The Hamada equation is a fundamental analysis method of analyzing a firm's cost of capital as it uses additional financial leverage and how that relates to the overall riskiness of the firm.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
Look-through earnings is a term attributed to Warren Buffett, who prefers this concept to overcome limitations of accounting rules in determining value.
Form 8606, "Nondeductible IRAs," is a tax form distributed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and used by filers who make nondeductible contributions to an IRA.
A single-premium deferred annuity (SPDA) is an annuity established with a single payment featuring investment growth solely during the accumulation phase.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
The names sound similar – continuing care, assisted living – but retirement communities differ widely. How to tell them apart and what you'll need to pay.
A daylight overdraft is when a bank withdraws more money than it has in its Federal Reserve account in order to make a payment; the overdraft must be settled by the end of the business day.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
Foregone earnings are the difference between earnings actually achieved and earnings that could have been achieved with the absence of specific fees, expenses or lost time.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
File and suspend was a Social Security claiming strategy that allowed couples of retirement age to receive spousal benefits while delaying retirement credits.
If you've taken early distributions or owe excess-contribution or excess-accumulation penalties, then you may owe money to the IRS at tax time. Form 5329 is the form you need.
A spousal IRA is a strategy that allows a working spouse to contribute to an IRA in the name of a non-working spouse to circumvent income requirements.
A representative payee is an individual who acts as the receiver of disability or social security payments for someone who is not capable of managing their own benefits.
An education IRA is a tax-advantaged investment account for higher education, now more formally known as a Coverdell Educational Savings Account (ESA).
SIMPLE IRAs and traditional IRAs are retirement savings vehicles that differ in their early distribution penalties and in who can participate in each type of plan.
A Keogh, or HR10, is an employer-funded, tax-deferred retirement plan for unincorporated businesses or the self-employed. An IRA is funded by employees.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
The Interstate Commerce Commission regulated the economics and services of specified carriers engaged in transportation between states from 1887 to 1995.
A DB(k) plan is a hybrid retirement plan that combines some of the characteristics of a defined contribution 401(k) plan with those of a defined benefit (DB) plan.
Find out how and when your IRA can be taken in a lawsuit, including why IRAs are not fully protected like 401(k) plans and how IRA exemptions vary by state.
You are subscribed to email updates from rss_headline. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.
Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
There are now more niche markets than ever. If you own a commerce or e-commerce brand, you've probably been told to appeal to a mass audience, right? This advice no longer rings true. Instead, it's more profitable to sell niche products and specialize in one specific audience. But if you're selling niche products, it's important you create a powerful brand and brand your products effectively. This separates your product from competitors and your customers will develop brand loyalty faster. If you're developing a new branding strategy for 2020, you'll want to include some core branding components. Here are the 3
You are subscribed to email updates from ShoeMoney. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.
Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
NEW DELHI: Setting a floor for mobile phone tariffs is now off the table, with the regulator and the telecom department unable to agree on the matter and private telcos Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Reliance Jio along with state-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. having decided to increase prices from next month, a senior government official said."There's no more discussion on floor prices," the telecom department official said. "The telcos have already decided to raise tariffs. They can raise them further as well... we won't intervene."Telcos appear to broadly agree there is no immediate need to set a floor price, given their intention to raise tariffs."We will wait to see where ARPUs (average revenue per user) settle once these tariffs are in effect. Floor pricing may not be necessary if the ARPUs reach sustainable levels," said Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, which represents private telcos."Floor prices are a complex issue and for now our focus is on enhancing ARPUs to sustainable levels, which will lead to recovery of the industry," Mathews added. 72269264 However, at an industry meeting with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Wednesday, Vodafone Idea again raised the issue of a floor price but was opposed by BSNL, a person familiar with the matter said.A panel of secretaries that looked at ways to ease the financial burden of telcos had nudged the telecom regulator to consider setting a floor price. However, Trai apparently pushed back, with officials saying privately the idea wasn't workable and had been rejected in 2017.They said Trai wouldn't take up the matter suo motu. They called the move anti-consumer and said it would disincentivise investments in future technologies. Trai wanted a reference from the telecom department, backed by written requests from telcos, which didn't come."How could we have sent any reference? Pricing is under Trai," said another official.With the matter in a stalemate, the government pushed the telcos to increase prices, industry and government officials said. Initially, while Vodafone Idea and Airtel were willing, they were also wary about losing more subscribers if Jio didn't follow suit."Jio was hesitant to commit to raising prices, having started charging its customers for off-net calls (calls to rival networks), which was an effective price hike of around 14-15%," said an industry executive.Jio is said to have finally agreed, at the urging of the government. However, Jio wasn't as direct as Vodafone Idea and Airtel in announcing increased rates from December – it said prices would be raised "in the next few weeks" under directions from the regulator.Jio's tariff increases are not expected to be as much as those by its rivals, government and industry executives said.The Department of Telecommunications official said the price increases and a two-year moratorium on spectrum payments of Rs 42,000 crore recently approved by the government would provide enough cashflow relief to the telcos and put them on the path to recovery.However, relief in the matter of Rs 1.47 lakh crore of cumulative adjusted gross revenue-based dues depends on the Supreme Court's response to review petitions filed by some telcos and the telecom department will act as per the court's directions, officials said.Under intense financial pressure, Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel had sought the two-year moratorium on spectrum payments, lower licence fees and spectrum usage charges, and a refund of Rs 35,000 crore in input tax credits. They also wanted a mechanism to set a floor for tariffs to ensure prices rise, which they said was key to immediate financial relief.Their strife was aggravated by the October 24 apex court order widening the definition of AGR to include non-core revenue items, leaving Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel as the worst hit, facing dues of over Rs 89,000 crore to be paid in three months.According to an internal DoT calculation, a 10% increase in realisations from subscribers by increasing phone bills may yield about Rs 35,000 crore in revenue for the sector over three years, without affecting consumer demand, while helping companies regain financial viability.
BENGALURU: The central government plans to cap the commission earned on rides by firms such as Uber and Ola to a maximum of 10% of the total fare in its upcoming rules for taxi aggregators, people privy to the matter said.This is the first time the government is looking to regulate the commission collected by such firms, which currently stands at about 20%.Further, state governments, if they choose to, could also levy a charge on the aggregators' earnings, according to the guidelines shared with state officials that ET has reviewed."We are planning to release the draft (aggregator rules) for public feedback sometime next week," said a senior official from the road transport and highways ministry that formulated the guidelines shared with the states last month. "It will largely be in line with the guidelines that were shared, with a few small changes."On the contentious issue of surge pricing, the government has suggested capping it to a maximum of twice the base fare. The base fare can be fixed by the state, or suggested by the aggregator and revised every quarter.Rules may be in place by year-endHowever, there is a follow-on clause stipulating that no more than 10% of daily rides undertaken by a driver can be subject to surge pricing.ET first reported on the proposal to cap the surge pricing at thrice the base fare in its September 13 edition.The final rules for cab aggregators, which will be notified under the Motor Vehicle Act, 2019 that came into force on September 1, is likely to be formalised before the end of the year.The guiding document detailed the fee caps, apart from regulations on surge pricing, passenger and driver safety, penalties for drivers and aggregators, and licencing norms for aggregators.Tackling the other big issue of drivers cancelling rides, the guidelines suggest a penalty in the range of 10-50% of the total fare not exceeding Rs 100. Further, states will be able to set a maximum number of cancellations a driver can make in a week, before being off-boarded by the aggregator for a period of two days. A similar penalty of 10-50% of the total fare not exceeding Rs 100 could be levied on passengers cancelling a ride for no reason. 72269146 On the safety front, the government could mandate an insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh for each rider, the guidelines said. Aggregators will also have to verify a driver either through facial recognition or biometrics once every three hours to ensure that the driver undertaking the trip is the same as the person enlisted with the aggregator."Ride-hailing is one of the best solutions for India. One cab replaces 10 personal cars on the road and 35% of personal car trips at any given point remain idle," one of the senior officials said. "This is what causes congestion."He added that the rules were in line with promoting ride-hailing in the country, while also protecting driver and rider interests. The guidelines suggest that states should allow city taxi permit holders to also get attached to aggregator apps. Further, state governments should ensure that public parking spaces be allocated to cabs attached to ride-hailing companies. "Municipalities need to recognise that this (ride-hailing) is something good for the country. Unfortunately we have been facilitating only the sale of private vehicles through our policies," added the official.
MUMBAI: KKR is doubling down on the India renewables story and is in advanced talks to buy the solar portfolio of Shapoorji Pallonji Group for Rs 1,500-1,750 crore ($230-250 million). It is also in talks to buy Hyderabad-based Mytrah Energy for Rs 5,250 crore ($750 million), said people aware of the negotiations.KKR alone is looking at deploying at least half of the amount involved as equity commitment in Mytrah while some existing lenders like Dutch pension fund manager APG Asset Management may join as co-investors by converting a part of their exposure and rolling over the rest.The deal with SP Group is expected to be stitched up in the coming weeks, while due diligence is underway for Mytrah.KKR to Control 2-gw portfolioThe transactions — if successful — will give KKR control over a 2-gw clean energy portfolio, making it a sizeable player in the space.KKR began to focus on Asia's infrastructure sector with a series of hires beginning about a year ago, and launched its fundraising in 2019. About 50% of its maiden fund has just been raised. It made its first investment in May via a $400-million deal to take control of India Grid Trust (IndiGrid), the infrastructure investment trust of Sterlite Power Transmission.Both SP Group and Mytrah are leveraged, and are facing liquidity challenges. 72269234 Mytrah's problems have been compounded also because it is caught in the political crossfire following the Jaganmohan Reddy government's decision to review renewable energy tariffs in Andhra Pradesh, which triggered a ratings downgrade for the company's projects. Mytrah has around Rs 11,000 crore of debt at various entities. The new investors plan to get the loans refinanced.In September 2017, Mytrah raised Rs 1,800 crore ($277 million) from the Piramal Group through non-convertible debentures. It used the funds to provide an exit to some investors — IDFC Alternatives, AION Capital, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs — besides meeting growth capital needs.Mytrah's 1.6 gw operating portfolio of wind solar parks are spread across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Punjab and Tamil Nadu. SP Group's footprint is focused around Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and its plants fetch average tariffs of Rs 4-7 per unit.Earlier this year, Sprng Energy, a renewable energy platform of Actis LLP, acquired 194 mw of solar assets from Shapoorji Pallonji Solar Holdings for an enterprise value of $200 million. Now the residual 260 mw is also up for grabs.SP Group watchers said the divestments are part of a longterm strategy, launched in 2018, to deploy more capital and equity to develop greenfield assets. But matters have gone downhill since then, they said, with the group seeking an extension to repay an inter-company loan of Rs 2,341 crore (as of September 2019) to the recently listed EPC arm — Sterling and Wilson Solar."Shapoorji Pallonji Group is in discussions with various investors; however, as a group policy we cannot disclose further details," the SP Group spokesperson told ET. KKR declined to comment. Mails sent to Mytrah did not elicit a response till press time Wednesday, while APG refused to comment on individual investments.
