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Animated characters are as old as human storytelling itself, dating back thousands of years to cave drawings that depict animals in motion. It was really in the last century, however—a period bookended by the first animated short film in 1908 and Pixar’s success with computer animation with Toy Story from 1995 onwards—that animation leapt forward. Fundamentally, this period of great innovation sought to make it easier to create an animated story for an audience to passively consume in a curated medium, such as a feature-length film.

Our current century could be set for even greater advances in the art and science of bringing characters to life. Digital influencers—virtual or animated humans that live natively on social media—will be central to that undertaking. Digital influencers don’t merely represent the penetration of cartoon characters into yet another medium, much as they sprang from newspaper strips to TV and the multiplex. Rather, digital humans on social media represent the first instance in which fictional entities act in the same plane of communication as you and I—regular people—do. Imagine if stories about Mickey Mouse were told over a telephone or in personalized letters to fans. That’s the kind of jump we’re talking about.

Social media is a new storytelling medium, much as film was a century ago. As with film then, we have yet to transmit virtual characters to this new medium in a sticky way.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t digital characters living their lives on social channels right now. The pioneers have arrived: Lil’ Miquela, Astro, Bermuda, and Shudu are prominent examples. But they have are still only notable for their novelty, not yet their ubiquity. They represent the output of old animation techniques applied to a new medium. This Techcrunch article did a great job describing the current digital influencer landscape.

So why haven’t animated characters taken off on social media platforms?  It’s largely an issue of scale—it’s expensive and time-consuming to create animated characters and to depict their adventures.  One 2017 estimate stated that a 60-90 second animation took about 6 weeks.  An episode of animated TV takes between 1–3 months to produce, typically with large teams in South Korea doing much of the animation legwork. That pace simply doesn’t work in a medium that calls for new original content multiple times a day.

Yet the technical piece of the puzzle is falling into place, which is primarily what I want to talk about today. Traditionally, virtual characters were created by a team of experts—not scalable—in the following way:

• Create a 3D model
• Texture the model and add additional materials
• Rig the 3D model skeleton
• Animate the 3D model
• Introduce character into desired scene

Today, there are generally three different types of virtual avatar:  realistic high-resolution CGI avatars, stylized CGI avatars, and manipulated video avatars. Each has its strengths and pitfalls, and the fast-approaching world of scaled digital influencers will likely incorporate aspects of all three.

The digital influencers mentioned above are all high-resolution CGI avatars. It’s unsurprising that this tech has breathed life into the most prominent digital influencers so far—this type of avatar offers the most creative latitude and photorealism. You can create an original character and have her carry out varied activities.

The process for their creation borrows most from the old-school CGI pipeline described above, though accelerated through the use of tools like Daz3D for animation, Moka Studio for rigging, and Rokoko for motion capture. It’s old wine in new bottles. Naturally, it shares the same bottlenecks as the old-school CGI pipeline: creating characters in this way consumes a lot of time and expertise.

Though researchers like Ari Shapiro at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies are currently working on ways to automate the creation of high-resolution CGI avatars, that bottleneck remains for obstacle for digital influencers entering the mainstream.

Stylized CGI avatars, on the other hand, have entered the mainstream. If you have an iPhone or use Snapchat, chances are you have one. Apple, Samsung, Pinscreen, Loom.ai, Embody Digital, Genies, and Expressive.ai are just some of the companies playing in this space. These avatars, while likely to spread ubiquitously a la Bitmoji before them, are limited in scope.

While they extend the ability to create an animated character to anyone who uses an associated app, that creation and personalization is circumscribed: the avatar’s range is limited for the purposes of what we’re discussing in this article. It’s not so much a technology for creating new digital humans as it is a tool for injecting a visual shorthand for someone into the digital world. You’ll use it to embellish your Snapchat game, but storytellers will be unlikely to use these avatars to create a spiritual successor to Mickey Mouse and Buzz Lightyear (though they will be a big advertising / brand partnership opportunity nonetheless).

Video manipulation—you probably know it as deepfakes—is another piece of tech that is speeding virtual or fictional characters into the mainstream. As the name implies, however, it’s more about warping reality to create something new. Anyone who has seen Nicolas Cage’s striking features dropped onto Amy Adams’ body in a Superman film will understand what I’m talking about.

Open source packages like this one allow almost anyone to create a deepfake (with some technical knowhow—your grandma probably hasn’t replaced her time-honored Bingo sessions with some casual deepfaking). It’s principally used by hobbyists, though recently we’ve seen startups like Synthesia crop up with business use cases. You can use deepfake tech for mimicry, but we haven’t yet seen it used for creating original characters. It shares some of the democratizing aspects of stylized CGI avatars, and there are likely many creative applications for the tech that simply haven’t been realized yet.

While none of these technology stacks on their own currently enable digital humans at scale, when combined they may make up the wardrobe that takes us into Narnia. Video manipulation, for example, could be used to scale realistic high-res characters like Lil’ Miquela through accelerating the creation of new stories and tableaux for her to inhabit. Nearly all of the most famous animated characters have been stylized, and I wouldn’t bet against social media’s Snow White being stylized too. What is clear is that the technology to create digital influencers at scale is nearing a tipping point. When we hit that tipping point, these creations will transform entertainment and storytelling.

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1. Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings despite a seemingly constant beatdown in the press.

The company said it hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 percent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. And it earned $16.91 billion off all those users, with $2.38 in GAAP earnings per share.

2. Robert Swan named Intel CEO

Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. He stepped into the interim role as word emerged of then-CEO Brian Krzanich’s “past consensual relationship” with an employee.

3. New York cracks down on companies that sell fake followers

The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James has reached a settlement with Devumi, a company that made millions selling fake followers to unsuspecting customers. The state of New York found that Devumi had engaged in illegal deception and illegal impersonation in the course of fluffing up social media profiles with its automated accounts.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

4. Google will stop peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door

It looks like Facebook wasn’t the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users.

5. Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd

Speaking of Google: It’s no secret that the company planned to pull life support from the consumer version of Google+ in April. Until now, though, we didn’t know the exact date.

