Sony WH-CH720N wireless headphones review

The WH-CH720N are Sony's latest alphabet soup wireless noise-canceling headphones. The CH-series is Sony's mid-range offering with a balanced feature set that sits under the more premium 1000X series and alongside more specialized models like the XB extra bass series. The CH720N sits at the top of that range with a fairly broad feature set that makes it essentially a lite version of the 1000XM5. You get Sony's active noise-cancellation along with a claimed 'balanced' tuning for the sound, all powered by the dedicated Sony V1 processor, also found on the 1000XM5. Let's see how they...

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The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

UPSIDE Foods bites into $400M round to serve cultivated meat later this year

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

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Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them?

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.

Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.

That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.

“We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website

For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.

My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.

Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

The situation in VC

If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them? by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, we’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s our job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. 

About a year ago, it seemed like myself and other colleagues were writing story after story about spend management companies raising tranches of venture capital — remember Mary Ann’s roundup story from basically this same time last year?

On Friday, PitchBook’s Q1 2023 B2B fintech investment report showed that investment into enterprise fintech was $11.8 billion. Though it is a decrease from the same quarter in 2022, it was above the first quarter of 2021. And compared to the shrinking of quarter-to-quarter investments for the rest of 2022, the $11.8 billion shows a boost of confidence from investors, and dare we say a comeback?

Those figures are certainly proving themselves in stories we’ve been working on lately that show some spend management companies continue to do well in raising money and generating revenue. One of those is Clara, a spend management company based in Mexico that announced $60 million in new funding last week. Gerry Giacomán Colyer, Clara’s co-founder and CEO, told me the company is working with over 10,000 customers across Latin America and that its annual run rate of 5 million credit card transactions is equivalent to $1 billion.

He also noted that “over 10x in transactional volume is coming from revenue. With Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, we are covering two-thirds of LatAm’s GDP.” Giacomán Colyer also expects continued 2x month over month growth through the end of the year.

Meanwhile, last month, Mary Ann wrote about Ramp’s 4x revenue growth in 2022. She spoke to co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman, who described the successful results “as a desire on the part of companies of all sizes and stages seeking to save money by managing their spend better.”

However, despite the seemingly good times the spend management sector is currently experiencing, we learned this week that not everyone is popping bottles. Axios reported last week that Teampay, a corporate card company, confirmed it laid off 30% of its 100-person staff “in two instances in recent months.”

This comes five months after colleague Kyle Wiggers reported that Teampay secured $47 million in equity and debt. Perhaps founder and CEO Andrew Hoag inadvertently forecasted the layoffs when he told Kyle, “Teampay’s software-led approach has proven resilient — as we saw in late 2020 to 2021, when the economy rebounds, Teampay benefits disproportionately through accelerated growth.” If that’s true, maybe the opposite is also true: When the economy doesn’t do so well, maybe Teampay doesn’t do so well either?

Despite Teampay’s setback, the numbers are showing it’s still a space to watch. We’ll keep an eye on it for you.

Now I’m throwing it over to Mary Ann, who got the scoop on Navan’s growth metrics. — Christine

Clara’s co-founders Diego Iván García Escobedo and Gerry Giacomán Colyer Image Credits: Clara

Navan’s chatbot, growth and IPO plans

A few weeks ago I talked to Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan (formerly TripActions), about that company’s growth. For the unacquainted, Navan was initially focused on travel expense management before accelerating efforts on its general spend management offering in 2020 after its revenue literally dropped to zero when the pandemic hit.

Highlights of the conversation include Ariel sharing some impressive growth metrics:

Spend volume processed via Navan Expense in the first quarter of 2023 grew more than 3x compared to Q1 2022 — and by 4.7x when looking at the 12 consecutive months ending in March 2023, as compared to the 12 months preceding. Also, the company touts that recent calendar year volume is nearly 80x that of the first full year of the Navan Expense product launch. Revenue-wise, Navan says it saw “3x YoY revenue growth.”

I also asked Ariel if Navan was still planning to go public considering it filed confidentially to do so in September of last year. His answer: “I think eventually we will be a public company. We’ve raised around $1.4 billion to date and maturity wise, we are there, to be public. Growthwise, we are growing extremely fast, and a lot of our metrics would support being public. I don’t think the market is there right now.”

I also got a demo from CTO and co-founder Ilan Twig of just how Navan is using ChatGPT within its new offering, which is essentially a CFO dashboard, the company says. It was very interesting to see firsthand how its chatbot, Ava, works. Ilan was almost like a child with a new toy, honestly, giddily showing me how the bot could provide insight as to which hotels employees had used the most within a given time period in a given city, and other details such as did they get a corporate negotiated rate, or not? It even produced graphs! At one point, Ilan did have to reword his prompt but it was cool to see how the chatbot could respond to questions sequentially based on previous prompts. Navan’s goal is to help replace data analysts at companies, it says, ultimately helping them save money in more ways than one.

A recent panel at Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas in March — made up of Mesh Payments co-founder and CEO Oded Zehavi; Michael Sindicich, EVP and general manager of Navan Expense; and Michael Tannenbaum, COO and CFO at Brex — also touched on the topic of innovation in the space — all agreeing on the importance of globalization, automation and travel expense as a category.

This quote from Zehavi of Mesh Payments (which raised its own $60 million funding round last September) sums up pretty well the potential for spend management companies: “We were all playing a game of musical chairs. When it was very happy music, many companies in our space got a lot of funding, even though their fundamentals were not so strong. And now the music has stopped, some of us have chairs, but others don’t…The fact that we are connected to the accounting system, we see all the employees, we sit in the middle between the employees, the finance team, and the vendors, is an amazing position for us to leverage and start offering more and more services under the stack of the CFO that we’ll be able to monetize.” — Mary Ann

Anthemis’ layoffs — an outlier or a ‘sign of what’s to come’?

