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The basis of the classic James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” is an evil media mogul who instigates war between the U.K. and China because it will be great for TV ratings. There’s been a wake-up call recently that our most popular social networks have been indirectly designed to divide populations into enemy camps and reward sensational content, but without the personal responsibility of Bond’s nemesis because they’re algorithmically driven.

(This is part five of a seven-part series about virtual worlds.)

The rise of “multiverse” virtual words as the next social frontier offers hope to one of the biggest crises facing democratic societies right now. Because the dominant social media platforms (in Western countries at least) monetize through advertising, these platforms reward sensational content that results in the most clicks and shares. Oversimplified, exaggerated claims intended to shock users scrolling past are best practices for individuals, media brands and marketing departments alike, and social platforms intentionally steer users toward more extreme content in order to captivate them for longer.

Our impending cultural shift to socializing equally as often through virtual worlds could help rescue us from this constant conflict of interest between what we recognize as healthy interactions with others and how these social apps incentivize us to behave.

Virtual worlds can have advertisements within them, but the dominant monetization strategies in MMOs are upfront purchase of games and in-game transactions. Any virtual world that gains enough adoption to compete as a social hub for mainstream society will need to be free-to-play and will earn more money through in-world transactions than from ads.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’ll look at the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on the App Store, China’s demand for App Store removals — and soon-to-be-removals, it seems. We’re also talking about Facebook’s lawsuit over a data-grabbing SDK, Tinder’s new video series, the TSA ban on TikTok, Instagram’s explanation for its lack of an iPad app and how Democratic presidential primary candidates are performing on mobile and social, among other things.

Headlines

Coronavirus concerns send Chinese ride-hailing apps crashing, games surging

Well, after what I’m sure was a hectic few days for the folks planning the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the team announced today that they have officially decided to cancel the event happening this March, saying in a blog post that they hoped they would be able to reschedule an event for “later in the summer.”

In recent days, nearly all of the event’s top corporate sponsors announced that they would not be sending employees to the event due to concerns surrounding coronavirus. Microsoft, Unity, Epic, Amazon, Facebook and Sony had all bowed out of the event. GDC’s statement did not reference the virus.

The company behind GDC detailed that they will be refunding conference and expo attendees in full, though a blog post details that the group hopes to host a GDC event later in the summer, noting, “We will be working with our partners to finalize the details and will share more information about our plans in the coming weeks.”

GDC is just the latest tech conference to be shuttered in the wake of worldwide concern surrounding the outbreak of coronavirus. Yesterday, Facebook announced it would be canceling the in-person component of its F8 conference and we have already seen the cancellation of GSMA‘s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

A year ago, Lyft submitted a report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles that summed up its 2018 autonomous vehicle testing activity in a single, short paragraph.

“Lyft Inc. did not operate any vehicles in autonomous mode on California public roads during the reporting period,” the letter read. “As such, Lyft Inc. has no autonomous mode disengagements to report.”

The 2019 data tells a different story. Lyft had 19 autonomous vehicles testing on public roads in California in 2019, according to data released earlier this week by the CA DMV. Those 19 vehicles, which operated during the reporting period of December 2018 to November 2019, drove nearly 43,000 miles in autonomous mode.

The report is the latest sign that Lyft is trying to ramp up its self-driving vehicle program known as Level 5. 

The CA DMV, the agency that regulates autonomous vehicle testing on public roads in the state, requires companies to submit an annual report that includes data such as total AV miles driven and number of vehicles. It also requires companies to report “disengagements,” a term that describes each time a self-driving vehicle disengages out of autonomous mode either because its technology failed or a human safety driver took manual control for safety reasons.

That’s still far below established AV developers such as Cruise and Waymo, which accumulated 831,000 and 1.45 million autonomous miles, respectively. And it makes up just a tiny sliver of the total autonomous miles racked up by the 36 companies that tested on public roads in 2019.

The total number of autonomous miles driven in 2019 rose 40%, to more than 2.87 million, thanks largely to a notable uptick in public on-road testing by Baidu, Cruise, Pony.ai, Waymo and Zoox. While the number of companies with testing permits grew to 60 in 2019, the percentage of companies actually testing on public roads fell to about 58%. In 2018, about 62% of the 48 companies that held permits tested on public roads.

Still, the report shows Lyft is doing more than partnering with autonomous vehicle companies like Aptiv. Lyft and Aptiv launched a robotaxi pilot in January 2018 in Las Vegas. The program, which puts Aptiv vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network, surpassed 100,000 rides this month. Human safety drivers are always behind the wheel and the vehicles do not drive autonomously in parking lots and hotel lobby areas.

Lyft’s Level 5 program — a nod to the SAE automated driving level that means the vehicle handles all driving in all conditions — was launched in July 2017. Today, Level 5 employs more than 400 employees in the U.S., Munich and London.

The FCC has officially and finally determined that the major wireless carriers in the U.S. broke the law by secretly selling subscribers’ location data for years with almost no constraints or disclosure. But its Commissioners decry the $200 million penalty proposed to be paid by these enormously rich corporations, calling it disproportionate to the harm caused to consumers.

Under the proposed fines, T-Mobile would pay $91M; AT&T, $57M; Verizon, $48M; and Sprint, $12M. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media. This does not affect our coverage in the slightest.)

The case has stretched on for more than a year and a half after initial reports that private companies were accessing and selling real-time subscriber location data to anyone willing to pay. Such a blatant abuse of consumers’ privacy caused an immediate outcry, and carriers responded with apparent chagrin — but failed to terminate or even evaluate these programs in a timely fashion. It turns out they were run with almost no oversight at all, with responsibility delegated to the third party companies to ensure compliance.

