The domestic market is huge, but eventually you do run into diminishing returns if everybody already has your app and they’re already borrowing and investing.

Cloudflare today announced a new partnership with JD Cloud & AI that will see the company expand its network in Chinato an additional 150 data centers. Currently, Cloudflare is available in 17 data centers in mainland China, thanks to a long-standing partnership with Baidu, but this new deal is obviously significantly larger.

CloudFlare’s original partnership with Baidu launched in 2015. The idea then, as now, was to give Cloudflare a foothold in one of the fastest-growing internet markets by providing Chinese companies better reach customers inside and outside of the country, but also — and maybe more importantly — to allow foreign companies to better reach the vast Chinese market.

“I think there are very few Western technology companies that have figured out how to operate in China,” Matthew Prince, the CEO and co-founder Cloudflare told me. “And I think we’re really proud of the fact that we’ve done that. What I’ve learned about China — certainly in the last six years that we’ve been directly working with partners there, […] has been that while it’s an enormous market and an enormous opportunity […], it’s still a very tight-knot technology community there — and one with a very long memory.”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 22: (L-R) Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn of CloudFlare speak onstage during day two of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 at Pier 70 on September 22, 2015 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

He attributes the fact that Cloudflare was a good partner to Baidu for so many years to JD’s interest in working with the company as well. That partnership with Baidu will continue (Prince called them a “terrific partner”). This new deal with JD, however, will now also give Cloudflare the ability to reach another set of Chinese enterprises, too, that are currently betting on that company’s cloud.

“As we got to know them, JD really stood out,” Prince said. “I think they’re first of all really one of the up and coming cloud providers in China. And I think that then means that marrying Cloudflare’s services with JD’s services makes their overall cloud platform much more robust for Chinese customers.” He also noted that JD has relationships with many large Chinese businesses that are increasingly looking to go global.

To put this deal into perspective, today, Cloudflare operates in about 200 cities. Adding another 150 to this — even if it’s through a partner — marks a major expansion for the company.

As for the deal itself, Prince said that its structure is similar to the deal it made with Baidu. “We contribute the technology and the know-how to build a network out across China. They introduce capital in order to build that network out and also have some financial guarantees to us and then we share in the upside of what happens as we’re both able to sell the China network or as JD is able to sell Cloudflare’s services outside of China.”

When the company first went to China through Baidu, it was criticized for going into a market where there some obvious issues around free speech. Prince, who has been pretty outspoken about free speech issues, seems to be taking a rather pragmatic approach here.

“[Free speech] is certainly something we thought about a lot when we first made the decision to go into China in 2014,” he said. “And I think we’ve learned a lot about it. Around the world, whether it’s China or Turkey or Egypt or the United Kingdom or Brazil or increasingly even the United States, there are rules about what content can be accessed there. Regardless of what my personal feelings might be — and I grew up as a son of a journalist and in the United States and have seen the power of having a very free press and really, really, really strong freedom of expression protection. But I also think that every country doesn’t have the same tradition and the same laws as the United States. And I think that what we have tried to do everywhere that we operate, is comply with whatever the regional laws are. And it’s hard to do anything else.”

Cloudflare expects that it will take three years before all of the data centers will go online.

“I’m thrilled to establish this strategic collaboration with Cloudflare,” said Dr. Bowen Zhou, President of JD Cloud & AI. “Cloudflare’s mission of ‘helping to build a better Internet,’ closely aligns with JD Cloud & AI’s commitment to provide the best service possible to global partners. Leveraging JD.com’s rich experience across vast business scenarios, as well as its logistics and technological capabilities, we believe that this collaboration will provide valuable services that will transform how business is done for users inside and outside of China.”

The contract between the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and ecommerce giant Amazon — for a health information licensing partnership involving its Alexa voice AI — has been released following a Freedom of Information request.

The government announced the partnership this summer. But the date on the contract, which was published on the gov.uk contracts finder site months after the FOI was filed, shows the open-ended arrangement to funnel nipped-and-tucked health advice from the NHS’ website to Alexa users in audio form was inked back in December 2018.

The contract is between the UK government and Amazon US (Amazon Digital Services, Delaware) — rather than Amazon UK. 

