End-to-end encrypted email provider Tutanota finally got a fix last month from Microsoft for a registration issue that had affected users who were trying to sign up to the tech giant’s cloud-based collaboration platform, Teams, using a Tutanota email address — but only after complaining about the problem publicly.

TechCrunch picked up its complaint last month.

In a blog post confirming the resolution yesterday, Tutanota writes that Microsoft got in touch with it “within a week” after media outlets such as this one raised the issue with Microsoft. It had been complaining about the issue through Microsoft’s official support channels since January 2021 — without any resolution. But after the oxygen of publicity arrived the problem was swiftly fixed last month. Fancy that!

While it’s (finally) a happy ending for Tutanota, its co-founder Matthias Pfau makes the salient point that this situation remains an entirely unsatisfactory one for SMEs faced with the market muscle of powerful platforms which have — at best — a competitive disinterest in swiftly attending to access issues and other problems affecting smaller businesses that need fair interfacing with their platforms to ensure they can properly serve their own customers.

“While the issue has been resolved pretty quickly by Microsoft after the right people contacted us following the media attention, we still believe that this example shows why we need better antitrust regulations. It is not fair that a Big Tech company can ignore a small company’s request to fix an issue that effects its users for months, and is only interested in fixing the issue after it received bad publicity because of this,” he writes.

“After all, not every small company has the option to go public, possibly because the media will decide their issue is not worth talking about or because they simply do not have established media contacts and find it hard to get through to the right people.

“While we are very happy that this particular issue has now been fixed for all Tutanota users, we still believe that there must be a better way for companies to contact Big Tech and request fixes from them – one where they can not simply answer to the request with “Sorry, fixing the issue you are having is not feasible for us.”

Platform fairness is one issue that the European Commission has been attending to in recent years — but apparently not with enough of a flex to ensure all SMEs are being treated attentively by cloud giants.

Tutanota is not alone in experiencing issues with Microsoft’s support response to its complaint. Another SME, the browser maker Vivaldi, got in touch following our report on Tutanota’s issue — saying users of a webmail service it offers had reported a similar issue on Azure, another Microsoft cloud computing platform. It told us that users of its Vivaldi.net email service had been given information — “and possibly access to” — other vivaldi.net users’ Azure accounts. Which sounds, well, suboptimal.

“The reason is that vivaldi.net is handled as a corporate domain, not an email provider domain. Microsoft has refused to fix the problem, claiming it is by design,” a spokesperson for the company explained last month, adding: “We have also had similar reports about other services.”

“It’s frustrating that in 2022 to find Microsoft blatantly continues to engage in anti-competitive practices,” they added.

After TechCrunch raised Vivaldi’s complaint with Microsoft, the SME got back in touch with us to say — surprise! — it had suddenly had fresh attention from the cloud giant to its complaint… “We are having a meeting with them this week. So they have woken up after two years. Let’s see what comes out of this,” its spokesperson told us a few weeks ago.

We followed up this month to see if Vivaldi has also had a resolution — but at the time of writing we’re still waiting on a response.

We also asked for an update from Microsoft but haven’t heard back yet. But the tech giant previously told us: “We’re in touch with Vivaldi.net to look into their concerns around data and will take action as needed to ensure that customer data is handled properly and any issues are addressed appropriately.”

One thing is clear: These two complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. (Just the social media chatter around our Tutanota reporting includes a similar complaint about IBM Cloud — and another that Microsoft also blocks self hosted emails from its virtual private servers “without any sort of explanation, so you can conveniently get an email address from them as well”, with the complainant accusing its business of “always been forced dominance” — for e.g.)

What’s a whole lot less clear is whether or not current (and incoming) EU regulations are up to the task of protecting SMEs from cloud giants’ power to be totally disinterested in resolving platform problems that affect smaller competitors.

Back in 2019, the European Union agreed a regulation the bloc’s lawmakers claimed was pioneering in this regard — aimed at tackling unfair platform business practices, with the Commission saying they wanted to outlaw “some of the most unfair practices” and create a benchmark for transparency. The regulation, which came into force just over two years ago, included a requirement that platforms set up new avenues for dispute resolution by mandating they have an internal complaint-handling system to assist business users.

However the EU’s platform-to-business (P2B) trading regulation, which was targeted at so-called “online intermediation services” which provide services to business users that to enable them to reach consumers, had a heavy focus on ecommerce platforms, search engines, app stores and rental websites etc (and barely any mention of cloud computing). So it’s not clear whether services like Microsoft Teams and Azure are intended to fall in scope — despite “online intermediation” itself being a broad concept.  

If the regulation is supposed to apply to cloud services, the poor experiences of SMEs like Tutanota — having core issues affecting their users essentially ignored via official support channels — indicates something isn’t working. So, at very least, there’s a failure of enforcement going on here. The lack of clarity around whether the P2B regulation even applies in such cases also obviously doesn’t help. So there does seem to be a communication gap — if not an outright loophole.

The EU has further digital regulations incoming that are squarely targeted at ruling how platforms do business with others, with the goal of ensuring open and contestable markets via proactive enforcement of fair terms and conditions. Most notably the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which will apply to the most powerful “gatekeeper” platforms.

However this regulation is not yet in force — application will start next year — and it will require individual gatekeepers and “core platform services” to be designated before requirements apply, which will take many months in each case. So, well, it’s not going to be a quick fix.

Additionally, there have also been some concerns about whether the new regime will robustly apply to cloud giants productivity and enterprise services to other businesses. So some legal fuzziness around cloud services may persist.

