Apple’s iPhone 14 lineup delivers on a bunch of different vectors this year with very few peccadillos or complaints. Apple is really leaning into its silicon lead to deliver big gains year over year in cameras and it’s leaning on its design teams to give users new ways to interact with their very familiar devices.

The always on display does what competitors have done, but better and more logically. The cameras improve upon the already dominant iPhone 13 Pro’s arrays especially in low light and telephoto performance.

This year’s iPhones also defy inflation to offer better performance, better battery life and improved connectivity at the same price as last year. Through some lenses this actually makes them cheaper for much of the world – though the dollar’s relative strength has led to a higher cost in Europe and elsewhere.

Even the ‘Dynamic Island’ (a pill-shaped area that houses the iPhone’s front camera and other sensors) actually proves to be clever and useful. I’d go so far as to say that Apple has pulled off a remarkable feat here in taking a reviled design concession – “the notch” – and turning it into a true tool that improves user experience.

As a note, this year I decided to do something a bit different with my review of the iPhone. Typically I will try to fit in a solid experiential tour with the new devices because I prefer to have a real-world take on it by the time the public starts to get them.

But there is an enormous amount of time pressure there and I never feel like I’ve really lived in them long enough. So this year I’m going to drop some initial impressions today based on testing some of the marquee new features and then I’m going to take a couple of weeks to layer on some experience-time with them. If my initial impressions stand, I’ll likely just update this post.

Color

I had access to the Deep Purple and Space Black models of iPhone Pro and the Blue iPhone 14. The Space Black, I’m happy to report, is much blacker than the Graphite of last year. It’s not Jet Black, my all time favorite iPhone finish, but you do get the deeply black hi-shine steel band at least. The back of the phone is still not super dark because of the frosted glass finish, but it’s far darker than last year’s.

Not my cracked iPhone

The Deep Purple is my personal favorite color this year and it’s what I ordered. It’s fairly dark overall but shows well when the light hits it. This is going to be a fan favorite I think and will do really well with a transparent case.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

The Blue in the iPhone 14 is fairly milquetoast in my opinion. The winning colors that I saw in the hands on area at the event last week were Purple, which brought back a shade close to the iPhone 12’s lavender and the (PRODUCT)^RED which is a really bold Pat McGrath-esque uber red that verges on magenta. Really nice in person.

eSIM

This year, Apple shipped test iPhones to reviewers with a line of service attached. This meant that when I booted up the devices for the first time I was presented with the option of activating that line or adding my own. I added both to get the full dual-line experience and it went smoothly. Apple has had eSIM in iPhones since 2018 so they’ve had some practice at this but it was overall aggressively pleasant.

Adding my line even though I was ‘converting’ from a physical SIM was painless. Once I added it I was taken through a nicely designed flow to choose which number I would use as primary, which data plan I would use and whether I wanted to blend the plans to use whatever data was faster at the moment. The new signal indicator which shows both services on it takes some getting used to but otherwise nicely done.

You can add up to 8 lines to the iPhones 14 and you can name each one separately to keep track of them. If you’re purchasing a region locked iPhone you’re going to get the same experience that you do with a physical SIM in that you need to purchase a travel plan if you’re going overseas. If you’re buying an unlocked phone you can add lines from any carrier anywhere to it at will, which is neat.

Google added the ability to use Fi in eSIM a while ago so I’ll probably be using both my Fi line and my carrier line in my personal phone when it arrives.

Internals

Apple says that all of the iPhone 14 models have a new internal structure that allows for better thermals and heat dissipation. It’s next to impossible to determine if there is any real benefit here in my testing, though I’m sure that a teardown will display whatever architectural changes Apple has made. Whatever has changed, it is significant, because the iPhone’s back glass can now be replaced without having to disassemble the phone, something that was not possible before.

The iPhone 14 Pro’s display can now also be replaced without having to remove the True Depth Camera module from it as well. The cost of repair for these kinds of problems goes way down as a result.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

There is now an ambient light sensor on the back of all new iPhone models – something that is used to adjust display brightness but also to determine camera exposure. This can help when moving suddenly into or out of big backlit scenarios. This is also hard to verifiably test – especially as the camera and screen adjustments are already well supported by existing sensors.

I would love to see Apple finally convert at least the iPhone’s pro models over to USB-C. It just makes sense at this point given that Lightning was originally given a roughly 10 year “for the next decade” lifespan when it was announced. But I get the feeling Apple’s not happy being forced into anything to do with a connector choice by the EU or anyone else. So your guess is as good as mine as to when that will happen.

For those of us not used to having it, the always-on screen does take some getting used to. I found myself habitually thinking that the phone had just gone into that brief ‘dimming’ stage before it turned off. As someone who runs with the ‘show notifications but hide the contents’ setting already, I didn’t have to adjust behavior much but if you keep the contents of your notifications visible then you may want to rethink your strategy there.

And for those of you who just don’t like the new way, yes there is a stay off my lawn setting to turn off the always on behavior in the settings app.

The new A16 ability to ramp the display down to 1Hz lets them leave the screen on without materially affecting battery life but by nature you will likely get a small amount of extra life by leaving it off. Some other interesting side effects of the refresh rate dropping down to sub 1 second is that any timers you have running will show only to the minute while the display is in ‘off’ mode unless the timer has less than 2 minutes left, in which case it will ramp back up enough to show you that the seconds are ticking away.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

The display is noticeably brighter in daily use. Not enough to feel like a violent change from the iPhone 13 Pro but even then there is a delta and it’s more than on paper – it’s brighter, period. Apple claims it can spike to 2000 nits but for most people that’s a pretty random number.

To give you at least some comparison, I shot an exposure locked frame from an iPhone 14 Pro Max of the same image displayed on both the iPhone 13 Pro (left) and iPhone 14 Pro (right). I believe the resulting shot gives a fair approximation of how much brighter the iPhone 14 Pro’s screen can look in direct sunlight.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

Since I’m almost constantly bombarded with notifications my habit has been to lay my phone face down on the table. I think that cue will become much more common now that the always on screen will continue to show notifications coming in unless you’ve customized your focus modes to keep them in the quiet place until you go looking for them.

All of this aggressive variable frame rate (VFR) adjustment has led to pretty solid battery life across the lineup. I didn’t run any formal battery tests this year but still got a solid day’s use and then some once they finished indexing. One interesting quirk is that the iPhone 14 actually gets a higher battery life rating for audio playback and lower ratings on the video tests. Once again, this is VFR at work as Apple dynamically adjusts the refresh rate of the screen in video playback.

Cameras

The iPhone 14 Pro has one of the best compact cameras ever made onboard. It strains against the limitations not of its software or image pipeline but against the physics of sensor size and light gathering. And, mostly, it succeeds.

In years past we could and did predict and joke about a far-flung future where the image quality of iPhone rivaled or surpassed a dedicated removable-lens camera. The iPhone 14’s leap to a quad-Bayer coded 48 megapixel sensor turns the corner from maybe to eventually. It’s no longer if it’s when and the when is probably more a matter of your use case than it is about the camera’s capability.

iPhone 14

The majority of the impressions you see in this piece come from extensive use of the iPhone 14 Pro, because the most dramatic updates live there. But I thought I should dedicate a section of this piece to talking specifically about the iPhone 14. For the second year in a row, Apple delivers a really enticing ‘entry’ point to the new lineup. Though I have a personal predilection for telephoto focal lengths that would never allow me to settle into the ‘wide and ultra-wide only’ lifestyle – I have to admit there is a strong appeal.

With the excellent base of the A15 bionic, a brand new main sensor with a 49% (not 50, never catch Apple lacking, they use number numbers) better light gathering and access to the new image pipeline with the Photonic Engine – and all of the new safety features like Crash Detection and Emergency SOS via satellite, the iPhone 14 becomes a really, really tempting buy. When you add to this that the color palate of options available is bolder and more fun than the somewhat reserved Pro lineup and you’ve got a killer looking deal.

Yes, you’ll have to live with the fact that Apple is likely making better margins off of your purchase given that they’re shipping last year’s top of the line chip again in it, I’m not sure that’s a dealbreaker. Given that the performance headroom of Apple’s chips far outpaces their yearly release schedule, you’re going to be hard pressed to notice any shortcomings if there are any.