Nor is it a standard NHS Choices content syndication contract. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed the legal agreement uses an Amazon contract template. She told us the department had worked jointly with Amazon to adapt the template to fit the intended use — i.e. access to publicly funded healthcare information from the NHS’ website.

The NHS does make the same information freely available on its website, of course. As well as via API — to some 1,500 organizations. But Amazon is not just any organization; It’s a powerful US platform giant with a massive ecommerce business.

The contract reflects that power imbalance; not being a standard NHS content syndication agreement — but rather DHSC tweaking Amazon’s standard terms.

“It was drawn up between both Amazon UK and the Department for Health and Social Care,” a department spokeswoman told us. “Given that Amazon is in the business of holding standard agreements with content providers they provided the template that was used as the starting point for the discussions but it was drawn up in negotiation with the Department for Health and Social Care, and obviously it was altered to apply to UK law rather than US law.”

In July, when the government officially announced the Alexa-NHS partnership, its PR provided a few sample queries of how Amazon’s voice AI might respond to what it dubbed “NHS-verified” information — such as: “Alexa, how do I treat a migraine?”; “Alexa, what are the symptoms of flu?”; “Alexa, what are the symptoms of chickenpox?”.

But of course as anyone who’s ever googled a health symptom could tell you, the types of stuff people are actually likely to ask Alexa — once they realize they can treat it as an NHS-verified info-dispensing robot, and go down the symptom-querying rabbit hole — is likely to range very far beyond the common cold.

At the official launch of what the government couched as a ‘collaboration’ with Amazon, it explained its decision to allow NHS content to be freely piped through Alexa by suggesting that voice technology has “the potential to reduce the pressure on the NHS and GPs by providing information for common illnesses”.

Its PR cited an unattributed claim that “by 2020, half of all searches are expected to be made through voice-assisted technology”.

This prediction is frequently attributed to ComScore, a media measurement firm that was last month charged with fraud by the SEC. However it actually appears to originate with computer scientist Andrew Ng, from when he was chief scientist at Chinese tech giant Baidu.

Econsultancy noted last year that Mary Meeker included Ng’s claim on a slide in her 2016 Internet Trends report — which is likely how the prediction got so widely amplified.

But on Meeker’s slide you can see that the prediction is in fact “images or speech”, not voice alone…

So it turns out the UK government incorrectly cited a tech giant prediction to push a claim that “voice search has been increasing rapidly” — in turn its justification for funnelling NHS users towards Amazon.

“We want to empower every patient to take better control of their healthcare and technology like this is a great example of how people can access reliable, world-leading NHS advice from the comfort of their home, reducing the pressure on our hardworking GPs and pharmacists,” said health secretary Matt Hancock in a July statement.

Since landing at the health department, the app-loving former digital minister has been pushing a tech-first agenda for transforming the NHS — promising to plug in “healthtech” apps and services, and touting “preventative, predictive and personalised care”. He’s also announced an AI lab housed within a new unit that’s intended to oversee the digitization of the NHS.

Compared with all that, plugging the NHS’ website into Alexa probably seems like an easy ‘on-message’ win. But immediately the collaboration was announced concerns were raised that the government is recklessly mixing the streams of critical (and sensitive) national healthcare infrastructure with the rapacious data-appetite of a foreign tech giant with both an advertising and ecommerce business, plus major ambitions of its own in the healthcare space.

On the latter front, just yesterday news broke of Amazon’s second health-related acquisition: Health Navigator, a startup with an API platform for integrating with health services, such as telemedicine and medical call centers, which offers natural language processing tools for documenting health complaints and care recommendations.

Last year Amazon also picked up online pharmacy PillPack — for just under $1BN. While last month it launched a pilot of a healthcare service offering to its own employees in and around Seattle, called Amazon Care. That looks intended to be a road-test for addressing the broader U.S. market down the line. So the company’s commercial designs on healthcare are becoming increasingly clear.

Returning to the UK, in response to early critical feedback on the Alexa-NHS arrangement, the IT delivery arm of the service, NHS Digital, published a blog post going into more detail about the arrangement — following what it couched as “interesting discussion about the challenges for the NHS of working with large commercial organisations like Amazon”.

