Technical

A federal antitrust lawsuit over the long-shuttered alternative app store called Cydia has now been given the green light to proceed, after its initial complaint was dismissed. The Cydia app store, which once featured apps and other tweaks that weren’t permitted by Apple’s official App Store policies, is suing Apple over its alleged unlawful monopoly over iOS app distribution — a monopoly that contributed to the end of Cydia’s business, it says. The plaintiff, SaurikIT LLC, maker of the rival app store, originally filed its legal challenge back in 2020, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — the same judge who recently issued the Apple-Epic ruling now under appeal — granted Apple’s motion to dismiss the first complaint on the grounds that its claims were outside the statute of limitations. But the judge allowed Cydia to amend its complaint, which was filed in Jan. 2022. That new complaint is now moving forward, as Judge Gonzalez Rogers has rejected Apple’s motion to dism...

Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer revealed details during an investor call on Thursday, May 26, about the company’s plans to spin off its Starz streaming unit by the end of the summer. He also alluded that there could be more M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) for both Lionsgate and Starz if the two were separated. Feltheimer said , “We are targeting an announcement of our plan by the end of the summer and expect a transaction could close as early as our fiscal fourth quarter.” He added that the company is engaged in conversations with bankers and “a number of potential strategic partners.” Although he did not disclose who these possible partners were, the confirmation follows earlier reports. In an earnings call back in the fall of 2021, the company announced it was exploring strategic options for the cable network and streamer as it failed to provide a boost for Lionsgate. One solution was to sell all or a part of the asset could unlock value. Michael Burns, Lionsgate’s COO sai...

The creator economy is “ burning up ,” and the Jonas Brothers are cashing in. Launching today with the help of these former teen heartthrobs, Scriber is a creator subscription company geared toward more established figures in entertainment (… like the Jonas Brothers). Joe, Kevin and Nick aren’t just Scriber’s first creators — they also have equity in the company. Besides catering to more established artists, Scriber differentiates itself from other creator subscription products by functioning solely via SMS. The creator will post a phone number on their social media platforms for fans to text, and after messaging that number, fans can pay a subscription fee via Apple Pay or Stripe to get exclusive content sent to their phone. For this launch with the JoBros, fans will pay $4.99 a month, but the service is only available in the U.S. right now. Team Jonas is now on Scriber Text GO to 1-844-228-4544 You’ll want to be a part of this *US Users Only pic.twitter.com/WHVqMN4Qhf ...

I would love to see more companies like Artiphon in the world. Hardware startups with clever ideas and a knack for bringing them to market. Back in November 2020, I spent a good bit of time with the company’s handheld synth/sampler/instrument. It didn’t turn me into Wendy Carlos, but it helped pass a few dark pandemic hours by firing up some music-making neurons. The device’s strength lies in its extraordinarily low barrier of entry. No lessons or musical aptitude are required — just a free hand or two and the desire to noodle around with sound. Today the device is getting a sequel, in the form of the fittingly named Orba 2. The product looks identical to its predecessor, with a round base and eight touch-sensitive pads arranged in triangles like pizza slices. Image Credits: Artiphon The device largely functions the same as the Orba 1, as well, but features a revamped sound engine with new built-in audio samples. Those are augmented by built-in sensors, which let you modify the ...

DeLorean released fresh details and images of its Alpha 5 EV, a gull-winged electric vehicle that the company’s owners hope will resurrect the long defunct brand and possibly set the direction for more electric models. The company’s — and the EV’s — big public moment won’t come until later this summer at the Monterey Car Week. But the brand’s owners, anxious to capitalize on interest in EVs and perhaps spur a little momentum ahead of the event, released images and specs that reveal the Alpha 5 retains the gull-winged, two-door frame featured in the “Back to the Future” trilogy, but features a curvier, sleeker silhouette and room for four passengers. So far, the company’s intentions for reviving the DeLorean brand after a long hiatus — as well as how and where it will fund and built the Alpha 5 — are not clear. DeLorean CEO and former Karma Automotive executive Joost de Vries, who joined the company in December, is scheduled to speak Friday at the Electrify Expo EV festival in Long B...

Despite economic turmoil in the tech world, an Oakland-based startup shows that moonshots are still getting funded. Felt, co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk , wants to disrupt the role of maps in society, and rethink how we think about the medium. The startup allows users to build a map with datasets integrated into it, and work with each other to showcase impact in a less static way than your average Google maps query. Despite a massive mission — proving that maps are a forgotten yet fundamental medium worth renovating — the co-founders cited proven business models from Figma and Notion, both valued in the billions, as reason to believe in their work. The aforementioned companies both succeeded in rolling out to users for personal use, then pivoting to the enterprise, a playbook that Felt wants to follow (and that VCs can certainly speak the language of). “That kind of business model and go to market is — I don’t want to say immune, but is a little bit removed from the kind o...