Last week, I published a scoop on fintech-focused VC firm Anthemis having laid off 28% of its staff, or 16 people, earlier this year as part of a restructuring. While 16 people may not seem like a lot, when it comes to venture firms, it actually is. It’s not typical, or often, that we see such large cuts at one time. Anthemis is an active investor, having backed the likes of eToro and Betterment. It’s also had a couple of recent stumbles in Pipe and Daylight. So the news of its staff reduction came as a bit of a surprise. (These are among the least fun types of scoops.) One thing that struck me is that after publishing the story, a founder reached out expressing concern about perception around Farhan Lalji — a former managing director at Anthemis — being among those affected by the cuts. That founder wrote me a note saying that while at Anthemis, “Farhan was the first VC to believe in” his company. “And there’s no way we’d be where we are today without him,” he added. Anyway, I have since learned that Farhan has branched out to start his own firm, LTV Capital.

Interestingly, there was a lot of chatter on Twitter as to whether these layoffs were an outlier in the industry or “a sign of what’s to come.” It’s hard to say. There could be other similar cuts taking place at other venture firms, and we just don’t know about them. But as Alex pointed out in last week’s episode of the Equity podcast, if firms are investing less, wouldn’t it make sense that they would need less staff?

Meanwhile, a couple of days after my story ran, Anthemis announced that it secured additional capital from institutions such as Visa and BMO for its Female Innovators Lab (FIL) Fund. In a statement, the firm said: “Anchored by Barclays, with investment from Aviva, the fund now totals $50 million, making it the largest early-stage fintech fund focused on female founders. With this latest raise, the fund will invest in additional early-stage companies and continue its focus on designing, sourcing, and scaling female-founded embedded finance startups.” — Mary Ann

Ansa’s virtual wallet for merchants

Having covered fintech now for a few years, it’s less and less often that I come across companies building technology that feels, well, unique. But this week, I wrote about a startup building something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before: virtual wallets for merchants. It sounds simple, right? But it’s not, or else we’d see a lot more of it outside the Starbucks of the world. Interesting backstory: Sophia Goldberg, a former Adyen product manager, had this idea for a company but was looking for a technical co-founder. Bain Capital Ventures partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi ended up introducing Sophia to JT Cho, a software engineer she’d worked with at Affirm.

The two self-proclaimed “payments nerds” hit it off famously and went on to raise $5.4 million for Ansa. Besides Bain, other backers include Nimi Katragadda at Box Group; Nichole Wischoff at Wischoff Ventures; Cambrian Ventures; the Fintech Fund; Susa Ventures; and angels such as Plaid co-founder and CEO Zach Perret; Gokul Rajaram and the founders of Alloy; among others. I tend to always root for the underdog, so the fact that Ansa aims to help small businesses like coffee shops and quick-service restaurants (and down the line, they say, enterprises) save money on fees and better retain customers made me happy. Read more here. — Mary Ann

Image Credits: Ansa

Other news

A super interesting feature from Catherine Shu: “Southeast Asia is already home to a thriving fintech scene, where Grab, GoTo and Sea have built super apps that encompass financial services, and startups like Xendit, Akulaku and Dana (to name a few) have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for payments, banking services and other financial tools. Indonesia and Malaysia, in the heart of Southeast Asia, are among the countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world. These factors are proving fertile ground for establishing and growing fintechs that focus exclusively on Islamic finance, offering products and services that follow shariah law.” More here.

Mary Ann wrote about how Shopify has teamed up with Israeli B2B payments startup Melio to launch a new bill pay tool designed to allow U.S.-based merchant customers to manage their expenses and vendors via its platform. It’s another step in Shopify’s plan to straddle the intersection of fintech and commerce, noted Shruti Patel, global head of merchant services partnerships and monetization at Shopify. The rationale behind the new feature plays to the notion that if merchants can spend less time on tedious tasks such as consolidating their invoices and paying bills, they can spend more time focusing on growing their businesses. It also was in part driven by merchants asking for money movement capabilities, Patel told TechCrunch in an interview. More here.

Smart analysis from Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm: “While the banking world watches American lender First Republic publicly convulse after its earnings report detailed a widespread evaporation of its deposit base, the startup world of neobanks is taking blows as well. Earlier this week, Revolut, a highly valued, U.K.-based neobank saw its valuation decline by some 46% in the eyes of one of its backers…Revolut’s revaluation raises a few questions: How much trimming is there left to do in the fintech world? And, are we likely to see something similar more generally in the neobanking startup sector?” More here.

Speaking of banks, Alex first took a look at First Republic’s tanking stock and deposits earlier in the week: “Shares of First Republic Bank are off 29% in early-morning trading Tuesday as investors digest its first-quarter earnings results, which came out Monday after the bell. The bank reported revenue and profit above analysts’ expectations, but for investors, other concerns outweighed the good results. Chief among those concerns is a massive decline in the bank’s deposit base. The bank closed 2022 with $176.4 billion worth of deposits against $166.9 billion in loans, but by the end of Q1 2023, it had $104.5 billion in deposits against $173.3 billion in loans.” More here.

By Friday, unfortunately for First Republic, the stock had tanked even further at the threat of government intervention. And, listen to Mary Ann, Alex and Natasha riff on just how much the Silicon Valley Bank debacle played a role in all this on the Equity podcast.

Contributor and fintech consultant Grant Easterbrook takes a look at three fintech concepts that, in his view, “initially seemed promising but largely failed to change the financial services industry.” You may agree. You may not. Either way, it’s a good read. More here.

Reports Rebecca Bellan: “Uber Freight, the logistics business spun out of Uber in 2018, is partnering with transportation fintech startup AtoB to offer carriers fuel cards and spend management software. AtoB, a four-year-old company that has been described as Stripe for transportation, offers an integrated financial platform based around its core product of a fuel card for truckers. Unlike other fuel cards offered by competitors like Brex and Fleetcor, AtoB’s fuel card is based on the Visa platform, so payments are more likely to be accepted at a wider range of fuel retailers. There are also no hidden or annual fees, according to the company.” More here.

Christine spoke with Stripe’s Vivek Sharma, head of revenue and finance automation, about the financial infrastructure company’s updates to its revenue and finance automation suite that included new billing features, tax API and revenue reporting tool. “It’ll lead us into the larger trend that’s happening in what we call the ‘revenue front office and finance back office,’” Sharma said. “These are considered to be disconnected systems, so Stripe has had a rare privilege of sitting right in the middle.” TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Stripe processed $817 billion in transactions in 2022 and is now valued at $50 billion after raising $6.5 billion in March.