Meanwhile the FCC was called on to investigate the nature of these offenses, and spent more than a year doing so in near-total silence, with even its own Commissioners calling out the agency’s lack of communication on such a serious issue.

Finally, in January, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai — who, it really must be noted here, formerly worked for one of the main companies implicated, Securus — announced that the investigation had found the carriers had indeed violated federal law and would soon be punished.

Today brings the official documentation of the fines, as well as commentary from the Commission. The general feeling seems to be that while it’s commendable to recognize this violation and propose what could be considered  substantial fines, the whole thing is, as Commissioner Rosenworcel put it, “a day late and a dollar short.”

The scale of the fines, they say, has little to do with the scale of the offenses — and that’s because the investigation did not adequately investigate or attempt to investigate the scale of those offenses. Essentially, the FCC didn’t even look at the number or nature of actual instances of harm — it just asked the carriers to provide the number of contracts entered into.

And why not go after the individual companies? They’re not being fined at all. Even if the FCC lacked the authority to do so, it could have handed off the case to Justice or local authorities that could determine whether these companies violated other laws.

As Rosenworcel notes in her own statement, the fines are also extraordinarily generous even beyond this minimal method of calculating harm:

The agency proposes a $40,000 fine for the violation of our rules—but only on the first day. For every day after that, it reduces to $2,500 per violation. The FCC heavily discounts the fines the carriers potentially owe under the law and disregards the scope of the problem. On top of that, the agency gives each carrier a thirty-day pass from this calculation. This thirty day “get-out-of-jail-free” card is plucked from thin air.

Given that this investigation took place over such a long period, it’s strange that it did not seek to hear from the public or subpoena further details from the companies facilitating the violations. Meanwhile the carriers sought to declare a huge proportion of their responses to the FCC’s questions confidential, including publicly available information, and the agency didn’t question these assertions until Starks and Rosenworcel intervened.

$200M sounds like a lot, but divided among several billion-dollar communications organizations it’s peanuts, especially when you consider that these location-selling agreements may have netted far more than that in the years they were active. Only the carriers know exactly how many times their subscribers’ privacy was violated, and how much money they made from that abuse. And because the investigation has ended without the authority over these matters asking about it, we likely never will know.

The proposed fines, called a Notice of Apparent Liability, are only a tentative finding, and the carriers have 30 days to respond or ask for an extension — the latter of which is the more likely. Once they respond (perhaps challenging the amount or something else) the FCC can take as long as it wants to come up with a final fine amount. And once that is issued, there is no requirement that the fine actually be collected — and the FCC has in fact declined to collect before once the heat died down, though not with a penalty of this scale.

The only thing that led to this case being investigated at all was public attention, and apparently public attention is necessary to ensure the federal government follows through on its duties.

An iPhone app built by controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI has been blocked by Apple, effectively banning the app from use.

Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the startup “violated” the terms of its enterprise program.

The app allows its users — which the company claims it serves only law enforcement officers — to use their phone camera or upload a photo to search its database of three billion photos. But BuzzFeed News revealed that the company — which claims to only cater to law enforcement users — also includes many private sector users, including Macy’s, Walmart, and Wells Fargo.

Clearview AI has been at the middle of a media — and legal — storm since its public debut in The New York Times last month. The company scrapes public photos from social media sites, drawing ire from the big tech giants which claim Clearview AI misused their services. But it’s also gained attention from hackers. On Wednesday, Clearview AI confirmed a data breach, in which its client list was stolen.

The public Amazon S3 page containing the iPhone app. (Image: TechCrunch)

TechCrunch found Clearview AI’s iPhone app on an public Amazon S3 storage bucket on Thursday, despite a warning on the page that the app is “not to be shared with the public.”

The page asks users to “open this page on your iPhone” to install and approve the company’s enterprise certificate, allowing the app to run.

But this, according to Apple’s policies, is prohibited if the app’s users are outside of Clearview AI’s organization.

Clearview AI’s use of an enterprise certificate on an iPhone. (Image: TechCrunch)

Enterprise certificates are issued by Apple to allow companies to build and approve iPhone and iPad apps designed for internal company use only. It’s common for these certificates to be used to test apps internally before they are pushed out to the App Store. Apple maintains a strict set of rules on use of enterprise certificates, and says they cannot be used by consumers. But there have been cases of abuse. Last year, TechCrunch exclusively reported that both Facebook and Google were using their enterprise certificates for consumer-facing apps in an effort to bypass Apple’s App Store. Apple revoked the tech giants’ enterprise certificates, disabling the infracting app but also any other app that relied on the certificate, including their catering and lunch menu apps.

The app was labeled as “beta” — typically a pre-release or a test version of the app. Besides this claim, there is no evidence to suggest this app was not used by Clearview AI customers.

Clearview AI chief executive Hoan Ton-That told TechCrunch: “We are in contact with Apple and working on complying with their terms and conditions.”

A brief analysis of the app through network traffic tools and disassembly tools shows it works largely in the same manor as Clearview AI’s Android app, which was discovered by Gizmodo on Thursday.

Like the Android app, a user needs a Clearview AI-approved username and password to use the app.

Chat bots were central to Facebook Messenger’s strategy three years ago. Now they’re being hidden from view in the app along with games and businesses. Facebook Messenger is removing the Discover tab this week as it focuses on speed and simplicity instead of broad utility like China’s WeChat.

The changes are part of a larger Messenger redesign that reorients the People tab around Stories as Facebook continues to try to dominate the ephemeral social media format it copied from Snapchat. The People tab now defaults to a full-screen sub-tab of friends’ Stories, and requires a tap over to the Active sub tab to see which friends are online now.

