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Samsung forecasts record $15.5B profit thanks to chips not smartphones

05 Oct 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

Samsung’s last quarter of business saw its slowest growth of profits in a year thanks to weak sales of its flagship Galaxy S9 smartphone. But the company is about much more than just phones, and that’s why it is forecasting a record operating profit of nearly $15.5 billion for its upcoming Q3 results.

The Korean firm said in a filing that it expects to revenue jump five percent year-on-year to hit 65 trillion KRW ($57.5 billion) with an operating profit of 17.5 trillion KRW ($15.5 billion), which represents a 20 percent annual jump and an 18 percent increase on the previous quarter.

Samsung’s pre-earnings filings are brief and don’t contain detailed information about the performance of its business units, thus we can’t assess demand for its high-end phones — which include the Note 9 — in the quarter that Apple unveiled its newest iPhones. But the clues suggest that it is actually the more boring (but reliable) divisions that are, once again, responsible for Samsung’s strong forecast.

Chips account for some 80 percent of Samsung’s revenue and demand for DRAM, which is important in areas such as cloud, pushed prices up during Q3 but analysts suspect that the growth …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Africa Roundup: Paga goes global and 4 startups raise $99M in VC

04 Oct 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

Jake Bright
Contributor

Jake Bright is a writer and author in New York City. He is co-author of The Next Africa.

Nigerian digital payments startup Paga is gearing up for international expansion with a $10 million round led by the Global Innovation Fund.

The company is exploring the release of its payments product in Ethiopia, Mexico, and the Philippines—CEO Tayo Oviosu told TechCrunch.

Paga looks to go head to head with regional and global payment players, such as PayPal, Alipay, and Safaricom according to Oviosu.

“We are not only in a position to compete with them, we’re going beyond them,” he said of Kenya’s MPesa mobile money product. “Our goal is to build a global payment ecosystem across many emerging markets.”

Launched in 2012, Paga has created a multi-channel network and platform to transfer money, pay bills, and buy things digitally 9 million customers in Nigeria—including 6000 businesses.

Since inception, the startup has processed 57 million transactions worth $3.6 billion, according to Oviosu. He joined Cellulant …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Tencent Music, China’s largest streaming service with 800M users, files for US IPO

03 Oct 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

This year has seen a number of tech companies that are majority or substantially owned by Chinese giant going public in the U.S. Baidu’s iQiyi service, Xiaomi-backed Huami and Viomi are a few examples, and now Tencent Music — the music division of Tencent, as you can guess — is making its run after plenty of speculation.

TME — Tencent Music Entertainment — filed initial paperwork to go public in the U.S. (exchange not specified) overnight and the initial target is a $1 billion raise, although that is subject to change. We know that Tencent Music is valued at least at $12 billion, based on data from Spotify’s IPO earlier this year, so it’ll be interesting to note how much that rises from this listing.

Hardly a startup, TME is a spunout subsidiary that houses four Tencent music streaming services, Q Music, Kugou Music, Kuwo Music and WeSing. Those include orthodox streaming services, karaoke apps and live-streaming services. They are generally recognized to be China’s top four music apps and together they claim over 800 million monthly users.

Unlike Apple Music, Spotify or Pandora, TME …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Opera Touch is a solid alternative to Safari on the iPhone

02 Oct 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

Browser company Opera is back doing what it does best, offering you beautifully-designed alternatives to the stock browsers from the likes of Google and Apple . This week the company brought its ‘Opera Touch’ browser to iOS to give iPhone owners a new alternative to the basic Safari browser.

The app was first launched for Android in April and, as we noted at the time, it reinvents a lot of the established paradigms to work well on mobile and particularly large screens that don’t have a home button — which is steadily becoming every premium devices on the market today.

Touch for iOS — which you can download here — will be particularly of interest to owners of the iPhone X or Apple’s newest iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and (upcoming) iPhone XR devices since it is optimized for one-handed use. That’s to say it employs the same nifty user interface seen on the Android app (see below), which lets you open or close tabs, switch to search, go back or forward using a menu bar located at the bottom of the screen. One thing …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Trump administration sues California over its brand-new net neutrality law

01 Oct 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

The Department of Justice announced on Sunday that it has filed a lawsuit against California to block its new net neutrality law, just hours after it was signed by governor Jerry Brown. The lawsuit was first reported by the Washington Post. Senior Justice Department officials told the newspaper it is filing the lawsuit because only the federal government can regulate net neutrality and that the Federal Communications Commission had been granted that authority by Congress to ensure states don’t write conflicting legislation.

In its announcement, the Justice Department stated that by signing California’s Senate Bill 822 into law, the state is “attempting to subvert the Federal Government’s deregulatory approach by imposing burdensome state regulations on the free Internet, which is unlawful and anti-consumer.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said “under the Constitution, states do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does. Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy. The Justice Department should not have to spend valuable time and resources to file this suit today, but we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order.”