MUMBAI: India's richest state is set to be ruled by parties opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, jeopardising a Japanese-backed bullet-train project opposed by farmers.The BJP's inability to pull together voters in the westerly state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is capital, has meant that three parties, including a former BJP ally, will form the government. That is a major setback for Modi after his landslide victory in general elections this year.It could also hinder the bullet train project, a $17 billion investment largely financed by a long-term, low-cost loan from Japan. The BJP was in power in both Maharashtra and Gujarat states when work began on project in 2017."We have always opposed the bullet train," said Manisha Kayande, a spokesperson for the Shiv Sena, a former BJP ally whose leader is now set to head Maharashtra. "Our state is giving a major chunk of money for the project, when most of the track is in another state. This will definitely be re-framed," .The train will run from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, the main city in Gujarat state, a distance of 508 kilometres (315 miles). But it has run into obstacles acquiring land amid opposition from fruit farmers.Any delay of the project is likely to undermine investor confidence, at a time when growth has slowed to its weakest pace in years.Critics say India does not need the high-speed train and investment should go instead to improve the existing network."We are not against development or infrastructure projects, but at the same time farmers' interests can't be ignored. We will rethink about projects that farmers are opposing," said a senior leader of Nationalist Congress Party, which is a part of the coalition government.National High Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRCL), the government agency overseeing the project, had no immediate comment.The authorities have acquired 548 hectares land out of the total requirement 1,380 hectares and the project was targeted to be operational by 2023 , the government told parliament in July.
MUMBAI: India's richest state is set to be ruled by parties opposed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, jeopardising a Japanese-backed bullet-train project opposed by farmers.The BJP's inability to pull together voters in the westerly state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is capital, has meant that three parties, including a former BJP ally, will form the government. That is a major setback for Modi after his landslide victory in general elections this year.It could also hinder the bullet train project, a $17 billion investment largely financed by a long-term, low-cost loan from Japan. The BJP was in power in both Maharashtra and Gujarat states when work began on project in 2017."We have always opposed the bullet train," said Manisha Kayande, a spokesperson for the Shiv Sena, a former BJP ally whose leader is now set to head Maharashtra. "Our state is giving a major chunk of money for the project, when most of the track is in another state. This will definitely be re-framed," .The train will run from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, the main city in Gujarat state, a distance of 508 kilometres (315 miles). But it has run into obstacles acquiring land amid opposition from fruit farmers.Any delay of the project is likely to undermine investor confidence, at a time when growth has slowed to its weakest pace in years.Critics say India does not need the high-speed train and investment should go instead to improve the existing network."We are not against development or infrastructure projects, but at the same time farmers' interests can't be ignored. We will rethink about projects that farmers are opposing," said a senior leader of Nationalist Congress Party, which is a part of the coalition government.National High Speed Rail Corporation (NHSRCL), the government agency overseeing the project, had no immediate comment.The authorities have acquired 548 hectares land out of the total requirement 1,380 hectares and the project was targeted to be operational by 2023 , the government told parliament in July.
MUMBAI: KKR is doubling down on the India renewables story and is in advanced talks to buy the solar portfolio of Shapoorji Pallonji Group for Rs 1,500-1,750 crore ($230-250 million). It is also in talks to buy Hyderabad-based Mytrah Energy for Rs 5,250 crore ($750 million), said people aware of the negotiations.KKR alone is looking at deploying at least half of the amount involved as equity commitment in Mytrah while some existing lenders like Dutch pension fund manager APG Asset Management may join as co-investors by converting a part of their exposure and rolling over the rest.The deal with SP Group is expected to be stitched up in the coming weeks, while due diligence is underway for Mytrah.KKR to Control 2-gw portfolioThe transactions — if successful — will give KKR control over a 2-gw clean energy portfolio, making it a sizeable player in the space.KKR began to focus on Asia's infrastructure sector with a series of hires beginning about a year ago, and launched its fundraising in 2019. About 50% of its maiden fund has just been raised. It made its first investment in May via a $400-million deal to take control of India Grid Trust (IndiGrid), the infrastructure investment trust of Sterlite Power Transmission.Both SP Group and Mytrah are leveraged, and are facing liquidity challenges. 72269234 Mytrah's problems have been compounded also because it is caught in the political crossfire following the Jaganmohan Reddy government's decision to review renewable energy tariffs in Andhra Pradesh, which triggered a ratings downgrade for the company's projects. Mytrah has around Rs 11,000 crore of debt at various entities. The new investors plan to get the loans refinanced.In September 2017, Mytrah raised Rs 1,800 crore ($277 million) from the Piramal Group through non-convertible debentures. It used the funds to provide an exit to some investors — IDFC Alternatives, AION Capital, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs — besides meeting growth capital needs.Mytrah's 1.6 gw operating portfolio of wind solar parks are spread across Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Punjab and Tamil Nadu. SP Group's footprint is focused around Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and its plants fetch average tariffs of Rs 4-7 per unit.Earlier this year, Sprng Energy, a renewable energy platform of Actis LLP, acquired 194 mw of solar assets from Shapoorji Pallonji Solar Holdings for an enterprise value of $200 million. Now the residual 260 mw is also up for grabs.SP Group watchers said the divestments are part of a longterm strategy, launched in 2018, to deploy more capital and equity to develop greenfield assets. But matters have gone downhill since then, they said, with the group seeking an extension to repay an inter-company loan of Rs 2,341 crore (as of September 2019) to the recently listed EPC arm — Sterling and Wilson Solar."Shapoorji Pallonji Group is in discussions with various investors; however, as a group policy we cannot disclose further details," the SP Group spokesperson told ET. KKR declined to comment. Mails sent to Mytrah did not elicit a response till press time Wednesday, while APG refused to comment on individual investments.
HDFC Mutual Fund, ICICI Prudential MF and Aditya Birla SL Mutual Fund have received payments from the Essel group after the promoters sold stake in Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEE) to repay lenders. The recovery is on loans that were given to Essel, with ZEE shares used as collateral.In a filing with the stock exchange, HDFC Mutual Fund said it has received Rs 167 crore toward part repayment of debt instruments, along with interest. The outstanding exposure of HDFC MF to this debt reduced to Rs 13.7 crore from Rs 1,156 crore. ICICI Prudential AMC has received its entire principal of Rs 267 crore along with interest, while Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund has received Rs 840 crore."With this repayment, the aggregate market value of the outstanding exposure… which was Rs 1,156 crore as on March 31, 2019, stands substantially reduced to Rs 13.7 crore as on November 26, 2019, which is adequately covered by listed shares of DishTV India Ltd," HDFC Mutual Fund said in a note to investors.In the case of ICICI Prudential mutual fund, two open-ended schemes had exposure to the Essel Group, with ZEE shares used as collateral."Pursuant to the sale of shareholding by the promoters of ZEEL, the above schemes of ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund have received repayment of the total principal amount invested along with the accrued interest thereon. Subsequently, none of the schemes of ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund has any investments in debt instruments issued by the promoter group companies of ZEEL," ICICI Prudential Mutual fund said in a statement to investors.A spokesperson at Aditya Birla SL Mutual Fund said it received Rs 840 crore, which included the interest accrued on the principal advanced.However, three schemes of Aditya Birla SL Mutual Fund have exposure to Adilink Infra and Multitrading, an Essel group company that defaulted on loan repayment commitments. Aditya Birla Sun Life Mutual Fund has segregated Rs 787 crore of Adilink Infra & Multitrading debentures that its schemes held.