The iPhone 14 is pleasant to use, friendly to look at and extremely capable. The lack of the advanced cameras in the iPhone 14 Pro is leavened a bit by the image pipeline delivering Action Mode, 24p 4k shooting and improved zoom interpolation while filming. Those could easily have been reserved for the Pro models and I doubt anyone but some close observers would have complained. But you get all of it.

And this year they even have ‘the big one’ if that’s what you’re into.

The iPhone 14 Plus is shipping one month later than the other models of iPhone. Apple won’t say why but it’s very likely sourcing components – the display being the main suspect – that is pushing it back. That means that I do not have one here so I’m unable to bring you any impressions of the larger screen on the ‘main line’ model. But otherwise the functionality of the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are theoretically supposed to be identical. That’s something I can’t test, but we can assume for now.

Also, I know it’s heresy in some parts, but I really like the blasted aluminum trim over the shiny fingerprint-prone sides of the Pro models.

Camera stuff

My shooting with the iPhone 14 Pro so far has brought me to several conclusions, which I’ll lay out here and then dig into after.

• Having a 48MP RAW image at hand is going to be huge for photographers, but essentially a non feature for most people.
• Apple’s Photonic Engine is interwoven with all of the camera improvements, though it’s difficult by nature to nail this down because so much of the process is happening on the raw images much earlier in the process. It’s not snake oil though, it’s in the mix because you can see the improvements in the iPhone 14 as well.
• The quad-Bayer array in the Main camera delivers on its promise of adding fine detail, more light gathering and better color rendition.
• The 3x telephoto camera is absolutely, 100% better than the one in the iPhone 13 Pro. That’s good because the previous one was not great.
• A native 12MP 2x option is genius because it provides a near 50mm equivalent option for amazing candid shooting with zero interpolation due to the perfect 12mm crop fitting inside of the huge new sensor. It’s my favorite new mode.
• The Ultra Wide camera is vastly improved from the iPhone 13 Pro – it focuses faster and shoots way better in low light conditions.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

Forty Eight Megapixel

If you were in the room during the Apple presentation you would have heard the immediate susurration that ran through the room in reaction to the words “48 megapixel”. My head certainly snapped up from typing in our liveblog. A 4x jump in pixel count in a single year was unheard of for iPhone – in fact they hadn’t increased it at all since the jump from 8MP to 12MP in the iPhone 6s.

An increase in pixel count of this size wasn’t automatically a reason for euphoria, however. The Nokia Lumia 1020 had a 41 megapixel sensor in 2013, for instance – and though the images were serviceable they weren’t materially better than what the 8MP camera in the iPhone 5s delivered – and in most cases the consensus was the iPhone won out handily due to better processing choices.

In fact, adding more megapixels has been a dangerous game that manufacturers have been playing for decades in digital cameras. Because higher megapixel numbers on the box were an easy way to sell cameras at big box retailers they kept climbing. But more pixels means more heat and more noise and often smaller pixel pitch (size of individual sensor elements). This quickly degrades image quality if you don’t have enough horsepower to correct it at the ISP. But manufacturers eventually turned towards larger sensors once a natural equilibrium around the 10-12MP mark was hit for compact cameras. At one point Canon even pushed back on the market, dropping the total pixel count of a new sensor in order to improve light gathering, noise and overall quality.

But the 48MP camera in the iPhone 14 Pro doesn’t fall into the trap of selling based on raw number of pixels. Instead, it uses a Quad Bayer design to take 4 individual pixel sensing elements and ‘bin’ them – combining their information into one mega-megapixel that offers better low light performance with less noise.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

You can see the vastly improved detail in these night mode RAW images, both shot at 12MP just to be “fair”.

The resulting image is always 12MP coming out of this camera from Ultra Wide through Telephoto if shot in JPG or HEIC. But a couple of quirks arise here which allow for some interesting interactions.

First, of course, photographers who are serious about taking as much control of the image as possible now have access to 48MP of RAW image data to play with – a ML-interpolated version of what the quad array would produce for that image.2 While on an individual basis the pixels are individually smaller at 1.2 µm, there are 4. So they combine to make up a 2.44 µm photosite. Bigger is better, in this case, because it produces lower noise images.

Photonic Engine

Driving improvements across the model lineup is a new image pipeline Apple is referring to as the Photonic Engine. The big revelation here is that Apple is taking the raw captures – 4 main frames and 2-3 secondary frames – from the sensor and doing its combination work on them through Deep Fusion before it does any adjustments including de-mosaic, noise reduction and color correction.

By interpolating the images earlier in the pipe, the ISP can work on these bigger, more information rich 16-bit RAW exposures – allowing it to retain fine detail down to the final 12MP JPEG.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

The ‘why now’ of Photonic Engine seems to boil down to a handful of factors, the most prominent being that the newly enhanced internal design dissipates heat better, the image pipeline is better integrated and the 5-core GPU in the iPhone 14 is considered minimum viable to pull this off without any lag in shooting. The improved pipeline and thermals appear, as far as I can divine in my casting about, to be why the iPhone 13 Pro cannot utilize the same process.

The results in my testing appear to be crisper images taken at any focal length, with strong color rendition that tends towards saturated neutral tones. Where the iPhone 13 Pro’s pipeline generally trends warmer, the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro present a ramped up but cooler (and truer) image in most conditions.

It’s difficult to test most of the cameras against one another in order to create a true comparo for Photonic Engine because nearly every one has some new hardware involved as well. And all of them are getting whatever ISP enhancements have been made aside from the Photonic Engine specifically.

I had to do some digging here to figure this out but I confirmed that the iPhone 14’s Main camera is the same exact hardware as the iPhone 13 Pro’s Main camera. So that’s the only way I can see to test how much Photonic Engine/pipeline is contributing to the images directly. All other cameras have new hardware of some sort involved.

In my testing of these two cameras against one another I found that the updated pipeline delivered strong results. With the same hardware, the images from the iPhone 14’s camera displayed better overall sharpness and color rendition in bright conditions. In low light conditions the dynamic range was also expanded – highlights retained more detail, for instance. That’s likely due to other pipeline tweaks as the Photonic Engine does not, by itself, increase dynamic range – it just preserves more detail for the latter parts of the process.

These differences aren’t momentous but I don’t know if there’s going to be a lot of people migrating from the iPhone 13 Pro to the iPhone 14 anyway. I just found it an interesting way to test whether the new pipeline delivered better results on essentially identical hardware and the answer is yes.

The Main Camera

Another fun in-keynote moment was when Apple renamed the Wide camera across its iPhone lineup. I was sitting with Apple writer and student John Gruber when he noted that they had just called this default camera the ‘Main Camera’ for the first time.

This Main Camera jargon makes logical sense and will clear up a lot of confusion about whether we were talking about the wide or the wide wide. I will, however, dispense with the capitalization, trade dress be damned.

Whatever it’s called, the main camera was the biggest recipient of upgrades this season, with the aforementioned quad Bayer 48MP sensor and Photonic Engine at the heart of it. In my testing, the improvements are immediately clear over the iPhone 13 Pro. And in an easily visible way too – there’s no confusion – it’s absolutely better.

Among the differences I noticed were better color rendition – as mentioned above more neutral with boosted saturation. Improved detail in bright light. Improved detail and crispness in low light as well.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

The specs of the main camera are interesting for sure. The individual pixel pitch is lower than last year but the quad array gives it a total size nearly 2x bigger once 4 sensor sites are combined into one. The maximum aperture is smaller but other factors are in play.

Hardware alone produces 17% more light, then the Photonic Engine comes into play delivering 2x light gathering. The Sensor in the main camera is 96% larger in total than the iPhone 13 Pro. The total jump in sensitivity is rated at 3x from iPhone 13 Pro according to Apple.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

While exposures from the iPhone 13 Pro I shot alongside the iPhone 14 Pro still look pretty great, once you look at any detail areas or at the ends of the shadow/highlight spectrum the differences jump right out at you. There’s a general softness to the iPhone 13 Pro in comparison to the iPhone 14 Pro.

The change to 24mm is also interesting. The general rationale here was that 24mm is one of the most popular candid focal lengths in all cameras. In practice, it offers a sliver of extra real-estate but I doubt most folks will notice the change.

The ‘second generation’ sensor-shift optical image stabilization system does seem to improve stability, but honestly it’s hard to tell. If you’re curious, the system had to be redesigned because the sensor is almost twice as large, so the rack and amount of shift had to be adjusted. It takes up less space than the previous version and Apple says that it is now more efficient.