Asked if it’s confident the DMA will be an antitrust game-changer, a spokeswoman for Tutanota was doubtful it will prove a silver bullet to resolve the baked-in power imbalance between platforms and SMEs. “A better way to resolve such issues is needed,” she told us. “Possibly the DMA will address this but consequences in cases of negligence on the gatekeeper’s side must be in place; otherwise it will be easy for them to continue to ignore small competitors.

“As long as Big Tech companies do not have to fear any kind of consequence — be it bad publicity or drastic fines — they will not be interested to invest into fixing issues of competitors’ users — which from their business perspective is understandable. This is exactly why we need better legislation in this regard.”

“We expect the DMA to be a good first step into this direction, though it will probably not address all issues,” she added.

The Commission was contacted with questions on these issues but at the time of writing it had not responded. We’ll update this report if we hear back.

On cloud platforms and SME antitrust complaints by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

The voluntary carbon market remains a Wild West. There are few standards, a myriad of approaches, while buyers and sellers are crying out for clarity.

And there are lots of different approaches. In tokenization there are startups like Single.Earth and Flow Carbon. In marketplaces there is CarbonXchange, Aircarbon. In afforestation there is Land Life Company and Future Forest Company. The list goes on.

Arbonics‘ approach is to use a data- and science-driven tool to calculate the potential carbon income of land and forests for landowners in Europe. For obvious reasons, this creates a business for these owners as well as helping to fight climate change.

The company is now announcing that earlier this year it raised €1.8M in a pre-seed round from Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of Wise) with his new fund Plural.

Founded by Kristjan Lepik and Lisett Luik in early 2022, Arbonics says it helps landowners to analyze and calculate the ability of their land to absorb carbon using many data sources and looks at unused land and existing forests which can generate carbon credits.

Carbon credits are a way for carbon emitters to offset emissions. It’s estimated that the European Union alone has the potential to capture and store up to two gigatonnes of additional carbon annually – equivalent to 73% of the EU’s total CO2 emissions in 2021. Assuming Arbonics is successful, that’s a big prize to shoot for.

Kristjan Lepik, co-founder of Arbonics, told me: “Right now the process of getting carbon credits is far too complex and too costly for an average landowner to go through. Data and tech make this quick and transparent. Secondly, we are taking the long-term view. Some players on the market are trying to create short-term credits that are harder to sell to B2B credit buyers. We need to make sure that long-term changes are made to the forests.”

He says the company is different from competitors because it looks across the whole forest lifecycle, is aimed at European landowners, and is faster that others.

In a statement Taavet Hinrikus, founding investor, added: “I am a big fan of technologies that can speed up carbon capture – direct air capture is one example. But those technologies are only a small part of the solution; we need to empower nature and combine it with data-based technologies to help nature-based solutions scale.” 

Could the forests and land of Europe offset most of its CO2? This startup hopes to prove it by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Remote work struck down barriers for many employees, and now Virtual Internships is doing the same for university students around the world by partnering with over 12,000 companies from 100 countries. The edtech startup announced today it has raised a $14.3 million Series A led by Hambro Perks, with participation from Sequoia India & Southeast Asia’s Surge, Arsenal Growth, Kaplan, Ascend Vietnam Ventures and STIC Investments.

Virtual Internships uses AI to match students at scale with internships at companies ranging from startups to blue chips and guarantees a match within one month. Its host companies include AWS, Carrefour, Dentons, GAM Investments, Asian Development Bank and Bio Pharm Dongsung.

Over 70% of interns work directly with a founders or C-suite executive and the platform also trains students before and during internships with an employability course called CareerBridge. They have access to weekly check-ins, group discussions, webinars and coaching calls in the middle and at the end of their internships. About 25% of students who complete an internship through the platform are invited to continue working with their matched company, and 70% are working in full-time roles within three months of their internship.

CEO Daniel Nivern told TechCrunch that work experience is the most important differentiator for graduates seeking a job, but out of 260 million students in higher education around the world, less than 80 million internships are undertaken. This results in many students feeling that their universities didn’t give them adequate career support. But geography and time commitments also make many top internships inaccessible.

“Virtual internships solves all of these barriers and more by giving all students around the world access to a global, structured internships that they can do at any time and from any place,” he said. “It allows employers to create global talent pipelines, and universities or governments can support specific audiences, ensuring enhanced employability outcomes and better ROI.”

Before founding Virtual Internships, Nivern and co-founder Edward Holyroyd Pearce launched CRCC Asia in 2006 to help students get internships in Asia, growing the business to more than 10,000 students. In 2018, they realized there was a much larger market of students who wanted to do international internships and created Virtual Internships to help them find positions no matter where they are.

Since its launch, Virtual Internships has increased its revenue from $100,000 in fiscal year 2019/2020 to $4.1 million in 2021/2022, and it expects to hit $10 million by 2024. Most of its revenue comes from universities that have added Virtual Internships to their curriculum. It also partners with governments and university pathway programs.

Nivern says competitors include venture-backed companies like Forage, which offers five to six hour virtual work experience programs; apprenticeship programs platform Multiverse; and Riipen, which organizes company competitions and assignments for students to complete with the help of faculty. Virtual Internships differentiates by partnering with universities and governments to offer guaranteed internships that have a high chance of leading to employment.

The company will use its new funding to grow its product and engineering teams. It also plans to add to its partnership development teams in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, along with emerging markets like the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Nivern says Virtual Internships will focus on scalability and employability outcomes by further developing its matching process and working on a post-internship employability portal that will let companies find potential employees from its database of students and graduates.

“Virtual internships is addressing the needs of a more digital working world and providing opportunities for young people from all backgrounds to be part of the globalized economy,” said Hambro Perks managing director Nicholas Sharp in a statement. “The global network that the team is creating through the platform—with customers, teams and investors worldwide—is unique and exciting, and we are delighted to be supporting them through their next stage of growth.”

