Realme 10 Pro series is launching globally on December 8

The Realme 10 Pro and 10 Pro+ unveiled last week in China will begin their global journey on December 8. The launch event will begin at 3PM UTC +8, except in India, where Realme will hold a separate event starting at 12:30PM IST (7:30AM UTC +8). Since Realme has already detailed the specs sheets of both smartphones, we know what they have on offer. The Realme 10 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 695 SoC, sports a 6.72" 120Hz FullHD+ LCD, and packs a 5,000 mAh battery with 33W charging. It features a 108MP camera on the back with a 2MP depth unit. The Realme 10 Pro+, on the other...

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Oppo Reno9 series debut: Pro+ comes with Snadpragon 8+ Gen 1, 16GB RAM

Oppo announced today a trio of Reno9 smartphones - a vanilla Reno9 with Snapdragon 778G, a Reno9 Pro that shares the same body but runs on Dimensity 8100, and a mighty Reno9 Pro+ with Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset and three cameras on the back. The Reno9 Pro and Reno9 Pro+ both launched with 16GB RAM as a base option, which is a first for the Reno series, and a feature we haven’t seen in an Oppo phone since the Find X3 Pro flagship, launched over 1.5 years ago. Oppo Reno9 The vanilla smartphone of the trio brings a 6.7” AMOLED display with a Full HD+ resolution. It supports 120Hz...

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Atoa helps UK merchants cut down on card processing fees

Visa and Mastercard payments are convenient for customers, but can cost merchants high processing fees. Atoa Payments wants to provide a cheaper alternative that is still easy for customers to use. The London-based fintech announced today that it has raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding.

The round was led by Leo Capital and Passion Capital, with participation from angel investors like GoCardless and Nested co-founder Matt Robinson, Moon Capital Ventures and MarketFinance co-founder Anil Stocker.

Atoa co-founder Sid Narayanan told TechCrunch that he and co-founder Cian O’Dowd developed the idea for Atoa after selling their previous startup, expense management platform KlearCard, to Singapore fintech Validus in 2021.

Their barber, who initially accepted card payments, started asking for cash payments or bank transfers because he wanted to reduce his card processing fees, which were around 1.6%. Narayanan and O’Dowd were used to card alternative payments after living in Singapore, and saw an opportunity to use the U.K.’s open banking payments stack to build a Visa and Mastercard alternative, Narayanan told TechCrunch.

Mastercard and Visa payment rails can cost small merchants and their customers net margins of 51%, with card machine fees of about 1.75%, Narayanan said. Atoa, on the other hand, charges a fixed percentage fee billable to merchant each months that is up to 70% lower than debit cards. It also does not have hardware rentals, service fees or PCI attestation of compliance charges.

To use Atoa, merchants download an app that connects to their bank accounts. Customers don’t need to download Atoa’s app to use the service. Instead, they can use Atoa as long as they have a U.K. mobile banking app. According to Narayanan, the majority of adults, or about 80% in the U.K., already have a mobile banking app on their phone, removing the main source of friction. Merchants send a link for payment by SMS, PayBay or offer a QR code to scan.

To incentivize more customers to use Atoa, the startup also plans to add rewards and loyalty benefits, like digital scratch cards that can let them get cash rewards into their existing U.K. bank accounts.

Once customers pay with Atoa, merchants to receive payment instantly through Instant Bank Pay. They also get funds in their bank account right away, instead of waiting for up to 1 to 2 business days.

Atoa says since it went live in June, it’s gotten more than 100% month-on-month total payment volume (TPV) growth and merchant customers. Its most direct competitors include card machine providers like SumUp, Zettle, Square and Barclaycard, Narayanan said. Atoa differentiates by offering lower fees and enabling merchants to receive funds more quickly than the three days typically required by card machine providers. It also charges lower fees than players that are intermediated by Visa and Mastercard.

In a statement about its investment, Passion Capital partner Robert Dighero said, “Atoa has come to the UK market at the right time to leverage open banking and bring to small and medium sized merchants a truly viable alternative to payment cards and card machines that can be deployed in-store within minutes. We’re delighted to work with the Atoa team after their first fintech success and look forward to partnering with them as they achieve even greater heights with Atoa.”

