Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Kroger, one of America’s largest grocery chains, experiments with ghost kitchens and delivery in the Midwest

• October 8, 2020
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The Kroger Co., one of the biggest grocery chains in the Midwest is dipping its toe into on-demand delivery and the ghost kitchen craze through a partnership with an Indianapolis-based startup, ClusterTruck. Supermarkets would seem to be logical places to site the kinds of ghost kitchens that have caught investor’s eye over the past few

The Kroger Co., one of the biggest grocery chains in the Midwest is dipping its toe into on-demand delivery and the ghost kitchen craze through a partnership with an Indianapolis-based startup, ClusterTruck.

Supermarkets would seem to be logical places to site the kinds of ghost kitchens that have caught investor’s eye over the past few years and it wouldn’t be the first time that business models from startup companies bubbled up into large national brands, who are better positioned to capitalize on the trends.

Think about the various meal prep kits that launched and raised millions of dollars before being taken over or copied by big retail groceries. Meal prep kits are everywhere in the grocery store these days and supermarkets have had hot food counters dating back decades at least.

Through the partnership with ClusterTruck, Kroger is expanding on a pilot conducted last year, where the grocer set aside 1,000 square feet at participating stores in Carmel and Indianapolis, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio for ClusterTruck staff to cook meals for delivery and in-store pickup.

“Kroger remains focused on providing our customers with fresh food and experiences enabled by industry-leading insights and transformative technology,” said Dan De La  Rosa, Kroger’s group vice president of fresh merchandising, in a statement. “The new on-premise  kitchen, in partnership with ClusterTruck, is an innovation that streamlines ordering,  preparation and delivery, supporting Kroger as we meet the sustained customer demand for quick, fresh restaurant-quality meals, especially as we navigate an unprecedented health crisis that has affected every aspect of our lives, including  mealtime.” 

The idea, according to Kroger, is to continue to capitalize on the shift to digital deliveries and sales. In the second quarter of the year, the company said it saw over 100% growth in its digital sales.

Ghost kitchens (or cloud kitchens) caught investors’ attention when Uber co-founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick raised over a hundred million dollars to make the idea his next big bet after Uber. Interest and investment into the model, which sees companies offer food prep and storage spaces for would-be food truck and delivery entrepreneurs, soared. Kalanick’s CloudKitchens have gone on to raise several hundreds of millions of dollars and spawned competitors like the Pasadena, Calif.-based company Kitchen United.

Not everyone is convinced that the dark kitchen or cloud kitchen trend is all that it’s made out to be. My colleagues at TechCrunch have taken the idea to task for its reliance on some WeWork -ian assumptions around margins.

But if anything could make the model go, it’s the combination of existing infrastructure and digital efficiencies. That’s likely what Kroger is hoping to leverage.

It’s an interesting experiment at least and one worth tracking.

News: U.S. Space Force is getting an immersive space sim training tool built in part by the VFX studio behind ‘The Mandalorian’

• October 8, 2020
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The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so they relatively new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim, in partnership with The Third Floor, a Hollywood VFX firm that worked on blockbusters including Gravity, The Martian

The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so they relatively new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim, in partnership with The Third Floor, a Hollywood VFX firm that worked on blockbusters including Gravity, The Martian and The Mandalorian. The goal is to generate a simulator that can replicate real-world physics, and provide interactive training capabilities for the Space Force.

In total, the partners have received $2 million towards development of the sim, including a $1 million contract from the Space Force itself, as well as $1 million in funding from ATX Venture Partners. The end result will be called the “Slingshot Orbital Laboratory,” and will be used to provide Space Force members with a better understanding of how objects and spacecraft operate and behave in the unique theater of outer space.

“Space operators need to understand complicated concepts like astrodynamics, the effects of various items in orbit, and how spacecrafts maneuver among other objects in space—all of which demand more adaptive, interactive, and tailorable educational tools than what we are currently using,” said Col. Max Lantz, Commandant, National Security Space Institute, United States Air Force in a press release. “Building an immersive environment to drive better comprehension of these foundational theories will be vital to support the Space Force.”

Slingshot Aerospace, which is a provider of data analytics, tools and computer vision related to both aerospace and terrestrial intelligence, will be handling all the informatics components of the system, while The Third Floor will take care of the immersive visuals. The Laboratory will aim to be a tool that’s simple to use, with the goal of creating a final product that’s accessible to service members with any level of education and technical understanding.