Virtual Internships matches students with top companies around the world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Walmart is expanding its support for AI-powered virtual try-on technology that allows online shoppers to better visualize clothing on models that look like themselves in both appearance and body type. Before, Walmart.com customers could select from among dozens of different models to find one who best looked like them in order to see how clothing would likely look on their own body, and with their own skin tone, across a range of apparel items. Now, the retailer is launching new technology called “Be Your Own Model,” which lets shoppers use their own photos to see how clothing looks on them, instead of choosing one of the existing fashion models.

The virtual try-on technology hails from Walmart’s 2021 acquisition of the startup Zeekit. The computer vision and neural network-powered feature is capable of analyzing catalog images of garments to create a dressed image. The use of neural networks helps to determine the different variations of a product, including size, color and other factors — like fabric draping or sleeve length, for example.

The result is more realistic imagery than some other experiences where a photo is simply laid overtop another image, Walmart says. This makes it feel different from other tech, like AR-enabled shopping, notes Cheryl Ainoa, Walmart SVP of New Businesses and Emerging Tech.

“Where we didn’t feel like customers were satisfied is that a lot of the AR experiences are basically the equivalent of taking and laying a flat image on top of a flat image,” she says. “That doesn’t let you actually experience what this article of clothing is going to look like on me.”

Initially, Walmart presented its virtual try-on options across models ranging in height between 5’2″ and 6’0″ and in sizes XS through XXXL across “thousands” of items. As of today, this earlier iteration is now available on more than 270,000 items across both national brands like Champion, Levi’s and Hanes, and Walmart’s portfolio of brands, including Sofia Active by Sofia Vergara, Love & Sports, ELOQUII Elements, Time & Tru, Athletic Works, Terra & Sky, No Boundaries, Avia and The Pioneer Woman. A smaller number of items on the Walmart Marketplace also support the feature. It’s also expanded from 50 models to now over 100.

With the coming expansion, customers no longer have to only select from the available models.

Instead, desktop shoppers on Walmart.com and users of Walmart’s mobile app will be able to use their own photos in order to create a more personalized shopping experience. This option is rolling out first to iOS users of the Walmart app and to the web, with Android launching in the weeks ahead.

Image Credits: Walmart

To get started, customers will first need to snap their photo with the Walmart iOS app in order to import their own image into the system. From there, they can then virtually try on any supported clothing items and see how it really looks. If signed-in, the photo will remain associated with the customer’s account for future use but can be deleted at any time.

The company believes this sort of technology will go a long way to increase conversions and minimize returns — issues that still today plague online apparel shopping.

According to Denise Incandela, Walmart EVP Apparel Division and Private Brands, the initial “Choose My Model” feature has already been successful on that front, in fact.

Image Credits: Walmart

“We’re very excited about the insights that came from [the ‘Choose My Model’ feature], which is why of course we expanded beyond the 50 models to the 120, and continue to invest in that,” she says. “We have seen right what we hoped to see in terms of improved conversion.”

Walmart declined to share specific metrics on conversion increases, however, or the impact on returns, as the tech is still new.

The retailer acknowledges that not everyone will want to use themselves as a fashion model, which is why it will continue to support the “Choose My Model” feature alongside the new addition. Still, the company’s long-term goal is to push more customers to use their own image to help them shop — whether that’s online or even in-store, as a way to skip the dressing room.

The retailer also suspects it will continue to help drive conversions, as the earlier feature has done.

“This will be the first time [customers] can see themselves. And they’re gonna see themselves in the product detail page; they’ll see themselves in the product landing page. Frankly, it’s why I was so excited to acquire the Zeekit product, to begin with — because gamification of shopping hasn’t really existed in the past…we think this is the future of shopping,” says Incandela.

Further down the road, Walmart wants to expand the technology to men’s and children’s apparel and even accessories, as well as introduce more brand integrations.

“Be Your Own Model” had been soft-launched before today on the Walmart iOS app but is rolling out more broadly, starting today.

Walmart introduces virtual try-on tech which uses customers’ own photos to model the clothing by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Cryptocurrency transactions in Indonesia hit $60 billion last year, according to the country’s commodities futures trading agency. Crypto exchange and marketplace Reku has been riding the wave with what it says are the lowest fees on the market, and a platform that is aimed at both newcomers and experienced traders. Today, the startup, founded in 2017, announced it has raised $11 million in Series A funding, led by AC Ventures (ACV) with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Skystar Capital.

This is Reku’s (previously called Rekeningku.com) first round of institutional funding. The company generated $3 billion in gross transaction value in 2021 and is profitable. Its founders say that Reku’s five years of operation mean that they know how to scale and endure fluctuations in the market, including the pandemic and this year’s recession.

Reku, which currently has 80 employees, plans to add 50 more positions with the funding. The platform will also continue focusing on security, compliance, efficiency and scalability, said co-founder and CEO Sumardi Fung. Reku recently appointed Jesse Choi, a former private equity investor at Bain Capital, as COO.

Reku’s team

Fung said the company sees “a significant gap in the market for products that actively guide users all the way from the very beginning of their crypto journey until they become experts themselves. Education is one thing, but our vision is to create products that seamlessly guide all users to smart investing.”

Reku makes it platform accessible to first-time traders with educational features. It is compliant with Indonesia’s commodities future trading agency (BAPPEBTI) and emphasizes user safety by offering only well-established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Before founding Reku, Fung worked in the futures trading sector for 12 years.

“In 2017 and 2018, crypto was not this big but we saw a huge opportunity there. Internet penetration expanded rapidly, then it would lead to a more resourceful community where people would seek simplicity such as a global currency,” Fund told TechCrunch. “The logic behind blockchain always made sense to me and we can definitely see a future where people would demand a more transparent financial system.”