Nifty 48

As a byproduct of the main camera sitting at 24mm, the 2x now hits right around 48mm equivalent focal length. It turns out that this is my favorite new shooting mode. Having the length back from the iPhone 12 Pro to take candid shots and have tighter framing without going ‘full telephoto’ is a lovely surprise.

Because the native output is 12MP and the sensor is 48MP, the 2x mode offers a prime 1:2 ratio, delivering an image produced right out of the center 12MP patch. There is some ML work being done here on the quad Bayer of course, but the larger pixels and perfect 50% crop make this a solid lens from a quality perspective.

There’s a nice homage here too – the term ‘nifty 50’ has been used in photography for decades to refer to a lightweight, wide aperture prime lens at a fixed 50mm focal length. They’re often the first lens that anyone buys who is newly conscious of the quality of optics and the importance of wide apertures.

This new 2x mode has that comfortable feeling of nestling right into a sweet spot that allows for some creative framing without being too unwieldy. I think I’m going to get a lot of use out of this one for candid shots in and out of Portrait mode.

The new telephoto

I’m extremely happy to report that the new telephoto sensor and lens array is a solid improvement over last year’s model. Though the specs are very similar, I’ve confirmed that it is indeed a new sensor this year. That’s huge for me, because I shot nearly 60% of my photos at 2x or above in 2021. I love a telephoto for its ability to get picky about framing and margins.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

This new telephoto produces less noise and more detail than the 3x camera in the iPhone 13 Pro. Some examples that I was able to pull out were detailed stamping patterns in metal and the grain of wood. It’s easy to see that there’s been a generational jump here. Let’s hope Apple keeps paying attention to this very handy lens – at least for my sake!

Ultra Wide

More open in shadows, sharper near the edges and overall better. That’s the verdict here. The 100% focus pixels means that it gets a better lock on subjects and does it quicker. The sensor is twice as big here and Apple claims 3x “better” low-light photos are possible.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

In my observance, the edges are sharper and there is less comatic nonsense happening in details there. It regularly turned in better images – slightly sharper throughout and more open in shadows – in my testing. Though the Ultra Wide got “very decent” last year when it got auto focus for the first time, I think this year it’s crossed the border into worth you seriously exploring as a storytelling tool not just a ‘we need to get everyone in this picture’ tool.

True Depth and flash

The front camera got auto focus. This is…nice? I think the vast majority of shots here were probably ok but I can absolutely see it coming in handy for vlogging or live streaming. The selfies I took with it were good, probably a tad sharper but nothing incredibly overwhelming to report there. Group shots may benefit from this as well if you’re trying to fit everyone in – the auto focus will track a bunch of faces at once and try to maximize sharpness across them.

It will also focus even closer now, so good for those check out the ring shots I suppose.

The flash is an interesting little upgrade too – it now has 9 different LEDs that make up its surface, and the camera system can choose how to throw that light. For a telephoto shot, for instance, it can choose to send a bright narrow beam. For a group shot with the wide it can turn on the edge LEDs to broaden the beam to catch the edges.

In practice I believe that I am getting better exposed flash images with softer overall light that look a little less harsh. That’s as much as I can tell though. I don’t shoot many flash images at all, frankly.

Video

I didn’t get to test out the video modes much but they’re all trading hard on the silicon work – cinematic mode moving up to 4k from 1080p is a testament to the amount of overhead that the A16 Bionic has to work with.

I did run a couple of tests on the action mode and zoom smoothing though. As you can see from the clips above, having a huge 48MP array to work with means that OIS + big overscan = bigtime stabilization capabilities. Though the iPhone is a tad on the expensive side to be considered an action camera, it’s closer now than its ever been to being near the top of that heap. I don’t think that Apple was exaggerating when they compared it to using a gimbal.

There’s also a neat trick that they pull now with zooming while in video mode. They steal a few frames of video from the buffer of the camera that they’re switching to, say from 1x to 3x, and use an ML aided process to interleave them with frames from the current lens. This means that instead of the hard jump cuts you used to see while tapping from one zoom level to another, you get this nice rack zoom instead. It’s very pleasant.

Foreground blur in Portrait Mode

The upgraded segmentation of the portrait mode this year means that we now get foreground as well as background blur. The lack of a true ‘field of focus’ that expanded outward from the subject and got softer organically as it traveled further away has been one of the biggest roadblocks to helping portraits taken on iPhone look more natural – as if they were shot with a true portrait-style lens.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

I wouldn’t say the execution is perfect here yet, if the subject is too close to the lens you get the natural bokeh of the optics in the camera with the foreground blur layered on top so you can quickly see results getting cartoonishly ballooned outwards instead of softly blurred. Of course, if the segmentation falls over here you also still get an awkward mix of foreground and mid-ground elements that are not placed where they need to be spatially.

But if you strike a decent balance, keeping the subject at around 7-10 feet, and nothing to prominent in the center of the frame, it’s extremely convincing.

As with the original portrait mode, I’d say that this is one of those features that will evolve over time to get better and more natural. But out of the gate it really does level up the whole mode’s game, allowing you to place a subject in the midst of foreground and background elements and separate them out naturally. When they’re properly detected and segmented, of course.

Safety and security

Two main safety features were introduced to the iPhone 14 lineup: Crash Detection and SOS over satellite. I was unable to test crash detection because my local crash test simulator closed last year after an unfortunate watermelon incident. And SOS over satellite doesn’t ship until November.

But I think both features are massively compelling to anyone who travels or adventures solo. Especially in driving heavy locations. In lieu of crashing my car, here’s a rundown of the way these features work.

Crash detection

Most common types of crashes are detectable by the feature

• Sedan
• SUVs
• Trucks

The feature is made possible specifically by software plus new hardware:

• Dual core accelerometer that detects 256g (currently 32G) of force.
• Between 100-200G of force is typical in crash scenarios.
• New faster Gyroscope – senses faster with more sampling per second.
• The mic, GPS and barometer are also used.
• Crash data is processed locally and when driving only.

When a crash happens:

• There’s a 10 second countdown.
• Dials emergency services, worldwide.
• A voice looped message is transmitted.
• Sends your location to EMS.
• Alerts emergency contacts and sends your location to them.
• Crash detection will also use satellite if there is no signal to send message to EMS.

The emergency contact message will say that this user has been in a crash (providing the name of the user if it is set in their My Card) and provide the estimated location of the user (if available) in a maps URL. In Messages on an iPhone, that URL will turn into a Maps window with the location shown as a pin. On any other device, it will likely show the URL and the user can click on it to open the web version of Maps.

SOS Feature

• A new status indicator shows not in range (SOS) when there is no cell signal at the top of your device.
• A simple 911 call to any cellular service activates the feature.
• If you call 911 and you don’t get anything then 30-60 seconds later it activates.
• You then see an Emergency sos via satellite screen with expectations about the service and connectivity laid out.
• Then goes to tappable questionnaire that Apple worked on with emergency specialists to nail down.
• You can choose to notify or not notify emergency contacts.
• They can also see transcript of your SOS convo.
• It then brings up a screen to guide you to pointing at a satellite.
• A message then goes out to Messages app.
• Grey chat boxes appear when you’re sending emergency messages.
• You can also Text 911 directly with messages services.
• That’s a function of Apple relay centers because most EMS providers don’t take 911 texts though some do.
• The relay centers are in US and Canada currently.
• Part of the training is calling the right services to cover the emergency and the area of emergency.
• Your Medical ID info will go to them displaying things like medications, height, weight etc from your medical card.
• It uses a short text compression algorithm to send more quickly to a satellite.
• The internals of the phone were adjusted – including antenna tweaks and new software enable the connection to satellite – so it uses the existing, but modified, antenna.
• The feature will work for people traveling to the US from elsewhere even if they ‘don’t have the service’.

One interesting detail is that you can also use the satellite feature to send a non-emergency location – ‘we got to the summit’ type locations etc. to the Find My service to keep your friends updated on your location and progress.

Dynamic island

As I said above, I think that this whole Dynamic Island situation is one of the better UI turnaround jobs I’ve ever seen. The ‘notch’ that houses the front camera, True Depth array and proximity sensor has been a lightning rod for critique ever since its introduction. To see Apple go from trying to hide it to at least acknowledging and owning it and then onward into full on lean-in mode with this new pill-shaped dynamic area has been pretty enjoyable.

Instead of another year of pretending that they love the notch and everything is fine, Apple has turned that area into something that’s actually useful and interesting.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

Before we get into function, there are a couple of interesting things worth noting about the pill itself.