6. Cheap Internet of Things gadgets betray you even after you toss them in the trash

It’s not just while they’re plugged in that these slapdash gadgets are a security risk — even from the garbage can, they can still compromise your network.

7. Hulu announces a new ad unit that appears when you pause

Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video.

Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) announced today that its engineering school received its largest single donation in history. The donation was offered by Square co-founder and WashU alumni Jim McKelvey, for whom the school will be renamed, from the School of Engineering & Applied Science to The James McKelvey School of Engineering.

WashU did not disclose the donated amount and historically does not disclose financial information.

McKelvey has deep ties to his alma mater. McKelvey’s father, Jim McKelvey Sr., was a professor at the WashU School of Engineering for 23 years, before serving as its dean for an additional 27 years. In 2017, McKelvey donated $15 million for a new engineering building that will bear his father’s name. The serial entrepreneur is determined to improve the reach of the school to which he attributes much of his success – since it was there where he first fell in love with computer science.

“This is such a fantastic place to study,” McKelvey told TechCrunch regarding his time as an undergraduate. “At the time, I had no plans to be an engineer. I came in as an economics major and then discovered the engineering school.”

WashU is already one of the top private research universities in the country and its engineering school – which provides 40 different degree programs led by roughly 230 professors — represents the university’s second largest concentration of undergraduate enrollment. STEM majors and careers have continued to grow more popular – yet the supply of education and talent hasn’t kept up. The fight for talent in the Valley remains harder than ever and by 2020, the number of unfilled computing jobs is expected to reach one million. With the incremental capital and its connection to major McKelvey leaders like McKelvey, WashU hopes the donation can help the school satisfy the demand for high-quality technical education and seriously enhance its position as an elite engineering university.

Though the funds are not tied to any particular spending requirements and can be used flexibly, the school plans to use the money primarily to fund scholarships and faculty recruitment, retention and research. Additionally, McKelvey’s donation will be key to WashU’s initiative of expanding opportunities for interdisciplinary study between the engineering school and other departments.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, the engineering school’s dean, Aaron Bobick, highlighted his hope for inter-department concentrations involving Economics and Computing, Finance and Systems Engineering and various other combinations. “Engineering is a way of thinking and we need to produce folks that sit at the intersection of all these disciplines,” said Bobick.

WashU also hopes to allocate a portion of the donation towards increasing community engagement and establishing partnership programs with the growing tech ecosystem in St. Louis. “We need to be a place where the quality of both our impact and the people we produce is clear to everyone. We want to do more and do it at a higher level.” 

In the school’s release, Bobick outlined his large ambitions for the McKelvey School of Engineering:

“We are extraordinarily grateful to Jim Jr. and his family for their incredible history of generosity to the engineering school. Particularly now, while we stand poised to truly transform our approach to research, innovation and learning, this new commitment will allow us to advance the McKelvey School of Engineering into the next tier of top engineering programs in this country and the world. This tremendous gift creates new opportunities for our students and faculty to tackle the world’s greatest engineering challenges, and to dramatically expand computing throughout the university. At the same time, it helps ensure that a diverse population of students will have access to a world-class engineering education, and enable the school to be a catalyst for economic development for the St. Louis region and beyond.”

The donation represents the latest in a series of large gifts to universities with a focus on enhancing resources in STEM fields. WashU has also been pushing the expansion of its engineering school through a number of other avenues, having invested over $250 million since 2000, which includes 700,000 square feet in new engineering facilities, with two new academic buildings set to open in 2019 and 2020.

Uber, after announcing its intentions to get into public transit last April, is ready to launch in Denver. In partnership with the Regional Transportation District and transit data provider Moovit, residents of Denver will now be able to navigate public transportation within the Uber app.

For transit, Uber is serving two sets of customers: agencies and riders. For both sets, Uber is aiming to increase efficiency, enhance the experience, and increase equity and accessibility, Uber Head of Transit David Reich told TechCrunch over the phone.

Initially, the ability to purchase tickets via the Uber app won’t be available, but it’s on the horizon. The in-app ticketing portion, in partnership with Masabi, will be available in the coming weeks, Reich said.

“You’ll have that full end-to-end experience,” Reich said. “We’re trying to take the stress out of traveling so you don’t have to worry about waiting in line [for a ticket] and missing the train.”

While Uber is only launching this in Denver today, Masabi handles ticketing for 30 transportation agencies worldwide, including Los Angeles’ Metrolink, New York’s MTA, London’s Thames Clippers and Boston’s MBTA. Uber also has relationships with a number of cities already, Reich said.

“We’ve been speaking with dozens of transit agencies around the world,” he said. “Denver was super innovative, very future-thinking and was a great city to partner with.”

Moving forward, Reich says to expect to see Transit launch in more cities in the coming months. This is all part of Uber’s new efforts, under the leadership of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, to become a mulit-modal transportation provider. In April, when Khosrowshahi first announced Transit, he said,

“Whether you’re using mass transit for your morning commute, taking an e-bike for a mid-day meeting, using Pool to take a ride home or renting a car for the weekend,” Khosrowshahi said at the press event in D.C. today, “we want Uber to be there with you and we want to partner with cities to be part of our solution moving forward.”

Google today announced that Cloud Firestore, its serverless NoSQL document database for mobile, web and IoT apps, is now generally available. In addition, Google is also introducing a few new features and bringing the service to ten new regions.

With this launch, Google is giving developers the option to run their databases in a single region. During the beta, developers had to use multi-region instances and while that obviously has some advantages with regard to resilience, it’s also more expensive and not every app needs to run in multiple regions.

“Some people don’t need the added reliability and durability of a multi-region application,” Google product manager Dan McGrath told me. “So for them, having a more cost-effective regional instance is very attractive, as well as data locality and being able to place a Cloud Firestore database as close as possible to their user base.”

The new regional instance pricing is up to 50 percent cheaper than the current multi-cloud instance prices. Which solution you pick does influence the SLA guarantee Google gives you, though. While the regional instances are still replicated within multiple zones inside the region, all of the data is still within a limited geographic area. Hence, Google promises 99.999 percent availability for multi-region instances and 99.99 percent availability for regional instances.