The changes could push users to spend more time visually communicating with friends and consuming content than exploring chat bots for shopping, connecting with businesses, and playing games. That in turn could help Facebook earn more money from Messenger since it’s now showing Stories ads.

TechCrunch was tipped off to the redesign by social media director Jeff Higgins who provided us with extensive screenshots of the update. These show the absence of Discover tab, the switch to just Chat and People tabs, and the People sub-tabs for Stories and Active. We poked around some more and noticed the Instant Games and Transportation options missing from the chat composer’s utility tray. That formerly offered quick Uber and Lyft hailing. Messenger’s M Suggestions also no longer recommend the Transportation feature.

When we asked Messenger about the changes, a spokesperson confirmed that this redesign will start rolling out in the next week, removing Discover and splitting the People tab. They noted that Facebook had announced last August that it planned to eventually axe Discover, and that the added emphasis on Stories was motivated by users’ affinity for the ephemeral social media format. They also told us that Transportation was removed in late 2017, and Instant Games’ removal from the composer is part of the migration to Facebook Gaming announced last July.

A look at the old Messenger Discover tab that’s being removed

Chat bots, businesses, and games are being hidden, but not completely banished from Messenger. They’ll still be accessible if users purposefully seek them through the Messenger search bar, Pages and ads on Facebook, buttons to start conversations on businesses’ websites, and m.me URL that create QR codes which open to business accounts in Messenger. The spokesperson diplomatically claimed that businesses are still an important part of Messenger.

But without promotion via Discover, businesses will have to rely on their owned or paid marketing channels to gain traction for their chat bots. That could discourage them from building on the Messenger platform.

The Rise And Fall Of Facebook Chat Bots

The update feels like the end of a four-year era for Facebook. Back in 2016, it saw artificially intelligent chat bots as a way for businesses to scalably communicate with people, deliver customer service, and push ecommerce. But when it launched the chat bot platform at its F8 conference that year, it arrived half-baked.

The typing-based semantic user interfaces were confusing, the AI necessary to make chat bots seem human or at least reliably understand their human conversation partners hadn’t evolved yet, and several of the launch partner bots like Poncho The Weather Cat were laughably useless. The public soured on the idea of chat bots, and attempts to improve them felt insufficient.

Messenger launched Discover in 2017 in hopes that free promotion and visibility might convince developers to invest in building better chatbots. Yet by early 2018 even Facebook was backpedaling, shelving its plan to build out a full-service AI personal assistant called M that you could ask to do anything. Instead, it’d merely make AI suggestions of different Messenger features to use like Stickers or reminders based on what you typed. Then it announced last year that it would move Instant Games out of Messenger and into Facebook’s dedicated Gaming tab.

A laughably bad interaction with old Messenger chat bot Poncho The Weather Cat

Now with Discover disappearing, Messenger seems to be surrendering the fight to become a WeChat-style monolithic utility. In China, WeCat serves not just as a messaging app but a way to make payments, hail a taxi, book flights, top up your mobile data, get a loan, find housing, or shop at businesses via mini programs.

But while that centralized all-in-one style fit Chinese culture, Western markets have experienced more of an unbundling with different apps emerging to handle each of these use cases. Facebook’s constant privacy scandals and increasing anti-trust scrutiny also inhibited this approach with Messenger. Users and the US government weren’t ready to trust Facebook to handle so much of our daily lives. Facebook Messenger also has to jockey with competition like iMessage and Snapchat that could undercut it if it gets too bloated.

So now Messenger is going in the opposite direction. It’s becoming more WhatsApp-like — simple, speedy, and centered around peer-to-peer communication. Visual communication through Stories, with replies to them delivered as messages, feels like a natural extension of this focus while conveniently offering a path to monetization. If Messenger can be the best-in-class place to chat, unencumbered by promotion of chat bots and businesses, users might stay locked into the Facebook ecosystem.

Facebook first showed off its 3D photos back in 2018, and shared the technical details behind it a month later. But unless you had one of a handful of phones with dual cameras back then (when they weren’t so common), you couldn’t make your own. Today an update brings 3D photos to those of us still rocking a single camera.

In case you don’t remember or haven’t seen one lately, the 3D photos work by analyzing a 2D picture and slicing it into a ton of layers that move separately when you tilt the phone or scroll. I’m not a big fan of 3D anything, and I don’t even use Facebook, but the simple fact is this feature is pretty cool.

The problem is it used the dual-camera feature to help the system determine distance, which informed how the picture should be sliced. That meant I, with my beautiful iPhone SE, was out of the running — along with about a billion other people who hadn’t bought into the dual-camera thing yet.

But over the last few years the computer vision team over at Facebook has been working on making it possible to do this without dual-camera input. At last they succeeded, and this blog post explains, in terms technical enough that I’m not even going to attempt to summarize them here, just how they did it.

The advances mean that many — though not all — relatively modern single-camera phones should be able to use the feature. Google’s Pixel series is now supported, and single-camera iPhones from the 7 forward. The huge diversity of Android devices makes it hard to say which will and won’t be supported — it depends on a few things not usually listed on the spec sheet — but you’ll be able to tell once your Facebook app updates and you take a picture.

That’s it, that’s the whole post.

Coronavirus fears prompt even more event cancellations, controversial facial recognition software is being used widely and DocuSign acquires Seal Software. Here’s your Daily Crunch for February 28, 2020.

1. Facebook cancels F8 conference, citing coronavirus concerns

Facebook has confirmed that it has canceled its annual F8 developers conference over growing concerns about the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. More specifically, the company says it’s canceling the “in-person component” — there may still be video presentations, along with live-streamed and local events, under the F8 umbrella.

