Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: Mark Zuckerberg threatened to end Facebook’s UK investment in private 2018 meeting with digital chief, warning over “anti-tech” tone

• December 8, 2020
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Round of applause for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — which fought for two years to obtain details of a closed door meeting between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the UK secretary of state in charge of digital issues at the time, Matt Hancock (now health secretary). Freedom of information requests for minutes of the 2018

Round of applause for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism — which fought for two years to obtain details of a closed door meeting between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and the UK secretary of state in charge of digital issues at the time, Matt Hancock (now health secretary).

Freedom of information requests for minutes of the 2018 closed-door meeting between Zuckerberg and Hancock, which took place amist Cambridge Analytica-related tensions, were repeatedly refused by the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS).

An order by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office finally forced the government to hand them over — with the ICO concluding that transparency and openness are clearly in the public interest where Facebook’s business and CEO is concerned.

Last year the UK government set out an intent to regulate online platforms, publishing its Online Harms White Paper — which proposes to place a legal duty of care on social media platforms to protect users against a range of harms, from bullying to illegal content. Although there’s no sign of a draft law.

The government has only said it will lay one before parliament ‘as soon as possible’. (And this summer refused to commit to doing so next year.)

Additional context specific to Facebook is Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to appear before the UK parliament’s DCMS committee in 2018 to answer questions about online disinformation and the role of Facebook’s ad-targeting tools in the UK’s Brexit referendum — sending a variety of minions in his stead despite multiple requests for face-time.

It’s now clear that Zuckerberg took time to meet privately with Hancock, on the sidelines of the Paris VivaTech conference in late May 2018.

There, according to the minutes obtained by the Bureau, the Facebook CEO accused the UK of having an “anti-tech government” — and joked about making it one of two countries he would not visit. (The other is redacted from the documents but may have been a reference to China.)

Zuckerberg also threatened to pull Facebook’s investment from the UK — saying that while it was the “obvious” place for them to invest in Europe they were now “considering looking elsewhere”.

The tech giant employs thousands of staff at its London base, which is a major engineering hub for the company.

At the start of this year Facebook announced it would add another 1,000 jobs — bringing its total headcount up to 4,000+ in the city. A new HQ it’s preparing in London’s King’s Cross, to consolidate its existing London offices, is intended to house 6,000 staff in total when running at full capacity.

Per the minutes, Hancock responded to Zuckerberg by offering “a new beginning” for the government’s relationship with social media platforms — and offered to change its approach from “threatening regulation to encouraging collaborative working to ensure legislation is proportionate and innovation-friendly”.

He is also said to have sought “increased dialogue” with Zuckerberg — in order to “bring forward the message that he has support from Facebook at the highest level”.

While Zuckerberg is reported to have expressed support for UK policy and its intent to regulate the Internet — but said he was “worried about tone”.

We’ve reached out to DCMS for comment on the meeting and remarks made by its former digital secretary and to ask why it fought disclosure of the information for two years. We’ll update this report with any response.

Around the time Zuckerberg met Hancock Facebook employed around 2,300 staff in the UK. The tech giant signed the lease on the King’s Cross office space in July 2018 — a few months after Zuckerberg’s meeting with Hancock — generating headlines which couched it as a ‘major vote of confidence in the UK capital‘.

Reached for comment on the revelations that Zuckerberg branded the UK “anti-tech” and threatened to pull the plug on its local investments, Facebook sent us this statement — attributed to ‘a spokesperson’:

Facebook has long said we need new regulations to set high standards across the internet. In fact last year Mark Zuckerberg called on governments to establish new rules around harmful content, privacy, data portability, and election integrity. The UK is our largest engineering hub outside of the US and just this year we created 1,000 new roles in the country.

Also responding to the Bureau’s story in a series of tweets today, Damian Collins, the former chair of the DMCS committee said the minutes show Facebook did not like the inquiry; and that Zuckerberg was “determined not to appear as a witness”.

Collins was highly critical of Zuckerberg’s refusal to testify to the UK parliament, issuing a summons for him to do so on May 1, 2018 should he ever deign to step onto UK soil, and publicly lambasting the company for displaying an evasive “pattern of behavior”.

“The context of Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 meeting with Matt Hancock was that it was two months after the Cambridge Analytica scandal had broken and MZ was refusing our requests for him to appear before [DCMS committee] to discuss it,” Collins tweeted.