And talking about regions, Cloud Firestore is now available in ten new regions around the world. Firestore launched with a single location when it launched and added two more during the beta. With this, Firestore is now available in 13 locations (including the North America and Europe multi-region offerings). McGrath tells me Google is still in the planning phase for deciding the next phase of locations but he stressed that the current set provides pretty good coverage across the globe.

Also new in this release is deeper integration with Stackdriver, the Google Cloud monitoring service, which can now monitor read, write and delete operations in near-real time. McGrath also noted that Google plans to add the ability to query documents across collections and to increment database values without needing a transaction soon.

It’s worth noting that while Cloud Firestore falls under the Googe Firebase brand, which typically focuses on mobile developers, Firestore offers all of the usual client-side libraries for Compute Engine or Kubernetes Engine applications, too.

“If you’re looking for a more traditional NoSQL document database, then Cloud Firestore gives you a great solution that has all the benefits of not needing to manage the database at all,” McGrath said. “And then, through the Firebase SDK, you can use it as a more comprehensive back-end as a service that takes care of things like authentication for you.”

One of the advantages of Firestore is that it has extensive offline support, which makes it ideal for mobile developers but also IoT solutions. Maybe it’s no surprise then that Google is positioning it as a tool for both Google Cloud and Firebase users.

Sarahah, the anonymous messaging app founded in Saudi Arabia that became an unexpected viral sensation with teens, clocking up over 300 million registered users before getting banned by Apple and Google over bullying, is making a return to the App Store — but not as you might think.

The startup has launched a new, free iOS app called Enoff (pronounced “enough”) aimed at organizations, tapping into the wave of employee activism and speaking out about unfair practices to provide a way for people in a team to give anonymous, one-way feedback to bosses and human resources reps.

Available also on the web, the aim is to provide a way to give feedback in cases of harassment, corruption and other tricky workplace situations where employees might fear repercussions for speaking out.

Enoff is going head to head with a number of alternatives already in the market for giving “anonymous” feedback in the workplace, including other apps like Blind as well as incumbent solutions that business might already have in place for getting feedback. But it’s also a return to the startup’s roots: the original Sarahah was originally built to let employees provide honest feedback anonymously to bosses, before it inadvertently got hijacked and turned into a hit with consumers.

This does not signal an end to Sarahah itself. Despite its origins in Saudi Arabia and all the potential controversy that might come along with that, the eponymous app now has 320 million registered users with concentrations especially in the US, UK, India, Egypt and Japan, according to CEO and founder Zain al-Alabdin Tawfiq. And it has been getting rebuilt to provide better safeguards and blocks against bullying, harassment and other negative uses that raised the ire of parents and many others.

Specifically, Sarahah is now tapping into APIs from bigger tech companies like Google to develop better filters that go beyond keywords to flag content based on sentiment and inference. (Tawfiq said that the company is also building its own technology, although with only 10 employees currently working for the startup, it’s slow work to create anything new in-house on top of running the app that already exists.)

The plan is to launch Enoff while resubmitting Sarahah to Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Android store in coming months to hopefully get it listed again. These days, people are using the app primarily via the web, where they can get to a user’s profile by following links on other platforms, Tawfiq said. Sarahah currenly sees “millions” of active users each month.

“We are working on improving the platform and protection measures,” Tawfiq said, of the bullying that eventually brought the original app down, he described it as “a very limited use case, but we’re working on fixing it.”

To coincide with the launch of Enoff and the work on rebuilding Sarahah, Tawfiq said the startup is working on raising a Series A round of funding to hire more staff, as well as pay for the infrastructure to provide the bigger app and build more of a business around it. He would not comment on how much Sarahah is raising, nor how much it has raised from private backers to date.

Enoff works like this: a company or organization initially registers its domain, which includes on-boarding where a person has to upload identification to get verified to become the company representative on the site. Once an organization has been added, a code to communicate with the representative can be shared with employees, clients, or partners. These individuals then register and can start to provide feedback.

That feedback, in turn, never gets shared with anyone except for whoever is the administrator of that organization, essentially running it like an open-ended tips line going to a single mailbox.

Tawfiq confirmed that Enoff will be free to use with no plans to add any paid tiers to the app, but Sarahah itself is quietly building other kinds of monetization into the wider platform. He notes that select advertising is now running in Sarahah and over time the plan will be to introduce wider data analytics services tapping into the platform’s wider trove of anonymous information, an area he refers to as “corporate solutions” that will draw on the fact that many organizations — Netflix is one — are already using Sarahah to run feedback campaigns, by providing more targeted analytics and sentiment analysis.

“The service we provide right now is generic, so individuals and companies get the same experience, but we have a great opportunity to provide added value services for companies to give them more benefits from the feedback they receive,” Tawfiq said. “We believe that the billions of messages that are available in Sarahah can be extracted, to find a lot of useful information to help companies improve their processes.”

In all, Sarahah’s continuing popularity points not only to how — despite its issues — we still seem to be craving, as an internet culture, more forums for revealing our thoughts; but that sometimes the simplest solutions, even if flawed, continue to have sticky attraction.

“I think that Sarahah was born with a clear objective. It’s different from other platforms because it was created to break down barriers around giving candid feedback,” Tawfiq said. “Focusing on this objective will help us grow our business even when other services like us have failed.”

A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even though they, too, want to spend their money on things that require a payment card, like Amazon.com purchases or mobile gaming, for example.

That’s where Step comes in.

The company aims to address the needs of what it believes is an underserved market in mobile banking — the 75 million children and young adults under the age of 21 in the U.S., who are still being forced to use cash.

This market isn’t the “unbanked,” it’s the “pre-banked,” explains Step CEO CJ MacDonald, whose previous startup, mobile gift card platform Gyft, sold to First Data several years ago.

Above: Step CEO, CJ MacDonald

“We’re building an all-in-one banking solution that primarily focuses on teens and parents,” he says. “We want it to be a teen’s first bank account. We want to be a teen’s first spending card. And we want to teach financial literacy and responsibility firsthand.”