At the same time, companies, including Microsoft, are pulling out of the Game Developers Conference over similar concerns. And the Geneva Motor Show was just canceled.

2. Clearview said its facial recognition app was only for law enforcement as it courted private companies

After claiming that it would only sell its controversial facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, a new report in BuzzFeed News suggests that Clearview AI is less than discerning about its client base, and has in fact shopped its technology far and wide.

3. DocuSign acquires Seal Software for $188M to enhance its AI chops

Seal Software was founded in 2010, and, while it may not be a mainstream brand, its customers include the likes of PayPal, Dell, Nokia and DocuSign itself. (DocuSign previously invested in the company, too.) These businesses use Seal for its contract management tools, but also for its analytics, discovery and data extraction services.

4. Senate passes ‘rip and replace’ bill to remove old Huawei and ZTE equipment from networks

Written as a response to recent concerns around Chinese hardware manufacturers, the bill would ban purchase of telecom equipment from embattled Chinese manufactures like Huawei and ZTE. It also includes $1 billion in funding to help smaller rural telecoms “rip and replace” existing equipment from specific manufacturers.

5. The world Bob Iger made

The Disney executive has been openly thinking about retirement and searching for a successor — a search that culminated in this week’s announcement that he’d be stepping down from the CEO role immediately. But Iger’s succession planning hasn’t stopped him from solidifying Disney’s dominance of the entertainment business, a position designed to last long after his departure. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. ‘Robot’ was coined 100 years ago, in a play predicting human extinction by android hands

Published 100 years ago, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Czech writer Karel Čapek is best remembered for bringing the word “robot” to sci-fi — and English, generally.

7. Catching up with Startup Battlefield

We’re trying out something new: As you (hopefully) know, TechCrunch hosts a number of Startup Battlefield events, and afterwards, those startups often go on to do interesting and newsworthy things. But there are so many Battlefield alumni at this point that we can’t cover every announcement. So occasionally, I’ll be rounding them up here.

This week, we’ve got news from Berlin 2019 competitor Nodle.io, which is crowdsourcing the connectivity of smart sensors by offloading the task to smartphones. And Nodle announced this week that it has acquired Internet-of-Things security company Brickchain.com.

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.

GDC’s top sponsors continue to pull out of attending the San Francisco gaming conference. Today, Amazon announced it would no longer be sending employees to the event.

In an update, the team shared that they would instead be hosting a “global online event” to share news that they had been planning to detail at the conference.

Amazon Game Tech is a “diamond partner” at the Game Developers Conference this year, a designation that signifies sponsors “who play an integral role in the success of GDC,” the conference says on its website. At this point, the only diamond partners who have not officially withdrawn are Intel, Nvidia and Google.

Facebook, Sony, Microsoft, Unity and Epic Games had all pulled out on the conference over concerns surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, Amazon joins them.

TechCrunch has reached out to the other remaining sponsors at the event.

With the next version of Windows 10, coming this spring, Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant will lose a number of consumer skills around music and connected homes, as well as some third-party skills. That’s very much in line with Microsoft’s new focus for Cortana, but it may still come as a surprise to the dozens of loyal Cortana fans.

Microsoft is also turning off Cortana support in its Microsoft Launcher on Android by the end of April and on older versions of Windows that have reached their end-of-service date, which usually comes about 36 months after the original release.

As the company explained last year, it now mostly thinks of Cortana as a service for business users. The new Cortana is all about productivity, with deep integrations into Microsoft’s suite of Office tools, for example. In this context, consumer services are only a distraction, and Microsoft is leaving that market to the likes of Amazon and Google.

Because the new Cortana experience is all about Microsoft 365, the subscription service that includes access to the Office tools, email, online storage and more, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the assistant’s new feature will give you access to data from these tools, including your calendar, Microsoft To Do notes and more.

And while some consumer features are going away, Microsoft stresses that Cortana will still be able to tell you a joke, set alarms and timers, and give you answers from Bing.

For now, all of this only applies to English-speaking users in the U.S. Outside of the U.S., most of the productivity features will launch in the future.

In a wide ranging discussion at the Air Warfare Symposium held by the U.S. Air Force, Elon Musk touched on some old and new themes, but one highlight of the discussion was the small window into hiring and firing practices at SpaceX — arguably one of the world’s most demanding engineering companies. 

The company prides itself on innovation and for its chief executive officer, that apparently extends to the interview process itself.

“[When we] interview people we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation,” says Musk. “At the interview point we select for new people who want to create new technology.”

The mercurial chief executive didn’t elaborate more fully on what proof of innovation looks like in the interview process or in an applicant’s previous work, but it’s an interesting bullet point on the company’s practices.

And the emphasis on innovation extends to the company’s incentive structure, advancement decisions and ultimately how long someone will remain at the company, Musk said.

“Incentive structure is set up that innovation is rewarded and making mistakes along the way but failure to try to innovate comes with a big penalty,” Musk said.  “You will be fired.”

It’s not just a failure to innovate, according to Musk. If the employee’s “innovations aspirations are not very good, they will no longer be at the company.”

This emphasis on innovation is critical for companies and nations to remain ahead of their competition. Musk said he doesn’t necessarily worry about intellectual property theft at either Tesla or SpaceX because hopefully the companies are developing technologies that are at least three years ahead of the competition.

“The way you achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough,” says Musk. “Speed of innovation is what matters. I do say this to my teams quite a lot. Innovation per-year is what matters.”

Although a company like IBM, with a massive patent portfolio and thousands of innovations locked in its laboratory might take issue with the sentiment, Musk says his point extends not just to companies, but to competing nation-states too.

Specifically, Musk mentioned the need for innovation if the U.S. is going to compete effectively against China, a country that could have an economy twice to three-times the size of the United States in the coming years.

