Bitcoin’s price is rebounding from a sell-off Tuesday while large ether holders are making moves.
Read more The popularity of decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges had backed up the Ethereum blockchain, raising questions about its ability to scale.
Read more Running a small to medium-sized business means a small staff needs to juggle a plethora of tasks, like bookkeeping, tax records and regulatory filings. Singaporean startup Lanturn streamlines their workload with a combination of corporate services and an internal platform that helps automate administrative work. Lanturn announced today that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by East Ventures and CoCoon Ignite Ventures.
Spun out from Zave, a Singaporean management app (and another startup in East Ventures’ portfolio), two years ago, Lanturn now has almost 400 clients. It focuses on startups and SMEs, acting as a “one-stop online corporate services” solution, and uses its internal tech platform to differentiate from other corporate service providers.
Lanturn’s services include helping companies incorporate in Singapore and handling visa applications for new hires. It is led by chief executive officer Velisarios Kattoulas.
Kattoulas told TechCrunch that Lanturn’s seed funding will be used for hiring and to develop its technology.
In a statement about the investment, East Ventures managing partner and co-founder Batara Eto said, “We are pleased to support solutions that enable agility and adaptability among businesses, especially in the wake of the pandemic, and Lanturn provides that by leveraging technology to streamline corporate services and empower businesses to make more informed data-driven decisions.”
Other participants in the round included individual investors Alex Turnbull; RVP Equity managing partner Saki Georgiadis; Meiyen Tan, the head of Oon & Bazul’s restructuring and insolvency practice; White & Case Asia-Pacific partner Chris Kelly; and Next Billion Ventures venture partner Tiang Foo Lim.
Lanturn’s clients range in size from very early-stage startups with only one person, to small and mid-sized asset managers, SMEs and tech firms that have more than 100 employees spread across several countries.
The COVID-19 pandemic meant there was less demand for Lanturn’s services this year than the company had expected, but on the other hand, “the pandemic has highlighted to clients that because Lanturn has its own cloud-based corporate services platform, we can serve them as well today as we could before the pandemic,” Kattoulas said. “That’s helped us maintain momentum, and it’s one reason we’ll grow more this year than almost any cloud-based or traditional corporate services firm.”
When you look at maps of micromobility across the world, it appears there’s not a ton of activity throughout Africa. Well, that’s because there’s not, Gura Ride founder and CEO Tony Adesina said at TC Sessions: Mobility.
In Africa, there are “very few” micromobility operators, Adesina said. “Almost non-existent.”
That’s why launching bike and scooter share in Africa, and specifically Rwanda was strategic, he said. In Kigali, there are many bike lanes and cycling is quite popular in Rwanda, Adesina said. But bikeshare and scooters are “completely new to them.”
Gura Ride has been in operation for the last couple of years and says people are generally receptive to the idea. Still, it hasn’t attracted the same type of market activity as other places.
“Africa is quite unique,” Adesina said. “I don’t think it’s somewhere where you can bring an existing model, maybe that worked in the States or the UK and just dump in a country like South Africa or Rwanda. You have to understand the culture and the people you’re dealing with. It takes quite some time. You have to study the terrain and make sure the model you run in the U.S. or the U.K. can actually fit. Another thing is price. The buying power is not as heavy as you have in the States. So the numbers have to make sense and you have to make sure that the market you’re going into can meet your projected goals.”
That’s partly why Voi, which has gained a stronghold across Europe, has yet to launch in Africa. Voi CEO Fredrik Hjelm noted how the cost of supply and operations is pretty much the same wherever it operates, so in markets where there is less willingness among riders to pay higher costs, it makes it “very, very difficult to operate profitably,” he said.
Once Voi can bring down the costs of operations, it will be easier to launch in more markets and operate profitably there, Hjelm said.
“So there is definitely a time where we will be able to make markets with lower willingness to pay, such as Africa, profitable, when we go there,” he said.
What’s key to micromobility becoming more mainstream in Africa is infrastructure, Adesina said.
“I think the biggest issue [in Kigali] is that the roads are quite narrow, so how do you share the road so you don’t have a lot of hit and runs,” he said.
On the other hand, micromobility is thriving so much in Europe because of the infrastructure, Hjelm said. So, infrastructure can really make or break the industry.
“The infrastructure is better than anywhere else,” Hjlem said. “Culturally also, we’re much more used to bikes to mopeds to vespas to scooters — to all kinds of alternatives to cars. So I think that fundamentally, Europe is the world’s most attractive market.”
The major tech platforms push back against the House antitrust report, Google Assistant gets a “guest” mode and we interview a freshly minted Nobel laureate. This is your Daily Crunch for October 7, 2020.