Anyone else getting Ender’s Game Battle Room vibes from this announcement?

News: IBM plans to spin off infrastructure services as a separate $19B business

• October 8, 2020
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IBM, a company that originally made its name out of its leadership in building a myriad of enterprise hardware (quite literally: its name is an abbreviation for International Business Machines), is taking one more step away from that legacy and deeper into the world of cloud services. The company today announced that it plans to

IBM, a company that originally made its name out of its leadership in building a myriad of enterprise hardware (quite literally: its name is an abbreviation for International Business Machines), is taking one more step away from that legacy and deeper into the world of cloud services. The company today announced that it plans to spin off its managed infrastructure services unit, a $19 billion business, to help it focus more squarely on newer opportunities in hybrid cloud applications and artificial intelligence.

Infrastrucuture services includes a range of services based around legacy infrastructure and digital transformation related to it. It includes things like testing and assembly, but also  product engineering and lab services, among other things. A spokesperson confirmed to me that the deal will not include the company’s servers business, only infrastructure services.

IBM said it expects to complete the process — a tax-free spinoff for shareholders — by the end of 2021. It has not yet given a name to “NewCo” but it said that out of the gate the spun off company will have 90,000 employees, 4,600 big enterprise clients in 115 countries, a backlog of $60 billion in business, “and more than twice the scale of its nearest competitor” in the area of infrastructure services. Others that compete against it include the likes of BMC and Microsoft.

At the same time that IBM announced the news, it also gave some updated guidance for Q3, which it plans to report officially later this month. It said it expects revenues of $17.6 billion, with GAAP diluted earnings per share from continuing operations of $1.89, and operating (non-GAAP) earnings per share of $2.58. As a point of comparison, in Q3 2019 it reported higher revenues of $18 billion. Last quarter it had revenues of $18.1 billion. Tellingly, the divisions that contained infrastructure services saw declines last quarter.

The market seems to like the news: IBM shares are trading up some 10% ahead of the market opening.

The move is a significant shift for the company and underscores a bigger sea change in how enterprise IT has evolved and looks to continue changing in the future.

IBM is betting that legacy infrastructure and the servicing of it, while continuing to net revenues, will not grow as it has in the past, and as companies continue with their modernization (or “digital transformation,” as consultants like to refer to it today), they will turn increasingly to outsourced infrastructure and using cloud services, both to run their businesses and to build the services that interface with consumers.

IBM, often referred to as “Big Blue”, is using the announcement as the start of an effort to streamline its business to spur growth (maybe we’ll have to rename it “Medium Blue.”).

“IBM is laser-focused on the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO, in a statement. “Client buying needs for application and infrastructure services are diverging, while adoption of our hybrid cloud platform is accelerating. Now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best. IBM will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. NewCo will have greater agility to design, run and modernize the infrastructure of the world’s most important organizations. Both companies will be on an improved growth trajectory with greater ability to partner and capture new opportunities –creating value for clients and shareholders.”

Its purchase of Red Hat in 2019 is perhaps its most notable investment in recent times in IBM’s own transformation.

“We have positioned IBM for the new era of hybrid cloud,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM Executive Chairman in a statement. “Our multi-year transformation created the foundation for the open hybrid cloud platform, which we then accelerated with the acquisition of Red Hat. At the same time, our managed infrastructure services business has established itself as the industry leader, with unrivaled expertise in complex and mission-critical infrastructure work. As two independent companies, IBM and NewCo will capitalize on their respective strengths. IBM will accelerate clients’digital transformation journeys, and NewCo will accelerate clients’infrastructure modernization efforts. This focus will result in greater value, increased innovation, and faster execution for our clients.”

More to come.

News: MessageBird, the ‘omnichannel platform-as-a-service,’ raises $200M Series C at $3B valuation

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MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Spark Capital. The new investment gives 2011-founded MessageBird a whopping $3 billion valuation, and includes participation from Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and New View Capital. Existing investors Accel, Atomico, and

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-headquartered cloud communications company, has raised $200 million in Series C funding in a round led by Silicon Valley’s Spark Capital.

The new investment gives 2011-founded MessageBird a whopping $3 billion valuation, and includes participation from Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and New View Capital. Existing investors Accel, Atomico, and Y Combinator also followed on.