“The foundation of war is economics,” Musk said. “If you have half the resources of the counterparty then you better be real innovative because [otherwise] we’re going to lose… The U.S. will be, militarily, second.”

End Game Interactive CEO Yang C. Liu has a refreshingly straightforward description of what he and his co-founder Luke Zbihlyj are up to: “We’re just building games. And to be honest, we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Despite this self-proclaimed ignorance, End Game has just raised $3 million in seed funding from an impressive group of investors: The round was led by the game-focused firm Makers Fund, with participation from Clash of Clans developer Supercell, Unity CEO David Helgason, Twitch COO Kevin Lin, Twitch VP Hubert Thieblot, Danny Epstien and Alexandre Cohen of Main Street Advisors and music executive Scooter Braun.

Liu told me that he and Zbihlyj got their start by building websites tied to existing games, such as PokéVision, a site for finding Pokémon in Pokémon GO. However, they were inspired by the success of simple, browser-based multiplayer games like Slither.io to create games of their own — first Zombs.io, then Spinz.io, then Zombs Royale.

Altogether, End Game says its titles have attracted more than 160 million players, with 1 million people playing in a single day. Zombs Royale, in particular, seems to have been a hit — the battle royale game (where a single map can pit up to 100 players against each other) was one of 2018’s most Googled games in the United States.

Liu said the team’s success convinced them to focus their efforts on game development: “Do we want to make products that people simply use, or games that people think about out when they’re going to school, or going to work, or dream about?”

Zombs Royale was supposedly built in less than four weeks, but Liu said that after its launch in early 2018, the team spent most of the year maintaining and scaling the game. Then 2019 was all about building a team and creating the next game, Fate Arena, a title in the new Auto Chess genre that’s supposed to launch on PC, mobile and other platforms soon.

Liu noted that unlike End Game’s previous work, which featured simple 2D art (“On Zombs Royale and Spinz, I did the art, and it’s terrible”), Fate Arena will feature a “3D, high-fidelity art style.”

But even as the company’s games start looking a little less primitive, the goal is still to develop and iterate quickly. Liu said he hopes to fund “many tries” at building other cross-platform, multiplayer games with this seed round.

“We pride ourselves on rapid experimentation,” he said, adding that the key is “not biting off more than we can chew. We design [our games] to scale from the beginning. We don’t necessarily need to be World of Warcraft, where you need to make 100 quests as the baseline. We’re focused on games with a small starting point that can scale into something much bigger.”

Supercell Developer Relations Lead Jaakko Harlas made a similar point in a statement included in the funding announcement:

Many companies are quick to point out how fast-moving they are. Then you come across a team like this and realize what being lean and moving fast really means. Yang, Luke and the team have already shown that they can ship accessible games that showcase a real flair for fun, and we look forward to supporting them in their quest for the next big hit game.

In emerging markets, up to 80% of the population may have to rely on informally-run public transport to get around. Literally, privately-run buses and cars. But journey-planning apps that work well for commuters in developed markets like New York or London do not work well in emerging markets, which is why you can’t just flip open an app like Citymapper in Lagos, Nigeria. Furthermore, mobility is a fundamental driver of social, political, and economic growth and if you cannot get around then you can’t grow as a country. So it’s pretty important for these emerging economies.

WhereIsMyTransport specialises in mapping these formal and informal public transport networks in emerging markets. They have mapped 34 cities in Africa and are mapping cities in India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Its integrated mobility API includes proprietary algorithms, features, and capabilities designed for complex transit networks in these emerging markets.

It’s now raised a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by Liil Ventures, that also includes returning investors Global Innovation Fund and Goodwell Investments, plus new strategic investment from Google, Nedbank, and Toyota Tsusho Corporation (TTC).

The platform now has more than 750,000 km of routes in 39 cities and the new strategic investment will drive further international expansion.

Devin de Vries, said: “We make the invisible visible, by collecting all kinds of data related to public transport and turning the data into information that can be shared with the people who need it most. In emerging markets, the mobility ecosystem is complex; informal public transport doesn’t behave like formal public transport. Data and technology solutions that work well in London or San Francisco wouldn’t make anything like the same impact, if any at all, in the cities where we work. Our solutions are designed specifically to overcome these contextual challenges.”

Mr. Masato Yamanami, Automotive Division’s CEO of Toyota Tsusho Corporation. “Our division’s global network, that covers 146 countries, is primarily focused on new emerging countries where people rely on informal public transport. Through strategic collaboration with WhereIsMyTransport, we will establish better and more efficient mobility services that help to resolve social challenges and contribute to the overall economic development of nations, primarily emerging nations.”

Alix Peterson Zwane, Chief Executive Officer, Global Innovation Fund said: “Informal and often unreliable mass transit is a significant problem that disproportionately affects poor people. We are excited to continue to work with WhereIsMyTransport to make mass transportation in emerging cities more accessible and more efficient.”

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

All around, this has been a tough week. The coronavirus is spreading and worry is running high as infections mount. In economic terms, global markets were repeated declines last night (domestic results here), and the U.S. indices are off again this morning.

There’s been plenty of bad news to read, even in our private market, startup-focused world. Yesterday the impact of COVID-19 on earnings became more apparent, bringing what has, for months, been an external concern to domestic technology companies. The problems are now. The past week’s market collapse into correction territory hasn’t helped,.

But the story so far has largely been public-market focused and with good reason: You can see the public markets contract in real-time. It’s far harder to see into the shifting dynamics of the private market. Today, however, we are going to try, all the same, by digging into some preliminary venture capital data.