5 sustainable best practices for bootstrapped startups

Atoa helps UK merchants cut down on card processing fees by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

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KaiOS, the feature phone platform startup, raises a modest $3.4M to train its sights on growth in Africa

Smartphone shipments have been declining in what has been a rough year for mobile handsets, and that’s meant even more pressure on an already-precarious sliver of the mobile market: feature phones. Today, one of the players in that space, the feature phone operating system startup KaiOS, is getting a small financial injection that both speaks to that pressure, but also a chance to grow in what remains an opening in the market: selling cheaper and low-end, but ultimately still functional and usable devices, to the poorest consumers in developing economies in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Hong Kong-based feature phone startup, which has previously been backed by strategic investors like Google and TCL, has picked up $3.4 million from Finnfund, an impact investor out of Finland.

Finnfund’s financing is coming in the form of a convertible note — meaning it could convert into equity in a potential future funding round.

We’ve reached out to Sebastien Codeville, the founder and CEO of KaiOS, to ask whether more financial activity is in the pipeline and will update this post as we learn more. It’s been a while since KaiOS raised (or more specifically disclosed) outside investment: its last funding was in 2019, when it raised $50 million from investors including Cathay Innovation, Google and TCL.

Finnfund and KaiOS said that today’s money will go towards KaiOS building out its business in sub-Saharan Africa — a major market for lower-end, low-cost devices. Africa is a particular focus for the investor, and it’s directly backed a number of startups in the region, too, including food supply-chain startup Twiga and fintech Jumo.

“With this investment, KaiOS can expand into new markets in Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Codeville in a statement. “We are happy to partner with an investor like Finnfund who share our vision of how important it is to boost digitalisation in Africa.”

Finnfund estimates that there are some 3.4 billion people in the world today without internet access, mostly in developing economies, and mostly because they cannot afford smartphones. Even the cheapest smartphone models, powered for example Google’s Android OS, can work out to be as high as 20% of consumers’ monthly incomes, Finnfund estimates. (Running a little math on its numbers, Finnfund’s investment works out to $0.001 or 1/10 of a cent investment per potential user.)

KaiOS’s pitch is that it’s a low-cost alternative for handset makers that want to build feature phones that can compete with low-end smartphones. Equipped with apps and other hallmarks of in internet-enabled handsets, KaiOS currently lists 41 handset models running its OS, with the cheapest devices retailing for about $10.

But the startup has a tall order ahead of it.

KaiOS spent its early years on the wings of a lot of promise. It began life in 2017 as a fork of Firefox OS, which was an ill-fated attempt by Mozilla and partners to build a viable smartphone platform competitor to Google-backed Android and Apple’s iOS. Optimistically, the KaiOS team saw an opening to target the lowest end of the consumer market, in developing economies, and to consolidate R&D aimed at these users on a single platform for advanced feature phones.

Others agreed, and KaiOS quickly picked up OEMs like Nokia, as well as software partners to build out its ecosystem. Even Google, hedging its bets, wanted to make sure it played a strong role in the feature phone segment even as Android grew its market share, and so it became a strategic partner to KaiOS, investing tens of millions of dollars in the startup. 

But things haven’t played out as expected.

When KaiOS announced funding in 2019, it said that some 100 million devices using its OS had been shipped. At the time, IDC predicted that 500 million feature phones would be shipped annually for the next five. Today, the company says just that “over 170 million” KaiOS-powered devices have been shipped — with active users in the market a far lower number of around 100 million. It’s estimated that KaiOS today has a 0.07% share of the total mobile market. In contrast, Android, which itself has been powering an ever-cheaper range of smartphones, has just over 71% and iOS has a 28.3% share.

In addition to the small market share for feature phones, its overall sales volume is also in decline. India, followed by China, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are the countries that dominate the feature phone market today. But on the other hand, given that Nigeria is the only country in Africa to make it into the top-five markets for feature phones (it’s number five), that does imply that there is still potential across the rest of the continent, something that Finnfund is hoping to build on.