By Kunal BahlThe valuations of privately-held tech companies has become increasingly complex and opaque in recent years. A variety of factors, including liquidation preferences, anti-dilution rights and myriad other protections offered to investors obfuscate the direct link between performance, potential and valuation.Often growing losses in tech businesses are seen by private investors as smoke signals that signify faster future growth and hence deserving of higher valuations. The public market investors, however, take a very different view on private market valuations of loss-making tech businesses.Growing private valuations are often propped up by late entrants, who are willing to sign cheques for higher valuations based on future-bound assurances of bottom protection and priority in liquidation.The public markets offer no such comforts . The future arrives every quarter — rating the company on financial performance and corporate governance, determining corporate valuation based on the uncontrived simplicity of P/E ratios and other objective metrics.Given that most businesses will consider an IPO as part of their future plans, it is important for entrepreneurs to recognise that public markets do crystallise a reality check. And for this transition to be evolutionary and not cataclysmic, it is important to ensure that the company's capital structure are not designed for failure.For existing businesses, the first thing that needs to be done is a reset of liquidation preferences and antidilution rights, so that the interests of all shareholders are aligned in terms of business strategy, timelines and desired outcomes.Investing with the knowledge that valuations will be based on performance and not on the strength of shareholder agreement clauses, will automatically force the investors to factor in business risks.In the absence of astronomical valuations, companies will raise less money, because the cost of capital will be high. This will allow entrepreneurs to build their businesses at a sensible pace with a focus on economics and customer experience.Yes, it would probably mean that fewer start-ups will race to become unicorns in their first 12-18 months, but it would also mean that the path to such milestones would be paved with hard work, discipline and grit and not with hidden staircases and free rides.Large cash burns also postpone the profitability pangs for companies, putting them in a cheap-capital induced haze that hides the path to profitability, delaying the journey towards sound unit economics More companies in our ecosystem would start going public sooner if the path to profitability won't be as nebulous as it otherwise seems given rising cash burn. Therefore, less capital to burn is a faster and clear-headed way to go public, with less distractions and excuses on the way.Entrepreneurs need to demonstrate a long term view on their business, and be willing to take one on the chin on the valuation, but know that they also haven't guaranteed downside protection to investors.(The author is CEO of Snapdeal)
BENGALURU: India's share in the global software product market is miniscule and the country remains a net importer of software products, the joint secretary to the electronics & information technology ministry Rajiv Kumar said on Wednesday. Currently the global software product market is valued at USD 438 billion and India's share in this is miniscule as the country continues to be a net importer of software products, Kumar was quoted in a press release as saying on the second day of the Global Exhibition on Services (GES)-2019 here. Of the total software business of USD 8.2 billion in the country, Indias exports amount to just USD 2 billion, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) quoted Kumar in the release. India has done well in software services and our next big opportunity is in software products. There will be USD one trillion opportunity in the software production by 2025 and India has a great chance to tap it, Kumar reminded the audience. According to CII, Rajeev Kandpal, Joint Secretary and CFO, Government e-marketplace,said the GeM is the fastest growing as compared to similar initiatives across the world. The platform has 40,000 buyers, 3,00,000 sellers and 15,10,000 products valued at Rs 39,000 crore, he said. "It is one of the most inclusive marketplaces in the world comprising 20 per cent MSMEs and startup gross merchandise value is at Rs 600 crore. GeM has created a gross merchandise value of USD 5.5 billion in a short span of 3 years," Kandpal said. Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation Managing Director Shivayogi C Kalasad underlined the importance of technology in transforming the logistic sector and said digitisation has greatly helped improve the quality of services. According to him, KSRTC has introduced technology similar to wearable devices that can track and monitor driver behavior, keep them awake in case they doze off and warn them of nearby traffic threats. The officer said data driven decision making will play a key role in the logistic sector going forward.
China media releases court footage showing alleged spy confessing to fraud Chinese police claimed that the accused was an unemployed man from the southeastern province of Fujian who had been found guilty of fraud in 2016.
Fintech startup Revolut is adding a key feature for users who want to replace their traditional bank account altogether. You can now pay with GBP direct debits. Revolut already added EUR direct debits last year.
While most people use cards to pay for goods and services in the U.K., some businesses require you to pay with direct debit. It can be a utility bill, a gym membership or a phone contract for instance.
Compared to card transactions, direct debits pull money directly from your account and transfer it to the recipient's account. It doesn't go through Mastercard or Visa. Some businesses love direct debits because it's usually cheaper than card processing fees. Direct debits also don't have an expiry date, unlike cards.
Customers from the European Economic Area can now share their GBP account details for direct debits in the U.K. Direct debits are protected against some fraud and payment errors by the U.K. Direct Debit Guarantee.
Revolut has partnered with Modulr for this feature as it uses Modulr’s API. Business customers will also be able to take advantage of direct debits. You can now pay suppliers with your account details, which could be convenient for large sums of money for instance.
Looking for some gift ideas for the photographer in your life? Look no further. Though shooters amateur and professional tend to take care of their own needs pretty well, there are plenty of things you can given them that they’ll appreciate. But you might have to be ready to spend a bit — people don’t pick up this hobby because it’s so cheap.
USB-C Hub – $40-$60
A lot of the latest laptops are eschewing a variety of ports for more or only USB-C. Some like this trend, and some hate it, but one way or another you’ve got to deal with it. Photographers especially. This Vava hub has pretty much everything your average shooter needs, including old-type USB ports for legacy gear, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack for reviewing video. This one is $60 but there are bigger and smaller ones if you happen to know they use Ethernet, microSD, and so on. Just stay away from the bargain bin ones — you don’t want to mess around when it comes to carrying lots of power.
Hand strap – $10-$40
Everyone has a neck strap for their camera because they always come with one. But not everyone wants to use them — the included ones are cheap and even good ones can be annoying. A hand strap is a good alternative that adds a lot of security very simply. For a smaller camera like a mirrorless, a simple, high quality strap like Gordy’s is a good option. And for heavier bodies like DSLRs with big lenses, Peak Design’s Clutch is a solid one that works across many brands. Many camera manufacturers make their own as well, but we’ve found that Peak often makes meaningful improvements on suchstandard models.
Extra SD cards and a carry case – $30-40
A photographer can never have too many cards, and a good case never goes amiss, either. You can’t go wrong with Pelican when it comes to cases, even if $30 seems a lot to spend on a little plastic clamshell with foam inside. As for SD cards, 32 gigabytes is a nice safe number. Just make sure you stick to known brands like Sandisk and Kingston, and make sure it’s a “Class 10” card — lower numbers mean slower transfer speeds.
A year of Adobe – $120
This is a tough one. Lots of photographers use Lightroom and Photoshop, and it would be nice to be able to gift them a few months or a year’s worth of subscription to Adobe’s platform. But Adobe makes this so hard to do that we can’t actually figure out a good way to do it. Nevertheless, if you can figure out a creative way to go about this, your photographer friend will appreciate it. Adobe, if you’re reading this, make this work!
Microfiber wipes – $10-15
One thing you can never have too many of as a photographer is lens wipes. Some prefer the disposable type and/or a little air puff, but a pack of small microfiber ones will also be welcome, as they can be used for glasses, laptop screens, and everything else as well. They’re all pretty much the same and you can get a dozen small ones for less than ten bucks.
A soft shutter release is definitely a niche gift, but if you have someone on the list who shoots one of Fujifilm’s rangefinder-style cameras, or a Leica if they’re really fancy, a soft shutter release is an awesome, inexpensive stocking stuffer. The Match Technical Boop-O pictured above on an X-T3 camera adds a very nice, easy-to-squeeze ergonomic shutter control to the existing flat button. It screws into a hole that’s already built in to Fuji cameras that support this, including the X100-series and the X-T series cameras, to name just a few popular options. Stick-on soft shutter releases are also available for cameras that don’t have this mount built-in.
Portable lighting – $70-$500
If you think photographic lighting is just about on-camera flash, then you probably haven’t done enough experimenting with the variety of smart lightening accessories out there. Two great options are the Lume Cube line of products (Lume Cube Air pictured, left above) and the Profoto C1 and C1+. These serve different needs, but can both be used to help you do really fun stuff with both smartphone and dedicated camera-based photography. The price ranges vary, but Profoto’s offering is aimed more at pros who want portable lighting that approaches what you can get out of much more expensive studio setups, while Lume Cube is better suited to the action and drone photography set.
Gnarbox – $500-$900
This is definitely a gift reserved only for the people who merit big ticket purchases on your list, given its price. It’s also designed specifically to suit the needs of creative professionals, so it’s probably too much gear for most people. That said, if there is a pro photographer or videographer in your life who you really care deeply about, this is likely to be a gift that they’ll value – even if they already have one, since it’s the kind of gear where more = better. The Gnarbox provides easy SD backup and file management for photos and videos, so that you can keep shooting longer in the field and work with the files on the go. The 2.0 version is finally shipping, which offers SSD-based storage for much faster transfer and working speeds.
Mini tripod – $12 – $35
A mini tripod is a great addition to any photography kit, and there are a range of options available to suit different sizes and types of cameras, from smartphones all the way up to big DSLRs. The best value for money just might be the Manfrotto PIXI lineup, however, which itself comes in a range of options. The basic PIXI Mini Tripod is probably plenty enough for most, and can really help make sure that you get great travel shots and selfies while keeping your pack light. The PIXI EVO gives you a bit more flexibility with extendable legs for a bit more money.
The mobility industry is rapidly shifting to readjust for an electric and autonomous future.
Automotive companies are increasingly looking outside the manufacturing sector to fuel growth, and companies that used to bank on selling vehicles are now building mobility apps, scooters, and subscription services. Detroit is turning to to Silicon Valley for fresh ideas while Silicon Valley is studying Detroit for proven methods.
We surveyed top VCs in the mobility sector to see where they're putting their money, and one thing quickly became apparent — investors are funding startups that bring connectivity to mobility. From automobile components to social apps, connectivity is critical to investors and the industry alike.
We invest in startups that make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible. Anything that moves goods or people is interesting to us. We are first interested in exceptional founders, then exceptional ideas. For example, we just invested in a new type of car wash that doesn’t use any soap or chemicals; although it was never our intent to seek out that idea, we really believed in the founders’ vision for making it happen.
Which areas in automotive offer the most opportunity for startups?