It’s been a bumpy ride for Netflix recently, and the announcement that it will be charging for password sharing hasn’t gone as smoothly as it might have hoped, a new report claims. Subscribers in Peru who were opted in to new password-sharing restrictions have reported confusion over Netflix’s loose definition of “household” and noted the lack of clarity around the differing charges imposed on consumers. Global tech news site Rest of World informally surveyed more than a dozen Netflix users in Peru, after Netflix’s March announcement that it would be asking customers in the country — as well as in Chile and Costa Rica — to pay extra when sharing their account passwords outside their homes. Central and South America represent Netflix’s lowest revenue per user, which helps to explain the markets’ selection. The majority of those surveyed by Rest of World in Peru said that they have still not received uniform messaging around the new charges, even though it’s been over two months aft...

Vendia , a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across applications, platforms and clouds, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by NewView Capital. Neotribe Ventures, Canvas Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Aspenwood Ventures and BMW iVentures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $50 million. The company was founded by two AWS veterans: the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao. Since launching Vendia, the company added new customers like BMW, Aerotrax and Slalom , who use it to have a single source of truth for their multi-cloud data sharing with some of their partners. As Wagner noted, the company mostly focused on the financial services, travel and hospitality verticals so far, though with the new funding, it’ll likely look to expand to new verticals as well. Wagner also noted that the company rece...

Cybersecurity continues to grow in complexity due to the ever-increasing threat landscape — more services in the cloud, more digital operations and more devices mean more attack surfaces and variations for malicious hackers to worm into networks, and thus more tools to fight this — and that is creating more work for operations teams tasked with responding to security threats. Today a startup called Seemplicity is emerging from stealth with $32 million in funding for a platform that it believes will help reduce that load. Funding for the Israel-based startup is coming in the form of a $6 million seed round and a $26 million Series A. Glilot Capital Partners, by way of its early growth fund Glilot+, is leading the Series A with new backers NTTVC  and  Atlantic Bridge and previous backers S Capital  and  Rain Capital also participating. S Capital led its seed round . Ravid Circus — Seemplicity’s CPO who co-founded the company with Yoran Sirkis (CEO) and Rotem Cohen...

SBI Holdings, a Japanese securities and banking giant that launched a crypto-asset fund for retail investors last year, has been actively investing in the infrastructure that will allow it to roll out more crypto products. The firm has recently made a strategic investment in Digital Asset, a New York-based startup known for building enterprise blockchain solutions, it said in an announcement . As part of the deal, the pair are launching a joint venture this year to operate across East Asia, which includes Japan and South Korea. The undisclosed round adds to the $300 million in funding that Digital Asset has raised since its founding in 2014 from the likes of IBM and Goldman Sachs, which is tokenizing assets with help from the blockchain company. The objective of the partnership is to bring programmable money , or digital money that can be coded to act in a certain way based on predetermined conditions, into the Japanese market, said Digital Asset in a separate statement . ...

Google-backed DotPe, which helps businesses in India go online and sell digitally , is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $50 million in a new financing round, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Temasek, the Singapore state-owned investment firm, is finalizing deliberations to lead the investment in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup, the source said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. Terms of the investment could change and the deal may end up not materializing at all, the source cautioned. Temasek declined to comment, while DotPe did not respond to a request for comment. The two-year-old startup, which also counts PayU and Info Edge Ventures as its backers, also helps brick and mortar stores get visibility on Google Search. Restaurants, which are some of the customers of DotPe, use the startup’s offering to scan their inventories to make them digitally accessible via WhatsApp. These offerings puts DotPe chasing a similar set of audiences as o...

Whether to power translation to document summarization, enterprises are increasing their investments in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. According to a 2021 survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their NLP budgets grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that spending climbed by more than 30%. It’s a fiercely competitive market. Beyond well-resourced startups like OpenAI , Cohere , AI21 Labs, and Hugging Face and tech giants including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, there’s a new crop of vendors building NLP services on top of open source AI models. But Yochai Levi isn’t discouraged. He’s one of the co-founders of One AI , an NLP platform that today emerged from stealth with $8 million led by   Ariel Maislos , Tech Aviv , Sentinel One CEO Tomer Wiengarten, and other unnamed venture firms and angel investors.  “While the market is growing fast, advanced NLP is still used mainly by expert researchers...