Notably, MessageBird spent its first six years largely bootstrapped, claiming to have been profitable from day one. Aside from going through YC’s accelerator programme, the company’s first institutional investment came in late 2017 when it raised $60 million in Series A funding from U.S-based Accel and Europe’s Atomico. TechCrunch understands that off the back of accelerated growth, a $40 million Series B was quietly closed in February 2019 from existing investors but never announced.

Originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in a API — MessageBird has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Telegram, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omni-channel.

“People think of live chat as a ‘live’ channel, but [there’s] no ability to jump to other channels,” Vis told me in June when the company launched its omni-channel chat widget and Intercom competitor. “People still have to wait with a browser window open for a response during peak times. With the launch of the first-ever omni-channel widget, customers can now opt to have a business get back to them on WhatsApp, Messenger or the messaging platform of their choice. This means no more customers waiting in line, online, and agents don’t get flooded with tickets and can better manage customer relationships and response times”.

In a call earlier this week, Vis told me that the Series C was raised remotely during lockdown, and comes at a time where enterprises are increasingly looking for “messaging-first” customer communication tools across channels. In part, he puts this down to the coronavirus trend of companies wanting to move their sales and customer service fully remote and online, but concedes that with enterprise sales cycles typically quite long, in many instances this expedited digitisation was already underway.

Messagebird says one third of its 15,000 customers have now transitioned to using its omnichannel cloud communications products. Customers include Lufthansa Airlines, Heineken, Hugo Boss, Rituals Cosmetics and SAP, as well as fast-growing brands such as Uber, Glovo, HelloFresh, and Deliveroo.

To that end, MessageBird says the funding will be used to triple the size of its global team and further expand into its core markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Vis doesn’t rule out M&A activity, either, including both acqui-hires and companies with products or technology that can add value to MessageBird’s omni-channel offering.

One area the company is bolstering, for example, is the automation capabilities of its “Flow Builder” software, which aims to let customer service agents automate a portion of customer queries via AI-powered chatbots and FAQ bots. The bigger vision is that Flow Builder evolves to become an RPA (robotic process automation) platform for external business messaging.

Vis also says that MessageBird is now officially a “work from anywhere” company, even though he was initially slightly skeptical towards remote working. Now a full convert, he says in many instances at MessageBird the option to work remotely has already resulted in increased productivity and a better work-life balance. As the company continues to expand (and with an eye on a future IPO), he also says that being remote-first should help with recruitment, citing talent as any fast-growing company’s biggest challenge.

News: Grid AI raises $18.6M Series A to help AI researchers and engineers bring their models to production

• October 8, 2020
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Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain

Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute. 

Falcon co-founded the company with Luis Capelo, who was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier. Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to take PyTorch Lightning, which launched about a year ago, and turn that into the core of Grid’s service. The main idea behind Lightning is to decouple the data science from the engineering.

The time argues that a few years ago, when data scientists tried to get started with deep learning, they didn’t always have the right expertise and it was hard for them to get everything right.

“Now the industry has an unhealthy aversion to deep learning because of this,” Falcon noted. “Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor [have] the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.”

As Falcon noted, Grid is meant to help data scientists and other ML professionals “scale to match the workloads required for enterprise use cases.” Lightning itself can get them partially there, but Grid is meant to provide all of the services its users need to scale up their models to solve real-world problems.

What exactly that looks like isn’t quite clear yet, though. “Imagine you can find any GitHub repository out there. You get a local copy on your laptop and without making any code changes you spin up 400 GPUs on AWS — all from your laptop using either a web app or command-line-interface. That’s the Lightning “magic” applied to training and building models at scale,” Falcon said. “It is what we are already known for and has proven to be such a successful paradigm shift that all the other frameworks like Keras or TensorFlow, and companies have taken notice and have started to modify what they do to try to match what we do.”

The service is now in private beta.

With this new funding, Grid, which currently has 25 employees, plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Falcon tells me that he aims to build a diverse team, not in the least because he himself is an immigrant, born in Venezuela, and a U.S. military veteran.

“I have first-hand knowledge of the extent that unethical AI can have,” he said. “As a result, we have approached hiring our current 25 employees across many backgrounds and experiences. We might be the first AI company that is not all the same Silicon Valley prototype tech-bro.”