“The notes from this meeting clearly show that Mark Zuckerberg was running scared of the DCMS committee investigation on disinformation and fake news and was actively seeking to avoid being questioned by us about what he knew and when about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.”

“It shows how afraid Mark Zuckerberg is of scrutiny that Facebook saw questions about the safety of users data on their platform, and how they worked with Cambridge Analytica as an ‘anti-tech’ agenda,” he added.

Outstanding questions related to the Cambridge Analytica include how much and when Zuckerberg personally knew about the scandal. It has previously emerged that Facebook staff raised internal alerts about Cambridge Analytica’s activity as early as September 2015 — yet the company was not booted off its ad platform until 2018.

A Facebook-instigated post-scandal app audit has also never fully reported findings.

Nor do we know why the tech giant hired the co-founder of the company that sold user data to Cambridge Analytica — around the same time it heard about the ‘sketchy’ company.

Zuckerberg’s question dodging over his personal level of responsibility vis-a-vis the scandal has been highly successful, even as his business empire has faced increased scrutiny and lawmakers around the world have new appetite to regulate the Internet.

The UK’s ICO issue no final report on its own investigation into the data misuse scandal. But in a letter to the DCMS committee in October it confirmed Facebook user data had been transferred to Cambridge Analytica and incorporated into a pre-existing database containing “voter file, demographic and consumer data for US individuals” — with the aim of predicting partisanship to target US voters with political messaging.

The ICO’s investigation did not find any evidence that the Facebook data which was sold to Cambridge Analytica had been used to target voters in the UK’s Brexit Referendum vote.

In its final report for the disinformation inquiry, the DCMS called for Facebook’s business to be investigated — citing competition and data protection concerns.

Last month the UK government announced a plan to set up a “pro-competition” regulator for big tech.

 

News: Apple announces $549 over-ear headphones, the AirPods Max

• December 8, 2020
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The AirPods Max are joining the AirPods and AirPods Pro in Apple’s audio accessory lineup. As you can see on the photo, Apple is releasing its first over-ear headphones under the AirPods brand. The wireless headphones feature active noise cancellation and cost $549. With this product, Apple competes directly with Sony’s and Bose’s wireless headphones

The AirPods Max are joining the AirPods and AirPods Pro in Apple’s audio accessory lineup. As you can see on the photo, Apple is releasing its first over-ear headphones under the AirPods brand.

The wireless headphones feature active noise cancellation and cost $549. With this product, Apple competes directly with Sony’s and Bose’s wireless headphones — the Sony WH-1000XM4 and Bose 700. Pre-orders start today and they’ll ship on December 15.

This isn’t the company’s first over-ear headphones as Apple acquired Beats back in 2014. Apple has released new Beats headphones over the past few years. For instance, last year, Apple released the Beats Solo Pro, wireless headphones that feature Apple’s H1 chip and cost $300. They also have active noise cancellation.

The AirPods Max come in multiple colors — silver, space gray, sky blue, pink and green. They are foldable and can be stored in a case — or, as Apple calls it, a Smart Case. When you put your headphones in the case, the device enters an ultra-low power state — but that’s about it. Apple promises 20 hours of battery life.

Powered by Apple’s H1 chip, they bring many of the features that you can find in the AirPods Pro — active noise cancellation, transparency mode, spatial audio and adaptive EQ. The headband is made of stainless steel, which probably explains the pricing strategy. The ear cushions try to create a seal thanks to memory foam.

In addition to a noise control button, there’s an Apple Watch digital crown, which lets you adjust the volume, skip tracks, etc. Inside the device, you’ll find 40-mm dynamic drivers. Combined with computational audio, Apple promises very little distorsion and high quality sound.

If you’re not familiar with Adaptive EQ, the feature was originally introduced with the AirPods Pro. The device uses microphones to adjust the sound based on the fit and seal of the headphones or earbuds.

When it comes to active noise cancellation, the AirPods Max use three outward-facing microphones on each ear cup. When you pair the AirPods Max with an iPhone or iPad, Apple uses the gyroscope and accelerometer in both devices to compare motion data and deliver sound in 5.1, 7.1 and Dolby Atmos. Music also automatically stops when you remove the AirPods Max.

