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The EU will reportedly investigate Apple following anti-competition complaint from Spotify

06 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

The spat between Spotify and Apple is going to be the focus on a new investigation from the EU, according to a report from the FT.

The paper reported today that the European Commission (EC), the EU’s regulatory body, plans to launch a competition inquiry around Spotify’s claim that the iPhone-maker uses its position as the gatekeeper of the App Store to “deliberately disadvantage other app developers.”

In a complaint filed to the EC in March, Spotify said Apple has “tilted the playing field” by operating iOS, the platform, and the App Store for distribution, as well as its own Spotify rival, Apple Music.

In particular, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said that Apple “locks” developers and their platform, which includes a 30 percent cut of in-app spending. Ek also claimed Apple Music has unfair advantages over rivals like Spotify, while he expressed concern that Apple controls communication between users and app publishers, “including placing unfair restrictions on marketing and promotions that benefit consumers.”

Spotify’s announcement was unprecedented — Ek claimed many other developers feel the …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Great teams, UBI, data retention policies, and Amazon HQ2

04 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Danny Crichton

3 key secrets to building extraordinary teams

David Cancel, the CEO and founder of Drift, wrote a deep dive on how to think about finding and recruiting the kinds of people who build incredible startups. Among the factors he looks at:

Scrappiness (Importance: 35%)

The four most telling words a new hire can say: “I’ll figure it out.” If you find someone who says that (and can follow through on it), you know you’ve found someone with drive — someone who will plunge headfirst into any challenge and help move the company forward. But to clarify, the type of drive I look for in new hires is different from traditional ambition. Because traditionally ambitious people, while hard workers, tend to obsess over their own personal rise up the corporate ladder. They always have an eye on that next title change, from manager to director, director to VP, or VP to C-suite, and that influences how they perform. That’s why a decade ago, while running my previous company Performable, I added a new requirement to our job descriptions: “Scrappiness.” Today, it’s one of our leadership principles at Drift.

Scrappy people don’t rely on titles or defined sets of …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Lego introduces a new STEM Star Wars kit

04 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Brian Heater

No one does brand synergy quite like Lego. The company’s been one of the biggest Star Wars licensers over the years, and for the first time, it’s applying one of the most valuable pieces of IP to its own line of STEM kits, Lego Boost.

For this year’s Star Wars Day, the Danish company is announcing the arrival of the Lego Star Wars Boost Droid Commander set, which uses the underlying educational property as a jumping off point to build a trio of classic robots from the series.

Kids can use the kit to build R2-D2, Gonk and the Mouse Droid, commanding them on 40 different missions, while learning to build and code in the process. It looks like an effective way to disguise the whole learning bit behind one of history’s most beloved film series. It’s similar to the approach taken by littleBits’ Droid Inventor Kit a few years back — though Lego’s got a pretty remarkable track record of using Star Wars IP.

The set includes 1,177 pieces coupled with color and distance sensors and an interactive motor to get the robots moving. All of that works with a new Boost Star Wars app, which will be available for Android, …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Palantir’s software was used for deportations, documents show

03 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Manish Singh

Data mining firm Palantir’s software was used by a US government agency during an operation in 2017 in which immigrants crossing the border were arrested for deportation, newly released documents (PDF) have shown, contradicting the $20 billion firm’s earlier public statements.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents, obtained by advocacy organization Mijente through Freedom of Information Act litigation, notes that agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations used Palantir’s software to build profiles of immigrant children and their family members for the prosecution and arrest of any undocumented person they encountered in their investigation.

When an ICE investigation agent located an unaccompanied minor, the documents reveal, they were instructed to log the “arrival in the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system.” ICM is a software platform developed by Palantir for “managing and investigating complex cases,” according to a description on the company’s website.

The findings of Palantir’s involvement, first reported by The Intercept, is in contrast to the Silicon Valley firm’s previous claims. The firm told The New York Times last year that it only works with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, which is responsible for …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Once a major name in smartphones, LG Mobile is now irrelevant — and still losing money

02 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

LG was once a stalwart of the smartphone industry — remember its collaboration with Facebook back in the day? — but today the company is swiftly descending into irrelevance.

The latest proof is LG’s Q1 financials, released this week, which show that its mobile division grossed just KRW 1.51 trillion ($1.34 billion) in sales for the quarter. That’s down 30 percent year-on-year and the lowest income for LG Mobile for at least the last eight years. We searched back eight years to Q1 2011 — before that LG was hit and miss with releasing specific financial figures for its divisions.

To give an indication of its decline, LG shipped over 15 million phones in Q4 2015 when its revenue was 3.78 trillion RKW, or $3.26 billion. That 2.5 times higher than this recent Q1 2019 period.

Regular readers will be aware that LG mobile is a loss-making division. That’s the reason its activities — and consequently sales — have scaled down in recent years. But the losses are still coming.