MacDonald, along with CTO Alexey Kalinichenko, previously of Square and financial services startup Token, founded Step in May 2018. The 10-person team also includes several prior Gyft employees.

Last summer, Step closed on $3.8 million in seed funding from Sesame Ventures, Crosslink Capital and Collaborative Fund. Crosslink general partner Eric Chin sits on the board.

While there are a number of mobile banking apps out there today — like Chime, Monzo, Simple, Revolut and others — Step will specifically target teens, 13 and up, and other young adults with its marketing. Teens under 18 still need parents’ approval to sign up, of course. But the goal is to encourage the teens to bring the idea to their parents — not the other way around.

Step’s focus on this younger demographic puts it in a different space, where there are fewer competitors. Its more direct rivals are not the bigger mobile banks, but rather startups like teen debit card and bank app Current, or the parent-managed debit card for kids from Greenlight.

The mobile banking service Step provides will also aim to be more comprehensive than just a debit card. It will offer a combination of checking, savings and a Visa card that works as both credit and debit.

The card includes Visa’s Zero Liability Protection on all purchases from unauthorized use, and allows parents to set spending limits.

Parents will also be able to connect their own bank accounts to Step to instantly transfer in funds, which can then be distributed to kids’ accounts for things like allowances and chores, or other everyday spending needs. Step’s bank account itself is backed by Evolve Bank, so it’s FDIC-insured up to $250,000.

Unlike Current, which charges a subscription to use its service, Step aims to be a fee-free bank for consumers. Users don’t have to pay for their account, and there are no fees for things like overdrafts. Instead, Step’s plan is to generate revenue through traditional means — like interchange fees and by way of lending practices, once it has established a deposit base.

The company pays a 2.5 percent interest rate on deposits, offers a round-up savings feature and a range of budgeting tools and supports free instant transfers between Step accounts. It also provides access to a network of 35,000 ATMs with no fees.

Beyond simply facilitating mobile banking, Step’s bigger goal is to teach teens to become financially responsible.

“Schools do not teach kids about money. A lot of families don’t talk about money. And it’s a crucial life skill that’s not really addressed properly when people are growing up,” says MacDonald, who says he was lacking in life skills in this area, even as a young college grad.

“There were ‘Money 101’ skills that I had not learned — that no one had talked to me about. Things like building credit, how many credit cards you should have, debt to income ratio,” he continues. “A lot of people get released into the real world without experience [in those areas],” he says.

Long-term, after solving the needs associated with everyday banking transactions, Step wants to layer on other products and services — like tools that allow a family to save together for college, for example.

The company is launching the banking service under an invite-only system to scale up.

Today, it’s opening a waitlist and referral program. When you invite a friend, you each receive one dollar. Access will then be rolled out on a first-come, first-serve basis this spring. Users can join Step through the website, iOS or Android application.

Once upon a time, people had to wait for the Super Bowl to watch the ads. Those dark days are over. Now you can have companies sell you products on-demand, any time, day or night. Amazon has already debuted its latest Alexa ad, and now Microsoft’s getting in on the action — and this one’s a bit of a tear-jerker.

The software giant’s Super Bowl spot highlights some of the work it’s done to increase the accessibility of its products. Front and center is the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a $100 ad-on that makes the console more accessible to gamers with a range of different needs. The spot features a number of different children (and their parents) who are better able to enjoy gaming using the device. 

The Adaptive Controller was created with input from a number of different groups, including The AbleGamers Charity, The Cerebral Palsy Foundation, SpecialEffect, Warfighter Engaged and tested with help from various users. On top of its base functionality with two large pads, it also works with a number of different control inputs, which can be plugged into the rear of the product.e

An advertising pitch deck used by fast-growing short form video sharing app TikTok has leaked, providing a snapshot of usage in its biggest markets in Europe.

The pitch deck was obtained by Digiday which says it was sent to a large (unnamed) European ad agency.

Metrics and gender breakdowns for the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy are included in the deck. The slides are dated November 2018.

Germany and France come out as the top European markets for the video sharing app, according to the deck, with 4.1M+ and 4M+ monthly active users respectively, and an average of 6.5BN and 5BN video views.

Next is the UK, with 3.7M+ users (and 5BN video views); followed by Spain with 2.7M+ users (and 3BN video views); and Italy with 2.4M+ users (and 3BN views).

Last summer Beijing’s ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, said the app had passed 500 million monthly active users worldwide.

Analyst estimates suggest it’s had around 800M total downloads in total since launch in fall 2016.

Although usage stepped up in 2017, after Bytedance shelled out to acquire rival lip-sync video app, Musical.ly — paying between $800M and $1BN to bag and merge its 60M (mostly US) users.

In the UK, France and Germany TikTok users open the app an average of 8 times per day, according to the leaked deck, vs 6 times in Italy and Spain.

While UK users clock up the most time spent in the app, with an average of 41 minutes per day; followed by France (40 minutes); Germany (39 minutes); Italy (34 minutes); and Spain (31 minutes).

Users of the app skew female across all five markets but the skew is greatest in Italy and Spain, which both have a 65:35 female to male ratio.

The smallest skew is in Germany where the female to male ratio of users is 54:46.

The pitch deck also details ad formats TikTok is selling in the region, covering four ad products and how they are measured.

The listed ad products are: Brand takeover; in-feed native video; hashtag challenge; and Snapchat-style 2D lens filters for photos — with 3D and AR lenses listed as “coming soon” (2019, per another slide).

The slides do not include prices for the ad formats but Digiday cites one media buyer who told it the company is charging $10 CPMs for fixed buys. Though it says another media exec told it agencies are being given different rates, noting the person had heard higher prices for the brand takeover ad unit for example.

We’ve reached out to TikTok for comment.

South Park famously annoyed the world by triggering Echo and Google Home devices with familiar wake words. When Amazon’s at the wheel, however, the company is able to ensure that Alexa stays quiet, using a method called acoustic fingerprinting.

In the lead of to the Super Bowl, the company’s offered up a (relatively) easy to understand breakdown of why its celebrity-laden ads won’t wake up Alexa during the big game. With its own ads, the company ads a fingerprint of the audio, which is stored on-device.