There are many big opportunities across transportation — such is the case when you’re operating in markets measured in trillions. Right now, I am more convinced than ever that there is a 10-figure opportunity for a new navigation app — it’s one of the few/only transportation-related apps on everyone’s home screen. Still, the leaders are mostly incumbents (Apple Maps, Google Maps), where the products are good but haven’t made fundamental leaps in years or an app like Waze, which is high utility but low user experience. Other than YouTube, Waze is probably Google’s only social network, although I doubt they think of it like that. For how important navigation is and will be, we’ve been surprised more founders don’t create more there because the value is high. If you are working on something in this space, please email me! rpb@trucks.vc
What makes a startup attractive for investment from OEMs? Most OEMs are interested in companies that support their future product vision. Every once in a while, you will find an OEM with an alternative strategy that does not invest in supporting their products, but these are quite rare. As a result, startups who are actively selling in the auto supply chain are the best positioned for auto investment. Remember that many OEMs passed on investing in Uber in the early days.
Simple Contacts has launched a new service letting users try out new contact lenses for as little as $3.
The company launched a little over three years ago as a way for contact lens wearers to slash their refill costs, has now expanded into a service that offers users a chance to try out different lenses to see what might be a better fit.
Contact lenses are a big business. Just ask Warby Parker, href="https://www.warbyparker.com/contacts"> which recently entered the market with their “Scout” brand for contacts.
“Warby will get a lot of people thinking about dailies, and that’s a great thing for eye health,” says Joel Wish, the founder and chief executive of Simple Contacts. “There are a lot of choices in the market already, and we help patients navigate that by giving them a a personalized lens recommendation and issuing a prescription all online.”
Users who want to try out a new contact lens prescription can take an online test and give certain information about the contacts they currently wear, according to Bharat Ayyar, the general manager at Simple Contacts. Once the test is complete, and the company is assured that a user’s prescription hasn’t changed, Simple Contacts will recommend a daily disposable lens that would be the right fit for a user.
“If you have any questions or issues you can text the doctor,” says Bharat. “You test to see that you see clearly. If you like them you subscribe to them and it's super easy if you don't like them you can go back to your old lenses.”
Simple Contacts argues that the price is far more affordable than a visit to the optometrist. In person consultations can cost as much as $200. “Going from $200 plus to get lenses to $3 to get lenses, it’s a huge difference,” says Bharat.
The launch of its new contact lens product isn’t the only change afoot at Simple Contacts. The company has also begun offering a broader array of prescription services under the Simple Health brand as it expands into other aspects of the health care market and looks to compete with companies like Hims, Roman, and NuRX.
“We started delivering birth control last November,” says Wish. “It’s a natural extension of what we’re doing. Our mission is to increase access to care. We’re doing that by making it more cost effective and convenient to get care online. Birth control is another product that’s restricted by the doctor.”
Using influencer marketing on YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo and TikTok, Simple Health has grown its subscriber base quickly over the course of the past year, says Wish.
“We do not need to be the first mover to win,” says Wish of the incredible competition from other prescription drug providers online. “Only a few hundred thousand patients getting birth control are getting it online out of 10 million.”
The market is massive and already Simple Health is generating revenue in the seven figures per-month, according to the company’s chief executive.
It’s all part of the plan to expand upon the technology stack for remote consultations that Simple Contacts built as it was growing the contact lens business.
“Adding other verticals is something we can add to the existing system,” says Wish. “We bought simplehealth.com first. The idea was that we could give you access to medications for chronic conditions. Contact lenses are unique in t hat they don’t require a pharmacy and are less complicated and it allowed us to build the infrastructure for virtual pharmacies.”
Global politics are difficult to navigate ordinarily, but in times of conflict companies that aim to provide an unbiased service, such as a map or search function, may have to come down on one side or another. Apple just came down at least partly on the side of Russia in its controversial annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, and Google has accommodated Russian interests as well.
The large peninsula on the north side of the Black Sea was brought under Russian control in 2014 during political unrest there concerning Crimea’s status within Ukraine. World leaders decried the move, saying that Russia had deliberately helped instigate the crisis there in order to take advantage of it, and violated Ukraine’s sovereignty with its military presence.
While the controversy surrounding these events are ongoing (indeed, the events themselves are too, in a way), companies like Apple and Google don’t have the luxury of waiting for history’s judgment to do things like update their maps.
Both, for instance, have in the past labeled locations in Crimea as being part of Ukraine. But Russia has made official complaints to the companies and warned them that it is considered a criminal act to refer to Crimea as other than a Russian territory. Now both companies have made concessions to Russian demands.
Apple in its Maps and Weather app now shows locations in Crimea as being part of Russia, when being viewed from that country. Russian authorities today said that “Apple fulfilled its obligations and brought the applications on its devices in compliance with the requirements of the Russian legislation.”
If you’re viewing from the U.S., both Apple and Google appear to take something of a neutral stance, if any stance can be said to be neutral. The Crimean peninsula appears as neither Russian nor Ukrainian on both Apple and Google Maps, with some rather strange gymnastics to accomplish it.
For example, in Google Maps there is a prominent border on the north side dividing Crimea from Kherson Oblast (a Ukrainian province), much heavier than lines between other provinces. Clicking Kherson Oblast on the border brings up a description and outline, while clicking Crimea seems to do nothing at all. On cities and random locations located in Crimea, there is no country at all in the space where it is normally displayed:
On both Apple and Google Maps, there is no border at all between Crimea and Russia where it would normally appear, across Taman Bay. Yet on one side of the bay locations are prominently labeled as Russian, while on the other they are devoid of a country affiliation.
I’ve asked Google and Apple for comment on when and how they decided to implement their current maps and will update this post if I hear back. It’s very likely that both will justify these decisions with the fact that they must adhere to local laws. But what happens when two sets of local laws diverge in the same location?
Update: A Google spokesperson says: “We make every effort to objectively depict the disputed regions, and where we have local versions of Google Maps, we follow local legislation when displaying names and borders.”
My point here is not to take sides for or against any of these representations, but to show that companies like Apple and Google are in a tight spot when it comes to these situations, and their information is far from complete or authoritative. In this case we see that they have different results for different places, concessions for some governments in spite of international concern, and the reduction of some services to a non-functional state (comparatively) in order to avoid controversy.
Just something to keep in mind whenever you look up information on services provided by global companies — they’re not objective sources, though of course arguably nothing is.
There’s no such thing as perfect privacy or security, but there’s a lot you can do to lock down your online life. And the holiday season is a great time to encourage others to do the same. Some people are more likely to take security into their own hands if they’re given a nudge along the way.
Here we have a selection of gift ideas — from helpful security solutions to unique and interesting gadgets that will keep your information safe, but without breaking the bank.
A hardware security key for two-factor
Your online accounts have everything about you and you’d want to keep them safe. Two-factor authentication is great, but for the more security minded there’s an even stronger solution. A security key is a physical hardware key that’s even stronger than having a two-factor code going to your phone. These keys plug into your USB port on your computer (or the charger port on your phone) to prove to online services, like Facebook, Google, and Twitter, that you are who you say you are. Google’s own data shows security keys offer near-unbeatable protection against even the most powerful and resourced nation-state hackers. Yubikeys are our favorite and come in all shapes and sizes. They’re also cheap. Google also has a range of its own branded Titan security keys, one of which also offers Bluetooth connectivity.
Surveillance-focused malware, like remote access trojans, can infect computers and remotely switch on your webcam without your permission. Most computer webcams these days have an indicator light that shows you when the camera is active. But what if your camera is blocked, preventing any accidental exposure in the first place? Enter the simple but humble webcam blocker. It slides open when you need to access your camera, and slides to cover the lens when you don’t. Support local businesses and non-profits — you can search for unique and interesting webcam covers on Etsy
Now you have you webcam cover, what about your microphone? Just as hackers can tap into your webcam, they can also pick up on your audio. Microphone blockers contain a semiconductor that tricks your computer or device into thinking that it’s a working microphone, when in fact it’s not able to pick up any audio. Anyone hacking into your device won’t hear a thing. Some modern Macs already come with a new Apple T2 security chip which prevents hackers from snooping on your microphone when your laptop’s lid is shut. But a microphone blocker will work all the time, even when the lid is open.
You might have heard about “juice-jacking,” where hackers plant malicious implants in USB outlets, which steal a person’s device data when an unsuspecting victim plugs in. It’s a threat that’s almost unheard of, but proof-of-concepts have shown how easy it is to implant malicious components in legitimate-looking cables. A USB data blocker essentially acts as a data barrier, preventing any information going in or out of your device, while letting power through to charge your battery. They’re cheap but effective.
Price: from $6.99 and $11.49. Available from:Amazon | SyncStop
A privacy screen for your computer or phone
How often have you seen someone’s private messages or document as you look over their shoulder, or see them in the next aisle over? Privacy screens can protect you from “visual hacking.” These screens make it near-impossible for anyone other than the device user to snoop at what you’re working on. And, you can get them for all kinds of devices and displays — including phones. But make sure you get the right size!
Password managers are a real lifesaver. One strong, unique password lets you into your entire bank of passwords. They’re great for storing your passwords, but also for encouraging you to use better, stronger, unique passwords. And because many are cross-platform, you can bring your passwords with you. Plenty of password managers exist — from LastPass, Lockbox, and Dashlane, to open-source versions like KeePass. Many are free, but a premium subscription often comes with benefits and better features. And if you’re a journalist, 1Password has a free subscription for you.
Whether you’re lawfully protesting or just want to stay in “incognito mode,” there are — believe it or not — fashion lines that can help prevent facial recognition and other surveillance systems from identifying you. This clothing uses a kind of camouflage that confuses surveillance technology by giving them more interesting things to detect, like license plates and other detectable patterns.
Think of a Pi-hole as a “hardware ad-blocker.” A Pi-hole is a essentially a Raspberry Pi mini-computer that runs ad-blocking technology as a box that sits on your network. It means that everyone on your home network benefits from ad blocking. Ads may generate revenue for websites but online ads are notorious for tracking users across the web. Until ads can behave properly, a Pi-hole is a great way to capture and sinkhole bad ad traffic. The hardware may be cheap, but the ad-blocking software is free. Donations to the cause are welcome.