I realize that the last few days have been awful. So, at the end of this piece, I’ve excerpted a quote from a recent interview I held with the CEO of Smartsheet, Mark Mader, about tech cycles, downturns, and getting through tough times. It’s perhaps useful today as the downward trend appears to continue.

Let’s start with a brief reminder of how elevated stock prices remain and what that means for tech multiples, and then look at early February VC results from the U.S., China and Europe. With that, in Sanskrit: अभिमुखी करोति.

Multiples, Markets

Before we dig into the venture capital data, a reminder that, even with recent declines, we’re still in warm waters as far as tech valuations go.

It wasn’t a fad. Yolo became the country’s No. 1 app just a week after launch by letting teens ask for anonymous replies to questions they posted on Snapchat. But nine months later, Yolo is still in the top 100 iOS apps and has 10 million active users. Now it’s safeguarding the app from predators while revealing a smart new feature for spinning up anonymous group chats, powered by $8 million in fresh funding.

“What we are trying to build is a new kind of network where there’s a fluidity to identity,” Yolo co-founder Greg Henrion tells me. “We weren’t sure if Yolo was here to stay, but we’re still ranking well and there seems to be a real opportunity in anonymity starting with Snapchat Q&A.”

Yolo is the first big win for Snapchat’s Snap Kit platform that lets developers piggyback on its login, Bitmoji avatars, stickers and Stories. This lets tiny development teams build apps that hundreds of millions of people, teens in particular, can instantly sign up for in just a few taps. Another Snap Kit app for meeting new people called Hoop recently spiked to No. 2 on the charts

We haven’t seen this kind of social platform success since Zynga’s empire rose atop Facebook. Spawning more blockbusters like Yolo could ensure that a Snapchat account is a must-have utility for the next generation.

Sleepless nights atop the charts

“For two weeks we basically didn’t sleep,” Henrion recalls about the chaos he and co-founder Clément Raffenoux endured after Yolo shot to No. 1 last May. “You’re trying to stay afloat. It was very, very wild.”

The basic premise of Yolo is that you write a question like, “Who’s my celebrity look alike?”, “What do people really think of me?” or “How could I be nicer?”. You’re then switched over to Snapchat, where you can post the question in your Story or messages with a link back to Yolo. There, people can anonymously leave a response; you can post that and your reply with another post on Snapchat.

Yolo co-founder and CEO Greg Henrion, in real life and Bitmoji

The result is that friends and followers feel comfortable giving you real talk. They don’t have to sugarcoat their answers. And that makes people race to open Yolo each time they get a message. Yolo has seen 26 million downloads across iOS and Android globally, with nearly 70% in the U.S.

Other anonymous apps like tbh (acquired by Facebook) and Sarahah (kicked off the app stores) quickly faded, and others eventually imploded due to bullying, like Secret and YikYak. Although tbh hit No. 1 in September 2017, it was out of the top 500 by November. It seems a combination of inherent virality via Snapchat, easy user acquisition via Snap Kit and sharp product design has given Yolo some staying power. It still managed 2.2 million downloads last month versus a peak of 5.5 million in its first month back in May 2019.

That June, Yolo quietly raised a $2 million seed round thanks to its sudden success. The team had been grinding since 2017 on a video reactions app called Popshow funded by a small pre-seed round from SV Angel, Shrug Capital and Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover. They’d previously built music video-making app Mindie that eventually sold to influencer collective Shots Studios. Popshow never caught on, so the team began experimenting on Snap Kit, building a more official Q&A feature for Snapchat than predecessors like Sarahah and Polly. Then, boom. Days after launch, Yolo’s usage exploded.

But to keep users interested, Yolo needed to evolve. That would require more funding for the eight-person team split between Snapchat’s home of Los Angeles and Henrion’s home of Paris.

An honest way to chat

The concept of a social app where users could shift between full anonymity and representation via avatar attracted its $8 million Series A to invest in product and engineering. The round was led by Thrive Capital, Ron Conway’s A.Capital, former TechCrunch editor Alexia Tsotsis’ Dream Machine, Shrug, Day One, Goodwater, Knight VC, ex-Facebooker Bobby Goodlatte, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and SV Angel’s Brian Pokorny.

That cash fueled the release of Yolo’s new group chat feature. You can set up a chat room, give it a name and generate an invite URL or sticker you can post on Snapchat, just like its previous question feature. Friends or friends of friends that are already in can join the group chat, represented by their Bitmoji instead of their name. Yolo suggests people join the more open “party mode” chats where their friends are active.

What makes this special is that once an hour, users can tap the Yolo Superpowers button to send  a totally anonymous message to the group. More Superpowers are coming, but there’s also an anonymous “Someone has a crush on [name]” message so you can secretly profess your affection to anyone or someone else in the chat.

“The limits of Q&A is that it doesn’t generate real conversation. It’s an ice breaker, but we also want conversations to happen,” Henrion stresses. ” ‘What do you think about this dress?’ The group chat is more about ‘let’s talk about the dress.’ ” The chats could be focused on people you actually know offline, or those you share interests with. The option to restrict group chats to either just your contacts or friends of friends “limits the amount of meeting strangers,” Henrion explains. “This is very different from the public communities like Reddit or the dating apps.”

Can “anonymous” be synonymous with “safe”?

Still, anonymous apps have consistently proven to be havens for cyberbullying and unsafe behavior. Without the accountability of having your name attached, people are free to say awful things. That can be even worse amongst teenagers who might get in trouble for being mean at school but not on an app.

Yolo first focused on messages blocking 10% of overall messages that contained offensive content. That meant blatant hate speech and trolling couldn’t spread through the app. “We’re strict on moderation. When looking at the reviews about bullying, it’s like nothing compared to any other anonymous app. I think we solved 90% of the problem.”