News: Watch SpaceX fly its Starship spacecraft during its first high-altitude test live

• December 8, 2020
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SpaceX is all set to conduct a high-altitude test of its Starship rocket – a first for the spacecraft prototype design. The test will see Starship serial number 8 (SN8) fly from SpaceX’s development site in Cameron County, Texas, climb to a max height of around 41,000 feet, and then return to Earth during a

SpaceX is all set to conduct a high-altitude test of its Starship rocket – a first for the spacecraft prototype design. The test will see Starship serial number 8 (SN8) fly from SpaceX’s development site in Cameron County, Texas, climb to a max height of around 41,000 feet, and then return to Earth during a controlled landing using its Raptor engines, if all goes exactly to plan. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has noted that things likely won’t go exactly to plan with this test, saying he anticipates they’ll achieve maybe 1/3 of their goals with this attempt.

This is the first time that Starship will be flying with three Raptor engines on board – prior short hop tests of earlier prototypes used just one. It’ll also involve a key maneuver that the Starship will ultimately be required to get right in order to achieve its reusability goal and return safely through Earth’s atmosphere when landing – a mid-air belly flop of sorts to orient it correctly to avoid burning up during re-entry.

SpaceX has flown Starship prototypes to a height of just under 500 feet, and successfully landed both with a controlled descent. This attempt will also include an attempt to relight Starship’s engines and return it to Earth in a vertical orientation, but those are much less likely to be successful at this stage vs. the earlier stage goals just reaching that max altitude and then ideally completing that ‘belly flop’ maneuver. Conducting tests like this with low likelihood of successful outcomes is absolutely par for the course for rocket development programs, but SpaceX is one of the few companies that conducts these out in the open – and perhaps the only that does so with live-streamed access for all.

Ultimately, Starship will prove the central component of a new generation of launch vehicle that SpaceX hopes to use to reach Mars – and to replace all of its current launch activities with Falcon vehicles, as well as to provide high-altitude point-to-point flights between destinations on Earth for hyper-fast travel. The production Starship will be paired with a Super Heavy rocket for additional thrust for high mass cargo missions and long-duration deep space trips.

The test launch today could happen anytime between roughly 9 AM EST (6 AM PST) and 6 PM EST (3 PM PST), and SpaceX says that it will begin the livestream shortly before the actual launch attempt, so stay tuned to the video above and our Twitter account for updates.

News: Unit raises $18.6M to offer banking features as a service

• December 8, 2020
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Companies like Stripe and Twilio have changed the game for online businesses by making it easier to integrate payments and communications services into their customer interfaces without having to build those features from the ground up, or make costly investments to integrate them from elsewhere. Today, another startup is launching and announcing some funding in

Companies like Stripe and Twilio have changed the game for online businesses by making it easier to integrate payments and communications services into their customer interfaces without having to build those features from the ground up, or make costly investments to integrate them from elsewhere. Today, another startup is launching and announcing some funding in the hopes that it can do the same for financial features.

Unit has built a platform that lets third parties integrate banking services like payment cards, checking accounts, cash advances and money transfers into their own businesses by way of an API. And after quietly building the service (and a customer base) in stealth, the company today is announcing that it is open for business with $18.6 million in funding alongside that to continue growing — by adding in more features, hiring more people, and securing new users.

The capital is coming from a mix of investors that speak to the company’s Israeli roots and current San Francisco base. It includes Better Tomorrow Ventures, Aleph, Flourish Ventures, Operator Partners and TLV Partners, as well as 30 angels drawing on a pool of fintech experience among them.

CEO Itai Damti, who co-founded the company with Doron Somech (who is the CTO) said that the company’s mission is to make it easier for companies that have customers already doing some kind of transacting work with customers — for example, an on-demand transportation company interacting with its fleet of contract drivers; or an online bookkeeping platform providing services to users — to extend that into a wider and deeper and mor loyal relationship with more financial features.

“Companies in the freelancer economy are in the great position to bundle more banking services into their platforms for freelancers,” Damti said. Indeed many of these have dabbled in the past with providing other services such as payment cards as a way of paying out their commissions. Now, “it means they can help their freelancers track spending, as well as send payments to them.”

His belief is that by making it easier to incorporate these features, we will see a veritable explosion of businesses lining up to do so. “We have already seen a lot of pickup,” he said.