• The camera is a separate unit off to the right.
• The True Depth array is in its own little area.
• The proximity sensor is hidden under the screen.
• Apple is using hardware anti-aliasing to blend the edges of the screen with the expanded edges of the pill when it’s activated to make everything look seamless. It’s essentially seamlessly mixing a hardware screen edge with a software UI element edge with no differentiation. That’s harder than it appears.
• There are three separate APIs that can take advantage of the Dynamic Island. The NowPlaying API for music etc, CallKit for voice apps and later this year, the Live Activities API that adds a bunch of stuff like sports scores, food orders, ride sharing, fitness workouts etc.
• If a third party app currently uses those shipped APIs it will automatically work with the Dynamic Island.

It’s no surprise that I heard there is some shared DNA between the team that worked on the Dynamic Island and the one that helped design the lock and home screen interactions that replaced the home button. That too was a seemingly improbable feat – to replace a button that represented one of the single best bits of interaction design ever in consumer hardware with…swipes.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

In practice, the Dynamic Island works. It becomes a sort of ferrofluidic blob that expands and contracts as needed. Alerts bloop into the island with a stretchy little expansion that blooms out the bottom – FaceID’s activity icon lives here next to the camera, finally, making you look where you need to look. They then absorb back into the pill when they’re done.

Ongoing activities slither out the sides, expanding the pill shape to enclose their icons or voice-meters and what have you. The pill can absorb up to two recent ongoing background actions and will then begin to prioritize them as they come in using a ranking algorithm to sort them, surfacing the ones that are the most vital. If you are navigating, you have an active phone call and a personal hotspot on, for instance, you’ll likely see the call and the navigation. When the call ends, your hotspot icon will re-appear.

There’s also this extremely subtle breathing action it does after you collapse a new activity into it. Watch closely after you swipe away from an app and it disappears into the island. Over the next second or so it ever so slightly contracts down to a lower profile. It’s super subtle but a great little detail that makes it feel more like a living part of the interface.

Image Credits: Matthew Panzarino / TechCrunch

And yes, the area is reactive. The touch array stops at the edge of the area but apple uses touch heuristics to make it feel like the area is touch sensitive given the size of your finger and how it will likely connect with the sensitive areas around the pill. They know where you want to touch because of the implication.

You can press and hold for actions on ongoing activities or tap to go to a respective app.

The feature is not without its quirks and rough spots. The alignment of icons and activities across the length of the pill leaves something to be desired. At times the edges of text associated with things like timers will get cropped off by the edges of the pill, though only slightly. All of this feels juuuuust a tad fresh. Given that the Dynamic Island is a ‘marquee’ feature, I’m guessing that these will get polish passes sooner rather than later.

Overall though, it actually does work. It turns an area of the phone that everyone wanted to forget about into the beating heart of the active interface.

I will add one note for those who just hate the whole idea of the pill shape sitting up there. If your iPhone is on dark mode you’re pretty much almost never going to see it unless there are icons in it. Pro tip etc.

This year’s iPhone models deliver a strong series of upgrades across the spectrum of hardware and software. Itt’s increasingly difficult to recommend that anyone get the new iPhone every year. This year the safety and camera options might be the tipping point for those early early adopters – but if that’s you you’ve probably already pre-ordered anyway. However, for anyone who has held off for two or three years, this is probably the easiest upgrade now recommendation I’ve been able to give in years. Both the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Pro got material updates across their major feature sets.

Review of Apple’s iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro: They’re leaning into it by Matthew Panzarino originally published on TechCrunch

In 2022, the amount of corporate data stored in the cloud (versus on-premise servers) reached 60%, a signal of how the world of enterprise IT is evolving. But lest you think that cloud=modern=more efficient, when it comes to security, the picture is more complicated: multiple silos mean multiple challenges to visibility, creating security vulnerabilities and resulting in half of all data breaches last year happening in the cloud, according to IBM.

Now a startup called Dig Security, which is building security tools specifically to address that complexity, has raised investment that speaks to the demand it’s seeing.

The company — which assesses and the provides real-time monitoring for clients’ data assets sitting multi-cloud-based environments — has raised $34 million, a Series A investment that it’s going to be using to continue expanding its platform.

The startup’s focus today, said Dan Benjamin, CEO and co-founder, is on data in public rather than private clouds. It integrates with all of the major providers — Azure, AWS, Google Cloud — as well as big names in data warehousing like Snowflake and Databricks, and the services that it provides include data security posture management (DSPM), data loss prevention (DLP), and data detection and response (DDR).

The investment is being led by SignalFire, with Felicis Ventures, Okta Ventures and previous backer, cybersecurity-specialist incubator and investor Team8, also participating. Dig emerged from stealth and announced its $11 million seed round only in May of this year. The reason for the rapid follow-up is that the seed round had actually closed (and been used) some time before it was actually announced, said Benjamin; and because the emergence from stealth found the company getting a lot of inbound contacts from customers and investors.

Okta Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the identity and access management giant, falls into both of those categories: Dig has a strong integration with Okra’s sign-in management products to both monitor potentially malicious activity and also to help set up stronger protections to head off bad actors before they take hold.

Dig’s founders — Benjamin, Ido Azran (VP of R&D) and Gad Akuka CTO) — are repeat founders who have track records at companies like Microsoft, Google, Mimecast, SAP and more, and as Benjamin explained it, there is a strong argument for a big third-party player to provide security services for cloud data, simply because it’s grown up to be a huge, but very fragmented market with no proprietary ‘owner’: because of the prevalence of micro services, organizations rarely use only one service like AWS or Azure; and data is run over multiple instances.

“A typical organization has 30 different types of data stores across tens of thousands of instances,” Benjamin said. Even a smaller organization might have 10 different types of data stores.

This means that while a cloud company might develop strong cloud security product, we are still some ways away from those products working effectively across data regardless of where it is.

I should also point out that Benjamin also predicted that approach would likely change over time: he worked in corporate development at Microsoft and knows that the appetite among big players like these will be to see how cloud data security companies — like Dig — will evolve over the coming years and potentially snap one up to bolt on that kind of functionality.

For now, however, companies like Dig have a clear opportunity to make some traction in the market.

“Dig is uniquely positioned to help make DDR the standard for data security,” said Nir Polak, venture partner at SignalFire, who himself has a strong cyber profile as the founder and chairman of Exabeam. “The rise of remote work and the increasingly high stakes of cloud attacks require real-time data security capabilities – too many organizations remain exposed to the risks that lurk behind the public cloud. SignalFire is thrilled to support Dig as the only vendor in the cloud data security market that provides real-time data protection across any cloud and any data store.”

It is not the only player here: a number of others are also moving in on the opportunity to provide more holistic security approaches to bridge the fragmentation of most enterprise environments. Others that have raised big funds include Laminar, HYCU, vArmour, JupiterOne. Bigger tech companies that are making acquisitions to bring more multi-cloud management and security capabilities into their platforms include Google acquiring Siemplify, and F5 buying NGINX.

Dig scoops up $34M to tackle the fragmented world of cloud data security by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

The cloud, and the growing number of assets that are held and used within cloud services, have become a major focus in cybersecurity over the years. Today, a startup that’s leveraging the cloud in a different way — to run a security operations center within it — is announcing a round of funding to expand its activities. Cyrebro — a startup out of Israel built around a team of cybersecurity specialists that monitor networks for enterprises, leveraging both Cyrebro’s own automation tools and whatever other security apps an organization uses to keep data and infrastructure safe — has raised $40 million.

The funding, a Series C, is being led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with new backer Elaia and previous investors Mangrove Capital Partners, Prytek, Bank Mizrachi and InCapital Group also participating.

Cyrebro has been profitable for the last several years, and it’s seen some explosive growth in that time. Today, it helps manage security for 400 customers, up from just 38 three years ago.

“Growth like that needs support,” Nadav Arbel, the CEO and co-founder, explained as the rationale for the funding.

Today, the platform covers a number of functions for its customers — threat hunting, threat intelligence, forensic investigations, incident response, SIEM (security management) optimization, and strategic monitoring, which it provides either as a complete solution or to complement existing security operations at an organization, depending on the size (it works with small businesses as well as very large enterprises).

Image Credits: Cyrebro (opens in a new window)

Cyrebro will be using the new funding both to continue expanding the functionality of the product — today, for example, Cyrebro’s customers would use a third-party remediation tool to complement the work that Cyrebro does, so that could be one area of product expansion — and also to delve deeper into more geographies. The company is based out of Israel today with operations across North and South America, EMEA and Asia. 