More headlines 

PatientFi launches membership platform for aesthetics practices

Adyen, Olo to address financial challenges within hospitality

Female Invest: Meet the women taking on the gender finance gap

Wise launches new interest feature for US customers, bolstering multi-currency account (TechCrunch covered Wise’s name change from TransferWise amid the company going public in 2021.)

ACI and MagicCube to deliver ‘seamless’ contactless payments for commercial off-the-shelf devices (TechCrunch covered MagicCube’ $15 million raise and plan to ‘replace all chips’ in October of 2021.)

Frank founder moved millions of dollars out of JPMorgan after she was accused of defrauding the Wall Street giant—and put it in Signature Bank – The saga continues. Last we reported, Charlie Javice had been charged with fraud by the SEC.

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

Korean fintech Kakao Pay to acquire majority stake in US brokerage firm Siebert

Summer’s student debt repayment tools continue blooming with $6M Series A extension

And elsewhere

The Fintech Funding Crunch In 4 Charts

Financing platform Fairplay adds more than 100 million dollars to support new ventures (Christine covered the company’s January 2022 $35 million debt and equity raise here.)

Neobank creator Fintech Farm raises $22M

TheGuarantors snares $35m in growth financing

Digital insurance market Policygenius to be acquired by Eldridge’s Zinnia

Belvo acquires Skilopay to enter payments market in Brazil

Secro raises $3.6M in seed funding

Dori launches out of stealth with $2M in funding and a suite of VC automation products 

That’s it for this week! Thank you all again for reading, and for your continued support! Hope you’re having a fabulous and fun-filled weekend! xoxo, Mary Ann and Christine

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

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‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’

Kim Keenan Contributor

The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance, Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP.

The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight.

During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option.

Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by Congress and the administration to finish the private sector’s work of connecting every home in America with broadband internet service.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress.

Under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, for example, every participating state — as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — will receive a minimum of $100 million for internet infrastructure, with more to be doled out based on each state’s proportional number of unserved locations. Cartesian estimates that fiber providers will contribute another $22 billion in funds for $64 billion in total, which is “sufficient to achieve the program’s availability goal” of making broadband service “available to all eligible locations.” That’s a first.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, also included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helped over 17 million American families pay for a home broadband connection that they otherwise would struggle to afford. What’s more, the bill set aside $2.75 billion for Digital Equity programs; $2 billion for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program; $2 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning, Telemedicine and Broadband Program; and $1 billion for a new Middle Mile grant program. This truly is broadband’s moment in the sun.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress. Every American deserves to have the chance to “attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor, and participate in the modern economy.”

The Build America Buy America Act, which was enacted as part of the IIJA, requires infrastructure projects (including internet infrastructure funded by the BEAD Program) to use domestically sourced materials. But broadband networks are complex; they’re more than just fiber cables. Some essential pieces of the puzzle like certain electronic products aren’t currently manufactured in America and the components that make up those products are not available in the United States.

We should always do our best to honor President Biden’s goal to “Buy American,” but not at the expense of leaving Americans offline while they wait for every switch, router and radio to be made in the U.S. After all, the Government Accountability Office recently estimated that the BEAD Program alone could create 23,000 jobs for skilled telecommunications workers … just to build out the infrastructure. Spending will predominantly go toward U.S. paychecks and balance sheets, even if we need to rely on foreign manufacturers for a limited number of network components.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo recently announced that CommScope and Corning are investing nearly $550 million and creating hundreds of new jobs in America to build fiber optic cables. Although the Obama administration provided a blanket “Buy American” waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), recognizing that the U.S. share of global computer and electronics output had dropped 8.2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009, the Biden administration is right to seek a solution that is balanced, maximizing U.S. production when possible while permitting select network components to be sourced from outside our borders when necessary.

There are so many good things happening to close the digital divide, including the Federal Communications Commission recently devoting $66 million to Affordable Broadband Outreach Grants. Let’s not lose that momentum. Let’s not sacrifice the great for the perfect.

It’s time for the Biden administration to guard against the unintended consequences of the “Buy American” ideal and keep its eye on the prize: Everyone in America — including communities of color, rural communities and older Americans — needs broadband now.

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’ by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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Weekly deals: the best smartphone deals from the UK, the US, Germany and India

This week brings discounts for Samsung and Apple flagships and there are many interesting offerings in the mid-range too. You can use the links below to jump to the region that’s relevant to you: The UK USA Germany India UK The Samsung Galaxy A34 is barely a month old, but its price is falling significantly – the 8/256GB model is down to £300. For comparison, the 6/128GB model launched at £350. The phone is a solid mid-ranger with a 6.6” 120Hz FHD+ AMOLED display, IP67 rating, a Dimensity 1080 chipset, a 48+8+5MP camera setup and a 5,000mAh battery with 25W...

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Flashback: the phones that weren’t, part 1 – is 18,000mAh big enough?

Unlimited power! For a brief moment in 2019 there was a smartphone with a massive 18,000mAh battery – yes, that’s 3-4 times bigger than a typical phone battery today. However, it failed to find an audience and it launch was canceled. We’re talking about the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop, a highly descriptive name for a unique phone. The P18K should be self explanatory. “Pop” refers to the dual popup camera (it housed a 16MP module plus a 2MP depth sensor for face scanning). The Energizer Power Max P18K Pop was a beast of a phone with an 18,000mAh battery This phone was...

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We are looking for car reviewers based in Sofia, Bulgaria - come work with us!

With over a year of rapid growth behind its back ArenaEV already established itself as a go-to resource on EVs for a lot of people. We now feel it’s time to take the next step so we can expand our content range and serve our readers even better. To this end we’re looking to hire a car reviewer based in Sofia, Bulgaria. You will be tasked with driving the latest EVs, performing various tests and summarizing your findings to produce quality articles that will help potential customers in making the right decision. ArenaEV.com If you think you have what it takes, hit us up – we’d love...