A core critical “discussion” point is the question of what Amazon will do with people’s medical voice query data, given the partnership is clearly encouraging people to get used to asking Alexa for health advice.

“We have stuck to the fundamental principle of not agreeing a way of working with Amazon that we would not be willing to consider with any single partner – large or small. We have been careful about data, commercialisation, privacy and liability, and we have spent months working with knowledgeable colleagues to get it right,” NHS Digital claimed in July.

In another section of the blog post, responding to questions about what Amazon will do with the data and “what about privacy”, it further asserted there would be no health profiling of customers — writing:

We have worked with the Amazon team to ensure that we can be totally confident that Amazon is not sharing any of this information with third parties. Amazon has been very clear that it is not selling products or making product recommendations based on this health information, nor is it building a health profile on customers. All information is treated with high confidentiality. Amazon restrict access through multi-factor authentication, services are all encrypted, and regular audits run on their control environment to protect it.

Yet it turns out the contract DHSC signed with Amazon is just a content licensing agreement. There are no terms contained in it concerning what can or can’t be done with the medical voice query data Alexa is collecting with the help of “NHS-verified” information.

Per the contract terms, Amazon is required to attribute content to the NHS when Alexa responds to a query with information from the service’s website. (Though the company says Alexa also makes use of medical content from the Mayo Clinic and Wikipedia.) So, from the user’s point of view, they will at times feel like they’re talking to an NHS-branded service.

But without any legally binding confidentiality clauses around what can be done with their medical voice queries it’s not clear how NHS Digital can confidently assert that Amazon isn’t creating health profiles.

The situation seems to sum to, er, trust Amazon. (NHS Digital wouldn’t comment; saying it’s only responsible for delivery not policy setting, and referring us to the DHSC.)

Asked what it does with medical voice query data generated as a result of the NHS collaboration an Amazon spokesperson told us: “We do not build customer health profiles based on interactions with nhs.uk content or use such requests for marketing purposes.”

But the spokesperson could not point to any legally binding contract clauses in the licensing agreement that restrict what Amazon can do with people’s medical queries.

We’ve also asked the company to confirm whether medical voice queries that return NHS content are being processed in the US.

“This collaboration only provides content already available on the NHS.UK website, and absolutely no personal data is being shared by NHS to Amazon or vice versa,” Amazon also told us, eliding the key point that it’s not NHS data being shared with Amazon but NHS users, reassured by the presence of a trusted public brand, being encouraged to feed Alexa sensitive personal data by asking about their ailments and health concerns.

Bizarrely, the Department of Health and Social Care went further. Its spokeswoman claimed in an email that “there will be no data shared, collected or processed by Amazon and this is just an alternative way of providing readily available information from NHS.UK.”

When we spoke to DHSC on the phone prior to this, to raise the issue of medical voice query data generated via the partnership and fed to Amazon — also asking where in the contract are clauses to protect people’s data — the spokeswoman said she would have to get back to us.

All of which suggests the government has a very vague idea (to put it generously) of how cloud-powered voice AIs function.

Presumably no one at DHSC bothered to read the information on Amazon’s own Alexa privacy page — although the department spokeswomen was at least aware this page existed (because she knew Amazon had pointed us to what she called its “privacy notice”, which she said “sets out how customers are in control of their data and utterances”).

If you do read the page you’ll find Amazon offers some broad-brush explanation there which tells you that after an Alexa device has been woken by its wake word, the AI will “begin recording and sending your request to Amazon’s secure cloud”.

Ergo data is collected and processed. And indeed stored on Amazon’s servers. So, yes, data is ‘shared’.

The more detailed Alexa Internet Privacy Notice, meanwhile, sets out broad-brush parameters to enable Amazon’s reuse of Alexa user data — stating that “the information we learn from users helps us personalize and continually improve your Alexa experience and provide information about Internet trends, website popularity and traffic, and related content”. [emphasis ours]

The DHSC sees the matter very differently, though.