Large, incumbent banks have been relatively slow to bring their services up to speed with the pace of change in the world of tech, and that has opened the door to a number of challengers hoping to gain market share by providing more personalised services, more flexibility and better rates, all by way of efficient mobile apps rather than through queues in old buildings.

Unit’s bet is that there is an even bigger opportunity to provide banking services if you can identify places where people are doing work already. The global health pandemic, in its estimation, has increased that push simply because it’s bringing more people online than ever before, and they are looking towards the internet to get more work done than ever before.

The catch is that up to now, for companies that are not specifically in the business of fintech to provide those services, the costs — monetary, time, and labor — have been too high to make services viable. Unit says that its API-based solution solves that issue:

There are other companies that have identified the opportunity of “financial services as a service” and are growing at a fast pace tapping into that market.

One of the most notable, perhaps, is Rapyd, which was last valued at $1.2 billion about a year ago, with backers including the likes of Stripe alongside many other top investors.

Stripe, indeed, itself recently teamed up with banks to start an embedded business banking service of its own, Stripe Treasury, which underscores also the growing competition in this space.

But with ever-more business coming online, for now at least there remains an opportunity for everyone.

“Tech and non-financial companies are embedding financial services with an eye towards deepening customer relationships and enhancing unit economics,” said Emmalyn Shaw of Flourish Ventures in a statement. “This is a precarious move if not done right. Financial services are carefully regulated, demanding best in class compliance available from Unit. Executives, including Amanda Swoverland, former Chief Risk Officer at Sunrise Bank, position Unit to offer the highest quality compliance and frictionless integration for enterprises of all sizes.”

“True innovation in financial services requires a technical partner that straddles the finance and the technology part of fintech, and none do it better than Unit. We’ve backed many fintech companies through the years and think many of the next generation of companies will be built on top of Unit,” added Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures.

News: New York-based indoor ag company Gotham Greens raises $87 million

• December 8, 2020
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Lettuce celebrate the rise of indoor agriculture. In the past few months AppHarvest, a developer of greenhouse tomato farms went public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, vertical farming giant Plenty raised $140 million, and now Gotham Greens, which is developing its own network of greenhouses, is announcing the close of $87 million in new

Lettuce celebrate the rise of indoor agriculture.

In the past few months AppHarvest, a developer of greenhouse tomato farms went public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, vertical farming giant Plenty raised $140 million, and now Gotham Greens, which is developing its own network of greenhouses, is announcing the close of $87 million in new funding.

These new agriculture companies certainly have a green thumb when it comes to raising a cornucopia of capital.

Gotham Greens latest round takes the company to a whopping total of $130 million in funding since its launch. Investors in the round included Manna Tree and The Silverman Group.

While App Harvest has taken to tomatoes in its attempt to ketchup with the leading agricultural companies, Gotham Greens has decided to let its hydroponically grown leafy greens lead the way to riches.

The company said it would use the latest funding to continue developing more greenhouse across the U.S. and bring new vegetables to market.

“Given increasing challenges facing centralized food supply chains, combined with rapidly shifting consumer preferences, Gotham Greens is focused on expanding its regional growing operations and distribution capabilities at one of the most critical periods for America,” said Viraj Puri, the co-founder and chief executive of Gotham Greens, in a statement. 

The company already sells its greens in over 40 states and operates greenhouses in Chicago, Providence, R.I., Baltimore and Denver. From those greenhouses the company distributes to 2,000 retail locations including Whole Foods Markets, Albertsons stores, Meijer, Target, King Soopers, Harris Teeter, ShopRite and Sprouts. 

And Gotham Greens has already begun to expand its product portfolio. The company now sells packaged salads, cooking sauces, and salad bowls in addition to its greens.

News: Used car marketplace Carsome gets $30 million Series D for its Southeast Asia growth plans

• December 8, 2020
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Carsome, which bills itself as Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform for used cars, announced it has closed a $30 million Series D. The funding was led by Asia Partners, with participation from returning investors Burda Principal Investments and Ondine Capital. The startup claims that this is one of the largest “all-equity financings to-date in Southeast

Carsome, which bills itself as Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platform for used cars, announced it has closed a $30 million Series D. The funding was led by Asia Partners, with participation from returning investors Burda Principal Investments and Ondine Capital.