LG put Brian Kwon, who leads its lucrative Home Entertainment business, in charge of its mobile division last November and his …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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India’s Times Internet isn’t ceding ground to US rivals Facebook and Google

01 May 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Manish Singh

The aggressive push by Silicon Valley companies and Chinese firms to win India, one of the last great growth markets, has decimated many local businesses in recent years. With each passing day, Amazon is closing in on Walmart-owned Flipkart‘s lead on the e-commerce space. Uber is fighting with Ola for the tentpole position of the ride-hailing market; and Google and Facebook dominate the ads business, to name a few. But a handful of companies in India have not only survived the growing competition, but they have built businesses that are positively thriving.

Media conglomerate Times Internet, one such company, says that its properties now reach 110 million users each day and 450 million users each month. To put this in context: Facebook and Google have about 300 million monthly active users in India. Facebook, which is mired in controversy over the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp in India (and other regions), has not revealed its growth in the nation in last two years. But in a marketing pitch, the juggernaut says its family of apps (marquee Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) reach 350 million users in the nation …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Perkbox, the employee experience platform, raises £13.5M

30 Apr 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Steve O’Hear

Perkbox, the London-based startup now calling itself an “employee experience platform,” has raised a further £13.5 million in funding. The round is led by existing investor Draper Esprit, alongside a number of previous Perkbox angels. Prior to this, the company, which launched in 2015, had raised £11 million.

Targeting companies of all sizes, from SMEs to larger businesses, Perkbox’s platform lets employers give employees a number of benefits and rewards to enrich their work and personal life. The broader aim, of course, is to improve retention and staff well-being.

The offering now spans several products beyond its “perks” origins, including card-linked loyalty and medical provision. In addition, Perkbox enables companies to measure employee sentiment to help break down silos between management and teams, and to let employees give recognition to one another. This can either be peer-to-peer or top down from management.

“With this new suite of products, we transitioned from an employee ‘engagement’ platform to an employee ‘experience’ platform,” Perkobox co-founder and CEO Saurav Chopra tells me. “[All] with the aim of helping employers enrich the personal and working life of employees by catering for the full spectrum
of employee wellbeing: financial, physical and emotional”.

Headquartered in …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Apple defends its takedown of some apps monitoring screen-time

29 Apr 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

Apple is defending its removal of certain parental control apps from the app store in a new statement.

The company has come under fire for its removal of certain apps that were pitched as tools giving parents more control over their children’s screen-time, but that Apple said relied on technology that was too invasive for private use.

“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” the company said in a statement

The heart of the issue is the use of mobile device management technologies in the parental control apps that Apple has removed from the app store, the company said.

These device management tools give control and access over a device’s user location, app use, email accounts, camera permissions and browsing history to a third party.

“We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017,” the company said.

Apple acknowledged that the technology has legitimate uses in the context of businesses looking to monitor …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Bad PR ideas, esports, and the Valley’s talent poaching war

27 Apr 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Danny Crichton

Sending severed heads, and even more PR DON’Ts

I wrote a “master list” of PR DON’Ts earlier this week, and now that list has nearly doubled as my fellow TechCrunch writers continued to experience even more bad behavior around pitches. So, here are another 12 things of what not to do when pitching a startup:

DON’T send severed heads of the writer you want to cover your story

Heads up! It’s weird to send someone’s cranium to them.

This is an odd one, but believe it or not, severed heads seem to roll into our office every couple of months thanks to the advent of 3D printing. Several of us in the New York TechCrunch office received these “gifts” in the past few days (see gifts next), and apparently, I now have a severed head resting on my desk that I get to dispose of on Monday.

Let’s think linearly on this one. Most journalists are writers and presumably understand metaphors. Heads were placed on pikes in the Middle Ages (and sadly, sometimes recently) as a warning to other group members about the risk of challenging whoever did the decapitation. Yes, it might get the attention of the person you are sending their …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Elon Musk, SEC agree to guidelines on Twitter use

27 Apr 2019/0 Comments/in /by

By Kirsten Korosec

Tesla, Elon Musk and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reached an agreement Friday that will give the CEO freedom to use Twitter —within certain limitations — without fear of being held in contempt for violating an earlier court order.

Musk can tweet as he wishes except when it’s about certain events or financial milestones. In those cases, Musk must seek pre-approval from a securities lawyer, according to the agreement filed with Manhattan federal court.

U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan, the presiding judge on this matter, must still approve the deal. Nathan had given the SEC and Musk two weeks to work out their differences and come to a resolution.

Musk must seek pre-approval if his tweets include:

  • any information about the company’s financial condition or guidance, potential or proposed mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures,
  • production numbers or sales or delivery number (actual, forecasted, or projected),
  • new or proposed business lines that are unrelated to then-existing business lines (presently includes vehicles, transportation, and sustainable energy products);
  • projection, forecast, or estimate numbers regarding Tesla’s business that have not been previously published in official company guidance
  • events regarding the company’s securities (including Musk’s acquisition or disposition …read more

    Source: Tech Crunch

        

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