Given the Echo’s storage limitations, additional fingerprints are stored in the cloud, where the assistant can cross check things before waking. The system generally works pretty well, though complications can occur in, say, a noisy environment (what Super Bowl party has every been noisy, though?), in which case, a longer clip is required to do its job.

Things, naturally, get a big trickier when Amazon isn’t producing the ad (as South Park fans can attest). In that case, the system cross checks audio with different users.

“If the audio of a request matches that of requests from at least two other customers, we identify it as a media event,” the company explains. “We also check incoming audio against a small cache of fingerprints discovered on the fly (the cached fingerprints are averages of the fingerprints that were declared matches). The cache allows Alexa to continue to ignore spurious wake words even when they no longer occur simultaneously.”

Foxconn is even more aggressively cutting back its growth ambitions around the world than we previously thought. In addition to the news yesterday that Foxconn intends to scale back its plans for a $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, leaving that state in something of a lurch, we have now learned that the Taiwanese company intends to scale back a $9 billion factory in Guangzhou, according to the Nikkei Asian Review citing internal documents. It lists trade war fears and a macro slowdown as the cause.

We talked about the lessons for economic development yesterday, but there is another angle around manufacturing flexibility that is critical to understanding this news.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dave Evans, who is building a startup called Fictiv, which is a “a contract manufacturer that doesn’t own any machines.” He thinks about manufacturing “more like cloud computing” where you can “scale up and down production as you would with AWS or a load-balancing server.”

In a world filled with fast-moving political eddies and fickle consumer demand, Evans ardently advocates for manufacturing flexibility. “No one is talking about how to build a supply chain that is agile enough to deal with different geopolitical climates,” he said. In today’s world, “supply chain planning is years or sometimes decades out” and yet, “if I look at policy or governments, or nascent trade agreements, that tends to be on quarters.”

Flexibility is ultimately about resilience. Faster adaptation allows companies to increase profits and reliability. “If you are going to build a robust business that lasts, then you need to have robust supply chains,” Evans said. You “don’t want to be a company that is a ping-pong based on the mood of Trump’s tweets.”

A huge part of what Fictiv is attempting to do as a startup is to offer that flexibility as a service. According to its website, the company has produced more than 3 million parts and can have turnaround times in some cases as short as a day. As I pointed out yesterday, it is these part ecosystems that often prove the biggest barrier to (re)launching manufacturing back in the United States.

Manufacturing flexibility is something that Chinese factories have prioritized for years. As an email correspondent with knowledge of these supply chains for large consumer companies discussed with me, China’s biggest strength may not be the ecosystem that has developed around Shenzhen and in Guangzhou, but actually the ability to scale up and down manufacturing by tens of thousands of workers in a week.

Foxconn, perhaps more than any manufacturer, has learned the importance of that skill. Its very survival is predicated on its ability to quickly adjust — at a scale of hundreds of millions of units — to the changing needs of its partners. When the economics of its plants don’t make sense, they shut them down, immediately. That may not be a positive for Wisconsin, but it is the competitive edge that America has lost over the years against much more flexible international competitors.

How can you compete and also invest long-term?

Tokyo’s Shibuya station is both a major rail hub and a huge commercial center, owned by the Tokyu Corporation, a private rail company.

Competition is a key value of capitalism. The more competitors there are, the more that prices can drop and the more surplus value that consumers can pick up. That’s why why we try to avoid giving any one company too much sway over its market.

The challenge though is that competition also forces companies to fight each other for small wins, rather than carefully placing investments for the long term. If survival or even just profitability depends on precise revenues this quarter, then dollars will flow to marketing to juice sales rather than to R&D to invest in the future.

This is the great irony of competition. Too much of it and you get stagnation, while monopolies can counter-intuitively offer huge incentives for innovation. There is a reason that Google and Microsoft today, Xerox a generation ago, and Bell Labs even further back produced some of the most fundamental research in technology in the past century — durable, monopolistic revenue and a long-term view all cascade together.

So it was interesting reading through this Financial Times long read about the success and failures of privatizing different train systems around the world. The basic line is that Japan has managed to privatize its rail while maintaining great customer satisfaction, while the UK has stagnated with ever higher fares and diminished service since it sold off public rail. Switzerland in contrast has robust service and a completely nationalized rail.

Why the difference?

There are a couple of keys to Switzerland’s and Japan’s success. First, they think in systems, which means they understand that even as rail companies, they are not just limited to “rail.” For instance, Japan’s rail companies are also major real estate developers and landlords. The more people who choose rail, the more consumers who might shop at the malls erected around large train stations. There is a unity here that comes from ownership.

But monopolies are still monopolies — why not just cut service and bleed profits out of the system? The answer is that Japan’s rail companies own the underlying tracks themselves, and thus are ultimately dependent on the long-term vitality of specific routes. From the article:

“Our railway has relatively attractive residential areas along it. We want to make sure it’s a good place for young people to keep choosing it as a place to live,” says Fumiaki Shiroishi, director of the railway division at Tokyu, which serves some of Tokyo’s most popular western suburbs. “Even if we can’t expect an increase in overall population there will be winners and losers among the railways. People gather where it’s convenient. There are places where the population will increase 30 per cent and places where it will decline 70 per cent.”

There is indeed competition, but of a more long-term variety. These companies understand that their ultimate worth isn’t just having a reliable timetable, but having such quality service over many years that people make permanent life decisions based on that performance. It’s also key that the rail companies will eventually recoup their investments due to the stability of their business environment.

To me, these debates over long-term investment are central to the challenges facing many startups today. Competition is keen. You build a scooter company, and suddenly there are a whole crop of challengers in the blink of an eye. Capturing value is the key to building a startup, but how do you capture value if you don’t even know you will exist in six months?

Particularly as Silicon Valley enters industries such as health care, education, construction and others, where huge investments in product development and research will be critical to success, taming the downsides to competition will be necessary for returns to multiply.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

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What’s Next

• More work on societal resilience
• I’m reading a Korean novel called The Human Jungle by Cho Chongnae that places a multi-national cast of characters in China’s economy. It’s been a great read a quarter of the way in.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Intel, it seems, didn’t have to look too hard to find its new CEO. Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. Swan, the seventh CEO in Intel’s 50 year history will also be joining the chip maker’s board of directors.