The startup claims that this is one of the largest “all-equity financings to-date in Southeast Asia’s online automotive industry.” Part of the Series D may be used for mergers and acquisitions to consolidate the company’s supply chain.

Founded five years ago in Malaysia, Carsome’s platform serves both C2C and B2C segments, and ensures quality by conducting inspections before vehicles are listed on its platform. It now has 1,000 employees and claims to transact 70,000 cars on an annualized basis, totaling $600 million.

In a press statement, co-founder and group chief executive officer Eric Cheng said that the company, which now also operates in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, doubled its monthly revenue over the past six months, compared to pre-pandemic levels. The company claims that this is partly because more people and businesses are buying their own cars for safety reasons.

While sales of new vehicles have plummeted around the world, used car sales, especially through e-commerce platforms, are recovering more quickly, according to Counterpoint Research. This largely because people want to avoid public transportation and ride-hailing, but also want cheaper options.

Other used car platforms in Southeast Asia include Carro, OLX Autos (formerly called BeliMobilGue) and Carmudi.

News: Facebook adds carts to WhatsApp to make shopping easier

• December 8, 2020
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WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion userbase to shop. The instant messaging platform, where business accounts already process messages from more than 175 million people, said

WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion userbase to shop.

The instant messaging platform, where business accounts already process messages from more than 175 million people, said it is adding carts to WhatsApp around the world ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Carts are aimed at making it easier for consumers to buy multiple items from a business, and for merchants to keep better track of order inquiries and manage requests. WhatsApp said it is adding the new feature after early positive response from some businesses who tested it recently.

On WhatsApp, users will now see the option to add items to the cart. When done, users will be able to send the order request as a message to the business. WhatsApp said carts are going live for users across the globe today. (You can read the complete how-to flow here.)

In recent months, WhatsApp has added a number of features to supercharge the commerce experience on its app. It has unveiled QR codes, a dedicated shopping button, and the ability to share catalog links in chats. The platform is also offering free storage to merchants to host their business’s messages.

For WhatsApp, success with commerce is crucial. Despite its gigantic reach, it currently makes little to no money. The messaging app is available to users at no charge and also remains free of ads. But it stands to become a viable challenger to giants like Amazon and Walmart in at least emerging markets like India where e-commerce is still at a nascent phase.

In India, which happens to be WhatsApp’s biggest market by users, several businesses have kickstarted their journey on the Facebook-owned app. On Tuesday, DealShare, an Indian e-commerce startup, said it had raised $21 million in a new financing round. DealShare began its life on WhatsApp. But as commerce on WhatsApp gains traction, it might also pose a big challenge to emerging startups that are attempting to operate in the same space.

But one big element that remains missing from WhatsApp’s shopping experience is support for payments. As of today, when a user places an order with a business on WhatsApp, both parties are left on their own to figure out how money will exchange hands.

WhatsApp hasn’t had much luck with adding payments to its app so far. It was only recently that India permitted WhatsApp to roll out payments on its app to a larger subset of users. Brazil is the other market where WhatsApp rolled out payments this year, though the South American nation took no time in suspending the new service. Perhaps, Libra is the answer?

News: Sundae snags $36M to build out its distressed property marketplace

• December 8, 2020
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Opendoor has opened the door, so to speak, for startups to apply their technical expertise in search, marketplaces and audience segmentation to rethink the very antiquated and analogue world of property. Today, a startup that is doing this in the specific area of distressed property is announcing a round of growth funding to ramp up

Opendoor has opened the door, so to speak, for startups to apply their technical expertise in search, marketplaces and audience segmentation to rethink the very antiquated and analogue world of property. Today, a startup that is doing this in the specific area of distressed property is announcing a round of growth funding to ramp up its team and expand its business.

Sundae — which has built a marketplace for homeowners to list and sell dated or damaged homes, or homes that they may need to shift faster for financial reasons; for property investors/developers seeking to buy, fix up and then sell or rent out those properties; and for itself potentially to buy in a property and do the same — is today announcing that it has raised a Series B of $36 million.

The funding is being led by QED Investors; Founders Fund, Susa Ventures, Navitas Capital, and Prudence Holdings also participated. All are previous investors from the startup’s last round, a $16.55 million Series A also led by QED.