“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago,” Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon told me. “So intrigued in fact I remember rushing into a closet in Helsinki while at a conference to have the privacy needed to hear exactly what Will and Luis had built. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.”

News: Second U.S. Presidential debate will be done remotely via live-streamed video

• October 8, 2020
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The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner

The next U.S. Presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic candidate and former VP Joe Biden will be done remotely, the U.S. Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced today. This follows an intense news cycle that came immediately after the first Presidential debate, which saw Trump and a large number of his White House inner circle diagnosed with COVID-19. This debate will be held as a “town meeting,” as planned, the CPD said via a statement today, with each candidate piped in form a sarape location, and C-SPAN moderator Steve Scully also located separately in the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.

This is a historic first for the Presidential debate, though also something that’s not entirely unexpected given the coronavirus pandemic, and the recent diagnoses of Trump and his staff. Biden has since been tested and received negative results, indicating that he didn’t contract COVID-19 from the socially distanced first debate, but the added measures and precautions make sense in the wake of the President’s apparent super-spreader event. Last night’s VP debate took place in person (Pence has tested negative for the virus at last check), but did include 12 feet of separation between the VP and Democrat Kamala Harris, as well as the use of plastic dividers.

No word yet on what specific technology will be used in this virtual debate, or what venues each of the candidates will be using for their respective video feeds. We’ll update this post when and if we learn more.

News: Dr Lal PathLabs, one of India’s largest blood test labs, exposed patient data

• October 8, 2020
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Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the largest lab testing companies in India, left a huge cache of patient data on a public server for months, TechCrunch has learned. The lab testing giant, headquartered in New Delhi, serves some 70,000 patients a day, and quickly became a major player in testing patients for COVID-19 after winning

Dr Lal PathLabs, one of the largest lab testing companies in India, left a huge cache of patient data on a public server for months, TechCrunch has learned.

The lab testing giant, headquartered in New Delhi, serves some 70,000 patients a day, and quickly became a major player in testing patients for COVID-19 after winning approval from the Indian government.

But the company was storing hundreds of large spreadsheets packed with sensitive patient data in a storage bucket, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), without a password, allowing anyone to access the data inside.

Australia-based security expert Sami Toivonen found the exposed data and reported it to Dr Lal PathLabs in September. The company quickly shut down access to the bucket but the company did not reply, Toivonen told TechCrunch.

It’s not known how long the bucket was exposed.

Toivonen said the exposed data amounted to millions of individual patient bookings.

The spreadsheets appear to contain daily records of patient lab tests. Each spreadsheet contained a patient’s name, address, gender, date of birth, and cell number, as well as details of the test that the patient is taking, which could indicate or infer a medical diagnosis or a health condition.

Some booking records contained additional remarks about the patient, such as if they had tested positive for COVID-19.

Toivonen provided TechCrunch with a sample of the files from the exposed server for verification. We reached out to several patients to confirm their details found in the spreadsheet.

“Once I discovered this I was blown away that another publicly-listed organization had failed to secure their data, but I do believe that security is a team sport and everyone’s responsibility,” Toivonen told TechCrunch. “I’m glad that they secured it within a few hours after I contacted them because this kind of exposure with millions of patient records could be misused in so many ways by the malicious actors.”

“I was also a little surprised that they didn’t respond to my responsible disclosure,” he said.

A spokesperson for Dr Lal PathLabs said it was “investigating” the security lapse but did not answer our questions, including if the company plans to inform its patients of the exposure.

News: Google must negotiate to pay for French news, appeals court confirms

• October 8, 2020
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Google’s appeal against an order by France’s competition watchdog to negotiate with publishers for reuse of snippets of their content has failed. As we reported in April, the French authority was acting on a new ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed last year. The Paris

Google’s appeal against an order by France’s competition watchdog to negotiate with publishers for reuse of snippets of their content has failed.

As we reported in April, the French authority was acting on a new ‘neighbouring right’ for news which was transposed into national law following a pan-EU copyright reform agreed last year.

The Paris court slap-down leaves little legal wiggle room for the tech giant when it comes to shelling out for reusing French publishers’ content.

France’s competition authority already ruled it can’t unilaterally withdraw the snippets shown in its Google News aggregator (and elsewhere on its search service) — as it did when the national law came into force, seeking to evade payment.