The company has raised $60 million to date, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.

Cyrebro’s pitch is that it can complement and consolidate what an organization may already be investing in its security operations, and it can help those organizations run their overall security operations faster, more efficiently and ultimately at a lower cost, and its arrival speaks to a specific evolutionary stage in the world of enterprise IT.

Migration to the cloud is the name of the game in enterprise IT today, and for the most part that architecture promises a lot of new features, efficiencies, and flexibility when it comes to digital work. The down side is that in many cases, across a wider organization, between on premise and cloud services, IT is grappling with a very fragmented landscape when it comes to monitoring and managing that data.

And the same goes for securing it: typically a company uses a number of different apps and systems to monitor data, devices and networks across a wider organization, but that begs the question of how all of that data is subsequently consolidated, to make it usable and actionable. And that’s before considering the strain and burnout that security teams are facing to grapple with this.

And that is essentially where Cyrebro believes it can play a role: by being the central nervous system that can read these different signals, and make concerted sense of them. “Cyrebro” is triple wordplay, Arbel said: first, on cerebrum, the Latin word for “brain”; second, on Cerebro, the headgear used by Professor Xavier in X-Men to “see the entire world”; and third, on the obvious reference to cyber (short for cybersecurity). Note: even with the different spelling, Arbel said his legal team cleared the copyright on using the term with Marvel/Disney.

In cybersecurity, a lot of the innovations these days are focused around AI and other software that automate certain tasks, and there is a very logical reason for that: malicious hackers are also building automated and AI-based tools to swarm networks, creating a mass of sophisticated activity, across a mass of data, and so the aim is to fight fire with fire.

But alongside that, there is an indisputable role still for human intervention and judgement, and that is something that anchors Cyrebro as well, which is based on a team of specialists, who in turn work with a company’s own in-house teams, with all of Cyrebro’s software assets, and those of their clients.

Arbel explained that this is also because of how the startup itself germinated. As with so many in cyber intelligence and security in Israel, his roots are in defense and working in the public sector: one of his past roles was as the Israeli police force’s cyber chief. He also worked for years in consulting, where he saw first-hand the need for a better, centralized approach to security operations.

“We are a company that grew out of red teaming, so we have an offensive mindset,” he said. “My idea for building this came from hundreds of red team exercises: yes, companies were monitoring — we have tools installed everywhere these days — but they were asking the wrong things.” Essentially they “lacked a wider understanding” of threats and how to see them off.

The company does have competitors in the area of SOC as a service, as well as managed security service providers overall, large organizations like Cybreproof, CheckPoint, Axonios and more, as well as newer players like SOC Prime — who all provide some of the same or similar services (or similar concepts, but with different approaches). Investors say that Cyrebro stands out for its comprehensiveness and track record so far.

“Cyrebro provides MSSPs the highest level of automation and lowest false-positive rate with its SOC Infrastructure offering, making it truly distinct,” says Isaac Sigron, managing director at KDT, in a statement. “We believe they are revolutionizing the industry by providing MSSPs with the foundation to build a world-class, state-level product with fewer resources and expenses. This enables MSSPs to provide better and more cost-efficient service to their customers while significantly extending their offering. CYREBRO has shown significant growth in a challenging market, and we’re confident that Nadav and his team will continue to drive the business forward.”

Longer term, as security breaches and malicious activity get more sophisticated, Arbel believes that the trend will be for specialists to manage an increasing amount of security work in an outsourced way, with companies like Cyrebro playing an ever-bigger role as a result.

“In five to ten years, companies will not build security operations centers from scratch,” he said.

Cyrebro, a specialist in cloud-based security ops, locks down $40M by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Google’s appeal against a €4.34 billion antitrust fine handed down by the European Union four years ago, after the bloc’s competition regulator found major violations in how it operated its Android mobile OS, has not succeeded in overturning the decision: The EU’s General Court largely confirmed the Commission’s decision in a ruling issued today.

It’s a much needed win for the EU which has had a number of its antitrust decision unpicked by the courts in recent years.

Reached for comment, a Google spokesperson sent us this brief line:

“We are disappointed that the Court did not annul the decision in full. Android has created more choice for everyone, not less, and supports thousands of successful businesses in Europe and around the world.”

The size of the fine issued by the EU to Google over the Android violations in July 2018 equated to a record-breaking $5BN at the time — and it remains unsurpassed for an EU antitrust sanction.

However the General Court has revised the size of the fine downward slightly — setting the final amount imposed on Google at (a still record-breaking) €4.125BN (~$4.3BN at current currency conversion rates which have seen the dollar and euro hit near parity).

A spokesperson for the Court said: “The General Court largely confirms the Commission’s decision that Google imposed unlawful restrictions on manufacturers of Android mobile devices and mobile network operators in order to consolidate the dominant position of its search engine.

“In order better to reflect the gravity and duration of the infringement, the General Court considers it appropriate however to impose a fine of €4.125BN on Google, its reasoning differing in certain respects from that of the Commission.”

Google had sought to argue that the Commission had made an error in its definition of the relevant markets and that its assessment of the restrictions Google imposed on device makers and carriers as abusive was incorrect, among a number of pleas its lawyers put to the Court.

The Court largely rejected its arguments — but in the case of a pre-installation condition included in portfolio-based revenue share agreements (with mobile makers and carriers) the justices did it find fault with the Commission’s reasoning (and some procedural errors), thereby upholding Google’s plea that the exclusivity agreements were not abusive and annulling that part of the Commission decision.

A Court press release summarizing the ruling notes that “that partial annulment does not affect the overall validity of the [infringement] finding… in the light of the exclusionary effects arising from the other abusive practices implemented by Google during the infringement period” — but this element of the ruling explains the slight downward revision of the final fine.

In setting the final amount, the Court said it took account of “the intentional nature of the implementation of the unlawful practices and of the value of relevant sales made by Google in the last year of its full participation in the infringement”, per the press release.

Should Google wish to appeal the General Court decision to the bloc’s top court, the European Court of Justice (CJEU), it may only do so on a point of law — with a timeframe of two months and ten days to file such a petition.

It’s not clear whether the company will seek to bring a point of law appeal to the CJEU. The company told us it is reviewing the judgement before deciding on any next steps.

The Commission has also been contacted for comment.

At the time of writing competition chief Margrethe Vestager had not posted publicly on the win but her Twitter account retweeted the Court’s press announcement…

Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

Consumer groups and Google rivals were quick to welcome the Court’s decision.

In a statement, Monique Goyens, the director general of BEUC, the European consumer organization, dubbed the ruling a “crucial” win for consumers:

“Today’s General Court ruling on Google’s practices concerning Android is crucial because it confirms that Europe’s consumers must enjoy meaningful choice between search engines and browsers on their phones and tablets. The Court ruling makes clear that Google cannot abuse its strong market position to unfairly exclude competitors through a complex and illegal web of restrictions and requirements for phone manufacturers. The ruling will help to ensure that consumers can benefit from a more open and innovative digital environment,” she said, adding: “Google’s restrictions harmed many millions of European consumers by depriving them of genuine choice and innovation for a decade. In practice, many European consumers had no alternative to using Google’s search engine and Google’s browser Chrome on their mobile devices. If they preferred, for example, to use more innovative and privacy-friendly services, Google’s restrictions prevented them from doing so.”

While Ecosia, the environmentally focused not-for-profit search engines that competes with Google search — and has been a vocal critic of how the tech giant responded with ‘remedies’ following the antitrust decision — also welcomed the ruling, while emphasizing how much marketshare Google still retains in the region.

“Today’s decision is a significant victory for the European Commission (EC) and is a continuation of a positive trend in Europe towards fairer competition in the online search market,” said Sophie Dembinski, its head of public policy, in a statement. “Much remains to be done to bring about true fairness in the space — Google still maintains a 96.6% market share on mobile devices in Europe, down only 0.3% since 2018 when this ruling was initially made — thanks to the EC and European Parliament’s heroic efforts with the Digital Markets Act, this ruling strengthens the EU’s overall position as a leading regulatory force, capable of keeping up with fast-moving developments in the tech sector and taking the action necessary to hold tech giants accountable — something which European consumers and businesses alike will benefit from.”