Choi added that Indonesian traders initially saw cryptocurrency as a way to make money, but are becoming more interested in other uses for blockchain. “An example of this is NFTs,” he said. “On a relative basis, there’s a tremendous amount of building activity coming out of Indonesia, not just projects but also infrastructure and tools that address the global market. And in fact, Indonesia is one of the leading countries when it comes to crypto and web3 adoption.”

In a statement, ACV founder and managing partner Michael Soerijadji said, “We are excited to lead this investment into Reku. With an intuitive user experience, the lowest fees in the market, and a great leadership team, we are confident Reku will solidify its leadership in Indonesia’s vibrant crypto industry.”

Indonesian crypto platform Reku is built for both new and experienced traders by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Last year, TikTok quietly updated its privacy policy to allow the app to collect biometric data on U.S. users, including “faceprints and voiceprints” — a concerning change that the company declined to detail at the time, or during a subsequent Senate hearing held last October. Today, the tech company was again asked about its intentions regarding this data collection practice during a Senate hearing focused on social media’s impact on homeland security. 

TikTok’s earlier privacy policy change had introduced a new section called “Image and Audio Information” under the section “Information we collect automatically.” Here, it detailed the types of images and audio that could be collected, including: “biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints.”

The policy language was vague as it didn’t clarify whether it was referring to federal law, state laws, or both, nor did it explain why, exactly, this information was being collected, or how it might be shared.

To learn more, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) today asked TikTok’s representative for the hearing, its Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas, if the biometric data of Americans had ever been accessed by or provided to any person located in China.

She also wanted to know if it was possible for this biometric data to be be accessed by anyone in China. 

Pappas didn’t directly answer the question with a simple yes or no, but rather went on to clarify how TikTok defines biometric data. 

Noting that everyone has their own definition of what “biometrics” means, Pappas claimed TikTok did not use “any sort of facial, voice or audio, or body recognition that would identify an individual.”

She further explained that such data collection was only used for video effects and stored locally on users’ devices, where it’s subsequently deleted.

“…the way that we use facial recognition, for example, would be is if we’re putting an effect on the creator’s video — so, you were uploading a video and you wanted to put sunglasses or dog ears on your video — that’s when we do facial recognition. All of that information is stored only in your device. And as soon as it’s applied — like that filter is applied and posted — that data is deleted,” Pappas said. “So we don’t have that data.”

In other words, the TikTok exec saying that ByteDance employees in China would have no way of collecting this data from TikTok’s U.S. users in the first place, because of how this process works at a technical level. (TikTok, of course, has hundreds of filters and effects in its app, so analyzing how each one works independently would take technical expertise and time.)

Notably, this is the first time the company has responded to U.S. Senators’ inquiries about the app’s use of biometrics, as the question brought up during the October 2021 hearing was essentially dodged at the time. When Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) followed up with TikTok for more information after that hearing, the question about facial recognition and voiceprints hadn’t been included on the list of questions TikTok returned to her office later that year in December.

The biometrics issue also didn’t come up in the letter TikTok sent to a group of U.S. senators in June 2022, to answer follow-up questions about Chinese ByteDance employees’ access to TikTok U.S. users’ data, after BuzzFeed News’ damning report on the matter. Instead, that letter was focused more on how TikTok had been working to move its U.S. users’ data to Oracle’s cloud to further limit access from staff in China.

The lack of understanding about TikTok’s use of biometrics aspect raised further concerns in April 2022, when the ACLU pointed out that a new TikTok trend involved having users film their eyes up close, then using a high-resolution filter to show the details, patterns and colors of their irises. At the time of its report, over 700,000 videos had been created using the filter within a month’s time, it said. (Today, TikTok’s app reports only 533,000+ videos.) In an email to TechCrunch, the ACLU had also suggested taking a look at Oracle’s biometric technology, given its plans to host TikTok user data.

In addition to questions about biometric data collection, TikTok was also asked in today’s hearing whether or not it was tracking users’ keystrokes.

This related to an independent privacy researcher’s finding, released in August, which claimed the TikTok iOS app had been injecting code that could allow it to essentially perform keylogging. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also requested a meeting with TikTok after this research was released.

At the time, TikTok explained the report was misleading, as the app’s code was not doing anything malicious, but was rather used for things like debugging, troubleshooting and performance monitoring. The company also said that it used keystroke information to detect unusual patterns to protect against fake logging, spam comments and other behavior that could threaten its platform.

At today’s hearing, Pappas again stressed that TikTok was never collecting the content of what was being typed, and that, to her knowledge, this had been “an anti-spam measure.”

TikTok claims it’s not collecting U.S. users’ biometric data, despite what privacy policy says by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the Code Conference last week, suggested the tech company needed to become 20% more efficient — a comment some in the industry took to mean headcount reductions could soon be on the table. Now, it seems that prediction may be coming true. TechCrunch has learned and Google confirmed the company is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division known as Area 120.

The company on Tuesday informed staff of a “reduction in force” which will see the incubator halved in size, as half the teams working on new product innovations heard their projects were being canceled. Previously, there were 14 projects housed in Area 120, and this has been cut down to just seven. Employees whose projects will not continue were told they’ll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they’ll be terminated. It’s not clear that everyone will be able to do so.

According to Area 120 lead Elias Roman, the division aims to sharpen its focus to only AI-first projects, as opposed to its earlier mandate to fuel product incubation across all of Google.

TechCrunch learned of the changes from a source with knowledge of the matter. Google confirmed the changes in a statement.