With no contractual binds covering health-related queries UK users of Alexa are being encouraged to whisper into Amazon’s robotic ears — data that’s naturally linked to Alexa and Amazon account IDs (and which the Alexa Internet Privacy Notice also specifies can be accessed by “a limited number of employees”) — the government is accepting the tech giant’s standard data processing terms for a commercial, consumer product which is deeply integrated into its increasingly sprawling business empire.

Terms such as indefinite retention of audio recordings — unless users pro-actively request that they are deleted. And even then Amazon admitted this summer it doesn’t always delete the text transcripts of recordings. So even if you keep deleting all your audio snippets, traces of medical queries may well remain on Amazon’s servers.

Earlier this year it also emerged the company employs contractors around the world to listen in to Alexa recordings as part of internal efforts to improve the performance of the AI.

A number of tech giants recently admitted to the presence of such ‘speech grading’ programs, as they’re sometimes called — though none had been up front and transparent about the fact their shiny AIs needed an army of external human eavesdroppers to pull off a show of faux intelligence.

It’s been journalists highlighting the privacy risks for users of AI assistants; and media exposure leading to public pressure on tech giants to force changes to concealed internal processes that have, by default, treated people’s information as an owned commodity that exists to serve and reserve their own corporate interests.

Data protection? Only if you interpret the term as meaning your personal data is theirs to capture and that they’ll aggressively defend the IP they generate from it.

So, in other words, actual humans — both employed by Amazon directly and not — may be listening to the medical stuff you’re telling Alexa. Unless the user finds and activates a recently added ‘no human review’ option buried in Alexa settings.

Many of these arrangements remain under regulatory scrutiny in Europe. Amazon’s lead data protection regulator in Europe confirmed in August it’s in discussions with it over concerns related to its manual reviews of Alexa recordings. So UK citizens — whose taxes fund the NHS — might be forgiven for expecting more care from their own government around such a ‘collaboration’.

Rather than a wholesale swallowing of tech giant T&Cs in exchange for free access to the NHS brand and  “NHS-verified” information which helps Amazon burnish Alexa’s utility and credibility, allowing it to gather valuable insights for its commercial healthcare ambitions.

To date there has been no recognition from DHSC the government has a duty of care towards NHS users as regards potential risks its content partnership might generate as Alexa harvests their voice queries via a commercial conduit that only affords users very partial controls over what happens to their personal data.

Nor is DHSC considering the value being generously gifted by the state to Amazon — in exchange for a vague supposition that a few citizens might go to the doctor a bit less if a robot tells them what flu symptoms look like.

“The NHS logo is supposed to mean something,” says Sam Smith, coordinator at patient data privacy advocacy group, MedConfidential — one of the organizations that makes use of the NHS’ free APIs for health content (but which he points out did not write its own contract for the government to sign).

“When DHSC signed Amazon’s template contract to put the NHS logo on anything Amazon chooses to do, it left patients to fend for themselves against the business model of Amazon in America.”

In a related development this week, Europe’s data protection supervisor has warned of serious data protection concerns related to standard contracts EU institutions have inked with another tech giant, Microsoft, to use its software and services.

The watchdog recently created a strategic forum that’s intended to bring together the region’s public administrations to work on drawing up standard contracts with fairer terms for the public sector — to shrink the risk of institutions feeling outgunned and pressured into accepting T&Cs written by the same few powerful tech providers.

Such an effort is sorely needed — though it comes too late to hand-hold the UK government into striking more patient-sensitive terms with Amazon US.

Zhihu may not be as well known outside of China as WeChat or ByteDance’s Douyin, but over the past eight years, it has cultivated a reputation for being one of the country’s most trustworthy social media platforms. Originally launched as a question-and-answer site similar to Quora, Zhihu has grown to be a central hub for professional knowledge, allowing users to interact with experts and companies in a wide range of industries.

Headquartered in Beijing, Zhihu recently raised a $434 million Series F, its biggest round since 2011. The funding also brought Zhihu two important new partners: video and live-streaming app Beijing Kuaishou, which led the round, and Baidu, owner of China’s largest search engine (other participants in the round included Tencent and CapitalToday).