“The investment in KaiOS is yet another important step in connecting the unconnected,” said Finnfund investment manager Kuutti Kilpeläinen, in a statement. “KaiOS has proved that it can solve the affordability problem and we are proud to join the group of investors who all share the same ambitious goal of closing the digital gap.”

KaiOS, the feature phone platform startup, raises a modest $3.4M to train its sights on growth in Africa by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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Honor 80 Pro and Honor 80 debut with 160MP main cams, 66W charging

Honor held a big two-day launch event in China where we saw the debut of the MagicOS 7.0 interface yesterday while the big hardware announcements were left for today - among which three new phones. Honor 80 Pro and Honor 80 bring 160MP main cameras as well as Qualcomm chips and curved OLED displays. Honor 80 SE is the most affordable entry among the thre and gets a Dimensity 900 and 64MP main camera. Honor Magic Vs is the top new foldable in Honor’s lineup, but we also got the brand-new Honor 80 series consisting of three phones. Honor 80 Pro and Honor 80 Honor 80 Pro is...

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4 ways to use e-commerce data to optimize LTV pre- and post-holiday

Dan LeBlanc Contributor

Dan LeBlanc is the CEO and co-founder of Daasity, a data and analytics company built for omnichannel brands.

For consumer brands, the holiday season is go time. The high-energy, two-month period that starts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) can account for as much as 19% of a brand’s total annual retail sales, according to the National Retail Federation.

Even as brands have visions of profits dancing in their heads, there’s another side to the holiday season they must consider. Holiday shoppers tend to be the worst when it comes to customer lifetime value (LTV). Too many shoppers will buy once from your brand and then disappear. They might come back next year in some cases. Other times, they’re gone forever.

How do you take one-and-done shoppers and turn them into loyal brand advocates? The answer lies within the treasure trove of commerce data that you collect.

Let’s examine four ways that your commerce data can help you craft the right pre-holiday strategy and drive repeat post-holiday business.

Pre-holiday: Optimize your marketing spend

Proper segmentation drives better personalization during the holiday season.

In light of growing uncertainty over the effectiveness of digital advertising, brands must carefully monitor their marketing spend data in November to see whether they’re on track for success or failure over the holiday season. Your ROI should increase the closer you get to BFCM. If it’s not, you need to adjust fast to optimize your holiday profit margin.

At a high level, you want to monitor the effectiveness of each marketing channel over the holidays. One of the most helpful metrics to track is return on ad spend (ROAS), a barometer of efficiency that shows how much revenue you generate for every marketing dollar spent. Break your ROAS down by channel and watch for any sudden fluctuations or red flags so you can make adjustments in real time.

To see whether your marketing efforts are driving profitability and bringing the right customers to your website, you can go a step further by running a cohort analysis that measures LTV:CAC ratio. This calculation will give you valuable insight into your customer lifecycle so you can identify the ROI for each dollar you spend on customer acquisition.

To do so, you’ll need to create time-based cohorts of “customers from first time of purchase” and compare them year over year. Because the exact dates of BFCM are fluid, we recommend starting by making Black Friday day 0, then counting backward (-1, -2) pre-BF and forward (+1, +2) each day after BF. This also works for performing an LTV:CAC cohort analysis for Christmas sales using Christmas as day 0.

4 ways to use e-commerce data to optimize LTV pre- and post-holiday by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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New Xiaomi 12T Pro design brings a contemporary look, designed to be a sculptural object

The Xiaomi 12T Pro arrived in a Daniel Arsham Edition, the manufacturer announced today. The phone comes as a joint project with the New York-based artist who developed the device to be a “sculpture with a purpose outside of it as a functional object”. The device itself is a 12/256 GB version with a Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset and 200 MP camera but the back panel is green, with copper-colored crystals that shine differently under angle. Daniel Arsham said in 20 years people who will have this phone will use it as a sculptural object, linked to a particular moment in time and...

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