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Google Pixel Fold appears in first official-looking renders

We've seen several renders and live images of the Google Pixel Fold since last year, so we already know what the internet search giant's first foldable smartphone will look like. But today, we got our best look at the Google Pixel Fold since reliable leakster Evan Blass shared a couple of official-looking renders of the smartphone on Twitter, showing it in folded and unfolded form. You can see the images below. Google Pixel Fold These images don't reveal anything new and don't show us the folding screen of the Pixel Fold, but they do corroborate previous design leaks. And since...

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Honor's CEO says it will build a better system than Apple's iOS

During an Honor event at its R&D center in Shenzhen, the company's CEO said it has ambitious plans to take on Apple's iOS. He also said that Honor's R&D expenses in 2022 account for 10% of the company's total revenue, which is the main reason for being so optimistic about the future of MagicOS. Zhao Ming, Honor's CEO, pointed out that Apple's smartphones have inferior hardware, outdated design, bad reception and poor battery life compared to many Android smartphones, including the Magci5 series. But people flock to Apple mostly because of iOS and the ecosystem that it provides. And...

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Dimensity 9200+ posts higher Geekbench score than the SD8 Gen 2

MediaTek's next top-end chipset, the Dimensity 9200+, is scheduled to be released on May 10 but a Geekbench 6 score sheet appeared online showing impressive multi-core and single-core performance. In fact, it outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. The alleged Geekbench 6 listing shows 5,655 points in the multi-core test and 2,121 points in the single-core scenario. That's considerably more than most Snapdragon 8 Gen 2-powered smartphones we've tested. The chipset seems to be powering up a vivo smartphone, likely the rumored X90S flagship. The Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate with the...

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As the US cracks down on crypto, Hong Kong extends a warm welcome

On a balmy day in mid-April, thousands of people queued in line to enter the Hong Kong Convention Center where the city’s inaugural web3 festival was underway. Most had flown in from mainland China, but many others had trekked from Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and even the U.S. to see what the city had to offer to crypto ventures at a time regulation over digital assets is intensifying in the U.S.

In February, Hong Kong proposed a set of welcoming rules to regulate crypto-related activities. Under the new legal regime, retail investors will be allowed to trade certain digital assets on licensed exchanges, replacing a 2018 framework that restricted trading to only accredited investors.

The city is also paving the way to legalize stablecoins. One startup, which is backed by popular exchange KuCoin and USDC issuer Circle, recently launched an offshore Chinese yuan (CNH)-pegged stablecoin, the first of its kind in Greater China.

To create a favorable environment for web3 businesses, the city is facilitating communication between banks and crypto startups, many of which are scrambling to find alternatives following Silvergate Bank’s meltdown.

These moves are contrasting with Beijing’s heavy-handed crackdown on the crypto industry; they also highlight the degree to which the former British colony enjoys policy exceptions in certain areas, such as finance.

In 2021, China outlawed all forms of crypto transactions, sending the country’s web3 entrepreneurs fleeing to more web3-friendly jurisdictions like Singapore. With Hong Kong extending a welcoming hand to digital assets, many Chinese founders in self-exile are weighing the option of setting up in the city. Companies from the West are also evaluating Hong Kong as a potential outpost for their Asia expansion.

At the weeklong Hong Kong web3 festival, TechCrunch talked to a dozen participants from the web3 realm, including investors, nascent startups, and established players, as well as “traditional” web2 tech giants, to gauge Hong Kong’s attractiveness as the next crypto hub.

Some believe the new regulatory regime will spawn a new wave of crypto innovation. They feel reassured that they can now operate as a legitimate business on Chinese soil and are quick to tap the government’s policy support, such as subsidized office space for crypto ventures.

Others are more hesitant to accept the olive branch. As Asia’s financial center, Hong Kong doesn’t historically have a vibrant tech ecosystem and is too expensive for most scrappy startups, so the types of crypto businesses it attracts will likely be those serving and interfacing with traditional finance, they reckon.

The East rises

The timing is favorable for Hong Kong’s friendly move on crypto, said Shixing Mao, co-founder and CEO at Cobo, a Singapore-headquartered digital asset custody solution backed by DST Global.

“The tightening of regulation in the U.S. after the FTX implosion has a few consequences. In the past, several American banks played the key role of linking the traditional and crypto worlds, but that link is now broken, which presents a great opportunity for Hong Kong to step up,” said Mao, who is amicably known as ‘Discus Fish’ in the crypto community.

“Hong Kong has always been at the intersection of the East and West and played the important role as the bridge to enter China,” observed Lily King, chief operating officer at Cobo.

That advantage was already proven before. Hong Kong played an important role in the early development of the crypto industry by drawing once-influential exchanges like FTX and Bitmex to set up shops there. Following China’s crypto clampdown, FTX moved to the Bahamas for its friendlier and clearer regulatory stance towards the new asset class.

Hong Kong is regaining some attention from the West. Stephen Cheung, president at decentralized social network Bi.social, flew all the way from the U.S. east coast to Hong Kong to feel the pulse on the ground.

“As an American Born Chinese whose parents grew up in Hong Kong, I am extremely optimistic about the open door policy for crypto in Hong Kong,” he said. Nonetheless, Cheung believed that if American crypto firms are going to leave the country, “they will stay within the western hemisphere.”

“Hong Kong has the possibility [of attracting Western firms] only because the U.S. is currently openly hostile towards web3 companies,” he said, adding that the city will be more appealing to other Asia-based companies before it will have any significant influence on the West.

Indeed, Hong Kong is increasingly on the radar of crypto businesses in Singapore, many of which had come from China after the country’s crackdown on crypto. Now the tide is turning.

“After FTX’s implosion, the Singapore government has grown more cautious towards crypto. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is trying to attract talent and companies to build the basic infrastructure of the crypto industry,” said Luke Huang, director of business development at Safeheron, a digital asset self-custody solution provider that is based in Singapore but recently set up an office in Hong Kong.