Ayoken, an NFT marketplace for creatives, has raised $1.4 million pre-seed funding to enable users grow their revenue streams through digital collectibles. The startup’s marketplace, Ayokenlabs , will feature digital collectibles from musicians, sports brands and influencers from all-over the world. Ayoken founder and CEO, Joshua King , told TechCrunch that the marketplace is a bridge between fans and artists, and gives supporters a sense of ownership in the success of their idols. Through the NFT marketplace, he said, fans will have access to tokens such as behind-the-scenes videos and album art. NFT holders will also get other perks like access to unreleased music and exclusive live events by the creatives. “Through VIP passes, fans will get the ability to actually livestream music by these artists before it arrives on Spotify, YouTube or Apple Music. Fans will get discounts for future events too,” said King, who has 14 years’ experience in strategy, growth and innovation consult...

About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore , a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal. The Betastore marketplace enables informal traders to source fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) directly from manufacturers or distributors – which keeps the prices of the products competitive by eliminating interactions with sales agents. It also works with logistics partners to ensure the delivery of goods within 24 hours. The Nigeria-based startup plans to provide these services beyond its current three markets by expanding to Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon by the end of this year, after closing $2.5 million in pre-series A funding fro...

Given the likely global recession, small businesses are reaching for new kinds of financing. Thus, the Buy Now Pay Later business model is now expanding into this B2B world at a rate of knots. Playter has raised backing to do this, as has Hokodo, Billie and Tranch, to name a few other players. But in Germany, B2B Payments company Mondu has emerged as a significant entrant to the market. Mondu has now raised a $43M Series A round led by US-based venture capital fund Valar Ventures, and will use the funding to expand into more European countries later this year. Previous investors Cherry Ventures, FinTech Collective, and tech entrepreneurs and senior executives from Klarna, Zalando, and SumUp, also participated. The company has now raised $57M to date. Mondu’s BNPL for B2B solutions for merchants and marketplaces offers the main payment B2B payment options and flexible payment terms. Malte Huffmann, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Mondu, said in a statement: “The concept of BNPL isn’t new ...

Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago has long been a headache for logistics companies, but there’s no lack of brave challengers. Jarkata-based Astro, which provides 15-minute grocery delivery, has recently closed a $60 million Series B financing round, lifting its total funding to $90 million since the business launched just nine months ago. The Series B round was led by Accel, Citius and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors AC Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India. The company declined to disclose its post-money valuation. The speed at which Astro is attracting investment goes to show the need for hefty upfront investment in the grocery delivery race, which is about establishing a logistics infrastructure quickly and locking in loyal customers ahead of rivals. Founded by Tokopedia veteran Vincent Tjendra , Astro plans to spend its funding proceeds on user acquisition, product development, and hiring more staff to add to its current ...

India has withdrawn a warning that asked users to not share photocopies of their national biometric ID following a widespread uproar from users on social media, many of whom pointed that this is the first time they were hearing about such a possibility. A regional office of UIDAI, the body that oversees the national biometric ID system Aadhaar, warned users on Friday that “unlicensed private entities” such as hotels and theatre halls are “not permitted to collect or keep copies of Aadhaar card,” a 12-digit unique number that ties an individual’s fingerprints and retina scan, and individuals should avoid sharing photocopies of their Aadhaar to prevent misuse. The warning prompted an immediate and wide backlash from individuals. “I might have stayed in almost 100 hotels who kept a copy of my Aadhaar! Now this,” an individual tweeted, summing up the dilemma of tens of millions of people in the country, if not more. UIDAI has now woken up after everyone's distributed photocopies o...

ZeroAvia has raised $115 million from United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, British Airways and Amazon on a promise to fly a zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell regional passenger plane as soon as next year. Now the startup has set itself a slightly less high-flying goal: building a hybrid aircraft. This new experimental plane, which is under construction in California, is a 19-seat Dornier 228 that will have “a hybrid engine configuration that incorporates both the company’s hydrogen-electric powertrain and a conventional engine,” according to a recent press release . ZeroAvia declined to tell TechCrunch why it had altered its plans. A hybrid system could reassure regulators that the Dornier can fly safely for tests, while the company continues to develop the world’s largest aviation hydrogen fuel cells. The decision to build a hybrid plane follows a previously unreported statement from the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) into the April 2021 crash of the moonshot project th...

All is not well in smartphone land. The industry was headed for a slowdown well before SARS-CoV-2 entered the picture. The glory days of expanding markets and bi-annual upgrades are seemingly at an end, and things have only been exacerbated by two years of financial hardships and supply chain constraints. For all these reasons, it’s not surprising that manufacturers are pulling back on manufacturing. A new report from South Korea’s Maeil Business News has the world’s leading smartphone maker ramping production down by 30 million units for 2022. The news comes as sales are further hampered by the conflict in Ukraine. In March, the company followed fellow tech giants Microsoft and Apple by suspending sales in Russia . Apple, too, has been feeling the pain. Recent Bloomberg reports noted that the iPhone maker is throttling plans to manufacture an additional 20 million phones in 2022. Instead, its numbers are reportedly going to remain flat from 2021. Those reports follow several quar...