Prior to this gig, Swan was Intel’s CFO, grabbing that gig in late-2016 after holding positions at eBay and Electronic Data Systems Corp. Swan stepped into the interim role as word emerged of then-CEO Brian Krzanich’s “past consensual relationship” with an employee.

“In my role as interim CEO, I’ve developed an even deeper understanding of Intel’s opportunities and challenges, our people and our customers,” Swan in a release tied to the news. “When the board approached me to take on the role permanently, I jumped at the chance to lead this special company. This is an exciting time for Intel: 2018 was an outstanding year and we are in the midst of transforming the company to pursue our biggest market opportunity ever.”

Todd Underwood, the company’s VP of Finance, will become the interim CFO as the chipmaker looks to permanently fill that role. 

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, it won’t be a video ad.

Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial breaks before and during their viewing experience. However, Vice President and Head of Advertising Platforms Jeremy Helfand said the company realizes that having a video ad pop up as soon as you hit pause could be bad for both viewers and advertisers.

For the viewer, “It can be jarring — you think you’ve paused the content, but you’re still seeing sight, sound and motion.” As for the advertiser, they don’t want to create a 30-second ad that the viewer doesn’t see because they left for the kitchen or the bathroom, or because the viewer unpauses the show 10 seconds later.

Conversely, Helfand said that in during user testing, Hulu found that viewers accepted the format “if the ad is subtle and relevant.” So the Hulu Pause Ad is more like a translucent banner ad that appears on the right side of the screen. (“It’s like a car billboard on the side of the road.”) This makes for a better viewing experience, since it’s less distracting than video and you can still see your TV show underneath. And Helfand argued that it’s also better for the brand, because it allows them to get their message across in a quick and simple way.

Also, Pause Ads won’t appear until several seconds after you pause. That’s in case you’ve paused to rewind or otherwise adjust the video (which isn’t really an ideal time to show an ad). So if you start fiddling with the controls, the Pause Ad either won’t appear at all, or it will immediately disappear if it’s already on-screen. Similarly, it should disappear as soon as you hit play again.

When asked if this might give advertisers who are sensitive to where their ads appear something else to worry about — say if their banner shows up next to a risqué sex scene or a gory death scene — Helfand noted that Pause Ads won’t be appearing on episodes that have been rated TV-MA, and that Hulu allows advertisers to target or “anti-target” (explicitly avoid) based on genre, and it sounds like these capabilities will be further refined.

Hulu plans to launch the first Pause Ads in the second quarter of this year, and it’s already announcing two advertisers — Coca-Cola and Charmin. Helfand will appear in select on-demand content in the Hulu library.

The unit will probably continue evolving over time — the exact size and placement could change. Also, Hulu is still figuring out the exact pricing model, but Helfand said it’s envisioned as part of a larger package for advertisers.

And while it’s understandable for viewers to be annoyed when they see ads in new palces, Helfand suggested this is part of a broader push towards “non-disruptive formats,” where ads don’t interrupt your viewing experience. In fact, the goal is to make these new formats account for 50 percent of Hulu’s advertising within the next three years.

On the back of a strong showing for portfolio company Spotify going public last year and several biggies like Airbnb also slated to list very soon, VC firm TCV has announced its latest fund, the $3 billion TCV X, which has now closed and will start getting invested “soon,” the company tells me.

TCV’s previous fund — the $2.5 billion TCV IX — was closed in 2016 and focused on growth rounds. The firm says that it has made 21 investments out of that fund to date. Recent fundings have included travel platform Sojern, Tour Radar, home-exercise startup Peloton, activity booking platform Klook, ByteDance, LegalZoom and more.

“The amount we raised is about the opportunity in tech investing, it’s large and continues to grow,” Nathan Sanders, TCV GP and COO, said in an interview today about this latest fund. “We are not looking to have explosive growth but we’re increasing our size to meet the opportunity. It’s bigger than what we had before but we will stay focused and disclipined.”

TCV typically invests between $30M and $300M in companies.

The larger size of this fund compared to previous funds for TCV underscores bigger trends affecting the tech industry.

Startups are increasingly raising rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars — Crunchbase estimates that there were some $300 billion collectively invested in equity rounds in 2018, a high-water mark for the industry. Within that, deal volume was up 32 percent and dollar volume was up 55 percent over 2017.

For larger firms like TCV, that essentially spells raising more to spend more order to stay in the game.

Sanders confirmed that he thinks the larger fund sizes and larger rounds in general both were drivers in TCV going for $3 billion this time around. He added that while some are legitimately asking questions about startups that are staying private for too long and racking up sky-high valuations on paper in the process, this isn’t translating to pressure for TCV’s portfolio companies to jump into anything soon themselves.

“The amount of capital we’re seeing getting invested in high-growth companies means there are an increasing number of options for those companies,” he said. “Some will choose to stay private longer and some are using that amount of capital to grow faster. Our number-one priority for our companies is to help them grow and if the company is able to do that in whichever way is best, then the returns will follow.”

China’s internet firms are getting pally with giant state-owned automakers as they look to deploy their artificial intelligence and cloud computing services across traditional industries. Ride-hailing startup Didi Chuxing, which owns Uber China, announced earlier this week a new joint venture with state-owned BAIC. Hot on the heels came another entity set up between Tencent and the GAC Group.

GAC, which is owned by the Guangzhou municipal government in southern China, announced Thursday in a filing it will jointly establish a mobility company with social media and gaming behemoth Tencent, Guangzhou Public Transport Group alongside other investors.

The announcement followed an agreement between Tencent and GAC in 2017 to team up on internet-connected cars and smart driving, a deal that saw the carmaker tapping into Tencent’s expertise in mobile payments, social networking, big data and cloud services. Tencent, which is most famous for its instant messenger WeChat, went through a major restructuring last October to place more focus on enterprise-facing services, and the GAC tie-up appears to fit nicely into that pivot.