Confidence booster

For the most part, people are praising the Hong Kong government for providing more regulatory clarity on the crypto industry. But they are interpreting Hong Kong’s open arms differently. Some view the move as a sudden shift in the government’s attitude, while others see it as a reflection of the city’s policy consistency.

HashKey Capital, one of the world’s largest web3 venture capital firms that recently closed a $500 million Fund III, belongs to the latter camp.

The fund, which is Ethereum’s first institutional investor, set up in Hong Kong back in 2017 and has kept its office there since. “What we have seen [in Hong Kong] over the years is a relatively consistent government direction and sustainable policy,” said Chao Deng, the firm’s CEO. “The latest move is more of an update of the licensing regime.”

Conflux, a Layer 1 blockchain that claims to be the only crypto company allowed to operate in China since the industry crackdown, was also put at ease after meeting various Hong Kong government delegates during the web3 festival.

“Hong Kong is showing a tremendous amount of support for web3 development,” said Zhang Yuanjie, co-founder at Conflux. “From legislators and InvestHK [the city’s department of foreign direct investment] to its financial secretary and monetary authority, everyone is serious about supporting the crypto industry.”

Even though Hong Kong’s new web3 regulation seems more favorable towards transaction-focused crypto services, there’s room for infrastructure builders, reckoned Huang from Safeheron.

“Anyone entering the crypto industry needs cybersecurity infrastructure, whether it’s a traditional or web3 native company. Now that Hong Kong’s financial institutions might start integrating crypto-related products, we can play the role of helping to onboard them,” he said.

China’s Big Tech is riding Hong Kong’s crypto wave, too. Alibaba and Tencent were both present at the web3 festival with representatives from their cloud computing units. Like AWS, they want to get a headstart and be the decentralized world’s go-to cloud provider. Even if the nascent industry won’t likely generate any meaningful revenue anytime soon, the tech giants evidently don’t want to miss out on an industry that keeps luring capital and talent from traditional industries.

Wait and see

The web3 festival, with its teeming conference room and lavish boat parties, appears to be a euphoric celebration of the city’s new crypto regime. But not all attendees are hot-headed. One investor from a prominent China-focused venture capital firm, who declined to be named, said he wasn’t looking to source deals at the event because “it’s not where the real technical developers hang out.”

Three Chinese web3 founders who have moved to Singapore and declined to be named said they were in Hong Kong simply to catch up with partners and investors and would “wait and see” before drawing any conclusion on the city’s level of crypto-friendliness.

Those who tend to be the most passionate about Hong Kong’s new crypto regulation are fund managers, stock traders, and others in traditional finance, observed Rachel Lin, CEO and co-founder of SynFutures.

“It’s not that they feel so much for crypto, but it’s more about looking for the next investable assets. Right now, the financial markets are slowing and they can’t find any other alternative assets,” said Lin. Prior to running the DeFi protocol, she worked in the global markets division at Deutsche Bank, managed overseas payments solutions at Ant Group and was a founding partner of major crypto lender Matrixport.

“Crypto is very much close to what they’ve been doing in finance, unlike AI or biotech, which is something remote for them. I think the positive signal from the government also boosts their confidence,” she said.

It comes as no surprise that Hong Kong is vouching for a fledgling industry that plays to its strength. In recent years, the city has seen an exodus of multinational corporations and local talent as it undergoes a string of political events.

“Hong Kong has hit a big bottleneck in traditional industries like finance and real estate, so it’s in dire need of young talent and new blood to revitalize its economy,” said King. “Given the foundation it laid for the finance sector, focusing on digital assets is its best and only option going forward.”

Hong Kong is charting its own web3 path despite China’s anti-crypto stance

As the US cracks down on crypto, Hong Kong extends a warm welcome by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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Our Tecno Spark 10 Pro video review is out

In March, Tecno launched the Spark 10 Pro budget smartphone with the Helio G88 SoC and Android 13-based HiOS 12.6. It has 8GB RAM onboard, up to 256GB storage, and a dedicated microSD card slot for storage expansion. The smartphone packs a 6.8" 90Hz FullHD+ LCD and a 5,000 mAh battery with 18W charging. It also features three cameras - a 50MP primary camera, a depth unit, and a 32MP selfie shooter. We have already reviewed the Tecno Spark 10 Pro and found it to be a nice affordable smartphone with an excellent design, good screen, adequate performance, and long-lasting battery...

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Poco F5 Pro will pack a WQHD+ punch hole display

A couple of days ago, Poco announced it would unveil the Poco F5 and Poco F5 Pro on May 9. Today, the company revealed the Pro model would pack a flat WQHD+ screen with a punch hole in the center for the selfie camera. The image shared by Poco shows the F5 Pro has a power button on the right-side frame joined by the volume rocker, with the USB-C port at the bottom flanked by a SIM card slot, microphone, and speaker. There are no antenna lines on the phone's frame, meaning it's not metal. Poco doesn't show us the rear side of the F5 Pro, but it did tease the vanilla F5 in a new color,...

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Brave Search doesn’t use Bing’s index anymore

Brave just announced that it is now exclusively using its own index for its search engine. In other words, it doesn’t rely on third-party solutions like Bing anymore.

When the company launched Brave Search in 2021, it mentioned that it relied on other providers for nearly 13% of its queries. A year later, that number was slashed to 7%.

“By default, Brave Search users will now receive 100% of results from the Brave Index, giving users fully independent results. As always, our results will preserve user privacy,” Brave said in a blog post.

The company said that things like the Web Discovery Project — which let people who use Brave’s web browser contribute anonymous data to build Brave’s index — helped it push towards self-reliance. Plus, Brave was concerned about the future of the Bing API — especially after Microsoft’s strengthened its partnership with OpenAI and announced a significant increase in API pricing for Bing’s index.

The company noted that users will still be able to use Google Fallback Mix — a feature that allows users to privately query Google in case Brave Search doesn’t have answers.

In addition to this, Brave announced its own search API but said that details about this program will be revealed in the future.

Brave is trying to use fewer solutions published by big tech companies to set itself apart. In March, the company launched a summarization feature that wasn’t powered by OpenAI’s tech.