This is the latest of several legal …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Solve, MIT’s take on social innovation challenges, may be different enough to work

29 Sep 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Eric Eldon

Since McKinsey released a report on how best to use prizes to incentivize innovation nearly a decade ago, an entire industry has grown around social innovation challenges. The formula for these “save the world” competitions has become standard. Drum up a lot of buzz around an award. Partner with big names to get funding and high-profile judges. Try and get as many submissions as possible from across the world. Whittle down the submissions and come up with a list of finalists that get to pitch at a glitzy event with a lot of media attention.

On the final stage, based on pitches that last mere minutes, pick a winner that can get upwards of millions in prize funding. Don’t have a software platform to run a challenge of this kind? No worries, numerous for-profit vendors have sprung up that can do all the work for you—for anywhere from ten to a few hundred thousand dollars. The growth has been so exponential that prizes awarded through competitions has grown from less than $20 million in 1970 to a whopping $375 million just four decades later.

But do these prizes get the sort of world-saving results they aim for? There’s little …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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What Instagram users need to know about Facebook’s security breach

28 Sep 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Taylor Hatmaker

Even if you never log into Facebook itself these days, the other apps and services you use might be impacted by Facebook’s latest big, bad news.

In a follow-up call on Friday’s revelation that Facebook has suffered a security breach affecting at least 50 million accounts, the company clarified that Instagram users were not out of the woods — nor were any other third-party services that utilized Facebook Login. Facebook Login is the tool that allows users to sign in with a Facebook account instead of traditional login credentials and many users choose it as a convenient way to sign into a variety of apps and services.

Third-party apps and sites affected too

Due to the nature of the hack, Facebook cannot rule out the fact that attackers may have also accessed any Instagram account linked to an affected Facebook account through Facebook Login. Still, it’s worth remembering that while Facebook can’t rule it out, the company has no evidence (yet) of this kind of activity.

“So the vulnerability was on Facebook, but these access tokens enable someone to use [a connected account] as if they were the …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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One week left to buy spectator tickets to Startup Battlefield MENA 2018

28 Sep 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Leslie Hitchcock

It’s just one short week until we bring our premier startup competition to the Middle East and North Africa for the first time, and we are stoked! TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place October 3 in Beirut, Lebanon. We’ve chosen 15 of the region’s best early-stage startups to compete head-to-head and — in the process — launch their companies to the world.

We have an exciting day lined up, and the only thing missing at this point is you. Don’t miss your chance to witness the future of technology unfold before your eyes. Spectator passes cost $29 (including VAT), and you can score your tickets right here.

This day-long conference features the thrill-ride that is Startup Battlefield, and it also includes presentations from top tech leaders, movers and shakers to discuss the advances, challenges and opportunities in the region — more on that in a moment, so keep reading.

Never had the pleasure of watching Startup Battlefield? We’ll break it down for you. The 15 participating teams compete in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round. They have just six minutes to present a live product demo and pitch to the judges — a panel composed of distinguished …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Vinay Gupta to talk about Mattereum at Disrupt Berlin

27 Sep 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Romain Dillet

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Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services.

Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocurrency projects.

But he’s now 100 percent focused on his own project — Mattereum. As the name suggests, it’s all about bringing physical objects to the blockchain.

For instance, if you buy an expensive painting, you want to make sure that you sign a contract with the previous owner that says that you now own this painting.

Mattereum helps you set up self-executing smart contracts to transfer digital assets (including tokens that could prove the ownership of a painting).

But if you want to combine smart contracts with good old legal contracts, Mattereum has also worked on Ricardian contracts so that those contracts have a legal value. Finally, Mattereum also worked on a decentralized dispute resolution platform that can be enforced in a national court.

If you want to listen to Gupta talk about Mattereum …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Crypto giant Binance looks to the future with fiat trading and a decentralized exchange

26 Sep 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

Binance, the one-year-old startup that appeared from nowhere to become the world’s top crypto exchange, is making major moves as it enters the next phase of its business. That includes a plan to offer fiat-to-crypto trading in international markets and the release of a decentralized exchange to complement its current trading site.

The company routinely trades more than $1 billion in crypto volumes daily — even in this current bear market — but to date it has only allowed crypto-to-crypto trading. That’s primarily down to the need for regulation in order to offer fiat currency conversation, but that’s set to change.

Speaking at a Coindesk event in Singapore last week, CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao revealed plans to launch a slew of local exchanges offering fiat conversation in markets across the world and he provided further details in an interview with TechCrunch.

“Right now, we are centralized crypto-to-crypto,” Zhao told us. “We don’t offer fiat gateways and so we rely on others to do that. But through discussions with different regulators across the world, we now have those channels. We want to make it easier for fiat currency to get into the crypto world.”

There’s certainly a need …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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