The big story: Big tech responds to antitrust report
The House Judiciary Committee released its tech antitrust report late yesterday, concluding that the big tech platforms should face additional regulation. Recommendations include creating new separations to prevent dominant platforms from operating in adjacent lines of business, new requirements for interoperability and data portability and increased restrictions on mergers and acquisitions.
For now, these are just recommendations — and they weren’t endorsed by the committee’s Republican minority. But they have prompted forceful responses from four of the companies targeted by the report: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.
Amazon, for example, dismissed the committee’s views as “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing,” while Apple said it “vehemently” disagrees with the report’s conclusions.
The tech giants
Google Assistant gets an incognito-like guest mode — With Guest mode on, Google Assistant won’t offer personalized responses and your interactions won’t be saved to your account.
Slack introduces new features to ease messaging between business partners — One new feature: Slack Connect DMs, allowing users inside an organization to collaborate with anyone outside their company simply by sending an invite.
Instagram’s Threads app now lets you message everyone, like its Direct app once did — These changes are rolling out shortly after a major update to Instagram’s messaging platform.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Envisics nabs $50M for its in-car holographic display tech at a $250M+ valuation — The startup brings together computer vision, machine learning, big data analytics and navigation to build hardware that integrates into vehicles to project holographic, head-up displays.
Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own — Shogun lets companies build sites that sit on top of e-commerce back-ends like Shopify, Big Commerce or Magento.
DoorDash introduces a new corporate product, DoorDash for Work — DoorDash says it conducted a survey of 1,000 working Americans last month and found that 90% of them said they miss at least one food-related benefit from the office.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Transportation VCs suggest frayed US-China ties will impact mobility markets — During TechCrunch’s annual Mobility event, we interviewed three investors who spend much of their time focused on shifts in the transportation industry.
Unqork’s $207M Series C underscores growing enterprise demand for no-code apps — The no-code/low-code world could be enjoying an even sharper tailwind than anticipated.
Media roundup: Google to cut big checks for news publishers, Substack continues to draw top creators, more — I do my best to highlight the latest trends, platform shifts and noteworthy funding rounds.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna shares her perspective on COVID-19 and CRISPR — CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna was named a Nobel laureate in Chemistry today, so it seemed like the perfect time to post video of our interview at Disrupt.
Tech-publisher coalition backs new push for browser-level privacy controls — A coalition of privacy-forward tech companies, publishers and advocacy groups has taken the wraps off of an initiative to develop a new standard that gives internet users a simple way to put digital guardrails around their data.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
We don’t often cover telecom technology startups, but it’s periodically worth checking in to see what’s happening in that space. We can get a good indication from the latest cohort to emerge from an accelerator associated with South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, SK Telecom.
This group of startups will join the Telecom Infra Project accelerator in South Korea, which is part of a global program of telecoms specialist centers, and run in partnership with SK Telecom.
The cohort includes a ship-berthing monitoring system; an app that turns a group of mobile phones into a TV studio; an AI-powered indoor positioning system, which creates interactive maps; a vision system for delivery robots; and one which allows remote audiences to experience live events “together” via a digital stadium.
The selected startups include:
Dabeeo: Dabeeo’s AI-powered indoor positioning system uses vision data produced through smartphone cameras to create interactive maps, used for gaming, marketing and logistics. Crunchbase
Neubility: Neubility develops vision-based localization and path planning technologies for last-mile delivery robots. Crunchbase
Seadronix: Seadronix is a computer vision-based ship-parking-monitoring solution that provides an AI-based berthing-monitoring system. Crunchbase
39 degrees C: This is a mobile multi-camera live-streaming app. It directly connects multiple smartphone feeds to each other using a technology called WiFi-Direct — turning them into a TV studio. Crunchbase
Kiswe: Kiswe is a supplier of entertainment broadcast technology. Its product, CloudCast, is a “Broadcast Studio in the Cloud,” which enables partners to send a digital feed into the cloud to produce live and non-live content. Its other product, Hangtime, allows remote audiences to experience live events “together” through creating a digital stadium with chat rooms, and provides control over viewing angles from within the platform. Crunchbase
In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook said it will no longer allow content that encourages poll watching that uses “militarized” language or intends to “intimidate, exert control, or display power over election officials or voters.” Facebook credited the update to its platform rules to civil rights experts who it worked with to create the policy.
Facebook Vice President of Content Policy Monika Bickert elaborated on the new rules in a call with reporters, noting that wording would prohibit posts that use words like “army” or “battle” — a choice that appears to take direct aim at the Trump campaign’s effort to recruit an “army for Trump” to watch the polls on election day. Last month, Donald Trump Jr. called for supporters to “enlist now” in an “army for Trump election security operation” in a video that was posted on Facebook and other social platforms.