“Area 120 is an in-house incubator for experimental new products. The group regularly starts and stops projects with an eye toward pursuing the most promising opportunities,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ve recently shared that Area 120 will be shifting its focus to projects that build on Google’s deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems. As a result, Area 120 is winding down several projects to make way for new work. Impacted team members will receive dedicated support as they explore new projects and opportunities at Google.”

Over the years, the division has launched a number of successful products, including the HTML5 gaming platform GameSnacks, now integrated with Google Chrome; an AirTable rival called Tables which exited to Google Cloud; an A.I.-powered conversational ads platform AdLingo, which also exited to Cloud; video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, which exited to Google Search and Shopping, respectively; the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce; and a technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout.

One of the projects now being cut with the changes is Qaya, a service offering web storefronts for digital creators, launched late last year. Similar to “link in bio” solutions available today like Linktree or Beacons, Qaya additionally integrated with Google Search and Google Shopping. It could also be linked with a YouTube Merch Shelf, to promote the creator’s products and services.

The other six projects being canceled weren’t yet launched, but included a financial accounting project for Google Sheets, another shopping-related product, analytics for AR/VR, and, unfortunately, three climate-related projects. These latter projects had focused on EV car charging maps with routing, carbon accounting for I.T., and carbon measurement of forests.

The changes follow last year’s reorg of the Area 120 team, which saw the group moved into a new “Google Labs” division led by veteran Googler Clay Bavor. The incubator was then grouped alongside other forward-looking efforts at Google, like its virtual and augmented reality developments and its cutting-edge holographic videoconferencing project known as Project Starline. We understand Google Labs and Starline are not impacted for the time being.

Pichai announced in July that Google would slow its hiring and sharpen its focus, but the company had said larger layoffs were not planned — it would still hire in engineering, technical and other critical roles. However, as part of its renewed emphasis on productivity, the company acknowledges it may need to restructure teams, deprecate products or even, at times, eliminate roles.

As for the Area 120 team members whose projects have now been discontinued, Google’s recruiters will work to help them find new roles, though placement is not a given in situations like these.

Google has north of 170,000 full-time employees. Area 120 had over 170 employees at the beginning of the year but is now under 100.

Editor’s Note: The article was updated moments after publication with Google’s comment. 

Google cancels half the projects at its internal R&D group Area 120 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Disrupt is just a few short weeks away. Alongside our return to a live, in-person show, we’ve beefed up the Battlefield program. Two hundred companies have been hand selected by the TechCrunch editorial staff to grace the expo hall, 20 of which will launch their company for the first time live on our stage.

The Startup Battlefield is an incredibly unique experience for all involved. Not only do companies pitch their businesses (Y Combinator style), but they also demo their wares live onstage. It’s where legends are made. Plus, we recruit some of the top VCs in the world to prod and poke at these startups in the very best way.

After an initial evaluation, five companies are selected to pitch once again in the Startup Battlefield Finals. For this, we enlist the sharpest, most experienced venture capitalists we can find. So, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce the judges for the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield Finals.

We’re amped to be joined by Pear VC co-founder and managing partner Mar Hershenson; Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee; BoxGroup managing partner David Tisch; and Accel partner Rich Wong.

Learn more about these investors below, and don’t forget, this Friday September 16 is your last day to save $1100 on passes before prices increase.

Mar Hershenson is a co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC, a seed-stage investment firm in Palo Alto that backs companies like Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), DoorDash (NYSE:DASH), Gusto, Aurora Solar, and Branch. Prior to Pear, Mar co-founded three companies and held executive positions in product and engineering at Magma Design Automation. Mar holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where she is currently a lecturer in the Engineering School. Mar also serves on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd College and is on the advisory council of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a founding member of All Raise and the Equity Summit.

Aileen Lee is founding partner at Cowboy Ventures, a team that backs seed-stage technology companies reimagining work and life through technology, what they call “life 2.0.” Cowboy Ventures works with a wide range of startups, from modern enterprise–oriented companies like Guild Education and Lightstep to new consumer digital native brands like Dollar Shave Club and Tally. Aileen periodically writes about technology insights and is known for coining the business term “unicorn.” She has been named to Forbes’ Midas List of best investors and Forbes’ Most Powerful Women, as well as to Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Prior to Cowboy, Aileen was a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for over a decade, was founding CEO of digital media company RMG Networks and worked at Gap Inc. in operating roles. She has degrees from MIT and Harvard Business School and is mom of three and wife to a startup founder. She is also an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow and co-founder of the nonprofit All Raise, aiming to accelerate success for women in the technology ecosystem.

David Tisch is the managing partner of BoxGroup, an NYC-based seed-stage venture capital firm that has invested in over 400 seed-stage startups, including Plaid, Ro, PillPack, Ramp, Amplitude, Airtable, Flatiron Health, Stripe, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Oscar, Flexport, ClassPass, Vine, GroupMe and more. David is the chairman of Good Dog, a marketplace to find pets online. He is the co-founder of TechStars NYC and serves on the board of Hudson River Park Friends. He is a Rock Fellow at Harvard Business School and is on the Entrepreneur Board at New York University. David is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and New York University School of Law. David lives in NYC with his wife, Zara, and their three kids and three dogs.

Rich Wong joined Accel as a partner in 2006. Rich led Accel’s investments and currently serves on the boards of Atlassian (TEAM), UiPath (PATH), Checkr, Instabug, Pyn, Process Street, Middesk, and Qwilt. Rich also served on the National Venture Capital Association board of directors. Rich previously led Accel’s investments in AirWatch (acquired by VMware), Angry Birds/Rovio (ROVIO.HE), MoPub (acquired by Twitter), AdMob (acquired by Google), Dealer.com (acquired by Cox), Osmo (acquired by BYJUs), Parature (acquired by Microsoft), ServiceChannel (acquired by Fortive), Sunrun (RUN), SwiftKey (acquired by Microsoft), and 3LM (acquired by Motorola). Rich previously worked as EVP/GM of products for Openwave Systems and CMO of Covad Communications. Rich started his career as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble and at McKinsey.