In an interview, CEO and co-founder Josh Stech, who describes the business he is in as the “homes that need love segment”, declined to talk about the company’s valuation, and he also declined to give specifics on a number of other points: Sundae is not disclosing how many homeowners and developers have used its service (“thousands”); the average selling price for a property; the number of properties it’s shifted; and how many of those it’s bought it versus sold to a third party (the “vast majority”, more than 50% but less than 100%, are purchased by investors, not Sundae itself, he said).

He did note that in the four markets where the company has gone live since launching its business in January 2019 — San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and Sacramento — has yielded an annualized revenue run rate of over $400 million in gross merchandise value (the total value of home sales transacted on its platform). That also speaks to the vast and interesting quantity of data that the startup is amassing on home sales, and how it can use that to power its platform in the future.

And as another measure of its momentum, that this latest round comes less than six months after its Series A.

With those two funding rounds all equity-based, to buy up property itself and provide $10,000 cash advances to all sellers, Sundae previously also raised a debt fund from high net worth individuals, and it has a “very large” debt facility from Goldman Sachs that it also non-dilutive, Stech said.

The opportunity that Sundae is tackling is one that has been a persistent cornerstone of the housing market, but one that might have become an even more keen factor in the last year.

In the US, there has long been a relentless push, both in newer cities with more room for geographical expansion and older cities where you have legacy buildings that get demolished, a drive for new-build homes. Interestingly, that demand has grown a lot during the pandemic, with demand for new homes as much as four times higher than demand for buying “existing” homes.

But at the same time, there has been a quickly dwindling supply of any housing stock, going down to as low as one month in terms of sales pace. As Stech puts it, that means that “In 30 days, if no homes get listed, there are no homes for sale.” That subsequently has put more of an emphasis on the sale of older homes to meet demand.

The issue with distressed property is that typically these days, people are not as interested in buying fixer-uppers as they may have been in the past. Those selling property want to present ready-to-inhabit homes for a quicker turnaround and to lower the barrier to sales. This means that usually distressed homes are rejected for sale, unless they have some work put into them first.

That’s presented an opportunity for developers (or as they are more commonly called in the US, property investors) who buy up those properties and put in the work on them to make them more sales-friendly. They work on the principle of many F’s: “find, finance, fix, fill or flip” as Stech puts it.

Sundae basically removes the friction both for the homeowners and the developers: those who want to sell their homes only have to deal with one entity, Sundae itself, which comes in to photograph (using Matterport) the property, provide some guidance on how to sell it and at what price, offer an advance on the sale in case the owner needs the money even faster, and ultimately bring in a number of interested prospects, including itself.

Those who are looking for investment properties can use the service to widen the funnel of homes that they can discover and work on.

Stech said he had a brainwave about the opportunity here when he finished graduate school at Stanford and moved to Las Vegas, which at the time was at the epicenter of the housing market crash of 2009. He bought a one-bedroom condo that sold for $267,000 in 2007 for $19,000 in cash and realized that the market was ripe for the taking.

There is admittedly something a little unsettling about any kind of business that focuses on distress: the implication is that those building services for people who are in difficult circumstances can take advantage of them and essentially operate in a predatory way.

Stech said that his intention is in fact to prevent that very situation, by creating a more transparent process where sellers are given the option of considering offers from multiple developers rather than just one that is not going to be operating with the seller’s interests in mind, but his own.

“It’s shameful what property developers have become,” Stech said. “The idea has become glamorized, and they make a ridiculous amount of money. Everyone forgets who lost in the process: the homeowner who is probably being forced to sell.”

That’s not to say that selling on a marketplace will remove that self-interest but it creates the option for more balanced dynamics where a seller might at least have more competition to consider. If especially tight markets like London’s are any example, in the best case scenarios sellers sitting in a property might even make an excellent turnaround on their homes, compared to the sums they initially paid to buy them, even if the home might still need a lot of “love” to become habitable by gentrified comparisons.

All of this is especially interesting in light of the bigger forces at play, which have brought us all closer to staying put in one place more than being nomadic, heightening the bigger urge to buy property rather than rent if we can manage it financially.