The 2018 EU Android decision

The 2018 EU competition Commission decision against Android found Google had abused its dominant position by imposing anticompetitive contractual restrictions on manufacturers of mobile devices using its Android OS and on mobile network operators, in some cases since the start of 2011.

The three types of restrictions the Commission identified and sanctioned were found in contract clauses in distribution agreements: Those which required mobile device makers to pre-install Google Search and its Chrome browser apps in order to be able to obtain a licence from Google to use its app store — the popular Play Store; certain ‘anti-fragmentation’ agreements Google imposed on device makers that wanted to pre-install Google Search and Play Store which required them to undertake not to sell devices running versions of the Android operating system not approved by Google; and those contained in ‘revenue share agreements’, under which a cut of Google’s advertising revenue provided to device makers and mobile network operators was subject to their undertaking not to pre-install a competing general search service on a predefined portfolio of devices.

The Court did not agree with the Commission’s assessment that the latter restriction was abusive, as noted above.

As well as being sanctioned with a massive fine for the breaches, Google was ordered four years ago to cease the infringements. However the bloc’s competition regulator allowed the company to configure its own remedy. That resulted in several frustrating years for search competitors after Google started offering a choice screen to Android users in the EU but quickly moved to a paid auction model for assigning slots — thereby, they argued, creating an unfairly skewed playing field which penalized smaller, less well resourced competitors and those with not-for-profit business models.

It was only after further pressure from the EU that Google agreed to drop the paid auction — switching to a choice screen that’s free for eligible participants last year. At the same time it also expanded the number of participants displayed, showing a ‘top five’ (determined by per market popularity but displayed in a randomized order — so, of course, Google is always one of these top options given its regional marketshare… ) — after which, if the user chooses to keep scrolling, they can see up to seven further options (displayed in random order). If there are more than seven additional eligible options for the market Google says the choice of which it displays is also picked randomly.

The Court ruling largely upholding the EU’s Android decision suggests these choice screens are here to stay.

More such regulation-driven interventions could be on the way as the bloc starts to enforce updated competition rules on the most powerful “gatekeeping” platforms — under the incoming Digital Markets Act (DMA).

And it’s fair to say that EU lawmakers have taken their years of learnings from antitrust wrangles with tech giants such as Google and baked them into shaping the proactive operational rules that will be imposed on core platform services that fall in scope of the DMA. So the legacy attached to Google’s antitrust enforcements will be a lasting one.

Antitrust activity dialling up across Europe

The EU’s antitrust division has been very active in investigating Google over the past five+ years, landing a string of enforcements — including a $2.7BN fine related to shopping searches back in 2017 (which Google largely failed to overturn on appeal).

Google was also fined $1.7BN in a case related to AdSense, its search ad brokering business, in 2019. (Its appeal there is ongoing.)

The competition Commission also has an ongoing probe into Google’s adtech — opened in June 2021. And, on Friday, Reuters reported that the EU had widened this investigation.

The bloc is also looking into an ad deal between Google and Facebook — known as ‘Jedi Blue’.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has similar probes of Google’s adtech ongoing too. As well as expressed concerns about the mobile duopoly — one half of which is Google Android.

While Germany’s antitrust scrutiny of the company — which touches a number of fronts — stepped up a gear at the start of this year when its regulator determined the tech giant falls under a special abuse controls regime brought in under a major reform of digital competition rules that’s aimed at tech giants’ market muscle.

France has also been aggressive in probing a variety of competition concerns around Google. And this summer the company dropped an appeal against an antitrust fine of well over half a billion dollars that France’s competition watchdog hit it with in July 2021 — related to breaches in how it negotiated terms with news publishers over copyright licensing.

All this regulatory activity is also leading to an uptick in antitrust litigation aimed at tech giants.

Google fails to overturn EU’s €4BN+ Android antitrust decision by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

The U.S healthcare system is infamously labyrinthine, with a lengthy claims process that results in frequent errors and high administrative costs. Based in Bangalore, CloudSelf is building a cloud-native platform to improve payment integrity (or the process of making sure healthcare claims are paid accurately) by being more transparent and customizable than legacy systems. The startup announced today it has raised $4.8 million in seed funding led by BEENEXT Capital and 3one4 Capital.

Legacy systems present a major obstacle to payment integrity because many are black box, or have no transparency into their inner workings or systems, CoverSelf co-founder Rajasekhar Maddireddy told TechCrunch.

Claims and payment platforms identify inaccuracies in claims and payment contracts, including mismatches with current policies and guidelines. This means these platforms should continuously update policy and guidelines data, Maddireddy explained. But since legacy systems are black box, it is difficult for information to be shared among different parties in the payment integrity process. It also delays innovation, and results in the potential leakage of intellectual property, making payers reluctant to share use cases with one another.

Founded in 2021, CoverSelf wants to provide an open and easily customizable system that makes it easier for payers, vendors and providers to collaborate by enabling real-time data to be shared while protecting IP. The startup is currently pre-launch, but it has already partnered with leading healthcare companies.

CoverSelf’s team

Maddireddy said the platform can take different deployment approaches depending on what clients what. For example, it tested out its payment and claims accuracy platform by partnering with a top private health insurance provider. CoverSelf was able to show that the provider had a 9% inaccuracy rate in claims that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Before CoverSelf, Maddireddy and co-founder Raghavendra Pawar were early employees at U.S. healthcare startup HealthLucid (Maddireddy was its first employee). Pawar has also worked at healthcare organizations like Cotiviti and Prime Healthcare, spending a total of 16 years in the industry.

During their time at HealthLucid, a Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) company asked them to build a self-manageable platform for claims and payment integrity. A Fortune 500 company also contacted Pawar to ask if he knew any self-manageable and open platforms for claims and payment integrity. The two saw the need for a platform like CoverSelf.

“Current vendors are black box and don’t enable collaboration,” Maddireddy said. “Because of that, people are reinventing the wheel multiple times and increasing the healthcare cost.”

He added that the use of black box platforms by vendors forces payers to be too dependent on them by preventing transparency into the root causes of inaccurate claims. This means that they can’t tell hospitals and doctors what is causing errors, resulting in lengthy and expensive cycles of denials and appeals.

CoverSelf’s platform was designed to adapt to increasingly complex payment models and changes to compliance requirements, code sets and guidelines.

Users are able to build on top of CoverSelf’s domain-specific platform with pre-built code sets and industry libraries, allowing them to scale quickly while staying on top of new code sets and policies. CoverSelf’s platform also include claims verification APIs for payers and providers.

CoverSelf’s competitors include startups like Rialtic and HealthEdge, and legacy systems Cotiviti, Change Health, Optum and Multiplan.

Maddireddy said CoverSelf’s key differentiators include its ability to be customized and API-first/cloud native approach, IP protection, an ideation platform for data mining and what-if scenarios and a payer-specific claims auto-correction features that automatically fixes errors in claims and processes them.

“As this is an extremely niche space to operate in, the entry into this industry is extremely rare and oftentimes difficult,” Maddireddy said. “However, this only goes to emphasize the sheer potential of the same, with companies like Rialtic raising $43 million in funding recently, it brings forth a stronger purpose for companies like ours to develop cutting-edge solutions in order to take on the business challenges in this industry.”

Dirk Van Quaquebeke, managing partner of BEENEXT, said in a statement that the “estimated cost of waste in the US healthcare system is approximately 25% of total health care spending. Claims and payments integrity, i.e. incorrect billing or fraud, alone accounts for over US$100 billion of the problem. Now, anyone ever having worked in the US healthcare system, understands its massive complexity. We believe team CoverSelf has assembled a uniquely qualified team to abstract this away and improve healthcare outcomes at reduced prices for patients in the US.”

CoverSelf’s customizable platform simplifies the healthcare claims system by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Fazz, the Southeast Asian digital financial services group created by the merger of PayFazz and Xfers, announced today that it has raised a total of $100 million in Series C funding. This includes $75 million in equity and a $25 million debt facility.

The equity investment came from returning investors Tiger Global, DST Investment, B Capital, Insignia Ventures Partners and ACE & Company, with participation from Ilham Ltd, EDBI, InterVest, Y Combinator managing director Michael Seibel and GGV Capital managing partner Hans Tung. The debt facility is from Lendable.

Fazz will use the round to continue building out its business accounts, which include payment, savings and credit features. The company says that it saw $10 billion in annualized transaction volumes last year. It plans to double its transaction volumes over the next 12 months, and expand its teams in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan from 800 employees to 1,400.