There are two must-read books this year. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record” autobiography covers his time as he left the shadowy U.S. intelligence agency to Hong Kong, where he spilled thousands of highly classified government documents to reporters about the scope and scale of its massive global surveillance partnerships and programs. And, Andy Greenberg’s book on “Sandworm”, a beautifully written deep-dive into a group of Russian hackers blamed for the most disruptive cyberattack in history, NotPetya, This incredibly detailed investigative book leaves no stone unturned, unravelling the work of a highly secretive group that caused billions of dollars of damage.
Twttr, the prototype app Twitter launched earlier this year, has been testing new ways to display conversations, including through the use of threaded replies and other visual cues. Now, those features have been spotted on Twitter.com, giving the service a message board-like feel where replies are connected to original tweeter and others in a thread by way of thin, gray lines.
As you may recall, the goal with twttr was to give Twitter a place outside of its main app to publicly experiment with more radical changes to the Twitter user interface, gain feedback, then iterate as needed, before the changes were rolled out to Twitter’s main user base. Since its arrival in March, the prototype twttr app has focused mainly on how threaded conversations would work, sometimes including different ways of labeling the posters in a thread, as well.
Currently, for example, twttr labels the original poster — meaning the person who started a conversation — with a little microphone icon, similar to Reddit. It’s also testing a way to view the tweet details in a card-style layout you can activate with a tap.
But its main focus continues to be on the display of the threads themselves.
Following its launch, the work on twttr slowed as did the excitement over its exclusive, invite-only Twitter experience. Instead of being a continual testbed of new ideas, twttr mostly rolled out small tweaks to threads. And it never branched out beyond conversation redesigns to test entirely new features, like Twitter’s recently launched Topics, for example.
In August, Sara Haider, who had been heading up the design of Conversations on Twitter — a role that included running twttr — announced she would be moving to a new team at the company. Meanwhile, Suzanne Xie, who had just joined Twitter by way of the Lightwell acquisition, stepped in to lead Conversations instead. She confirmed at the time that part of her role would be working with the twttr team to bring its best parts to the main Twitter app.
That work now appears to be underway.
Noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong spotted a conversation tree layout being developed on Twitter.com, identical to the one found on twttr.
Twitter Web App is testing reddit-like conversation tree
The concept first appeared on its experimental Twttr iOS app, and now it might come to the web app too! It helps keeping track of the flow of conversation pic.twitter.com/wlOvTR4IWP
And just this week, the feature was tweaked a bit more to include the ability to focus on a specific tweet, even from a permalink — also similar to twttr’s card-style layout, which highlights tweets you tap within a thread in the same way.
Wong wasn’t opted into an A/B test on Twitter.com to view this feature but rather found it through her investigative techniques, we understand.
Twitter confirmed what she found is part of the company’s broader plan to bring twttr’s features to Twitter — a rollout that will take place next year, a spokesperson said.
In addition, the company is considering how to use the twttr app to experiment with other features going forward, it says.
Twitter has changed its tune regarding inactive accounts after receiving a lot of user feedback: It will now be developing a way to “memorialize” user accounts for those who have passed away, before proceeding with a plan it confirmed this week to deactivate accounts that are inactive in order to “present more accurate, credible information” on the service.
To the company’s credit, it reacted swiftly after receiving a significant amount of negative feedback on this move, and it seems like the case of deceased users simply wasn’t considered in the decision to proceed with terminating dormant accounts.
After Twitter confirmed the inactive account (those that haven’t tweeted in more than six months) cleanup on Tuesday, a number of users noted that this would also have the effect of erasing the content of accounts whose owners have passed away. TechCrunch alum Drew Olanoff wrote about this impact from a personal perspective, asking Twitter to reconsider their move in light of the human impact and potential emotional cost.
In a thread today detailing their new thinking around inactive accounts, Twitter explained that its current inactive account policy has actually always been in place, but that they haven’t been diligent about enforcing it. They’re going to begin doing so in the European Union partly in accordance with local privacy laws, citing GDPR specifically. But the company also says it will now not be removing any inactive accounts before first implementing a way for inactive accounts belonging to deceased users to be “memorialized,” which presumably means preserving their content.
Twitter went on to say that it might expand or refine its inactive account policy to ensure it works with global privacy regulations, but will be sure to communicate these changes broadly before they go into effect.
It’s not yet clear what Twitter will do to offer this ‘memorialization’ of accounts, but there is some precedent they can look to for cues: Facebook has a ‘memorialized accounts’ feature that it introduced for similar reasons.
Argentina's Ualá became the most recent Latin American fintech to receive a growth-stage funding ($150 million) from Asian investors, Tencent and Softbank.
This marks Tencent's second round of investment in Ualá, the first coming in April 2019. Tencent also invested $180M in Brazil's leading neobank, Nubank in 2018. With Ualá, Tencent and Softbank will join a team of investors including Soros, Goldman Sachs, Endeavor, Monashees, Ribbit Capital, and Jefferies LLC, who have backed Ualá since it was founded in 2016. Ualá has provided over 1.3M accounts for unbanked and under-banked Argentine customers in the past two years and recently launched new products for lending and savings.
Ualá was not the only neobank celebrating a significant round this month; Brazil's Neon raised a $94M Series B round from Banco Votorantim and General Atlantic just one week earlier. Neon offers a fully-digital bank card to almost 2M customers across Brazil, mostly concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The round will enable Neon to expand beyond Brazil's biggest cities and double its user base in 2020.
Neon has raised $121M to date, with previous investors Quona Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Omidyar Network, and Monashees, also joining their most recent round. The two-year-old startup has been expanding its product offerings to include credit, investment, and most recently, a personal lending line in July 2019.
Neon's products are helping to bring banking services to a famously complex and competitive market in Brazil. Brazil's largest neobank, Nubank, is valued at $10B+, has 10M customers in Brazil and Mexico, and is now the most-downloaded neobank in the world. Brazil's banking sector is one of the most lucrative in the world, with credit card interest rates reaching triple digits, whereas Nubank and competitors offer more US-style rates, putting Brazilian banks on the defensive against disruptors like Nubank and Neon who will drive competition.
With strong funding from Asia, Brazilian, and US-based backers, these neobanks are gaining traction across the region to provide banking services to the 50% of Latin America's population that is still excluded from traditional financial institutions.
Softbank invests $140M in VTEX
VTEX, a Brazilian cloud e-commerce platform for large companies, joined the growing list of Softbank's Brazilian portfolio companies, including QuintoAndar, MadeiraMadeira, Creditas, Buser, Gympass, and Loggi. The Japanese investor is supporting VTEX with a $140M investment to help the startup expand internationally and develop new products.
VTEX already has 14 offices in Latin America, Europe, and the US, and serves over 2500 global clients including Ambev, Nestle, North Face, Coca Cola, and General Electric. VTEX's solution involves a comprehensive digital commerce platform including order management, B2B marketplaces, web and in-store points of commerce, and customer service. As the back-end for some of the world's largest companies, VTEX provides an enormous opportunity for integration with other marketplaces and platforms.
LinkedIn expands to Mexico
Mexico is Latin America's second-largest market after Brazil for many US tech companies like Uber and Facebook. In November 2019, both LinkedIn and Stripe announced their intention to expand into the Mexican market with offices and operations. Over 13 million of Linkedin's 92 million total clients are in Mexico, making this country a logical place for Linkedin's second Latin America office. Linkedin opened their first Latin America offices in São Paulo in 2013.
The Mexican office will open in July 2020 and will help LinkedIn produce more Spanish-language content, as well as bring users closer to large clients like BBVA and Aeromexico.
Notable Rounds and Acquisitions from November
Brazilian bank Itaú acquired growth-hacking and digital consulting startup, Zup, for a $140M deal that will be disbursed over four years. Zup will help the bank improve and develop digital channels for customer acquisition and management. Although Itaú now owns 51% of Zup, the two companies will continue to operate separately and under different brands for the foreseeable future. Acquisitions of this size are still very rare in Latin America and provide liquidity into the startup ecosystem that can promote the development of a more dynamic environment for tech companies.
MUY Tech, a Colombia cloud kitchen startup, raised $15M this month to expand into Mexico and Brazil. MUY uses AI technology to predict food trends and create less waste, allowing users to order personalized meals from MUY's physical restaurants or through a mobile app. The startup currently serves more than 200,000 meals per month, according to founder Jose Calderon, who previously exited Domicilios to Delivery Hero. Mexican investor ALLVP led the round with support from previous investor Seeya.
Brazilian mobility startup Kovi raised a $30M Series B led by Global Founders Capital and Quona Capital, with support from previous investors Monashees, Maya Capital, Kevin Efrusy, Y Combinator, Broadhaven Ventures, Justin Mateen, and ONEVC. Kovi rents cars to drivers that work for rideshare companies like Uber, Didi, or Cabify to make quality vehicles available to these potential gig-economy workers. They will use this investment to grow the team and fleet, as well as exploring new geographies.
Mexico's virtual supermarket, Justo, raised $10M in a seed round from Foundation Capital to continue growing in the local market. Justo is the first grocery store in Mexico with no physical branches, using a D2C model that has been increasing in popularity in Latin America. The startup was founded by Ricardo Weder, the former president of Cabify, earlier in 2019 to disrupt the wasteful grocery industry.
Brazil's identity verification startup, idwall, raised $10M from Qualcomm Ventures to continue developing facial recognition software that helps large companies like Loggi, 99, and OLX to verify the identity of their employees and customers.
Looking ahead to December, Latin American financial institutions are on the lookout for a shaky future based on the recent unrest in countries like Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. This instability might provide a competitive edge for fintech startups who can use real-time data to adapt more quickly to the changing situation.