“Under the new policy if that video were to be posted again, we would indeed remove it,” Bickert said.
The company says that while posts calling for “coordinated interference” or showing up armed at polling places are already targeted for removal, the expanded policy will more fully address voter intimidation concerns. Facebook will apply the expanded policy going forward but it won’t affect content already on the platform, including the Trump Jr. post.
Poll watching to ensure fair elections is a regular part of the process, but weaponizing those observers to seek evidence for unfounded claims about “fraudulent ballots” and a “rigged” election is something new — and something more akin to voter intimidation. Poll watching laws vary by state and some states limit how many poll watchers can be present and how they must identify themselves.
Trump has repeatedly failed to say he will accept the election results in the event that he loses, a position that poses an unprecedented threat to the peaceful transition of power in the U.S. That concern is one of many that social media companies and voting rights advocates are anxiously keeping an eye on as election day nears.
“Donald Trump is not interested in election integrity, he’s interested in voter suppression,” VoteAmerica Founder Debra Cleaver said of the Trump campaign’s poll watching efforts. “Sending armed vigilantes to the polls is a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, unless you believe that Black and Brown people voting is a problem.”
Facebook is also making some changes to its rules around political advertising. The company will no longer allow political ads immediately following the election in an effort to avoid chaos and false claims.
“… While ads are an important way to express voice, we plan to temporarily stop running all social issue, electoral, or political ads in the U.S. after the polls close on November 3, to reduce opportunities for confusion or abuse,” Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen wrote in a blog post. Rosen added that Facebook will let advertisers know when those ads are allowed again.
Facebook also provided a glimpse of what its apps will look like on what might shape up to be an unusual election night. The company will place a notification at the top of the Instagram and Facebook apps with the status of the election in an effort to broadly fact-check false claims.
Images via Facebook
Those messages will remind users that “Votes are still being counted” before switching over to a message that “A winner has been projected” after a reliable consensus emerges about the race. Because the results of the election may not be apparent on election night this year, it’s possible that users will see these messages beyond November 3. If a candidate declares a premature victory, Facebook will add one of these labels to that content.
Facebook also noted that it is now using a viral content review system, a measure designed to prevent the many instances in which misinformation or otherwise harmful content racks up thousands of views before eventually being removed. Facebook says the tool, which it says it has relied on “throughout election season,” provides a safety net that helps the company detect content that breaks its rules so it can take action to limit its spread.
In the final month before the election, Facebook is notably showing less hesitation toward policing misinformation and other harmful political content on its platform. The company announced Tuesday that it would no longer allow the pro-Trump conspiracy theory known as QAnon to flourish there, as it has over the last four years. Facebook also removed a post this week in which President Trump, fresh out of a multi-day hospital stay, claimed that COVID-19 is “far less lethal” than the flu.
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand to power everything from security and facial recognition software to autonomous vehicles and mobile apps.
In “Women leading the future of mobile AI,” a video series sponsored by Qualcomm Technologies, MIT Technology Review CEO Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau explores the latest AI advances on software tools, mobile platforms, and algorithmic advancements with five women experts, all determined to make AI performance and power efficiency a reality.
Also in this content collection, get help untangling some of AI’s newest, and knottiest, concepts. For example, distributed intelligence—that is, AI spread across channels to power applications such as real-time language translation. Learn about ways to develop innovative applications that overhaul the manufacturing and retail landscape—and get the latest research and insights on machine learning, smart cameras, and edge computing.
View the content hub.
This content was paid for by an advertiser. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.
The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.
The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a “major pro-life victory” and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the “outrageous and disgusting” practice of “experimentation using baby body parts.”
But when the president faced a deadly encounter with covid-19, his administration raised no objections over the fact that the new drugs also relied on fetal cells, and anti-abortion campaigners were silent too. Most likely, their hypocrisy was unwitting. Many types of medical and vaccine research employ supplies of cells originally acquired from abortion tissue. It would have taken an expert to realize that was the case with Trump’s treatment.
Last Friday, as Trump developed worrisome symptoms of covid-19, the president received an emergency cocktail of anti-coronavirus antibodies made by Regeneron. These molecules are manufactured in cells from a hamster’s ovary, so-called “CHO” cells, according to the company—not in human cells.
But cells originally derived from a fetus were used in another way. According to Regeneron, laboratory tests used to assess the potency of its antibodies employed a standardized supply of cells called HEK 293T, whose origin was kidney tissue from an abortion in the Netherlands in the 1970s.
Since then, the 293T cells have been “immortalized,” meaning they keep dividing in the lab, somewhat like a cancer, and have undergone other genetic changes and additions.