“The concept of homeownership is fundamentally changing. This is particularly true given COVID-19 which has caused more uncertainty and forced people to rethink their real estate decisions. Homeowners are looking for solutions that make the selling process more efficient, transparent, and reliable, particularly for the distressed property segment,” said Frank Rotman, founding partner at QED Investors, in a statement. “Sundae’s rapid growth is a testament to their differentiated offering and the trusted brand they’ve created through a customer-centric approach to the market.”

News: Cloudflare and Apple design a new privacy-friendly internet protocol

• December 8, 2020
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Engineers at Cloudflare and Apple say they’ve developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit. But

Engineers at Cloudflare and Apple say they’ve developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.

But first, a little bit about how the internet works.

Every time you go to visit a website, your browser uses a DNS resolver to convert web addresses to machine-readable IP addresses to locate where a web page is located on the internet. But this process is not encrypted, meaning that every time you load a website the DNS query is sent in the clear. That means the DNS resolver — which might be your internet provider unless you’ve changed it — knows which websites you visit. That’s not great for your privacy, especially since your internet provider can also sell your browsing history to advertisers.

Recent developments like DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH) have added encryption to DNS queries, making it harder for attackers to hijack DNS queries and point victims to malicious websites instead of the real website you wanted to visit. But that still doesn’t stop the DNS resolvers from seeing which website you’re trying to visit.

Enter ODoH, which decouples DNS queries from the internet user, preventing the DNS resolver from knowing which sites you visit.

Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.

“What ODoH is meant to do is separate the information about who is making the query and what the query is,” said Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare’s head of research.

In other words, ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested. Sullivan said that page loading times on ODoH are “practically indistinguishable” from DoH and shouldn’t cause any significant changes to browsing speed.

A key component of ODoH working properly is ensuring that the proxy and the DNS resolver never “collude,” in that the two are never controlled by the same entity, otherwise the “separation of knowledge is broken,” Sullivan said. That means having to rely on companies offering to run proxies.

Sullivan said a few partner organizations are already running proxies, allowing for early adopters to begin using the technology through Cloudflare’s existing 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. But most will have to wait until ODoH is baked into browsers and operating systems before it can be used. That could take months or years, depending on how long it takes for ODoH to be certified as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

News: Mexican challenger bank, albo raises $45 million to expand

• December 8, 2020
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With nearly half a million customers across Mexico already and a network of 30,000 retail locations where representatives can take deposits, the challenger bank albo is already on its way to becoming a dominant player in Mexico’s emerging fintech industry. And the company has recently raised another $45 million to consolidate its position. “When your

With nearly half a million customers across Mexico already and a network of 30,000 retail locations where representatives can take deposits, the challenger bank albo is already on its way to becoming a dominant player in Mexico’s emerging fintech industry.

And the company has recently raised another $45 million to consolidate its position.

“When your mission is to build the biggest bank in Mexico, you will need a ton of money,” said albo founder Angel Sahagún.

The company received its license to operate as a full depository bank in Mexico, and is slowly working toward being the premiere internet-based financial services provider for Mexico’s large and growing middle class, Sahagún said.

“We are targeting a similar target market to Chime,” the albo founder and chief executive said. “We are targeting people who are underbanked and don’t have access to all the financial products in the market.”

Sahagún said the money will be used to expand the range of services albo offers into lending and insurance products. That’s a path which has already produced one multi-billion dollar business in Nubank, Brazil’s wildly successful fintech company, which planted a flag for a new generation of Latin American startups.

While many challenger banks in the region pursued a strategy targeting upper class and upper middle class consumers, Sahagún said his service had chosen a different path.

The company is trying to bring the middle and low income Mexican consumers into the banking system by making it easy for them to move from a cash-based world to a digital one. “Where 90% of transactions are cash-based you need a value proposition that fits very well on that cash-based society,” Sahagún said.

It’s why the company set up a network of 30,000 locations including convenience stores and drug stores so that it can accept deposits at the places where its customers frequent.

That growth, and the company’s 40% share of the digital banking market in Mexico, according to data from Apptopia cited by the company, is why investors like Valar Ventures, Greyhound Capital, Mountain Nazca and Flourish Ventures were willing to invest as part of the $45 million round.

“albo has proven its ability to drive sustainable growth and is leading the market. This is the team that is going to transform banking in the region and we are proud to be supporting them in that”, said James Fitzgerald of Valar Ventures, in a statement.