The fresh venture will bank a capital infusion of 1 billion yuan ($149 million) with GAC owning a 35 percent stake. Tencent and Guangzhou Public Transport will take up 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

A flurry of Chinese internet service providers have made forays into the automotive industry, marketing their digital and machine learning capabilities at old-school automakers. Besides Tencent, GAC has also recruited telecommunications equipment maker Huawei and voice assistant startup iFlytec to upgrade its vehicles. Search titan Baidu, on the other hand, operates an open platform for autonomous driving cars and has chosen state-owned Hongqi to test out its autonomous driving solutions. Ecommerce behemoth Alibaba has also set foot in transportation with a smart sedan jointly developed with state-owned SAIC.

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on trading volume, will now let you spend money you don’t have after it added support for credit cards from Visa and Mastercard.

Credit card usage in crypto is controversial. Aside from the risk — ask anyone who bought crypto last year… — top exchanges have gone back and forth on support. Coinbase, for example, stopped allowing credit card purchases a year ago but, when it still allowed them, customers were found to have incurred additional charges.

With many crypto owners getting “rekt” by a slump that has seen the market crash by around 90 percent, with some tokens now effectively worthless, the winds of change in the bear market are interesting to observe.

Coinbase is abandoning its conservative approach to the coins that it lists, while Binance — which operates on the opposite scale with support for a glut of tokens — has moved from being crypto-only to offer fiat currency options to customers. Support for credit cards is a major part of that.

The company, which is officially based in Malta, has opened fiat currency trading outposts in Uganda and Jersey, and it has plans to add similar ramps in Liechtenstein, Singapore and other places.

CEO Changpeng Zhao told TechCrunch last year that Binance plans to grow to 10 fiat exchanges in 2019, with “ideally two per continent.” Part of the strategy is to help larger, institutional investors bring money into the crypto ecosystem, a move that he believes will boost Binance and the crypto industry generally.

The credit card support has come via a partnership with crypto-focused payment company Simplex, but there are caveats.

Credit cards can only be used to purchase a limited set of tokens, those are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple’s XRP, Stellar (XLM) and NEO.

There are also geographical limitations. The Simplex service isn’t supported in some countries, while, in the U.S., it doesn’t cover the following states: New York, Georgia, Connecticut, New Mexico, Hawaii, and Washington.

Finally, support for banks is not universal, too, which means that some users will not be able to buy on Binance using their credit card.

Those that can are charged a 3.5 percent fee and must wait 10-30 minutes for their tokens, a Binance spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Once purchased, those tokens can be freely traded on Binance, which claims to list over 150 cryptocurrencies.

Still, the move may bolster the exchange’s trading volume which, while still the highest in the industry, has dropped below $1 billion per day in recent times.

At the time of writing, the exchange had traded some $666 million worth of crypto in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap. A lot of that depression is down to the market plummet, which has seen the overall value of that trading volumes fall and reduced consumer interest in trading, but giving more people the tools to buy might offset that somewhat.

“The crypto industry is still in its early stages and most of the world’s money is still in fiat. Building fiat gateways is what we need now to grow the ecosystem, increase adoption and introduce crypto to more users,” Zhao said in a canned statement.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Social media platforms are being urged to be far more transparent about how their services operate and to make “anonymised high-level data” available to researchers so the technology’s effects on users — and especially on children and teens — can be better understood.

The calls have been made in a report by the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee which has been looking into the impacts of social media and screen use among children — to consider whether such tech is “healthy or harmful”.

“Social media companies must also be far more open and transparent regarding how they operate and particularly how they moderate, review and prioritise content,” it writes.

Concerns have been growing about children’s use of social media and mobile technology for some years now, with plenty of anecdotal evidence and also some studies linking tech use to developmental problems, as well as distressing stories connecting depression and even suicide to social media use.

Although the committee writes that its dive into the topic was hindered by “the limited quantity and quality of academic evidence available”. But it also asserts: “The absence of good academic evidence is not, in itself, evidence that social media and screens have no effect on young people.”

“We found that the majority of published research did not provide a clear indication of causation, but instead indicated a possible correlation between social media/screens and a particular health effect,” it continues. “There was even less focus in published research on exactly who was at risk and if some groups were potentially more vulnerable than others when using screens and social media.”

The UK government expressed its intention to legislate in this area, announcing a plan last May to “make social media safer” — promising new online safety laws to tackle concerns.

The committee writes that it’s therefore surprised the government has not commissioned “any new, substantive research to help inform its proposals”, and suggests it get on and do so “as a matter of urgency” — with a focus on identifying people at risk of experiencing harm online and on social media; the reasons for the risk factors; and the longer-term consequences of the tech’s exposure on children.

It further suggests the government should consider what legislation is required to improve researchers’ access to this type of data, given platforms have failed to provide enough access for researchers of their own accord.

The committee says it heard evidence of a variety of instances where social media could be “a force for good” but also received testimonies about some of the potential negative impacts of social media on the health and emotional wellbeing of children.

“These ranged from detrimental effects on sleep patterns and body image through to cyberbullying, grooming and ‘sexting’,” it notes. “Generally, social media was not the root cause of the risk but helped to facilitate it, while also providing the opportunity for a large degree of amplification. This was particularly apparent in the case of the abuse of children online, via social media.

“It is imperative that the government leads the way in ensuring that an effective partnership is in place, across civil society, technology companies, law enforcement agencies, the government and non-governmental organisations, aimed at ending child sexual exploitation (CSE) and abuse online.”

The committee suggests the government commission specific research to establish the scale and prevalence of online CSE — pushing it to set an “ambitious target” to halve reported online CSE in two years and “all but eliminate it in four”.

A duty of care

A further recommendation will likely send a shiver down tech giants’ spines, with the committee urging a duty of care principle be enshrined in law for social media users under 18 years of age to protect them from harm when on social media sites.

Such a duty would up the legal risk stakes considerably for user generated content platforms which don’t bar children from accessing their services.

The committee suggests the government could achieve that by introducing a statutory code of practice for social media firms, via new primary legislation, to provide “consistency on content reporting practices and moderation mechanisms”.

It also recommends a requirement in law for social media companies to publish detailed Transparency Reports every six months.