In comparison, some of Brave’s competitors like DuckDuckGo and Neeva are still relying on sources like Bing. Though, the latter already plans to ditch Bing in a few years.

Brave Search doesn’t use Bing’s index anymore by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Nokia XR21 is the maker’s upcoming rugged phone, specs revealed

Yesterday we reported about the upcoming Nokia rugged phone which will serve as a successor to the Nokia XR20. The device was allegedly called Nokia XR30, but WinFuture now shared a new report where it clarifies the device will launch as the Nokia XR21. We also get more specs details on the upcoming rugged phone which will feature a 120Hz display, Snapdragon 695 chipset and a 4,800mAh battery. Nokia XR21 in green XR21 is said to bring a 6.49-inch LCD with FHD+ resolution and 120Hz refresh rate. The panel will be protected by Gorilla Glass Victus and will bring a 16MP...

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Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 coming with 3.7GHz prime core, new CPU clusters

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 brought a huge performance leap and better efficiency, but we now hear its successor has even higher ambitions. A noted tipster reveals the next generation of the flagship platform by Qualcomm will pack new CPU architecture, while pushing clock speeds significantly. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is said to have one prime Cortex-X4 CPU core at unprecedented 3.7 GHz, five powerful cores for performance and two small cores for efficiency. According to Digital Chat Station the model number is SM8650, and the GPU will be called Adreno 750. Expectations are for TSMC to...

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Reddit is testing Discord-like channels for community chat

Reddit announced Thursday that it is testing Discord-like chat channels with select subreddits. With this move, the social network is trying to give more avenues for community members to interact with each other apart from the usual asynchronous commenting system.

The company said it is starting this test with 25 volunteer subreddits — the company didn’t share a list of those subreddits. It specified that participating communities have less than 100,000 members.

Reddit said that channels will be persistent on the community navigation bar so members can revisit them frequently.

The company mentioned that it has learned from previous chat products like the community chat rooms feature, which was discontinued in 2020. In particular, it plans to give more control to moderators. The new feature will have a dedicated channel for moderators to chat about managing the subreddit. Plus, they will be able to decide if they want to enable this feature for the community in the first place.

Additionally, the platform is giving moderators tools like the ability to choose who can participate in the chat, manage the chat queue, and moderate reported messages in a conversation.

Image Credits: Reddit

In the r/modnews subreddit, the social network announced that it plans to introduce features for channels including threading, pinned messages, user mentions with push notifications, and messaging editing for the sender in the future.

The social network is also accepting applications from moderators of subreddits that want to try out the chat channels feature for their community.

When users pushed back on the post announcing channels, a moderator said that the company is launching this experiment to provide more ways for community members to converse with each other.

“We love our ‘tree of posts,’ asynchronous text-based communities, and making sure they have what they need to thrive is important to us. At the same time, we want to provide options for communities that like to interact in different ways, or that have sub-groups that like to interact in different ways,” they posted.

A number of communities on Reddit rely on external real-time chat servers like Telegram, Discord, or IRC to facilitate conversations between members. The introduction of channels might incentivize communities to stay on the platform more.

The platform has tried out different ways for live interactions like its now-depreciated Clubhouse clone called Reddit Talk and Live Chat posts within a community.

Reddit is not the only company launching ways for communities to host conversations. Last year, WhatsApp launched its discussion group feature for organizing different groups around a school or a club. Meanwhile, developers of the Telepath social network are trying to make group conversations suck less with a unique thread-based approach in their new app called Wavelength — the app works for both small groups of friends and large semi-public chat rooms.

Wavelength is a new app trying to make group chat suck less

Reddit is testing Discord-like channels for community chat by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 production to double that of the Z Flip4

Samsung is gearing up to launch its next generation of foldables in late July which leaves us with a full two months of rumors and speculations to go ahead. The latest prediction comes from Ross Young who shared some early estimations on the Z Flip5’s production numbers – claiming they will be double that of the Z Flip4 from last year. Samsung Galaxy Z Flip5 render Last year’s Galaxy Z Flip4 was more sought after than its predecessor but we’ll have to wait and see if the momentum holds up for the Z Flip5. The upcoming clamshell foldable from Samsung is expected to offer a larger...

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Samsung posts solid smartphone sales in Q1, but overall profits plummet

Samsung published its financial report for Q1 2023, and as the guidance warned profits plummeted to levels unseen in the past 15 years. Operating profit between January and March went down 18% YoY, while profit shrank from KRW 14.12 trillion to KRW 0.64 trillion - a stunning drop of 95%. Samsung is expecting global demand to rebound in the second half of the year, which would assist its recovery. The mobile experience division that is responsible for smartphones and smart devices was the least affected in this uninspiring quarter. Sales went down 2% YoY but increased 22% on a...

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Mediatek will unveil Dimensity 9200+ on May 10

Mediatek will introduce its new flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9200+ on May 10, the company revealed today. The new platform is likely a small upgrade over the regular 9200. Mediatek already did something similar with the Dimensity 9000 and 9000+ - the mightiest CPU core and the GPU got a minor increase in frequency while architecture, memory, and process technology all remained the same. If that is indeed the case, the Dimensity 9200+ will be built on the 4nm FinFET process and the CPU will one Cortex-X3 unit, three Cortex-A715 cores and and four Cortex-A510 cores. The GPU should...

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Motorola Razr 40 Ultra images reveal its giant cover screen, EU pricing leaks

We’ve seen plenty of rumors on Motorola’s upcoming Razr foldable phone with some calling it the Razr 2023 while other refered to it as the Razr+ and we now have another name to throw in – Motorola Razr 40 Ultra. The new info comes from Evan Blass who shared a bunch of new images on the device alongside its alleged retail naming. Motorola Razr 40 Ultra The images show out the alleged 3.5-inch cover screen with a bunch of different styles. We also get a sneak peek at some of the personalization menus which include options to tweak the fonts, color, sounds and...