Launched in 2011, Zhihu (the name means “do you know”) is most frequently compared to Quora and Yahoo Answers. While it resembled those Q&A platforms at first, it has grown in scope. Now it would be more accurate to say that the platform is like a combination of Quora, LinkedIn and Medium’s subscription program.

For example, Zhihu has an invitation-only blogging platform for verified experts and since launching official accounts, it has become a channel for companies and organizations to communicate with users. A representative for Zhihu told TechCrunch that the platform had 220 million users and 30,000 official accounts as of January 2019 (for context, there are currently about 800 million Internet users in China), who have posted a total of 130 million answers so far.

The company’s growth will be closely watched since Zhihu is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering. Last November, the company hired its first chief financial officer, Sun Wei, heightening speculation. A representative for the company told TechCrunch the position was created because of Zhihu’s business development needs and that there is currently no timeline for a public listing.

At the same time, the company has also dealt with reports that its growth has slowed.

The global smart speaker market grew 55.4% in the second quarter to reach 26.1 million shipments, according to a new report from Canalys. Amazon continued to lead the race, accounting for 6.6 million units shipped in the quarter. Google, however, fell to the third spot as China’s Baidu surged ahead. Baidu in Q2 grew a sizable 3,700% to reach 4.5 million units, overtaking Google’s 4.3 million units shipped.

China’s market overall doubled its quarterly shipments to 12.6 million units, or more than twice the U.S.’s 6.1 million total. The latter represents a slight (2.4%) decline since the prior quarter.

Baidu’s growth in the quarter was attributed to aggressive marketing and go-to-market campaigns. It was particularly successful in terms of smart displays, which accounted for 45% of the products it shipped.

“Local network operator’s interests on the [smart display] device category soared recently. This bodes well for Baidu as it faces little competition in the smart display category, allowing the company to dominate in the operator channel,” noted Canalys Research Analyst Cynthia Chen.

Meanwhile, Google was challenged by the Nest rebranding in Q2, the analyst firm said.

The report also suggested that Google should to introduce a revamped smart speaker portfolio to rekindle consumer interest. The Google Home device hasn’t been updated since launch — still sporting the air freshener-style looks it had back in 2016. And the Google Home mini hasn’t received much more than a color change.

Instead, Google’s attention as of late has been on making it easier for device manufacturers to integrate with Google Assistant technology, in addition to its increased focus on smart displays.

Amazon, by comparison, has updated its Echo line of speakers several times while expanding Alexa to devices with screens like the Echo Spot and Show, and to those without like the Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Auto, and others — even clocks and microwaves, as sort of public experiments in voice computing.

That said, both Amazon and Google turned their attention to non-U.S. markets in Q2, the report found. 50% of Amazon’s smart speaker shipments were outside the U.S. in Q2, up from 32% in Q2 last year. And 55% of Google’s shipments were outside the U.S., up from 42% in Q2 2018.

Beyond the top 3 — Amazon, Baidu and now No. 3 Google — the remaining top 5 included Alibaba and Xiaomi, with 4.1 million and 2.8 million units shipped in Q2, respectively.

The rest of the market, which would also include Apple’s HomePod, totaled 3.7 million units.

After his tenure as Chief Scientist at Baidu, Andrew Ng, the founder of the Google Brain project and former CEO of Coursera, set up a number of different proejcts that all focus on making AI more approachable. These include the education startup Deeplearning.ai, the AI Fund startup studio for building AI companies and Landing.ai, which helps enterprises (and especially manufacturing companies) use AI. Today, Ng announced that he has opened a second office for these projects in Medellin, Colombia.

At first, Medellin may seem like an odd choice. But today’s Medellin is very different from the one you may have seen on Narcos (and a lot safer). It’s home to a number of universities and over the course of the last few years, it’s a hub for Colombia’s startup scene thanks to incubators like Ruta N and others.

Ng told me that he chose Medellin after looking at a wide range of cities in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Medellin, he believes, offers a strong talent pool, educational system and business ecosystem. it also helps that the Colombia government has made tech a focus in recent years.

“I see early signs of momentum for Colombia being a talent magnet both regionally and globally,” he told me. Indeed, the company was able to hire team members from Poland, Bangladesh, Egypt and Chile for its offices in Medellin, which now has just under 50 people. Over the course of the next two years, Ng plans to expand this team to between 150 and 200 employees.