According to Regeneron, it and many other labs employ 293T cells to manufacture virus “pseudoparticles,” which are virus-like structures that contain the “spike” protein of the deadly coronavirus. It needs those to test how well different antibodies will neutralize the virus.
The two antibodies Regeneron eventually put forward as an experimental treatment, which may have saved Trump’s life, would have been selected using exactly such tests. Because the 293T cells were acquired so long ago, and have lived so long in the laboratory, they are no longer thought of as involving abortion politics.
“It’s how you want to parse it,” says Alexandra Bowie, a Regeneron spokesperson. “But the 293T cell lines available today are not considered fetal tissue, and we did not otherwise use fetal tissue.”
The Trump administration has sought to block or curtail research that requires tissue from recently performed abortions. In August, for example, a new board created by the Department of Health and Human Services, and stacked with figures opposed to abortion, voted to withhold funding from 13 of 14 proposals.
The rejections centered on research seeking fresh supplies of abortion tissue, rather than ongoing research involving older, well-established cell lines in use for many years, like the type Regeneron employed. However, one reason some scientists want to study abortion tissue is so they can create new and valuable cell lines.
Update: An earlier version of this story was headlined “Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells from an abortion.” The words “originally derived” were added to clarify that the cells are not from a recent abortion.
The president is running a disinformation campaign, and too many people won’t call it what it is.
“The simplest disinformation is explicitly false or misleading information disseminated for political ends,” says Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor who led a team that recently dissected the way disinformation is amplified.
Take President Trump’s claim that voting by mail invites widespread fraud.
“There’s no question that the assertion that mail-in voting leads to massive voter fraud is false,” Benkler says. “That consensus has emerged over years of study, so that by the time this disinformation campaign starts in April, it’s known to any person who wants to know. As the president says, they think mail-in voting will help Democrats. Why is it anything other than a disinformation campaign when someone tells you they have a specific electoral goal and, in pursuit of that goal, they’re engaging in a sustained and repeated campaign of disseminating information that is false and misleading?”
Benkler’s team just published its study, which examines the president’s disinformation campaign against mail-in votes and details the methods—and people—he’s using to accomplish his goals. The findings found that some of the biggest names in American mass media and the political elite are primarily responsible, and that social media plays only a secondary role. The findings run contrary to the popular idea that it’s foreign troll factories doing the worst disinformation dirty work.
The study examined 55,000 media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 Facebook posts. The conclusion, echoing their research from 2015 to 2018, is that Donald Trump and Fox News are the key players in this crucial disinformation campaign, not Russian trolls. The researchers mapped the campaign out, showing a clear and recurring culprit: Trump, whether on TV or Twitter or by close proxy.
There’s been a lot of alarm over Russian interference and clickbait factories on social media, says Benkler, but “in 2016 and today, what we see is that mass media is much more important.”
The American press amplifies this dramatically because outlets cannot resist giving attention to the White House. Calling his actions a disinformation campaign would be profoundly difficult for some journalists who are desperate to project balance as if it is equal to fairness.
But this has real consequences. Mail-in voting expands access to an election in the middle of a national health crisis, and lies are being used as justification to undercut or eliminate this access—a tactic clearly at play in Texas and other states.
There is a way forward, however. The research argues that the “primary cure” is for these media outlets to more aggressively police the president’s disinformation.
While many Americans are set in their beliefs on election fraud, there is still a substantial group of persuadables, says Benkler. They are unsure of the truth about election fraud, they watch network news, and they read local papers that aggregate journalism from outlets like the Associated Press.
That means “the only meaningful players are the news editors and the journalists at those outlets most often used for political news by the least attentive, least politically engaged people in society,” Benkler says.
That includes tackling the question of the president’s misinformation clearly and directly, and avoiding false balance. Even the New York Times, whose readers are well informed on the reality of voter fraud, sometimes publishes credulous and noncritical journalism on this. One recent story about Texas shutting down ballot drop-off sites, for example, was headlined “Citing security, Texas governor limits counties to one spot each for in-person ballot drop-offs,” giving credence to the idea. Not until the seventh paragraph does the story mention, as a brief aside, that there is absolutely no evidence that mail-in voting causes fraud.
None of this lets social networks off the hook for disinformation, by the way: it’s a real problem that exists on Facebook, YouTube, and beyond. Trump’s Twitter account is central to this disinformation campaign. He reliably wields its authority and influence as a tool to summon coverage and shape the agenda of American media almost at will.
But whether he tweets or goes on TV, the study says, it’s media coverage of the tweets that amplifies the message—often uncritically—far beyond what the account accomplishes alone.