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Meta says about 10% of its global ad revenue at risk from EU data flows order

Meta’s earning call yesterday was upbeat on better than expected revenue for the quarter. However buried in its disclosures to investors is a stark warning on looming regulatory risk it’s facing in Europe — where a decision is expected in a matter of weeks (by May 12) that could see the tech giant ordered to suspend its transatlantic data flows.

“We expect the Irish Data Protection Commission (IDPC) to issue a decision in May in its previously disclosed inquiry relating to transatlantic data transfers of Facebook EU/EEA user data, including a suspension order for such transfers and a fine,” Meta’s CFO wrote in its Q1 2023 report.

We’ve covered the (very) long-running saga — which hinges on a clash between US surveillance laws and EU privacy rights — most recently here and here. So regular TechCrunch readers will already know that a key development Meta is hoping will save its bacon in Europe is the adoption of a new high level data transfer pact which aims to resolve the legal uncertainty around EU data exports.

However the negotiations over this replacement deal have dragged on longer than expected and EU institutions are still reviewing the draft decision the Commission announced in December. So while the bloc had initially suggested the deal might be finalized by the end of 2022, it was forced to revise the estimate — saying in December that it hoped everything would be nailed down before July.

Since then, multiple EU institutions involved in reviewing the deal have been raising concerns — so there’s still no firm word on when exactly the thing might be done. (Or, indeed, whether a new deal will survive the inevitable legal challenges, given the two prior pacts got invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU.)

In its earnings report, Meta tells investors it’s hopeful the new EU-US data framework will arrive soon enough to be implemented before the deadline for a suspension of its EU transfers — meaning, were these stars to align, it could reboot its claim to have an authorized mechanism for its EU transfers and flick the suspension order away — however the company also warns it “cannot exclude the possibility” that adoption won’t happen soon enough to prevent such an order.

“Our ongoing consultations with policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic continue to indicate that the proposed new EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework will be fully implemented before the deadline for suspension of such transfers, but we cannot exclude the possibility that it will not be completed in time,” Meta writes. “We will also evaluate whether and to what extent the IDPC decision could otherwise impact our data processing operations even after a new data privacy framework is in force.”

During a call with investors, the social networking giant was asked about the potential impact on revenues if it is forced to suspend EU-US data flows on regulatory order. Responding, CFO Susan Li began by reiterating its hope that the new high level framework will save its bacon. However, if this sought for escape hatch fails to open in time, she warned investors Meta is facing a hit of around a tenth of its worldwide ad revenue — saying “roughly 10%” of this comes from ads delivered to Facebook users in EU countries.

Li caveated the disclosure by saying it’s difficult for Meta to forecast the overall impact of any EU data suspension at this point, given it lacks information on what a final order would contain — such as the length of a suspension.

Earlier in the call Meta’s CFO offered a breakdown of ad revenue growth by regions, saying it was strongest in the “Rest of World” segment (at 9%) during the quarter, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific (6% and 4%, respectively) — while she specified that Europe had declined 1%.

Meta beats revenue expectations, remains committed to metaverse

MEPs raise concerns over draft EU-US data transfer deal

Meta says about 10% of its global ad revenue at risk from EU data flows order by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

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Nokia XR30 rugged Android phone detailed press images leak

Nearly two years after Nokia announced its XR20 rugged smartphone, we get details of its successor – the Nokia XR30 aka Nokia Sentry 5G. WinFuture shared a multitude of official-looking images for the phone in its black and green color options. The XR30’s design appears to be slightly modified from its predecessor with a similar-looking punch-hole display and what appears to be a hard plastic shell. We can only assume the phone will retain the IP68 water and dust protection alongside MIL-STD-810H certification from its predecessor. Nokia XR30 in black The power...

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M3ter locks in $14M to expand its usage-based pricing tools for SaaS businesses

The concept of SaaS as a business model changed the game in tech by moving users away from buying software outright and towards paying for service availability based on time-based subscriptions, typically with per-month or annual pricing. Today, a startup out of London called M3ter that is building tools to take the next step in that evolution — more granular usage-based pricing — is announcing funding on the back of strong demand.

The company has raised $14 million — a Series A that it will be using to double down on new markets like the U.S., and to build more technology for its users. Notion Capital is leading this round, with Insight Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Kindred Capital — all previous backers from its $17.5 million seed round last year — also in the round. The company is not disclosing its valuation but CEO and co-founder Griffin Parry tells me it now estimates it has some 3-4 years of runway.

M3ter came out of stealth a little over a year ago — a debut that coincided with the announcing of that seed round — and in that time it has grown its business 375%.

Its customers these days are typically technology businesses built around API calls, a natural fit for usage-based pricing models, and they include payments business Paddle, ID verification company Onfido and fraud prevention startup Sift.

And indeed, the very concept of starting a business to help other tech companies adopt and adapt to usage-based pricing comes from the founders’ own experiences: Parry and co-founder John Griffin previously founded GameSparks, a games development engine build on usage-based pricing. That startup was eventually acquired by Amazon’s AWS — arguably the grand-daddy of popularizing usage-based pricing for APIs by way of its cloud services platform.

One of the unique aspects of usage-based pricing is the granularity it gives customers: they are paying just for what they are using. At its core, that is something that has proven to be more popular especially in current, leaner times, when businesses are more cautious than ever around how they spend money, possibly at the expense of being less focused on simply budgeting based on predictable outgoings.

And while it is certainly not ubiquitous among all SaaS businesses, it has definitely grown in popularity.

Research from OpenView found that 45% of SaaS vendors in 2022 were adopting usage-based pricing compared to 33% the year before that. The prediction for 2023 had been 55% but as Parry pointed out to me, that figure has been revised up to 61%, alongside another 10-15% growth if you add in those businesses that have said that they are considering it.

(Unsurprisingly, M3ter is not the only company looking to capitalize on that. SF-based Metronome, backed by some heavy hitters out of the Bay Area; and more legacy companies like LogiSense are among those also building out usage-based pricing platforms.)

“Software companies are looking at pricing as a strategic lever these days,” Parry said. “As a customer, you don’t want to leave money on the table, and you also want to focus on growing more efficiently.” Efficiently in this sense means, essentially, by spending as little money as possible to get there.