It’s important, Ng argues, that we set up AI hubs outside of Silicon Valley and China, in part, because they’ll provide a different perspective. “We are able to share our AI ecosystem and Silicon Valley know-how with Medellín,” he writes in today’s announcement. “We’re equally thrilled for our Silicon Valley team to be learning from the Medellín community. Local knowledge and innovation shared with a global community is what will catapult the technology forward.”

The teams in Medellin will work on all of Ng’s projects, including four unannounced stealth portfolio companies that are looking into using AI in sectors like healthcare, education and customer support. In total, the teams in Medellin are working on about a dozen projects right now. And that’s very much Ng’s approach to AI — and for Landing.ai in particular: build lots of specialized components for various verticals that can then be generalized. “AI isn’t some piece of SaaS software that everybody can just swipe their credit card and use,” he said.

Andrew Ng will also join us for our first TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event in San Francisco on September 5 to talk about Landing.ai and the future of AI in general. You can find more information about the event (and buy tickets) here.

Zhihu, the largest question and answer platform in China, has raised a $434 million Series F. This is not only the company’s biggest round since it launched in 2011, but also one of the largest secured over the past two years by a Chinese Internet culture and entertainment company, said China Renaissance, which served as the funding’s financial advisor.

The Series F was led by Beijing Kuaishou, the video and live-streaming app, with participation from Baidu . Existing investors Tencent and CapitalToday also returned for the round, which Zhihu will use for technology and product development. Baidu told Bloomberg that it will add 100 million Zhihu posts to its main app.

While Zhihu has downplayed reports that it is planning an IPO, it embarked on plans to hire a CFO and restructure last year.

Zhihu users tend to be educated with relatively high incomes and the platform has developed a reputation for hosting experts and organizations that are knowledgeable in tech, marketing and professional services like education. Like Quora and other Q&A platforms, Zhihu lets users post and answer text-based questions. But it also has other features, including discussion forums, a publishing platform and live videos for brands and companies to answer questions in real-time. Instead of making its streaming video feature, called Zhihu Live, open to all users, it is available to only to experts and organizations, differentiating it from other streaming apps like Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok (ByteDance is an investor in Zhihu but did not participate in this round).

In a post about the round on his Zhihu page, founder and CEO Victor Zhou wrote the company plans to keep up with rapid changes in China’s media and Internet landscape. “Over the past 8 years, users have gone from expecting simple entertainment to using the Internet to deal with real-life and work problems. The focus of competition has also shifted from traffic to traffic + quality.”

Zhihu, the largest question and answer platform in China, has raised a $434 million Series F. This is not only the company’s biggest round since it launched in 2011, but also one of the largest secured over the past two years by a Chinese Internet culture and entertainment company, said China Renaissance, which served as the funding’s financial advisor.

The Series F was led by Beijing Kuaishou, the video and live-streaming app, with participation from Baidu . Existing investors Tencent and CapitalToday also returned for the round, which Zhihu will use for technology and product development. Baidu told Bloomberg that it will add 100 million Zhihu posts to its main app.

While Zhihu has downplayed reports that it is planning an IPO, it embarked on plans to hire a CFO and restructure last year.

Zhihu users tend to be educated with relatively high incomes and the platform has developed a reputation for hosting experts and organizations that are knowledgeable in tech, marketing and professional services like education. Like Quora and other Q&A platforms, Zhihu lets users post and answer text-based questions. But it also has other features, including discussion forums, a publishing platform and live videos for brands and companies to answer questions in real-time. Instead of making its streaming video feature, called Zhihu Live, open to all users, it is available to only to experts and organizations, differentiating it from other streaming apps like Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok (ByteDance is an investor in Zhihu but did not participate in this round).

In a post about the round on his Zhihu page, founder and CEO Victor Zhou wrote the company plans to keep up with rapid changes in China’s media and Internet landscape. “Over the past 8 years, users have gone from expecting simple entertainment to using the Internet to deal with real-life and work problems. The focus of competition has also shifted from traffic to traffic + quality.”