What to watch next? International investors have not pulled out of the region despite recent political turmoil and many are willing to wait out this period to support their startups. While we may not have access to Q4 2019 for a few months, it will be interesting to see if growth and investment have been rocked by the changes of the past two months. Certainly the status quo for the traditional players in Latin America is rapidly changing, potentially leaving room for startups to take over more market share and compete for disgruntled customers.
Prevailing wisdom states that as an enterprise SaaS company evolves, there’s a tendency to sacrifice profitability for growth — understandably so, especially in the early days of the company. At some point, however, a company needs to become profitable.
Box has struggled to reach that goal since going public in 2015, but yesterday, it delivered a mostly positive earnings report. Wall Street seemed to approve, with the stock up 6.75% as we published this article.
Box CEO Aaron Levie says the goal moving forward is to find better balance between growth and profitability. In his post-report call with analysts, Levie pointed to some positive numbers.
“As we shared in October [at BoxWorks], we are focused on driving a balance of long-term growth and improved profitability as measured by the combination of revenue growth plus free cash flow margin. On this combined metric, we expect to deliver a significant increase in FY ’21 to at least 25% and eventually reaching at least 35% in FY ’23,” Levie said.
Growing the platform
Part of the maturation and drive to profitability is spurred by the fact that Box now has a more complete product platform. While many struggle to understand the company’s business model, it provides content management in the cloud and modernizing that aspect of enterprise software. As a result, there are few pure-play content management vendors that can do what Box does in a cloud context.
Science is exciting in theory, but it can also be dreadfully dull. Some experiments require hundreds or thousands of repetitions or trials — an excellent opportunity to automate. That’s just what MIT scientists have done, creating a robot that performs a certain experiment, observes the results, and plans a follow-up… and has now done so 100,000 times in the year it’s been operating.
The field of fluid dynamics involves a lot of complex and unpredictable forces, and sometimes the best way to understand them is to repeat things over and over until patterns emerge. (Well, it’s a little more complex than that, but this is neither the time nor the place to delve into the general mysteries of fluid dynamics.)
One of the observations that needs to be performed is of “vortex-induced vibration,” a kind of disturbance that matters a lot to designing ships that travel through water efficiently. It involves close observation of an object moving through water… over, and over, and over.
Turns out it’s also a perfect duty for a robot to take over. But the Intelligent Tow Tank, as they call this robotic experimentation platform, is designed not just to do the mechanical work of dragging something through the water, but to intelligently observe the results, change the setup accordingly to pursue further information, and continue doing that until it has something worth reporting.
“The ITT has already conducted about 100,000 experiments, essentially completing the equivalent of all of a Ph.D. student's experiments every 2 weeks,” say the researchers in their paper, published today in Science Robotics.
The hard part, of course, was not designing the robot (though that was undoubtedly difficult as well) but the logic that lets it understand, at a surface level so to speak, the currents and flows of the fluid system and conduct follow-up experiments that produce useful results.
Normally a human (probably a grad student) would have to observe every trial — the parameters of which may be essentially random — and decide how to move forward. But this is rote work — not the kind of thing an ambitious researcher would like to spend their time doing.
So it’s a blessing that this robot, and others like it, could soon take over the grunt work while humans focus on high-level concepts and ideas. The paper notes other robots at CMU and elsewhere that have demonstrated how automation of such work could proceed.
“This constitutes a potential paradigm shift in conducting experimental research, where robots, computers, and humans collaborate to accelerate discovery and to search expeditiously and effectively large parametric spaces that are impracticable with the traditional approach,” the team writes.
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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
“As part of our commitment to serve the public conversation, we're working to clean up inactive accounts to present more accurate, credible information people can trust across Twitter,” the company said.
Sounds like a smart move, with one big catch: If someone with a Twitter account died more than six months prior and no one else has their login, their account will be deleted. So hopefully, Twitter will come up with a way to memorialize these accounts.
Virtual reality doesn't have many hit games yet, but Facebook is buying the studio behind one of the medium’s biggest titles. It says Beat Games will join Oculus Studio but will continue to operate independently.
Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, allows customers to rent a scooter for as little as Rs 1 (0.1 cents) per kilometer and Rs 1.5 per hour. Sources told us the new financing round values the startup "well over $500 million.”
Netflix is expanding its theatrical presence by signing a long-term lease for a historic single-screen venue in New York City. This follows reports that the streaming company is also working to buy the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles.
Back in 2010, web performance and security company Cloudflare launched on-stage at our Disrupt SF Battlefield. And as Prince loves to remind us, the company came in second.
Yep, it’s gift guide season. Here’s our updated roundup of the latest wares clamoring to entice and inspire kids with coding tricks and electronic wizardry.
The Daily Crunch includes links to Extra Crunch stories just about every day. But if you’re still wondering what exactly TechCrunch’s premium membership program offers, here’s a 45-second video explaining everything you need to know.
A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, and collaborate with a spouse or partner to organize key financial accounts or other important documents. In addition, parents are able to coordinate with beneficiaries, children’s guardians, attorneys, financial advisors, and others right from the app.
Since launch, Fabric has expanded beyond life insurance to offer other services, like easy will creation and the addition of tools that help families organize their financial and legal information in one place. The idea, the company explained at the time, was to offer today’s busy parents a better alternative to meetings with agents to discuss complicated life insurance products. Instead, the company offers a simple, 10-minute life insurance application and the option to connect with a licensed team if they need additional help, as well as a similarly simplified will creation workflow.
As with the founders’ earlier company, Simple, which offered a better front-end to banking while actual bank accounts were held elsewhere, Fabric’s life insurance policies are issued by “A” rated insurer, Vantis Life, not Fabric itself.
However, until now, Fabric’s suite of services were only available on the web. They’re now offered in an app for added convenience. The app is initially available on iOS with an Android version in the works.
“Money can be especially stressful when you're trying to build a family and a career,” said Fabric co-founder and CEO Adam Erlebacher. “In one survey by Everyday Health, 52% of respondents said financial issues regularly stress them out, and people between the ages of 38 to 53 were the most stressed out financially. Parents want to have more control over their families' long-term financial well-being and today's dusty old products and tools are failing them,” he added.
Using the Fabric app, parents can take advantage of any of its offerings, including the option to apply for life insurance from the phone and get immediate approval. The app also makes it possible to share the policy information with beneficiaries, so it doesn’t get lost.
Another feature lets you create your will for free, and share that information with key people as well, including the witnesses you need to coordinate with in order to finalize the will, for example. And a spouse can choose to mirror your will, which speeds up the process of creating a second one with the same set of choices.
Fabric also helps to address an issue that often only comes up after it’s too late or in other emergency situations — organizing both parents’ finances in a single place. Many working adults today have not just a bank account, but also have investment accounts, 401Ks, IRAs, and credit cards, or a combination of those. But their partner may not know where to find this information or where the accounts are held.
The app, which we put through its paces (but didn’t purchase life insurance through), is very easy to use. It starts off with a short quiz to get a handle on your financial picture. It then delivers you to a personalized homescreen with a checklist of suggestions of what to do next. Naturally, this includes the life insurance application, as this is where Fabric’s revenue lies. And if you’re lacking a will and have other fiances to organize, these are featured, too.
The online forms are easy to fill out, despite the smartphone’s reduced screen space compared with a web browser, and Fabric has taken the time to get the small touches right — like when you enter a phone number, the numeric keypad appears, for example, or the integration of address lookup so you can just tap on the match and have the rest autofill. It also saves your work in progress, so you can finish later in case you get interrupted — as parents often do. And it explains terms, like “executor,” so you know what sort of rights you’re assigning.
Given its focus, Fabric protects user information with bank-grade security, including 256-bit encryption, two-factor authentication, automatic lockouts, biometrics, and other adaptive security features.
Fabric isn’t alone in helping parents and others financially plan wills and more from their iPhone. Other apps exist in this space, including will planning apps from Tomorrow, LegalZoom, Qwill, and others. Plus many insurers offer a mobile experience. Fabric is unique because it puts wills, insurance, and other tools into a single destination, without complicating the user interface.
Just one-third of the 2020 U.S. presidential candidates are using an email security feature that could prevent a similar attack that hobbled the Democrats during the 2016 election.
Out of the 21 presidential candidates in the race according to Reuters, only seven Democrats are using and enforcing DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender’s email and rejects spoofed emails, which hackers often use to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from seemingly known individuals.
It’s a marked increase from April, where only Elizabeth Warren’s campaign had employed the technology. Now, the Democratic campaigns of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Bullock have all improved their email security.
The remaining candidates, including presidential incumbent Donald Trump, are not rejecting spoofed emails. Another seven candidates are not using DMARC at all.
That, experts say, puts their campaigns at risk from foreign influence campaigns and cyberattacks.
“When a campaign doesn’t have the basics in place, they are leaving their front door unlocked,” said Armen Najarian, chief identity officer at Agari, an email security company. “Campaigns have to have both email authentication set at an enforcement policy of reject and advanced email security in place to be protected against socially-engineered covert attacks,” he said.
Green indicates a reject/quarantine policy, while yellow indicates a non-enforced policy. (Image: TechCrunch)
DMARC, which is free and fairly easy to implement, can prevent attackers from impersonating a candidate’s campaign but also prevent the same kind of targeted phishing attacks against the candidate’s network that resulted in the breach and theft of thousands of emails from the Democrats.
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Russian hackers sent an email to Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, posing as a Google security warning. The phishing email, which was published by WikiLeaks along the rest of the email cache, tricked Podesta into clicking a link that took over his account, allowing hackers to steal tens of thousands of private emails.
A properly enforced DMARC policy would have rejected the phishing email from Podesta’s inbox altogether, though DMARC does not protect against every kind of highly sophisticated cyberattack. The breach was bruising for the Democrats, one that led to high-profile resignations and harmed public perceptions of the Clinton presidential campaign — one she ultimately lost.