Announcing the stellar VC judges for the TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield Finals by Jordan Crook originally published on TechCrunch

EU lawmakers are moving in on the metaverse and making it plain that, whatever newfangled virtual world/s and/or immersive social connectivity that tech industry hype involving the term may refer to, these next-gen virtual spaces won’t escape one hard reality: Regulation.

There may be a second metaverse certainty too, if the Commission gets its way: Network infrastructure taxes.

The EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, said today it believes some of the profits made in an increasingly immersive software realm should flow to providers of the network backbone required to host these virtual spaces — a suggestion that’s sure to trigger a fresh round of net neutrality pearl-clutching.

The Commission has been signalling for some months that it wants to find a way to support mobile operators to expand rollouts of next-gen cellular technologies — via imposing some kind of a levy on US tech giants to help fund European network infrastructure — following heavy lobbying by local telcos.

Last week, Breton revealed it plans to consult on network infrastructure cost contribution ideas in Q1 next year — as part of a wider metaverse-focused initiative, with the latter proposal coming later in the year.

More details of the bloc’s thinking on fostering development of virtual spaces and the network pipes needed to connect them has emerged today.

EU initiative on virtual worlds

In a Letter of Intent published today, setting out the bloc’s policy priorities for 2023 — and accompanying her annual State of the European Union speech — the EU’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, confirmed the Commission will put forward an “Initiative on virtual worlds, such as metaverse” next year.

The letter offers scant details on what exactly will be inside the EU’s virtual worlds package. But Breton — via a blog post on LinkedIn of all places — has picked up the baton to flesh out his views on how to deal, in broad-brush policy terms, with (the) metaverse(s) — something he couches as “one of the pressing digital challenges ahead of us”.

Breton presents his remarks as “Europe’s plan to thrive in the metaverse”. Though it remains to be (officially) confirmed whether he’s flying a little solo here — or playing advanced messenger on the direction of next year’s initiative. (We asked the Commission for more on the forthcoming virtual worlds initiative but with so much EU action today our contact warned there could be a delayed response — before pointing back to Breton’s blog, suggesting he is indeed signposting where the bloc is headed on virtual worlds.)

First up, both Breton (at length) and von der Leyen (in passing) are clear in planting a regulatory stake in virtual ground — by pointing out that would-be metaverse monopolists will have to contend with existing EU rules, such as the recent major EU digital rule reboot.

Rebooted digital rules

In her letter penned in difficult geopolitical and economic times, von der Leyen urges the bloc to stay the course on the green and digital transitions — which formed a key plank of her policy plan when she took up her mandate at the end of 2019. “This is about building a better future for the next generation and making ourselves more resilient and more prepared for challenges to come,” she writes, encouraging EU institutions to stick with the transformative push for sustainability and digitalization and implement key pieces of the plan already agreed on.

“This includes implementing the landmark agreements on the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA) which saw the EU take global leadership in regulating the digital space to make it safer and more open,” she goes on, name checking two big components of the digital reboot agreed by the EU’s institutions earlier this year — before adding a further nod to what else may be coming: “We will continue looking at new digital opportunities and trends, such as the metaverse.”

In his blog post, Breton makes it even more plain that metaverse builders are already subject to EU rules. “With the DSA and DMA, Europe has now strong and future-proof regulatory tools for the digital space,” he writes, pointedly adding: “We have also learned a lesson from this work: We will not witness a new Wild West or new private monopolies.

“We intend to shape from the outset the development of truly safe and thriving metaverses.”

This conviction was doubtless cemented by Facebook’s corporate pivot last year to Meta — a self-declared “metaverse company” — as the tech giant sought to escape years of operational scandals and reputational toxicity stuck like a barnacle to its social media brand by deploying a crisis PR rebranding tactic that implies a pivot, without it having to make meaningful reform to its business or business model.

While no one can say for sure whether the metaverse will ever exist (or merely remain an amorphous marketing label), should anything of substance actually materialize it’s pretty clear it won’t be located that far away from the kind of social connectivity Meta already monetizes through mass surveillance-based profiling and behavioural ads. So it seems a safe bet Zuckerberg is hoping to bankroll Facebook’s ‘metaverse’ future via plenty of user-profiling and behavioral ads too, at least in large part.

But if the Facebook founder was betting on a little corporate rebranding exercise to get Meta ahead of pesky regulators — such as privacy watchdogs in Europe that are finally starting to land some sizeable lumps on the company — he may be disappointed to find virtual worlds aren’t an escapist paradise after all.

Out with the old growth playbook

Taken as a whole, Breton’s remarks suggest the EU will be coming with a blended ‘sow and scythe’ package for virtual worlds — offering support initiatives (to encourage development and infrastructure) but also warnings that it will step in actively to steer and shape development, to ensure any new wave of ever-more-immersive socio-digital spaces don’t just repeat the same toxic growth playbook as Facebook.

Key EU preoccupations here appear to be enforcing user-centric safety issues (such as in areas like content moderation); and ensuring platforms remain open and contestable to the whole market (via mandating interoperability standards).

“Our European way to foster the virtual worlds is threefold: People, technologies and infrastructure,” Breton writes, summarizing the planned approach. “This new virtual environment must embed European values from the outset. People should feel as safe in the virtual worlds as they do in the real one.