It is also for a 24 hour takedown law for illegal content, saying that platforms should have to review reports of potentially illegal content and take a decision on whether to remove, block or flag it — and reply the decision to the individual/organisation who reported it — within 24 hours.

Germany already legislated for such a law, back in 2017 — though in that case the focus is on speeding up hate speech takedowns.

In Germany social media platforms can be fined up to €50 million if they fail to comply with the NetzDG law, as its truncated German name is known. (The EU executive has also been pushing platforms to remove terrorist related material within an hour of a report, suggesting it too could legislate on this front if they fail to moderate content fast enough.)

The committee suggests the UK’s media and telecoms regulator, Ofcom would be well-placed to oversee how illegal content is handled under any new law.

It also recommends that social media companies use AI to identify and flag to users (or remove as appropriate) content that “may be fake” — pointing to the risk posed by new technologies such as “deep fake videos”.

More robust systems for age verification are also needed, in the committee’s view. It writes that these must go beyond “a simple ‘tick box’ or entering a date of birth”.

Looking beyond platforms, the committee presses the government to take steps to improve children’s digital literacy and resilience, suggesting PSHE (personal, social and health) education should be made mandatory for primary and secondary school pupils — delivering “an age-appropriate understanding of, and resilience towards, the harms and benefits of the digital world”.

Teachers and parents should also not be overlooked, with the committee suggesting training and resources for teachers and awareness and engagement campaigns for parents.

We’ve written extensively about LG’s struggling mobile business, which has suffered at the hands of aggressive Chinese Android makers, and now that unit has dragged its parent company into posting its first quarterly loss for two years.

The Korean electronics giant is generally in good health — it posted a $2.4 billion profit for 2018 — but its smartphone business’s failing saw it post a loss in Q4 2018, its first quarterly negative since Q4 2016.

Overall, the company posted a KRW 75.7 billion ($67.1 million) operating loss as revenue slid seven percent year-on-year to KRW 15.77 trillion ($13.99 billion). LG said the change was “primarily due to lower sales of mobile products.”

We’ve known for some time that LG’s mobile business is struggling — the division got another new head last November — but things went from bad to worse in Q4. LG Mobile saw revenue by 42 percent to reach KRW 1.71 trillion, $1.51 billion. The operating loss for the period grew to KRW 322.3 billion, or $289.8 million, from KRW 216.3 billion, $194 million, one year previous.

Over the full year, LG Mobile posted a $700 million loss (KRW 790.1 billion) but the company claimed things are improving thanks to “better material cost controls and overhead efficiencies based on the company’s platform modularization strategy.”

LG used CES to showcase a range of home entertainment products — that division is doing far better than mobile, with a record annual profit of $1.35 billion in 2018 — so we’ll have to wait until Mobile World Congress in February to see exactly what LG has in mind. Already, though, we have a suggestion and it isn’t exactly set-the-world-on-fire stuff.

“LG’s mobile division will push 5G products and smartphones featuring different form factors while focusing on key markets where the LG brand remains strong,” the company said in a statement.

It will certainly take something very special to turn things around. It seems more likely that LG Mobile head Brian Kwon — who also heads up that hugely-profitable home entertainment business — will focus on cutting costs and squeezing out the few sweet spots left. Continued losses, particularly against success from other units, might eventually see LG shutter its mobile business.

Still, things could be worse for LG, it could be HTC.

The founders of Dadi — pronounced daddy — think men are in need of a wake-up call.

“Men [have] a biological clock just like women, which is something that people don’t talk about,” Dadi co-founder and chief executive officer Tom Smith told TechCrunch. “Infertility isn’t a women’s issue; It’s both a men’s and women’s issue.”

Smith believes Dadi, the provider of a temperature-controlled at-home fertility test and sperm collection kit, will encourage men to contribute to family planning conversations and become more aware of their reproductive health. The startup is officially launching its kit and long-term sperm storage service today with nearly $2 million in venture capital funding from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital.

“Our mission is to normalize the conversation around male fertility and reproductive health, and empower men with knowledge of fertility so they can have that conversation with their family,” Smith said.

Here’s how it works: Dadi customers order a kit online, masturbate and collect their sperm within the comfort of their own homes, drop it off with FedEx and wait for a full fertility report, which comes with a microscopic video of the each man’s actual sperm. To survive the trip to the startup’s laboratory — the New England Cryogenic Center — the Dadi-designed container injects preservatives, which are nested in the lid of the cup, into the sperm sample.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, Dadi’s service is FDA-licensed in all 50 states and costs a total of $198, including a test and one-year of sperm storage.

Dadi’s co-founding team includes Mackey Saturday, a graphic designer who created Instagram’s logo, and Gordon von Steiner, a former creative director in the fashion industry. The team has prioritized design and messaging of the product, in addition to security, privacy and high medical standards.

“We aren’t trying to sell hair pills, we are actually interacting with customers at a very vulnerable part of their life,” Smith said. “We feel like our value set, approach and thoughtfulness really differentiate us from anyone else in the space.”

One in 6 U.S. couples struggles with fertility, with male factor infertility a cause of 30 percent of those cases, per ReproductiveFacts.org. Startups want to improve these statistics, targeting an industry that’s trapped in the 1980s.

“We are in the direct-to-consumer era,” Smith said. “We reached peak app a couple years ago and I think a lot of the innovation that’s happening in the space comes down to individualized services.”

Dadi joins a cadre of privately-funded male fertility or men’s health businesses. Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, leads the pact. The 2-year-old business entered the unicorn club last week with a $100 million investment. Ro, formerly known only as Roman, sells ED medication online, too, and has raised a total of $91 million. Legacy, which freezes men’s sperm, recently won TechCrunch’s very own Startup Battlefield competition in Berlin. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round earlier this month from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.

It’s clear that VCs have woken up to the opportunity to disrupt fertility with tech-enabled solutions to age-old issues and now, entrepreneurs passionate about helping men broach sensitive topics, from infertility to erectile dysfunction to hair loss and more, are able to gain ground.

Here’s to more funding for women’s health businesses, which are in dire need of innovation, too.