“It's perplexing that the campaigns are not aggressively jumping on this issue,” said Najarian.
An earlier version of this story identified Steve Bullock as a Republican, when he is a Democrat.
Every day, people slog over inputting date from invoices and other forms. So instead of using traditional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extraction software, you could apply a new form of machine learning to documents to speed up the process. That's the thinking behind Rossum's technology, which uses ‘Cognitive Data Capture' to teach computers to understand documents in the way humans do. It says its AI tool has been proven to extract data six times faster than at a human rate while saving companies up to 80% of the costs.
The company has now secured $4.5 million after one $1million pre-seed with Miton and StartupYard, followed by a second $3.5 million seed round, led by LocalGlobe out of London. Seedcamp also participated.
A number of Angels also took part: Elad Gil (Twitter's former VP of strategy and investor in Airbnb, Square, and Pinterest); Michael Stoppelman (investor in Wish, Lyft and the former SVP of Engineering at Yelp); Vijay Pandurangan (investor and advisor for Wish and Get Room and former Director of Engineering at Twitter); and Ryan Petersen (founder and CEO Flexport and Import Genius).
Rossum's software was built by its three founders, former AI PhD students Tomas Gogar, Petr Baudis and Tomas Tunys. Baudis' work is credited in Google's scientific paper on its historic AlphaGo AI victory in 2016.
Rather than replacing employees, Rossum's aim is to speed up human operators, giving businesses more flexibility and reliability for their customers, and helping employees focus their attention on more complex tasks or tasks that require creativity. Rossum says its accuracy rates average at around 95% and for any data fields Rossum's software can't identify, it asks for feedback from a human worker. Each time it receives feedback, the software learns, improves and this accuracy increases.
Rossum's product is already used by companies in every continent, including multiple Fortune 500 enterprises, such as Siemens.
Rossum's current system is helping its clients chiefly process invoices and similar documents, like delivery notes. However, the technology can be used to process documents across many segments including accounting, logistics, insurance, real estate management, among others. It plans to use its investments to further develop this technology for multiple sectors, open a US office and continue its global expansion.
Rossum's co-founder Tomas Gogar said: "Technology should make data entry easier and cheaper but businesses have become too reliant on using old systems that no longer meet their needs. Rossum solves these problems without complicated, clunky integrations; without teams of developers; and without high costs. ”
Reshma Sohoni from SeedCamp said: "Rossum's technology is a game-changer for business. We're excited to work with such a passionate and highly skilled team to bring the cost and time savings of its AI data-extraction tool to even more businesses."
Like another famous accelerator program founded around the same time, Techstars has grown considerably since its 2006 launch in Boulder, Colorado.
In fact, the brand seems to be in so many places that it’s hard to keep track of its reach, along with its impact. Where is Techstars, exactly? Who funds it? And how many startups have passed through its program?
We caught up yesterday with co-founder and CEO David Brown, who shared CEO duties with co-founder David Cohen until recently, and he got us up to speed while getting his family out of town for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
First, some stats: Techstars accelerators are now in 49 cities around the world, including across the U.S., as well as in Europe, Australia, Singapore and South Korea, among other countries. Each accepts 10 companies each year that pass through a three-month-long program that ends in a so-called demo day. This is typically at a physical hub, though, like YC, Techstars began to experiment with virtual batches a couple of years ago. Two weeks ago, for example, it launched a program in partnership with the U.S. Air Force, the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence and the Norwegian Space Agency called the Techstars Allied Space Accelerator. Beyond its focus on startups that operate, the programming is almost entirely remote.
Altogether, 2,000 companies have now gone through the Techstars program. Some of its better-known alums include email service provider Sendgrid, which went public before being acquired last year by Twilio; and the pharmacy company Pillpack, which sold last year to Amazon. Other high-fliers that have yet to exit include drone delivery company Zipline, cloud infrastructure startup DigitalOcean, and password manager LastPass.
A general lack of judgment has always been one of the strongest appeals of smart assistants. Whatever bad pop song or terrible online video you play for the 10,000th time — they don't care. They're simply there to help, judgment free.
Amazon, however, has been working on some features behind the scenes to help make Alexa more lifelike. Those involve bringing more emotional resonance to the smart assistant — namely the ability to make its voice sound varying levels of excited and disappointed.
"Alexa emotions" feature three levels of intensity. For the full effect, here's "I just listened to the Smiths and then Googled what Morrissey has been up to lately" mode:
We all get down around the holidays, Alexa. Are you sure there's nothing you want to talk about here? Amazon says users are feeling the newly empathetic assistant. " Early customer feedback indicates that overall satisfaction with the voice experience increased by 30% when Alexa responded with emotions," it writes in a post.
The feature is available to developers starting today, primarily focused on gaming skills. That means they'll probably start rolling out to applications in the near future. No word on whether it's possible to set those flash news briefings to perpetual disappointment.
The company is also rolling out a content-tailored delivery, design to give Alexa a style more akin to a news anchor or radio host.
Joe Procopio is a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. Joe is currently building Spiffy, and previously sold Automated Insights, sold ExitEvent and built Intrepid Media.
Are you considering selling your company as a potential exit? Now? A year from now? Five years from now?
In more than 20 years of startup, with over a dozen acquisitions under my belt as an entrepreneur, advisor and investor, I can assure you that an acquisition is always a massive and complex transaction that you’re never 100% prepared for. In fact, the one regret I hear over and over again from my peers is that they got less than what they should have when they signed the deal.
Whether you’re a founder or just have some equity, there’s a bunch of stuff you need to know before you decide to sell your startup, stuff that you won’t actually learn until you’ve been through it.
I sat down with a friend last week who is in the position to seriously consider selling her company. It’s her first startup, so we went over a high-level outline of the process. Then I added a bunch of notes from my own experience for this post.
How to know when it’s time to sell
There are basically four reasons to sell your company.
Things are going poorly. This obviously isn’t good, and unless you’re in a position where you have to sell, I would recommend against it. Instead, I’d do everything in my power to stabilize and reconsider later.
Things are going extremely well. On the other side, this is the best position to be in, but it’s also the time when the founders are least interested in selling. The deal has to be outstanding.
An external factor. Something has happened outside of the company that has made selling an attractive option. For example, I wound up running two companies at the same time, and decided to get out of the small one to focus on the big one.
You’ve taken it as far as you can. This is most often the primary reason why founders choose to sell their company. They see a lot of opportunity down the road, and decide that a specific acquirer can take much better advantage of that opportunity.
Usually, the decision to sell is based on a combination of these reasons.
How to make the decision to sell
There are basically three ways to get acquired.
A larger company. This is someone in your space or close to it. To them, your company represents either an advance in innovation or just a bunch of new customers. This is the most popular option.
Private equity. These firms usually buy out all of the existing owners and investors and may put company leadership on a profit plan to keep them around and motivated. These transactions usually happen at high levels of valuation, like approaching the billions.
A new investment round. At lower levels of valuation, the same kind of transaction can take place where a new investor or group of investors buys out all of the current owners and investors.
There are two things you need to do before you decide to sell. First, consider your negotiating position from strongest to weakest.
Ideally, you should already have at least one offer on the table, or have rejected one or more offers in the recent past. This is the strongest position, as one offer usually attracts more offers.
If you don’t have a solid offer, you should at least be investigating one or more implied offers. These hints and clues will come from partners, customers, competition, even investors and advisors with connections to other investors and PE firms.
If you have none of these, selling the company is going to be a lot more difficult, but not impossible. In this case, acquisition is a lot like fundraising. If you don’t have any offers or leads, you need to build connections and relationships. You’re basically putting together a pitch deck and going door to door. If you’re not patient, you’ll end up giving up a lot of value on your equity.
You might also consider bringing in a fixer, an experienced person who will come in as CEO for a large chunk of equity and get your company into a better position to sell, both operationally and in terms of connections. I rarely see this work, but I have indeed seen it work. Here, you’re trading shares for the hopes of increased value of those shares.
Finally, you might find private money that just wants to take over your company. These transactions happen at much lower valuations. Kind of a fire sale.
The second thing you need to do before you make the decision to sell is talk to your board, your current investors, your executive team, and your advisors. Everyone has to be in line, on board, and the proper expectations need to be set and agreed upon.
Preparing the company to be sold
There are basically three ways to calculate the sale price of your company.
A service-based company is usually valued at 1x to 2x annual revenue. In cases where the company is a hybrid of product or intellectual property that may be spun off, this can creep to 3x or maybe a little more.
A product company is usually valued at 2x to 10x annual revenue, depending on the market for the product, the protected unique differentiators, the higher the tech, and a number of other things, usually related to opportunity.
In cases of extreme opportunity and innovation, a product company can be sold for 20x to 50x.
There are two things you’ll have to do to sell your company: Show you’re worth the sale price and prove the legitimacy of your operation.
To show your worth, if your company is taking in $10 million in revenue and your valuation comes out at 10x, or $100 million, you need to be able to show the acquirer the path to $100 million within a three- to five-year time frame. The more objectively you can show that return, the more likely you’ll get your asking price.
There are a number of ways you can do this, but spreadsheets and hockey-stick charts probably aren’t enough to open the checkbook. For example, in one case we had to actually conduct a one-month experimental project and hit certain milestones dictated by the acquirer. In another, we went through a three month period where we pushed the accelerator to the ground to show 100% month over month growth for three straight months.
To prove your legitimacy, you’re going to have to go through due diligence. This will happen after an offer sheet has been put together and hopefully there’s a penalty clause if the buyer pulls out.
During due diligence, you’ll have to show that the structural integrity of your company is clean. This means you’ll need to:
Show a clean cap table, with all the equity in the company past, present, and future accounted for.
Open your books so they can audit your financials.