Reached for comment on the appeal court decision, a Google spokesperson sent us this statement: “As we announced yesterday, our priority remains to reach an agreement with the French publishers and press agencies. We appealed to get legal clarity on some parts of the order, and we will now review the decision of the Paris Court of Appeal.”

The company also told us it had appealed the interim measures ruling because it had concerns about aspects of the order that it found contradictory and confusing, adding that it continues to have significant concerns with respect to how publisher rights are being interpreted in the country. Although it also reiterated that the legal process is separate to its ongoing negotiations with French publishers which it said it continues to focus on.

A report by Reuters yesterday suggested Google is poised to strike a deal with French publishers.

Earlier this month the tech giant announced a $1BN licensing fees fund, which it has called the Google News Showcase, that it said would be paid to news publishers “to create and curate high-quality content” for new story panels to appear on Google News. It added that it would begin making payments in Germany and Brazil, expanding to other markets.

However that (Google PR) initiative is separate to the payment terms it will have to negotiate with French publishers as a result of a legal requirement for reuse of protected content.

The screw is also tightening on Google’s freebie reuse of news in Australia which is closing in on its own legally binding payment framework — triggering a warning from the tech giant that local access to its ‘free’ services may be at risk.

News: Consumers spent a record $28 billion in apps in Q3, aided by pandemic

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Mobile usage continues to remain high amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted social distancing measures and lockdown policies, and has pushed consumers to connect online for work, school and socializing. This, in turn, has helped drive record spending in apps during the quarter, as well as a huge surge in time spent in apps.

Mobile usage continues to remain high amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, which has prompted social distancing measures and lockdown policies, and has pushed consumers to connect online for work, school and socializing. This, in turn, has helped drive record spending in apps during the quarter, as well as a huge surge in time spent in apps. According to a new report from App Annie, consumers in the third quarter downloaded 33 billion new apps globally and spent a record $28 billion in apps — up 20% year-over-year. They also spent more than 180 billion collective hours each month of July, August and September 2020 using apps, an increase of 25% year-over-year.

The mobile data and analytics firm had earlier suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic would have a long-lasting impact on consumer mobile behavior, as it advanced mobile by at least two to three years ahead of pace. This continued to be true in the third quarter, with all major mobile trends seeing increases.

 

 

Google Play downloads grew 10% year-over-year, accounting for 25 billion of the total 33 billion new downloads in the quarter, while iOS accounted for nearly 9 billion downloads — up 20% year-over-year. Non-gaming apps on Google Play were 55% of those downloads, while on iOS the figure was a slightly higher 70%.

Top markets by downloads included India and Brazil on Google Play, while on iOS, the top two continued to be the U.S. and China. India, Brazil and Mexico drove growth on Google Play, while the growth drivers on iOS were India and South Korea.

Some of the download growth was directly tied to the pandemic.

As students in Mexico returned to remote learning, for example, downloads of Education apps grew 25% and Libraries & Demo apps grew 270%. As U.S. consumers turned to the outdoors to find activities amid lockdowns and business closures, Travel, Navigation and Weather apps all saw strong growth of 50%, 25% and 15%, respectively.

Overall, Games, Tools and Entertainment drove Google Play downloads outside of the top category, Games. And on iOS Games, Photo and Video and Entertainment remained the top categories for five straight quarters.

Consumers also spent a record $28 billion in apps in Q3 2020 — the largest quarter to date.

On iOS, spend grew 20% year-over-year to $18 billion, while Google Play saw a 35% year-over-year increase to over $10 billion. Non-gaming apps accounted for 35% of that spend on iOS and 20% on Google Play, largely thanks to subscriptions.

Top markets for consumer spend included the U.S. and Japan across both app stores, with the addition of South Korea for Google Play.

The increased consumer spending on apps could also be seen as being tied to the pandemic and its impacts. For example, Games, Social and Entertainment were the largest categories by consumer spend on Google Play. And within the Entertainment category, spend was driven by streaming apps, including Disney+, Twitch, Globo Play and HBO Max — apps that may have benefited from more consumers staying at home for entertainment.

On iOS, Games, Entertainment and Photo and Video were the top three categories by consumer spend. As sports returned to television in the U.S., spending in sports apps grew 55% from the prior quarter. TikTok, meanwhile, became the No. 2 app by consumer spend outside of games, thanks to increases in virtual tipping for streamers. However, the largest quarterly growth in spending, outside of games, was driven by the comics app piccoma, YouTube, Tinder and AbemaTV.