In the past, he continued, it was about predictability and knowing every month that you were paying a certain amount for a service, “but things have swung in other direction.”

Parry admits that there remains a significant cultural shift among SaaS businesses, especially those that might have already built their businesses around time-based models — growing pains that are probably not that much different than those that software companies faced when they moved from selling off-the-shelf software to products sold on subscriptions.

But on the other hand, introducing usage-based billing also means opening the door to getting more granular data on what customers are using, and how they are using it, which in turn can inform not just what you are offering them, but what the SaaS provider is building and investing in as business.

To that end, M3ter is going to be using some of the funding to continue building out more sophisticated tools of its own. They include a data science product it’s calling Cost Allocator.

Based on feedback M3ter has been getting from its users, it will let customers figure out gross margin performance on a per-user basis, which Parry explained to me will help them figure out how to adjust pricing accordingly. (The idea here is that you can create rewards or lower prices for those using more of a service, or charge more per use for those who are not power-users.)

Pricing Experimenter and Usage Forecaster are also products under development. Respectively, the former of these will let M3ter customers test pricing models in real-time with simulations based on data troves it has amassed; and the latter will apply similar modeling to determine what a company might make under different business evolution scenarios. All of this can also be used to help businesses price tiers but also work out more nuanced approaches with different users, including continuing to offer some of them more traditional SaaS packages if that turns out to be a better option.

The startup’s approach to product development, by working with its customers to build what they want, fits closely with the fact that at the end of the day, M3ter itself is also a usage-based business and working to be responsive to what its customers are doing.

Some of the products that its customers are building using its platform include database startup ClickHouse offering usage-based pricing for its cloud offering; and subscription management platform Chargebee offering event metering, usage-based pricing, and billing capabilities.

As I mentioned above, its customers these days are typically technology businesses built around API calls, but there is a clear opportunity for working this into all kinds of other products, from entertainment consumption through to anything a person might engage with online or in an app.

“As pricing becomes a strategic priority for more software businesses, the one-size-fits-all approach looks increasingly obsolete,” said Jos White of Notion Capital, in a statement. “m3ter’s technology will power this transition towards more usage-based and intelligent pricing. Already, the company’s co-founders have laid solid foundations with an exceptional team and product, as well as deep engagement and alignment with their early customers and partners.”

M3ter locks in $14M to expand its usage-based pricing tools for SaaS businesses by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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Realme 11 Pro+ official image confirms design

The Realme 11 series is arriving on May 10, and we already knew at least one phone will have a circular camera island and stylish leather-like design on the back. Today, the company treated us to a full view of the phone, confirming the Realme 11 Pro+ indeed features leather and fabric on the back, with the color bearing the official name Sunrise Beige. According to a Realme VP, the design was developed jointly with Matteo Menotto, currently Head of Design for Textile at Bvlgari, formerly Senior Designer at Gucci. The design is said to be inspired by the sunrise in a romantic city...

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Poco F5 and F5 Pro announcement set for May 9, design teased

The Poco F5, which was rumored to launch on April 6, will launch on May 9. This revelation comes from Poco, which also confirmed the Poco F5 Pro will be unveiled on the same date. Poco is yet to detail the F5 and F5 Pro's specs sheets, but Qualcomm's Indian branch confirmed the Poco F5 would be powered by the Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 SoC, making it the first smartphone in India to have this chip at the helm. Oncoming 🟡 🚀#IgniteYourHyperpower #POCOF5Pro #POCOF5 pic.twitter.com/jyLVI30QBp— POCO (@POCOGlobal) April 26, 2023 Today, Poco's Indian division gave us a glimpse of the Poco F5's...

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Alphabet Q1 report reveals increase in Google Pixel sales

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted its first quarterly report for 2023, revealing a slight increase in total revenue. The “Google other” segment that includes the Google Pixel 7, 7 Pro, 6A, and Watch sales, saw an 8.8% increase in revenue on a yearly basis. Google CEO said the company is “pleased” with performance in Q1 - Search performed well, while the Cloud business gained momentum, bringing operating profit for the first time since the establishment of the division. YouTube is taking a hit from TikTok, but ad revenue on the video platform reached $6.69 billion, which...

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Lookout sells its consumer cybersecurity business to F-Secure and goes all-in on the enterprise

Lookout’s long-running transition to becoming an enterprise security company is all but complete, revealing today that it’s selling its consumer mobile security business to Finland’s F-Secure. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded out of Boston in 2009, Lookout originally started out as a consumer-focused smartphone security and data backup business, garnering millions of users and hundreds of millions in funding from esteemed investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Greylock, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Telekom, and Jeff Bezos.

Over the past 10 years, Lookout has gradually extended its reach into the business realm, notching up enterprise partnerships with technology giants such as Samsung along the way. A couple of years back, Lookout went most of the way toward cementing its B2B credentials when it snapped up cloud-native cybersecurity startup CipherCloud, a company focused on the growing secure access service edge (SASE) security segment.

Fast-forward to today, and while Lookout still offers a suite of security products for the consumer market including antivirus software for smartphones, it’s clear that its trajectory in recent years has been heading much closer to the enterprise, which is why it’s offloading pretty much all of the remnants of its consumer business to F-Secure — a long-established European consumer cybersecurity company that sells everything from password management tools to antivirus applications.

Lookout says that with this transaction, which it expects to conclude within the next two months, its business will “now evolve into a pure-play enterprise company,” focusing on mobile endpoint security and cloud security. While it didn’t disclose how much it gained for its consumer business, it said that the proceeds will be be plowed back into its enterprise products, alongside the $150 million in debt-financing it secured from BlackRock last summer.

“Our success in the highly competitive enterprise market has compelled us to focus our product and go-to-market efforts to gain advantage,” Lookout CEO Jim Dolce noted in a press release. “By doubling down on the enterprise market, we’ll be better positioned to capitalize on its projected hypergrowth, fueled by an increase in remote and hybrid work, a shift to cloud-based delivery models and the transition to zero-trust architectures.”

Lookout sells its consumer cybersecurity business to F-Secure and goes all-in on the enterprise by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

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