Now it’s working with Snapchat to safeguard the group chats feature. The goal is to ensure Yolo doesn’t actively recommend chat amongst adults to minors and vice-versa. Henrion says this update should roll out soon.

“It’s 2020 and we need to be very responsible” Henrion tells me. “Moderation and growth are the most difficult things to balance. It’s moderation first for sure. We don’t care about growth if it’s not healthy or sustainable.” The new funding also gives Yolo the luxury of pushing back monetization while it focuses on safely adding more users.

By making anonymity more private, Yolo has a chance to sidestep some of the worst elements of human behavior. Making fun of someone has less appeal if there’s no wider audience like trolls exploited in the feeds and comment reels of Secret and YikYak.

That could let the brighter side of anonymity shine through: vulnerability, honesty and deep connections that are enhanced by the absence of embarrassment. With all the change, uncertainty and anxiety that’s part of growing up, teens deserve a place where they can be open with each other and speak their minds. After all, you only live once.

Building a rocket is a big operation, even when you’re printing them from the ground up, like Relativity Space. The launch startup is graduating from its initial office, which is a bit cramped for assembling rockets, to a huge space in Long Beach where the company will go from prototype to first flight.

We recently visited Relativity at their old headquarters, which had the scrappy (literally — there were metal scraps everywhere) industrial feel you’d expect from a large-scale hardware startup. But except for the parking lot, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to put together… you know, a rocket.

So it was no surprise when co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis said that the company was just starting the process of moving to a gigantic new open-plan warehouse-style building in Long Beach.

Relativity CEO Tim Ellis is obviously excited about the new HQ.

“It’s a big step,” Ellis told TechCrunch. ” It’ll actually be the first factory we fully build out with 3D printers. This new space is actually big enough that we’ll be printing the first and second stages, and the fairing at the same time. The new ceiling height is approximately 40 feet, which will allow us to build taller – about twice the height of our current facility. We’re on track to start shipping parts to Stennis for testing later this year.”

In addition to the three “Stargate” printers that can print parts up to 15 feet high, they’ll have three more that can go up to 20 feet and two that can go up to 30. It’s a bit hard to imagine a single printed rocket part 30 feet tall until you’ve seen some of the pieces Relativity has already made.

Not only do the rockets take up a lot of space, but the company itself is growing.

“From two years ago to now we’ve over 20X-ed our entire footprint as a company,” Ellis pointed out. In other words, it was starting to feel a bit overpopulated in their old spot near LAX.

This the space as it is now; the image up top is a render of how it will look once active.

Assembly of the launch vehicle, called Terran 1, its Aeon engines, and R&D will all take place in the new HQ. It’s  nearly 120,000 square feet, and will be built as a very high-tech manufacturing operation indeed. There will be no fixed tooling, meaning the factory can be rapidly reconfigured, and will be highly automated. The company’s 3D printers aren’t like the simple ones used for rough prototyping but enormous, carefully monitored robot arms that perform real-time analysis of the metal they are laying down.

“It’s really the first autonomous factory, and it’s not just for rockets,” Ellis said. “Once we prove out the factory with this first launch vehicle, we’re convinced this works towards our long term plan of launching factories to Mars and building a wide range of products that you’re going to need there. It’s on the path for the long term vision but also a way for us to be a pioneer in this new value chain for aerospace.”

“It’s going to be cool,” he added.

There were the times when it seemed like Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger might be the last Hollywood executive standing.

Yes, Iger’s been openly thinking about retirement and searching for a successor — a search that culminated in this week’s announcement that he’d be stepping down from the CEO role immediately, with Disney Parks Chairman Bob Chapek succeeding him. (Disney says Iger will remain involved as executive chairman and will continue to “direct the Company’s creative endeavors” until the end of 2021.)

But Iger’s succession planning hasn’t stopped him from solidifying Disney’s dominance of the entertainment business, a position designed to last long after his departure.

Acquisitions have been the cornerstone of that strategy, with Disney acquiring Pixar, then Marvel, then Lucasfilm and most recently a big chunk of 21st Century Fox. More than anyone, Iger seemed to understand that the Hollywood studios’ continued success would depend on their intellectual property. It’s no longer enough to just to make a successful movie or series; a successful studio needs to own IP that could fuel cinematic universes, TV shows, theme parks, toys, games and more, indefinitely.

To be clear, even before Iger, Disney was no stranger to mining IP for both box-office success and its broader corporate aims. Nor was he the only Hollywood executive to pursue these strategies over the past decade. By now it’s a well-worn observation that virtually every big-budget Hollywood film is either a remake, a sequel or an adaptation of existing material.

But Iger was the one who made the biggest bets, repeatedly, and for whom those bets seemed to pay off most impressively and consistently. That’s clear when you look at the biggest box office successes of 2019 — Disney released seven of the top 10 films, with another (“Spider-Man: Far From Home”) benefiting from Marvel’s input and audience goodwill.

If virtual worlds are so enticing, why haven’t we already shifted to them as our online social hubs?

The thought of virtual worlds for socializing evokes Second Life (launched in 2003), where users created unique avatars to socialize, build and trade with each other. Contemporaneous press hype told us that our entry into the metaverse appeared imminent, and a 2006 cover story in BusinessWeek magazine featured an analyst who predicted that Second Life could displace Windows as the leading PC operating system.

That didn’t happen.

Granted, Second Life is still around, albeit with only a few hundred thousand active users. Eve Online is another long-running, open-world MMO where the experience is shaped by users’ contributions and social interactions. It’s been the subject of numerous studies on economics and psychology, given the depth of its data on human interaction, but it remains niche as well.

The popularity of Roblox, which surpassed 100 million MAUs and 40 million user-created experiences in August, and Minecraft, which surpassed 112 million MAUs, shows this movement gaining traction in a bigger way among the youngest generation of internet users.

There are both technical reasons and cultural reasons why participation in virtual worlds will finally go massively mainstream in the next few years.

On the technical side, most consumers have lacked the high-performance hardware necessary to meaningfully participate in advanced MMOs while going about their daily lives. And even if they had the right hardware, they weren’t entering one shared virtual space with all other users, they were just entering one instance of that world which was limited in scope and player count by the capabilities of a single server.

(This is part four of a seven-part series about virtual worlds.)

That’s all in the process of changing:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week. What an insane, heart-stopping, odd, and stuffed week. I’m utterly exhausted. But, in better news, all of that great fodder for podcast and chat, so today’s Equity is pretty ok if I may say so.

Danny and I chewed through all the stuff that we couldn’t get out of our heads, like the markets falling apart and DoorDash’s initial movement towards going public. But in keeping with the real beating heart of Equity, we also went over four venture rounds and spent some time talking about SoftBank.

We were also a little tired, so come laugh with us and avoid taking things seriously for a few minutes.

Here’s the week’s rundown. And, yes, I did figure out my mic in the end:

• The markets have lost faith in themselves, with indices falling sharply.
• DoorDash is going public! We talked through the company’s known numbers and results.
• Roblox raised $150 million at a $4 billion valuation.
• Three low, or no-code startups raised money, including $51 million for Unqork, $6.3 million for ProtoPie, and $3.9 million for Gyana.

We wrapped with whatever this is, other than utterly hilarious and terrifying. We wish you all a lovely weekend. Chat you Monday morning.

The Geneva Motor Show is the latest trade show to cancel over fears of the coronavirus. The Swiss auto show is one of the largest car shows in the world and is usually the venue where high-end and exotic auto makers roll out new models and wild concepts. The show, like most auto shows, is more than a trade show as its doors are open to the public.

The Geneva Motor Show joins other major canceled events such as GSMA’s Mobile World Congress and Facebook’s F8 conference. So far, the associations behind the upcoming New York International Auto Show have yet to announce its closure. The NYIAS runs from April 10-19 in New York City.

These auto shows are more than just an open exhibit for the public. Auto makers dump millions into massive installations and announcements. Years of work go into crafting the right message for each show and without the shows, auto makers will need to shift strategies to announce their latest models and trends.

Up until now, the Geneva Motor Show was advising attendees to avoid sick people — which is nearly impossible in the packed halls as people push and shove to see the latest supercar concepts.

“We regret this situation, but the health of all participants is our and our exhibitors’ top priority. This is a case of force majeure and a tremendous loss for the manufacturers who have invested massively in their presence in Geneva. However, we are convinced that they will understand this decision,” said Maurice Turrettini, Chairman of the Foundation Board, in a released statement.

The organizations behind the Geneva Motor Show state that they are now working on dismantling the show and determining the financial consequences for all those involved. It also notes that “tickets already purchased for the event will be refunded.”

A 9-year-old is smashing the shuttle far and wide, and frantically pacing back and forth on the court in Bangalore, India, as her competition refuses to back down. Her rival is not a human. She is playing against a machine that is mimicking the game of badminton legend P.V. Sindhu, toned down a few notches to adjust for the age difference.

By the court, her father, Jayanth Kolla, is watching the game and taking notes. Kolla is a familiar name in the tech startup and business ecosystem in India. For the last eight years, he has been helming the research firm Convergence Catalyst, which covers mobility, telecom, AI and IoT.

When his daughter showed interest in badminton, Kolla rushed to explore options, only to realize that the centuries old sports could use some deep tech.

He reached out to a few friends to explore if they could build a device. “I have always wondered how a younger version of players who have made it to the professional arena must have played like,” he said in an interview.

Months later, they had something better.

Sensate Technologies

Kolla founded Sensate Technologies last year and has hired many industry experts and data scientists from Stanford, MIT, and India’s IIT. Sensate is building solutions on deep technologies such as AI, ML, advanced analytics, IoT, robotics and blockchain.

In the last year, the bootstrapped startup has developed seven prototypes, five of which are for sports. It holds eight patents. Which brings us back to the court.

One of the prototypes that Sensate has built is the machine that Kolla’s daughter is playing against. In a recent interview, he demonstrated how Sensate was able to accurately map how a player moves on the court and goes about smashing the shuttle by just looking at two-dimensional videos on YouTube and mobile camera feed. This has been built using Computer Vision AI.

It then fine tunes the gameplay in accordance with the age difference, which is input into a machine that can now mimic that player to a great level, said Kolla.

A handful of startups and established players have sought to address the sports tech market in recent years. SeeHow, another India-based startup, builds and embeds sensors in bats and balls to track specific types of data that batsmen and bowlers generate.

Kolla’s aim is to turn Sensate Technologies into a global deep tech venture foundry and build 20 odd products that would then branch into multiple companies operating in 11 different industries.

Microsoft last year partnered with Indian cricket legend Anil Kumble’s company Spektacom to work on a number of solutions including a smart sticker for bats that contains sensor tech designed to track the performance.

But Kolla’s ambitions go way beyond sports tech.

“The best part about deep technology solutions and platforms is that you build solutions on these technologies to solve a problem in a particular sector and with very little incremental effort, they can solve problems in a completely different sector,” he said.

Kolla, a former product manager at Motorola and Nokia, among other companies, said the startup is also in discussion with one of the world’s biggest companies that is looking to license its tech for their healthcare stack. “This validates our approach.” He declined to name any potential clients as the talks have not materialized yet.