Formerly known as Fazz Financial Group, Fazz’s goal is to close the $300 billion funding gap for MSMEs, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic, and give them the same tools as larger businesses.

In a press release, CEO Hendra Kwik said, “Our technology is our key differentiator—we invest a lot in the tech side of our business to ensure that any business from small family shops all the way to big enterprises can access financial tools to build their business.”

Fazz’s units include Fazz Agen, an agent-based financial app for micro- and small-businesses in Indonesia, Fazz Business, its business accounts, which serves businesses ranging in size from MSMEs to large corporations, Modal Rakyat, a peer-to-peer lending and borrowing services for MSMEs, and payments infrastructure provider Straits X.

In a press statement, Tiger Global partner Alex Cook said, “Fazz provides important financial tools to businesses in Southeast Asia, many of whom lack easy access to digital payments, treasury functions and growth capital. The Fazz platform has been rapidly adopted by both small businesses and larger corporations, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with the Fazz team.”

Southeast Asian fintech Fazz raises $100M Series C to serve businesses of all sizes by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

AC Ventures (ACV), a venture firm focused on early-stage startups in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia, has reached the first close of its fifth investment fund (Fund V). The fund is targeting $250 million and has raised 65% of that capital so far, mostly from limited partners who invested in ACV’s previous funds. Fund V has already made five investments, including SkorLife, IDEAL and Atma.

The last time TechCrunch covered ACV was in December 2021, when it closed its Fund III. (Its fourth fund is focused on Malaysia and run by a separate team).

Founded in 2014, ACV’s portfolio now has over 120 investments in Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia. Some noteworthy companies include Xendit, Carsome, Stockbit, Ula, Shipper and Aruna. Its team has grown to 35 people, with most based in Indonesia, but ACV also recently established Singapore and Malaysia offices. Half of ACV’s leadership team are women and across its portfolio that figure is 40%.

ACV recently hired Helen Wong as managing partner. Wong previously worked at GGV and Qiming Ventures and has served on the boards of startups like Tudou and Mobike.

The firm is sector-agnostic, but many of its investments are in fintech, logistics, e-commerce, MSME and consumer technology. Fund V will also focus on new themes including climate tech. The firm’s check size in early-stage companies is typically $2 million, and it reserves a large part of each fund for follow-on investments.

“Broadly speaking, we are investing in the digitization of Indonesia and the Southeast Asia economy,” ACV co-founder and managing partner Adrian Li told TechCrunch. “Last year, Indonesia’s digital GDP was $70 billion and that’s expected to grow to over $350 billion in the next five to six years. Through our experience of investing over past funds, we’ve also developed expertise, particularly around commerce opportunities, fintech and micro- and small enterprises. Each of these thematic areas represent really deep pools of revenue potential and we’re seeing a lot of ways in which digital adoption can truly make things more efficient, cost less and create value for all the stakeholders in these verticals.”

In addition to Southeast Asia, Fund V’s LPs come from North Asia, the United States, the Middle East and Europe. Li said global investors are drawn to Southeast Asia as it continues to show evidence of being a maturing market, with the successful IPOs of unicorns like GoTo and Bukalapak, an increase in later-stage capital and more secondary exits.

ACV managing partners Michael Soerijadji, Helen Wong, Adrian Li and Pandu Sjahrir Image Credits: ACV

With its focus on early-stage companies, ACV is often the first institutional investor in startups.

“Our fund plays on a successful strategy we’ve continued to refine to be early-stage focused,” said Li. “That means backing companies at a point where we can be really valuable in the shaping of a business as they build it, and also at a point where we can be meaningful investors partnered with them. We typically invest in 30 to 35 companies per fund and reserve a deep follow-up ratio, 20-1, to invest in companies that are executing and creating value.”

ACV’s efforts to help founders include several key appointments who will work closely with startups. They are Lauren Blasco as head of ESG, Leighton Cosseboom as head of PR and communications, and Alan Hellawell as a senior advisor and venture partner.

The firm’s value-add includes working with founders to hire key talent and sharing talent operation playbooks. Li said ACV likes to invest early because as teams grow, it can help startups lay down fundamentals for culture, retaining talent and communication. It also helps companies with compliance and governance, like making sure they have functional boards and a good set of advisors.

Another part of its value-creation initiatives are partnerships with conglomerates and business stakeholders in Indonesia that can help startups accelerate the growth of their business. For example, it helps fintech companies work with banks or access capital they can use for lending.

Li said that ACV typically invests in 10 to 12 companies per year across its funds, and that continues despite the global slowdown in venture capital investing. “At times when money is easier, we may try to move a little faster, and at times like this, we may try to move a little slower, but fundamentally what we’re trying to do is underwrite for the right companies, and so we don’t want to be rushed by the timing of how the market is,” he said.

Though valuations across all stages have fallen by about 30% to 40%, Li also sees upsides in the market environment, including in the quality of entrepreneurs.

“What’s great about this type of period is that entrepreneurs are focused much more on quality metrics and product-market fit before starting to scale their businesses,” he said. “I think lats year when capital was easy, probably a number of companies chasing topline growth had scaled prematurely, and that’s never the most efficient use of capital. It’s simply trying to grab market share and get the next round, so I think times like this are good for both entrepreneurs and investors alike.”

AC Ventures reaches first close of a $250M fund for Southeast Asian startups by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

It’s become increasingly difficult to estimate how much money Apple’s App Store business makes, as it’s lumped in with other services on Apple’s balance sheet — and because Apple has adjusted its commission structure so it’s no longer a flat 30% across the board, making it difficult to work backward from the public figures Apple does provide to narrow down its numbers. But a new report indicates that overall, the prices consumers are paying to engage with apps listed on the App Store have grown considerably — a suggestion that Apple’s own cut has grown, as well.

And what’s more, this growth is not entirely organic, the report suggests. Rather, it’s more closely linked to Apple’s privacy changes — App Tracking Transparency, or ATT — instead of inflation or the broader macroeconomic factors that have impacted tech companies as of late.

Image Credits: Apptopia

This new data come from app intelligence firm Apptopia, which found that the average price of in-app purchases (IAP) on the App Store has climbed 40% since last year, while Google Play IAP prices only saw a 9% increase during that same time frame. The firm analyzed pricing across both app marketplaces between July 2021 to July 2022 to reach its conclusions.

Apptopia suspects ATT’s 2021 introduction is behind the rising prices for in-app purchases because the increases kick in before inflation began to hit the economy hard in 2022. In other words, it appears that app publishers were adjusting their rates in reaction to the increased effective cost per install (eCPI) that came about after Apple’s ATT made it more costly to acquire new users. To support this conclusion, the report cites data from measurement company Adjust which shows how the growth in eCPI directly correlates with the IAP price increases.

Image Credits: Apptopia & Adjust data

In addition, if the growing prices were more of a reaction to inflation than ATT, then it would go to reason that similar trends would be seen across Google Play — but that’s not the case. While it’s true that Google Play historically pulls in less overall revenue than the App Store through things like paid downloads, in-app purchases and subscriptions, it still hosts a number of apps reliant on in-app purchases to monetize. But Google Play’s average in-app purchase price increase was only in the single digits, compared with Apple’s 40%.

This news follows another recent report which found that ATT had helped boost Apple’s advertising business, as well, allowing it to earn a spot amid the Facebook-Google duopoly.

Apptopia’s new report also broke down how the different types of in-app purchases were impacted by the price changes.

It found that the average pricing of iOS single-purchase in-app purchases grew 36% year-over-year while other in-app purchases, including monthly and annual subscription options, grew only 19%.

Image Credits: Apptopia

The top iOS categories seeing the largest in-app purchase price increases were Navigation, Travel, Photo & Video, Sports, and Books. Food & Drink, Beauty and Events led the group on Google Play, though the overall average IAP price increases were much lower.

Apple’s in-app purchase prices jumped 40% year-over-year, likely tied to privacy changes by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

In the new era of remote and hybrid working, companies need to manage people who either relocate to join, or work remotely. For obvious reasons, that has created a huge headache for HR directors.

Back in 2014, FlatClub had an apartment rental platform. But a chance encounter encouraged them to pivot in 2017 to become Benivo, a B2B SaaS HR platform solution for mobile or moving workforces. The then used the funding and revenues from the consumer business to scale up the new company.

The result is a $12m growth funding round led by Updata Partners, a Growth Equity Fund, which brings the total amount invested in the company to $30m. Not bad for a start-up that began with apartments.