Tinder indicated some resiliency in Q3. Despite the pandemic, the app jumped up one position to reach No. 1 by consumer spend. Disney+ also jumped up a spot to reach No. 4.

In terms of monthly active users, however, Facebook still dominated the top charts, claiming the No. 1 through No. 4 positions for Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, respectively. The next most used apps were Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, TikTok and then Telegram. The latter broke into the top 10 for the first time, after jumping up two ranks from Q2.

Gaming also continues to get a boost from the pandemic, with weekly downloads hovering around 1 billion for the second straight quarter as consumers on lockdown look for entertainment — up 15% year-over-year.

Consumers also spent over $20 billion on games in Q3, the largest quarter ever. By year-end, App Annie forecast mobile gaming will extend its lead over desktop by 2.8x and over console gaming by 3.1x.

Game downloads reached 14 billion in Q3, with downloads up 20% year-over-year on Google Play to around 11 billion. On iOS, consumers downloaded 2.6 billion games. Because of this, games accounted for a higher share of overall downloads on Google Play (45%) compared with iOS (30%).

App Annie’s findings follow app intelligence firm Sensor Tower’s Q3 report, released earlier this month, which saw similar trends. Sensor Tower estimated app revenue grew to over $29 billion in Q3, while it pegged new app downloads higher at 36.5 billion.

News: German energy company E.ON forms EUR250 million venture fund focused on smart grid tech

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The German energy company E.ON, which counts over 50 million commercial, residential, and industrial customers, has created a new EUR250 million ($265 million) investment fund called Future Energy Ventures to invest in “asset-light” tech startups. As utilities move to decarbonize their sources of energy generation they’re coming to the realization that they will need exposure

The German energy company E.ON, which counts over 50 million commercial, residential, and industrial customers, has created a new EUR250 million ($265 million) investment fund called Future Energy Ventures to invest in “asset-light” tech startups.

As utilities move to decarbonize their sources of energy generation they’re coming to the realization that they will need exposure to a range of technology companies that can orchestrate, integrate, and manage power that’s coming from increasingly distributed sources. It’s a shift away from a century’s worth of energy infrastructure that relied on large coal and natural gas plants for generating the electricity that powered homes and businesses. And it’s a change that requires exposure to a range of new technologies being developed by early stage companies, according to E.ON executives.

At E.ON, the new fund will be led by Ines Bergmann-Nolting and Jan Lozek, two longtime company executives who have been investing off the company’s balance sheet into early stage businesses already. In fact, the fund launches with five companies already in its portfolio — Bidgely, Holobuilder, Intertrust, Thermondo and T-Rex.

The move to create a formal venture fund rather than just investing ad hoc off of the company’s balance sheet means that E.ON can ideally create a consortium of large investment partners that will be able to roll out and commercialize the technologies being developed by the companies in the portfolio, Lozek said.

“We will need more capital and more partners to invest in the best companies globally. That’s why we made our structure to potentially embed other partners,” Lozek said. 

The company sees a breakdown between the networks that startups need and the traditional model of venture capital, Lozek said. Large industrial partners like E.ON can provide not just investment, but access to a whole range of commercial and industrial customers and the regulators whose support startups need to bring new technologies to market.

“Businesses need more than just money to succeed,” said Bergmann-Nolting, managing partner at Future Energy Ventures, in a statement. “They need collaboration, mentoring and the opportunity to partner with other organizations that can help them achieve scale. We seek to actively create value by bringing together dynamic and innovative start-ups, E.ON and affiliated businesses, and a growing set of partners and to create meaningful impact for mutual financial and strategic benefit. Use-case potential forms a key part of our investment decision-making and we aim to facilitate and support pilots and use case roll-outs within E.ON and across our ecosystem of partners for systematic scaling across the portfolio.”

Future Energy Ventures will look to lead deals and will take as much as a 10% equity stake in the companies it backs, according to Lozek. The firm will focus its investment activity on Europe, the U.S. (primarily Silicon Valley) and Israel and will look to back asset-light companies developing technologies in three areas.

Lozek defines these areas as “future energy”, or the interconnected system that will sit on top of existing energy infrastructure; cloud cities, the integration of that energy infrastructure into urban environments; and finally frontier technologies, which could include new machine learning models, or new cybersecurity technologies to protect increasingly digital assets.