Sit your lawyers with their lawyers to sniff out liability and risk, and also make sure your intellectual property is properly protected.
Interview and background check your management team to uncover skeletons in anyone’s closet. And also make sure everyone important will stay on.
There will be no time between the initial interest from the acquirer and microscope time, so you’ll need to have all your ducks in a row before you put your company on the market.
Timeline
Your guess is as good as mine, so make your best guess, then double it.
The fastest I’ve ever been through an acquisition deal was four months, the longest was seven months. Again, it’s like raising a funding round, so the shape your company and the strength of your negotiating position will determine a lot of the timeline, but there will always be external factors to deal with.
For example, one time we had the buyer just drop off the face of the earth for 45 days. At about day 30 we resigned ourselves to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Then it did.
Think 1–2 months to prepare and line up suitors, 2–3 months to get a solid offer in place, 1–2 months of due diligence. It is not quick, but it should not drag. Regardless of my anecdote above, both sides have an incentive to move quickly, it just takes time.
Preparing yourself for life after startup
The last thing my friend and I talked about was what she was going to do once her startup was folded into a new company. Even from her early vantage point, in almost all outcomes, she was looking at a comfy VP position at a nice salary. She could do that. The question, of course, was for how long.
The last time my company was acquired was the first time I planned to stick around to hit the next milestone. I didn’t make it. Two years in, I hit a wall that I never recovered from, even after a few more months of soul-searching. It was a mix of internal changes, external factors, and me just being done. I felt like I was dragging a bag of bricks to work every morning.
I’d try to stick around again. I’ve never been one to hop from startup to startup, and I’ve been immersed enough in the corporate world to know I can navigate it. But there’s a reason they usually lock the executive team in for two years. That’s about all either side can take of the other.
The thing is, because it was the first time I planned to stay put after the acquisition, I never developed a contingency plan going into the acquisition, and I paid for it afterwards. When I did leave, it took three months just to find my feet.
I’ve seen other folks take way longer to decompress, and I’ve seen some of them do some crazy stuff along the way, like start that folly of a company they always wanted to start and now that they had the means to start it and no one to tell them no… disaster.
So whether your plan is to stick around or run away screaming, make sure you build in time to think about what’s next. You can do whatever you want after that time, maybe start a new project, maybe take a new position. What you do might not even be startup-related at all.
But chances are it will be. Entrepreneurs are like addicts; we don’t know when to quit.
Facing a shorter holiday shopping season this year, U.S. retailers started rolling out their Black Friday deals earlier than usual. That move has paid off, according to new e-commerce data shared by Adobe Analytics this morning, which found that U.S. consumers have already spent $50.1 billion online between November 1 and November 26, 2019 — which represents a comparable increase of 15.8 percent year-over-year.
This year, Thanksgiving arrived on November 28, a full week later than it did in 2018 when it came on November 22. That left retailers with 6 fewer days to drive post-Thanksgiving Day sales — a situation it hadn’t been in since 2013, when the shorter time frame led to serious delivery struggles. To salvage the lost shopping days (and to not again find themselves in a similar situation as 2013), retailers simply rolled out their deals a week early.
But consumers weren’t even waiting for these Black Friday preview deals to start shopping. According to Adobe Analytics, which tracks online transactions for 80 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, all 26 days in November so far have surpassed $1 billion in online sales. Seven days even passed $2 billion in sales, which made 2019 the first year to see multiple $2 billion days this early in the shopping season.
And as of this morning, $240 million has already been spent online, representing 19.3% growth year-over-year, and putting the day on track to hit $2.9 billion.
Based on this data, Adobe believes its earlier forecast of $143.7 billion spent during the full holiday shopping season (Nov.-Dec.) remains accurate. That estimate represents a 14.1% rise from a year ago, according to Adobe. In addition, the three biggest shopping days — Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — will also see increases, it says.
Thanksgiving Day sales are forecast to jump 19.7% year-over-year to $4.4 billion; Black Friday is expected to grow by 20.5% to reach $7.5 billion; and Cyber Monday sales are expected to top the charts at $9.4 billion, an increase of 19.1% year-over-year — a new record.
The firm also sees a surge in mobile shopping this year, with 34.3% of all e-commerce sales being made via a smartphone, up 24.2% year-over-year. App Annie’s mobile shopping forecast had also predicted a record number of mobile shoppers, with a 25% year-over-year increase in time spent mobile shopping during the weeks of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The firm said shoppers will spend 2.2 billion hours globally (outside China) across shopping apps this holiday season.
Other notable trends include a rise in “buy online, pickup in-store” shopping — 61% will take advantage of this, leading to 27% more in sales over last year. Plus email promotions this season have led to 16.5% of all online revenue, up 10% year-over-year. Paid search accounted for 23.7% of sales, while social media led to just 2.8%.
In terms of products, shoppers are buying Apple AirPods, Apple Laptops, Samsung and LG TV's, Frozen 2 toys, L.O.L Surprise Dolls, NERF toys, Pikmi Pops, Fortnite toys, and games like Pokemon Sword/Shield, Jedi Fallen Order, and Madden 20.
“With the shorter shopping season and retailers starting their promotions earlier, Adobe is seeing holiday discounts already well underway even before Thanksgiving Day,” said Jason Woosley, Vice President of Commerce Product & Platform at Adobe. “For televisions alone, shoppers are already seeing discounts twice as deep as expected with average savings yesterday of 17.5%. Those consumers who grab their smartphone to do some quick online shopping after dinner are likely to find offers that are even better than this time last year,” he added.
Xiaomi, the world’s fourth largest smartphone vendor, on Wednesday shared its earnings figures for the quarter that ended in September. While the results fell largely in line with analysts' expectations, a drastic drop in the company’s growth underscores some of the struggles that handset makers are facing as they shift to services to make up for dwindling smartphone purchases globally.
The Chinese electronics firm posted Q3 revenue of 53.7 billion yuan, or $7.65 billion, up 3.3% from 51.95 billion yuan ($7.39 billion) revenue it reported in Q2 and 5.5% rise since Q3 2018.
This is largely in line with analysts' estimated revenue of 53.74 billion yuan, per Refinitiv figures, but growth is slowing. As a point of comparison, in Q2, Xiaomi reported QoQ growth of 18.7% and YoY of 14.8%.
Xiaomi said its adjusted profit in the aforementioned quarter was 3.5 billion yuan ($500 million), up from about 2.5 billion yuan a year ago. Gross profit during the period was 8.2 billion yuan ($1.17 billion), up 25.2% year-over-year.
The company said its smartphone business revenue during Q3 stood at 32.3 billion yuan ($4.6 billion), down 7.8% year-over-year. The company, which shipped 32.1 million smartphone units during the period, blamed "downturn" in China's smartphone market for the decline.
Marketing research firm Canalys reported this month that China’s smartphone market shrank by 3% during Q3. Despite the slowdown, Xiaomi said its gross profit margin of smartphones segment had reached 9% — up from 8.1% and 3.3% in the previous quarters.
Other than Huawei, which leads the handsets market in China, every other smartphone vendor has suffered a drop in their shipment volumes in the country, according to research firm Counterpoint.
But for Xiaomi, this should technically not be a problem. Long before the company listed publicly last year, it has been boasting about its business model: how it makes little money from hardware and more and more from delivering ads and selling internet services.
That internet services business is not growing fast enough, however, to be an engine for the overall company. It grew by 12.3% year-on-year to 5.3 billion yuan ($750 million) and 15% since last quarter. Either way, it accounts for only a fraction of smartphone business’ contribution to the bottomline.
Furthermore, parts of that business are facing some other challenges: Advertisement revenue has been falling for more than two consecutive quarters, the company says.
Xiaomi said two years ago that it will only ever make 5% profit from its hardware, something its executives told TechCrunch has been engraved in the company's "constitution." But the slow shift to making money off of internet services, while making less money from selling hardware, is one of the chief reasons why the company had an underwhelming IPO.
Meanwhile, the user base of Xiaomi’s Android -based MIUI software is growing. It had 292 million monthly active users as of September this year, up from 278.7 in June.
In more promising signs, Xiaomi said its smart TV and Mi Box platforms had more than 3.2 million paid subscribers and revenue from its fintech business, a territory it entered only in recent quarters, had already reached 1 billion yuan ($140 million).
But it’s hardware that continues to make up the biggest proportion of its revenues. The company, which is increasingly moving its gadgets and services beyond Chinese shores, said revenue from its international business grew 17.2 year-over-year to 26.1 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) in the third quarter — accounting for 48.7% of total revenue.
Much of Xiaomi’s international success could be attributed to its dominance in India, the world’s second largest smartphone market. For last nine consecutive quarters, Xiaomi has been the top smartphone vendor in India, one of the rare markets where the appetite for handsets continues to grow. Of the 32 million smartphone units the company shipped in Q3, more than 12 million of those arrived in India, according to Counterpoint.
In a statement, Xiaomi founder and chairman Lei Jun said the company is hopeful that it will be able to further grow its revenues when 5G devices start to get traction. The company has plans to launch at least 10 5G-enabled smartphone models next year, he said. No word from him on what the company intends to do about its services ecosystem.
You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.
Email delivery powered by Google
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
England vs New Zealand: Daryl Mitchell to make Test debut against visitors New Zealand hold a 1-0 lead in the two-match series after winning the first test on the final day in Mt. Maunganui on Monday by an innings and 65 runs.
Railway tests in regional languages More than 47.18 lakh candidates opted to use vernacular languages during their direct Railways recruitment exams in the past three years, with the hig
India one of the largest gold smuggling hubs in the world: report 'Conflict gold' from Africa, South America entering legal international markets through India, says IMPACT
Madhya Pradesh Information Commission takes to social media for speedy disposal of cases Now, it is admitting complaints, passing orders and levying fines on Twitter