Playing in a similar space to Benivo is Topia, formerly MoveGuides which has burned through around $140m. Benivo has now managed to secure clients including Google, Mondelez, General Electric,  Phillips 66, Unity, Wayfair, CGI, Bloomberg and around 50 others. 

The so-called ‘global mobility’ market is pretty large but many processes are still manual and often require the use of several platforms by staff or their companies.

Benivo’s pitch is that it uses AI to automate and predictive analytics to help that poor person in HR who needs to move staff around, or monitor where the hell they are going.

Founder Nitzan Yudan tells me the journey started in Silicon Roundabout’s original startup co-working space TechHub, when a chance meeting with the Google HR team resulted in the idea to pivot in this new direction.

“Despite presenting Google with the ugliest page in the history of internet pages (which was our not-even-MVP product then), they cared about their employees and really wanted to solve a problem. So they went ahead with us. With Google as our first client, deciding to pivot from the consumer business and stop competing with Airbnb was a natural step for the company,” he said via email.

Benivo says it competes on various levels with ‘Assignment Management Systems such as Equus, Topia, KPMG and ‘Relocation Management Companies’ such as SIRVA, WIchert, Cartus, BGRS, AIRES, Altair), but addresses both issues with a single platform.

The company will use the new funding to grow its teams in the US, UK, Armenia, and India.

Can this startup solve the HR headache that is digital nomads? It just raised $12M to try by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Sonos has a new sub in its lineup, and this one isn’t quite as prohibitively expensive: The $429 Sub Mini comes in at almost half the price of the more expensive existing $749 Sub — and is also roughly half the size.

The Sonos Sub Mini is specifically recommended by the company to accompany its smaller speakers (like the Beam, Ray, and One), and for smaller and medium-sized room. It’s roughly the size of a small waste bin, and the cylindrical design with the central cutout echoes the larger Sub’s look but in a package that’s probably much easier to integrate into your existing home decor.

The Sub Mini comes in either black or white, and goes on sale on October 6 in select markets in eluding the U.S., Canada, the UK and more.

The company has long been tipped to be working on this more compact subwoofer, and the cost savings in particular are bound to be welcome for Sonos customers looking to fill out their home surround system with something that doesn’t cost as much or more than other complete soundbar/sub combos from competing brands.

We’ll be checking out the new Sub Mini to see how it compares to the existing Sub and other surround setups, so stay tuned for that once its available.

[gallery ids="2396091,2396092,2396093,2396094"]

Sonos introduces new $429 Sub Mini subwoofer by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Workday, which offers a set of services that helps companies manage people and finances, was one of the earlier enterprise SaaS companies, launching way back in 2005, coming online about six years after Salesforce.

Today, the company announced an interface overhaul across the product line in an attempt to modernize and make it easier to use for everyone from frontline workers to managers to IT.

Writing in a company blog post announcing the UX changes, Workday chief design officer Jeff Gelfus, who has been charged with implementing the design modernization, sees it as simplifying the experience for all users, regardless of their role.

“When it comes to simplifying, our mission is to make Workday feel effortless. For frontline workers, it should be easy to check-in to their shift with a single tap on their mobile phone, and managers should be able to approve an expense report quickly from their natural workspace without interrupting their flow of work,” he wrote.

“Power users should be able to have a hub of all the capabilities they need all in one place. For all these user types, they should be able to find information, easily and intuitively, when completing complex tasks.”

Over time this kind of redesign has come to mean delivering a more consumer-like experience, something that doesn’t look or feel like a clunky enterprise application, but rather one that looks like something you’re used to using in your personal life on your phone or tablet.

“We expect that [consumer experience] in the enterprise now as well…It’s just table stakes really for any application. And so that’s the way that we’re focusing on enabling that employee experience. It is that consumer grade UX within [our] enterprise applications,” company CTO Jim Stratton told TechCrunch.

That includes delivering an experience based on your job role, rather than having a one-size-fits-all interface. “We’re focusing on [job roles] as unique personas and having different experiences surfaced up to those individuals, those different personas, depending on where they are and what they’re doing,” he said.

New personalized Workday start page. Image Credits: Workday (Image has been cropped)

Stratton says that beyond making it easier for users to do their work, as part of an enterprise software ecosystem, it has to be open and extensible as well. “So the rest of our job is to enable a company to extend that platform for all the custom things that they do around their people and finance, but then also to be open and connected to those other systems that they need to run their business,” he said.

An example of how Workday has connected to other systems, even before this change, is its integration in Slack. Instead of requesting a day off in the Workday application, an employee can make the request in Slack and the request is routed automatically to a manager in Slack, who can quickly approve it.

There are two ways to build applications on top of Workday. The first is Workday Extend, an approach that has been around for some time, although there are improvements to it in the new version. Stratton says this is a tool that’s designed for IT and developers to build applications that meet the needs of an individual company.

The new way, which is called Workday App Builder, is a low code tool aimed at line of business users. “App Builder is a move towards low code, no code to enable business users to actually build those applications themselves. So rather than relying on a developer or someone in their IT shop, the actual business users will be able to develop those themselves,” Stratton said.

All of this and more is being introduced today at Workday Rising, the company’s customer conference, taking place this week in Orlando.

Workday turns more modern and personalized with new interface makeover by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

There is a stubbornly persistent line of thinking that it’s hard to find talent from underrepresented groups, or worse, you are somehow lowering the bar by trying to build a diverse workforce.

Joonko, an early-stage startup, has come up with a way to help companies find candidates who have made it to the final stage of the interview process with another tech company without getting hired. Today the company announced a $25 million Series B.

“We help companies source high-quality, vetted, underrepresented candidates with a zero-touch solution. So you as a company don’t need to do anything for your pipelines to be flooded with very high-quality, what we call the silver medalists, underrepresented folks,” company founder and CEO Ilit Raz told TechCrunch.

The idea behind pulling silver medalists from recruitment systems is that people who made it through the entire interview process at another company have proven that they have talent.

“The fact that Joonko focuses on silver medalists, which is the people who get to the last steps in the recruitment process at another company, being offered an opportunity in a second company, puts us in a position where we say everyone in Joonko’s talent pool is not just coming from an underrepresented group, but they are also super high quality,” Raz said.

As an example, she says if a person made it through a rigorous process at a company like Atlassian and came in second, it’s reasonable to assume that this person is a quality candidate. The startup has access to recruitment systems, and they get permission from the candidates themselves to be included in Joonko. Most people looking for a job are happy to participate.

Image Credits: Joonko

The product today helps companies find employees from three groups: women, people of color and veterans, some of whom cross over multiple groups. The company launched in 2017, but a lot changed after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in 2020 and companies began looking much more closely at their diversity efforts. VP of strategy Albrey Brown was head of diversity at Airtable at the time, and says that he witnessed a big shift in how businesses think about diversity.

“I think a lot of both CEOs and C-suite folks who I spoke to, talked about how it made them viscerally aware of what was going on in their companies,” Brown said. “So this kind of unawareness became an extreme awareness. And then that turned into ‘well, what can I do.’”

And one thing they could do was turn to companies like Joonko for help in recruiting more underrepresented people and getting more diverse people in the interview pipeline is the first step.

“Joonko is interestingly one of the most obvious ways to attack and really invest in diversity in your company, because we focus on only getting you and referring you to underrepresented candidates. So the conversation went from what I like to call, a movement from a moment. And thankfully, we’re continuing to see that movement move forward, rather than kind of this conversation falling to the wayside,” he said.

Joonko team Image Credits: Joonko

While the company is concentrating on bringing folks from these groups into the top of the funnel, it has bigger plans for the future.

Raz says the next step will be to focus on retention, which is often a problem if people feel isolated inside organizations. She says that her company currently has around 35 employees. She is definitely practicing what she preaches when it comes to diversity, even though she acknowledges that it’s a challenge as it is for any company.

“I can understand why companies struggle, but I think at the same time, we are very proud to say all of the employees in our New York office are underrepresented. We have 60% women, and about a third or maybe a little bit more people of color. So we’re really, really focused on making it right. But I think that the quicker you do it, and the earlier you do it, the easier it becomes,” she said.

Today’s $25 million investment was led by Insight Partners with participation from Target Global and existing investors Kapor Capital and Vertex Ventures Israel. A group of prominent DEI angel investors also participated.

Joonko helps companies pinpoint quality talent from underrepresented groups by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch