Many of the world’s largest economies will institute national digital currency banking standards with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Read more A new PwC report claims blockchain technology can add $1.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with the Asian continent standing to benefit the most.
Read more Paxful said the partnerships will allow users to trade bitcoin and tether using a lira-backed stablecoin.
Read more Bitcoin price jumped after a sleepy weekend while ether options interest has been weaker than the past month.
Read more For Coinbase users who don’t want to keep their funds on an exchange, the buying and storing crypto just became a lot easier.
Read more GoGet, a Malaysian on-demand work platform, announced today that it has raised a $2 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The platform currently has 20,000 gig workers, who are called “GoGetters,” and has onboarded 5,000 businesses, including Lazada Malaysia, IKEA Malaysia, Foodpanda and flower delivery service BloomThis.
While Malaysia has other on-demand work platforms, including Supahands and Kaodim, each has its own niche. Supahands focuses on online tasks, while Kaodim offers professional services like home repairs, catering and fitness training. GoGet is more similar to TaskRabbit, with GoGetters performing errands or temp work like deliveries, moving large items, catering at events, data entry and office administration.
Chief executive officer and co-founder Francesca Chia founded GoGet in 2014. The startup decided to focus on gig workers because there is a labor gap in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, she told TechCrunch.
“Today, the majority of ASEAN’s labor market are low- to middle-skilled, and the majority are not protected with job security, future career paths and financial services such as insurance and savings,” she said. “At the other end of the spectrum, over 70% of employment in ASEAN are from SMEs, who seek to scale without scaling full-time costs, and find it difficult to train and maintain a reliable pool of staff.”
GoGet wants to bridge the gap by connecting businesses with verified flexible workers, she added. GoGetters are able to switch between different categories of work, which Chia said gives the ability to learn new skills. Companies are provided with management features that include the ability to create a list of GoGetters they want to work with again and tools for recruiting, training and payment.
The Series A will be used to expand GoGet in Malaysia. One of the things many companies whose business models revolve around the gig economy need to grapple with as they scale include workers who are frustrated by uneven work, low pay and the lack of benefits they would receive as full-time employees. In California, for example, this has resulted in a political battle as companies like Uber, DoorDash and Lyft try to roll back legislation that would force them to classify more gig workers as full-time employees.
Chia said GoGet’s “vision is to bring flexible work to the world in a sustainable manner.” Part of this entails giving GoGet’s gig workers access to benefits like on-demand savings and insurance plans that are similar to what full-time employees receive. GoGet’s platform also has career-building features, including online trainings and networking tools, so workers can prepare for jobs that require different skill sets.
While GoGet’s short-term plan is to focus on growth in Malaysia, it eventually plans to enter other ASEAN countries, too.
In a press statement about the investment, Monk’s Hill Ventures co-founder and managing partner Kuo-Yi Lim said, “The nature of work is being redefined as companies and workers seek both flexibility and fit. This trend has been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses are transforming in response and require more elastic workforce. GoGet provides a community of motivated and well-trained workers, but more importantly, its platform extends the corporate people management systems to ensure quality, compliance and seamless workflow.”
Carl Pei, who co-founded the smartphone giant OnePlus in his 20s, has left the company, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Pei played an instrumental role in designing the OnePlus smartphone lineup over the years, including the recently launched OnePlus Nord, which has been the company’s biggest hit to date. Outside Shenzhen, China, where OnePlus is headquartered, Pei has also been the face of the Chinese firm, appearing at trade conferences, interacting with loyal customers and giving interviews to the media.
In the early years of OnePlus, Pei devised various marketing strategies for best positioning the company’s products and creating hype about them. In 2014 and 2015, when OnePlus struggled with scaling its inventories, the company sold its phones through invites and several other clever marketing techniques, including one in which people were required to destroy their current phones to buy a new OnePlus smartphone.
Also in the early years of the company, Pei lived almost exclusively in low-cost hotels in China and India to better understand the market and easily travel to new cities. OnePlus is now one of the most successful premium smartphone makers in India and several other markets.
“We didn’t have proper product management. What we lacked in experience, we made up in hours,” he said in an earlier interview. He talked more about the company’s early days and the state of the smartphone market at Disrupt 2019.
Once he publicly asked Samsung to hire him so that he could learn more about overseeing operations and logistics. “So, Samsung, today I have a proposal for you: let me be your intern. Seriously. I would be honored to learn from your team about how you’ve been able to scale, run, and manage your business so successfully,” he wrote on his personal blog.
Pei reached out to Pete Lau in 2012 through social media. The two started OnePlus a year later. “He said, ‘I want to change the world.’ I thought this kid has ambitious thoughts and dreams. I think it comes from the heart and it’s very important. I think he has tenacity,” Lau recalled in an interview in 2015.
Years before they started OnePlus, Pei collaborated with a friend and sold white-labeled MP3 players in China.
Pei, 31, is not joining Samsung, but has clarity on what he wishes to do next. He is starting his own venture, according to a person familiar with the matter. Pei did not respond to a request for comment early Monday.
OnePlus did not respond to a request for comment.
Alphabet (you know… Google) has taken the wraps off the latest “moonshot” from its X labs: A robotic buggy that cruises over crops, inspecting each plant individually and, perhaps, generating the kind of “big data” that agriculture needs to keep up with the demands of a hungry world.
Mineral is the name of the project, and there’s no hidden meaning there. The team just thinks minerals are really important to agriculture.
Announced with little fanfare in a blog post and site, Mineral is still very much in the experimental phase. It was born when the team saw that efforts to digitize agriculture had not found as much success as expected at a time when sustainable food production is growing in importance every year.
“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. What’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.
Much as Google originally began with the idea of indexing the entire web and organizing that information, Grant and the team imagined what might be possible if every plant in a field were to be measured and adjusted for individually.
Image Credits: Mineral
The way to do this, they decided, was the “Plant buggy,” a machine that can intelligently and indefatigably navigate fields and do those tedious and repetitive inspections without pause. With reliable data at a plant-to-plant scale, growers can initiate solutions at that scale as well — a dollop of fertilizer here, a spritz of a very specific insecticide there.
They’re not the first to think so. FarmWise raised quite a bit of money last year to expand from autonomous weed-pulling to a full-featured plant intelligence platform.
As with previous X projects at the outset, there’s a lot of talk about what could happen in the future, and how they got where they are, but rather little when it comes to “our robo-buggy lowered waste on a hundred acres of soy by 10 percent” and such like concrete information. No doubt we’ll hear more as the project digs in.
Disney is going all-in on streaming media.
On Monday, the company announced a massive reorganization of its media and entertainment business that will focus on developing productions that will debut on its streaming and broadcast services. And Disney’s media businesses, ads and distribution, and Disney+, will now operate under the same business unit, the company said.
Its major reorganization comes just days after activist investor Dan Loeb, a major investor in the company through his Third Point Capital hedge fund, called on Disney to cancel its dividend and redirect more investments into streaming.
Wall Street has already given its seal of approval to Disney’s new move, sending shares up nearly 6% in after-hours trading.
Disney’s announcement follows a significant reorganization of its release schedule to address new realities, including a collapsing theatrical release business; production issues; and the runaway success of its streaming service — all caused or accelerated by the national failure to effectively address the COVID-19 pandemic.
Planned theatrical releases of would-be tentpole films like “Black Widow” have been rescheduled, while other films, including “Mulan” and the upcoming Pixar film “Soul,” are seeing their first runs on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+.
“This reorganization will accelerate our growth in the dynamic direct-to-consumer space, which is key to the future of our Company. The new organizational structure, with content creation distinct from distribution, will enable us to be more effective and nimble in creating what consumers want most, and delivering it in the way they prefer to consume it,” wrote Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive officer, in an internal memo announcing the reorganization, seen by TechCrunch. “Under this new structure, our Company’s world-class creative engines will be able to focus wholly on developing and producing great original content.”
Production of new material for Disney’s many provinces of intellectual property will fall under three groups — Studios, General Entertainment and Sports. Leadership of these groups won’t change, with Alan F. Horn and Alan Bergman, Peter Rice and James Pitaro maintaining their respective positions within the organization, the company said.
Overseeing operations for this singularly large new operational structure will be Kareem Daniel, who previously helmed the company’s consumer products, games and publishing operations.
All of the men will report to Chapek.
“Given the incredible success of Disney+ and our plans to accelerate our direct-to-consumer business, we are strategically positioning our Company to more effectively support our growth strategy and increase shareholder value,” Chapek said in a statement. “Managing content creation distinct from distribution will allow us to be more effective and nimble in making the content consumers want most, delivered in the way they prefer to consume it. Our creative teams will concentrate on what they do best—making world-class, franchise-based content—while our newly centralized global distribution team will focus on delivering and monetizing that content in the most optimal way across all platforms, including Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ and the coming Star international streaming service.”
Studios will run all of the company’s development activities for live action and animated productions coming from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures.
General Entertainment will serve the same function for the company’s 20th Television and ABC Signature and Touchstone Television productions, along with its news divisions, Disney channels, Freeform, FX and National Geographic.
Sports will focus on ESPN and sports productions, including live events and original, and non-scripted sports-related material for cable channels, ESPN+ and ABC, the company said.
Overseeing the monetization, distribution, operations, sales, advertising and data and technology infrastructure for all of those groups will be Daniel. A longtime Disney executive, he formerly served as the head of the company’s Imagineering Operations, taking intellectual property and turning it into entertainment for the vast empire of Disney resorts and theme parks, before taking over the consumer products, games and publishing operations at the company.
“Kareem is an exceptionally talented, innovative and forward-looking leader, with a strong track record for developing and implementing successful global content distribution and commercialization strategies,” said Chapek. “As we now look to rapidly grow our direct-to-consumer business, a key focus will be delivering and monetizing our great content in the most optimal way possible, and I can think of no one better suited to lead this effort than Kareem. His wealth of experience will enable him to effectively bring together the Company’s distribution, advertising, marketing and sales functions, thereby creating a distribution powerhouse that will serve all of Disney’s media and entertainment businesses.”
The new structure is effective immediately, the company said, and expects to transition to financial reporting under this structure in the first quarter of fiscal 2021.
The company plans to hold an investor day on December 10th to unveil more of its direct to consumer strategies.
Year after year, a lack of transparency in how ad traffic is sourced, sold and measured is cited by advertisers as a source of frustration and a barrier to entry in working with various providers. But despite progress on the protection and privacy of data through laws like GDPR and COPPA, the overall picture regarding ad-marketing transparency has changed very little.
In part, this is due to the staggering complexity of how programmatic and other advertising technologies work. With automated processes managing billions of impressions every day, there is no universal solution to making things more simple and clear. So the struggle for the industry is not necessarily a lack of intent around transparency, but rather how to deliver it.
Frustratingly, evidence shows that the way data is collected and used by some industry players has played a large part in reducing people’s trust in online advertising. This is not a problem that was created overnight. There is a long history and growing sense of consumer frustration with the way their data is being used, analyzed and monetized and a similar frustration by advertisers with the transparency and legitimacy of ad clicks for which they are asked to pay.
There are continuing efforts by organizations like the IAB and TAG to create policies for better transparency such as ads.txt. But without hard and fast laws, the responsibility lies with individual companies.
One relatively simple yet largely spurned practice that would engender transparency and trust for the benefit of all parties (brands, consumers and ad/marketing providers) would be for the industry to come together and have all parties open their SDKs.
Why open-sourcing benefits advertisers, publishers and the ad industry
Open-source software is code that anyone is free to use, analyze, alter and improve.
Auditing the code and adjusting the SDKs functionality based on individual needs is a common practice — and so too are audits by security companies or interested parties who are rightly on the lookout for app fraud. By showing exactly how the code within the SDK has been written, it is the best way to reassure developers and partners that there are no hidden functions or unwanted features.
Everyone using open-source SDKs can learn exactly how it works, and because it is under an open-source license, anyone can suggest modifications and improvements in the code.
Open source brings some risks, but much bigger rewards
The main risk from opening up an SDK code is that third parties will look for ways to exploit it and insert their own malicious code, or else look at potential vulnerabilities to access back-end services and data. However, providers should be on the lookout and be able to fix the potential vulnerabilities as they arise.
As for the rewards, open-sourcing engenders trust and transparency, which should certainly translate into customer loyalty and consumer confidence. After all, we are all operating in a market where advertisers and developers can choose who they want to work with — and on what terms.
Selfishly but practically speaking, opening SDKs can also help companies in our industry protect themselves from others’ baseless claims that are simply intended to promote their products. With open standards, there are no unsubstantiated, false accusations intended for publicity. The proof is out there for everyone to see.
How ad tech is embracing open source
In the ad tech space, companies such as MoPub, Appodeal and AppsFlyer are just a few that have already made some or all of their SDKs available through an open-source license.
All of these companies have decided to use an open-source approach because they recognize the importance of transparency and trust, especially when you are placing the safety and reputation of your brand in the hands of an algorithm. However, the majority of SDKs remain closed.
Relying on forward-thinking companies to set their own transparency levels will only take our industry so far. It’s time for stronger action around trust and data transparency. In the same way that GDPR and COPPA have required companies to address privacy and, ultimately, to have forced a change that was needed, open-sourcing our SDKs will take the ad-marketing space to new heights and drive new levels of trust and deployment with our clients, competitors, legislators and consumers.
The industry-wide challenge of transparency won’t be solved any time soon, but the positive news is that there is movement in the right direction, with steps that some companies are already taking and others can easily take. By implementing measures to ensure brand-safe placements and helping limit ad fraud; improving relationships between brands, agencies, and programmatic partners; and bringing clarity to consumer data use; confidence in the advertising industry will improve and opportunities will subsequently grow.
That’s why we are calling on all ad/marketing companies to take this step forward with us — for the benefit of our consumers, brands, providers and industry at large — to embrace open-source SDKs as the way to engender trust, transparency and industry transformation. In doing so, we will all be rewarded with consumers who are more trusting of brands and brand advertising, and subsequently, brands who trust us and seek opportunities to implement more sophisticated solutions and grow their business.