“Private metaverses should develop based on interoperable standards and no single private player should hold the key to the public square or set its terms and conditions. Innovators and technologies should be allowed to thrive unhindered.”

There is also a reference to launching a “creative and interdisciplinary movement” — with the goal of developing “standards, increas[ing] interoperability, maximising impact” — a movement Breton says he wants to involve IT experts, regulatory experts citizens’ organisations and youth, in a similar fashion to the new European Bauhaus initiative the EU has applied to encourage engagement with sustainability-focused ‘green deal’ goals.

This piece of the EU plan contrasts to the more single-minded focus of Meta president (and former EU lawmaker), Nick Clegg, who — in his role evangelizing metaverse for Meta — has spent a lot of words talking up the volume of developer jobs that will be needed to build the immersive future Meta is betting its corporate continuity on.

Breton’s point appears to be that the EU wants a far more diverse mix of expertise to be involved in any ‘metaverse’ development. (Or, tl;dr: ‘We all know what happens when tech worlds are built, owned and operated by too many techbros — and we sure don’t want a repeat of that!’)

Ecosystem support — and infrastructure taxes?

A second big chunk of Breton’s blog post focuses on the technologies and tech skills the Commission sees as necessary for the bloc to have the power to bend virtual world makers to “European values”.

Breton notes these span many areas — of “software, platforms, middleware, 5G, HPC, clouds, etc” — but with “immersive technologies and virtual reality” identified as being “at the heart” of the metaverse “phenomenon”. So immersive tech looks to be where the EU will direct the meatiest ecosystem support in the forthcoming virtual worlds package.

But for starters Breton has announced the launch of a VR and AR industry coalition.

“The Commission has been laying the groundwork to structure this ecosystem,” he writes. “Today, I am happy to launch the Virtual and Augmented Reality Industrial Coalition, bringing together stakeholders from key metaverse technologies. We have developed a roadmap endorsed by over 40 EU organisations active in this space, from large organisations to SMEs, and universities.”

He also gives a nod to the European Chips Act — which aims to mobilize public and private investment to drive on-shore semiconductor manufacture in a supply chain resilience and digital sovereignty drive — with the commissioner recognizing that hardware development and production is a core component for virtual worlds, underpinning its development (and, ultimately, most likely, determining whether or not immersive technologies like VR and AR remain a niche (sometimes) nausea-inducing pass-time for the geeky few or actually make the leap into a transformative mainstream medium).

“The next step will be a quantum leap from current virtual reality and other enabling technologies to a world that truly blends the real with the virtual,” pens Breton, a former telco exec, in full tech evangelist mode.

The EU commissioner saves the most controversial piece of the upcoming metaverse plan for last: A plan for infrastructure taxes to come down the policy pipe. And he confines himself to trying to tamp down any objections by laying out a case for some form of levy to fund the necessary connectivity — aka the high capacity, high bandwidth, high speed, low latency networks we’re told will be needed to sustain these hyper immersive virtual spaces we’re also told we’ll want to pause our off-line existence to spend time in.

There are no firm details on what the EU is proposing on virtual world taxes as yet — just an affirmation that a consultation is coming down the pipe.

“The current situation, exacerbated during the Covid pandemic, shows a paradox of increasing volumes of data being carried on the infrastructures but decreasing revenues and appetite to invest to strengthen them and make them resilient,” writes Breton, drawing on long-standing telco gripes about scale of network investment demanded to roll out techs like 5G vs dwindling returns.

“The current economic climate sees stagnating rewards for investment and increasing deployment costs for pure connectivity infrastructure,” he goes on. “In Europe, all market players benefiting from the digital transformation should make a fair and proportionate contribution to public goods, services and infrastructures, for the benefit of all Europeans.”

Case made, Breton ends by trailing what he couches as a “comprehensive reflection and consultation on the vision and business model of the infrastructure that we need to carry the volumes of data and the instant and continuous interactions which will happen in the metaverses” — thereby landing a second blow of his case-hammer backing metaverse infrastructure taxes.

Still, you have to admire the EU’s repurposing of the tech industry’s latest shiny new hype vehicle to truck back the other way and deliver an age-old demand for a revenue share.

Europe wants to shape the future of virtual worlds with rules and taxes by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

As consumer social apps shift their focus to video for social expression and adopt more creative tools, like those for collage-making, Google Photos’ often more utilitarian app will now do the same. The company today announced an upgrade to Google Photos and its app for mobile devices that will better highlight users’ videos, create visual effects with photos set to music, introduce its own collage editor, and more.

The additions are a part of a larger upgrade to Google Photos’ Memories feature, first introduced in 2019.

A combination of something like Stories and Facebook’s Memories, Google Photos Memories similarly helps users look back at their older photos, organized into collections at the top of the app’s main screen — where Stories are often found in social apps. Last year, Google Photos upgraded Memories using machine learning technology to identify patterns across your photos, and added other types of Memories, like those that highlighted things like events and holidays.

Now, Google is rolling out another redesign to Memories, which introduces more video into the experience.

The service will automatically select and trim the best snippets from your longer videos using machine learning as part of this enhancement, Google says.

The changes come at a time when tech companies are seeing increased use of video among users. Meta earlier this year said Reels was making up 20% of time users spent on Instagram and video overall makes up 50% of the time users spent on Facebook, for example. Google Photos is seeing a similar trend. The company tells TechCrunch video uploads grew 4 times faster than photo uploads over the past two years, which is why it’s chosen to invest in more video tools.

The updated version of Google Photos will also do more with music, including by adding music to more Memories and setting multiple still photos to music in its “Cinematic Photos” visual effect feature. Launched in 2020, Cinematic Photos leverages machine learning to create 3D versions of your photos by predicting the image’s depth, then animating a smooth panning effect. It later expanded this effect to include stitched-together photos it called Cinematic Moments, which also give an illusion of a more 3D-like image.

Another new set of features in today’s update is focused on enhancing creativity and social sharing.

This includes a new feature called Styles, which automatically adds graphic art to your Memories by placing them on colorful backgrounds, for instance. Artists Shantell Martin and Lisa Congdon contributed to this feature at launch.

And as demand for Pinterest’s new collage maker Shuffles heats up, Google Photos is jumping on this trend with its own collage editor that will let users select a design, pick out and edit photos, then rearrange their layout using drag-and-drop controls.

Image Credits: Google

Photo Memories can also now be shared with friends and family, starting on Android with iOS and web to come.

A smaller, but interesting addition — and one not noted by Google’s official announcement — involves how you navigate through Memories following the update.

While you can still tap left or right to move between the photos within a given Memory — as you would with most Stories — when you move through Memories, you’ll now swipe up and down.

This user interface design choice, of course, is a nod to TikTok, whose vertical video feed has infiltrated so many top consumer apps.

And with Memories becoming more video-heavy with this update, it’s possible that some users’ retrospectives will now feel more like personal, private TikToks rather than static Stories going forward.

The updates are rolling out today to Google Photos and its mobile app.

Google Photos redesigns its Memories feature with vertical swiping, more video, and other creative tools by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Snowflake has a revenue model that investors have to love, but big customers, not so much. That’s because it’s based on a consumption model where the more you use, the more you pay — and when it comes to data management these days, that can add up pretty quickly.

Bluesky, a new startup from a couple of ex-Google and Uber engineers, came up with a way to help reduce those bills, and today the company announced a healthy $8.8 million seed.

Mingsheng Hong, Bluesky co-founder and CEO, who spent more than eight years at Google, says that Bluesky takes an organized approach to cost cutting. “First, we observe to get the visibility to understand who has been spending and what the most expensive workloads and queries are,” Hong explained. He jokingly referred to this step as “the walk of shame because finally everyone knows how much you’re spending.”

The idea is to delete workloads that are costing cash, but don’t add a lot of value.

The second piece involves optimizing the remaining spend by finding what the most expensive workloads are and figuring out how to adjust them to reduce the overall cost. He said it’s often about simply changing how they run the query, taking a smarter approach to save money.

“These queries will still run, and they will still get the same result, but we run them faster and cheaper by, for example, avoiding scanning a huge table, when we can generate indices [to get the same result] without having to scan a very large data set.”

The last step, which is planned for the future, is to have an optimization engine that automatically does this for you. Once customers trust the software to do the job, it will constantly be scanning the workloads and searching for ways to cut costs automatically.

You may think that Snowflake would be threatened by such a product, but Hong says the company is actually a partner. “Snowflake is bringing us in to help customers to reduce or manage growth, and this way all three parties are happy. Customers can sign a larger contract with Snowflake, and yet they know they have the assurance that they have the cost guardrails that Bluesky provides,” he said.

He said the product is built around optimizing SQL queries, and that it plans to apply the same approach to other consumption-based data products like Databricks in the future.

The company is just six months old, but has more than 10 customers using the product including Coinbase. Hong launched the company with CTO Zheng Shao, who helped build the open source project Apache Hive, a SQL query engine built on top of Hadoop, an early way of dealing with large data sets.

The company currently has 15 employees, and he is trying to build a diverse group right out of the gate. “In terms of diversity, we make sure that we have people coming in with different perspectives. They may have a different perspective due to their culture or gender, but first and foremost, it’s not about trying to diversify for the sake of diversity, hitting some metrics. It’s about people coming in with different ideas and perspectives,” Hong said.

Today’s $8.8 million seed investment was led by Greylock with participation from several industry angels.

Bluesky built cost guardrails to help cut Snowflake data spend by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Quickly dismissing a nascent technology or tech company is an excellent way to get dunked on in the future.

From RIM’s CEO on the iPhone’s launch to Thomas Siebel brushing off Salesforce challenging Microsoft, there’s a long-running history of such mistaken pronouncements. Given the illustrious history of folks being wrong about the future, I am not going to say that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are never going to become a mainstream technology. But I will admit at this juncture that I am becoming a mote impatient for what’s been promised.

NFTs fit neatly into the most recent crypto boom, with prices of many crypto tokens rising sharply, leading to huge growth in web3 wealth. A speculative frenzy formed around NFTs, leading to well-known projects like BAYC and Doodles managing to raise money to build on top of their IP.

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But as crypto prices have come down, and with consumer interest once again entering a period of abeyance over acceleration, we are also seeing NFT trading activity decline. OpenSea, perhaps the best-known NFT trading platform, is aware of the changing narrative surrounding its core asset class, writing this week about fluctuating market conditions and where it sees the future of non-fungible tokens. It’s a piece of writing worth considering.

So let’s do it. We’ll digest OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer’s arguments — and how they match up with what we might hope for in a tech-fueled future.

The promise of NFTs

Finzer considers NFTs to be “unique, provably scarce, openly transferable, user-owned and usable across multiple applications,” calling them a “foundational technology that will underlie thousands of use cases and industries.”

This use-case claim echoes what TechCrunch has heard from others in the web3 space: that NFTs will have myriad uses past what we have become most accustomed to — namely tokens pointing to images stored off-chain.

It’s not a small claim, the use-case comment, and it’s also one that’s testable; the time frame for the utility proliferation of NFT use cases is not entirely clear (more on that shortly), but where the technology and its associated market are heading appears limpid enough to folks building in the web3 market.

What sort of utility might NFTs offer in time? Finzer riffs on some examples:

Show me the utility! by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch