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During a small gathering of journalists in China, Ren Zhengfei made his first public remarks since Joe Biden was inaugurated at the 46th President of the United States. The Huawei CEO struck a hopeful tone for those gathered around the table, in comments reported by CNBC among others.
“I would welcome such phone calls and the message is around joint development and shared success,” the executive said, noting a readiness to speak with the new administration in translated remarks. “The U.S. wants to have economic growth and China wants to have economic growth as well.”
Huawei’s future in the U.S. has been a major question mark hanging over the new administration. Under Trump, a number of high profile Chinese companies were added to the Commerce Department’s so-called “entity list” to various effects. Huawei has been among the hardest hit by the moves.
In addition to blocking sales in the world’s third-largest smartphone market, the company has been unable to work with key U.S. companies, including Google. That, in turn, has blocked access to key technologies, including the Android ecosystem and left Huawei scrambling. The company’s support among consumers has increased within China, but the move has been a big blow to the smartphone maker’s bottom line.
The incoming Biden administration has mostly been quiet on the matter. Though, facing mounting criticism from Republican lawmaker, Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo has since added that, “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”
While there haven’t been many positive signs for Huawei thus far, the company’s Chief understandably would prefer to make nice with the new administration.
“If Huawei’s production capacity can be expanded, that would mean more opportunities for U.S. companies to supply too,” Ren said in the translated comments. “I believe that’s going to be mutually beneficially. I believe that (the) new administration would bear in mind such business interests as they are about to decide their new policy.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/huaweis-ceo-wants-to-talk-to-joe-biden/
Shopify announced this morning it’s partnered with Facebook to expand its payment option, Shop Pay, to all Shopify merchants selling across both Facebook and Instagram. This is the first time Shop Pay will be made available outside of Shopify’s own platform, and represents a significant expansion for the e-commerce platform’s payments technology.
The company tells TechCrunch Shop Pay will first become available to all Shopify merchants using checkout on Instagram in the U.S., and will then be rolled out to Facebook in the weeks that follow.
Prior to this launch, Facebook’s platform has been one of Shopify’s most popular sales and marketing channels for merchants, Shopify says. At the beginning of the pandemic last year (March through April 2020), marketing on Facebook and Instagram via Shopify’s channel integration saw 36% growth in monthly active users, and that trend continues to rise.
Today, Shop Pay’s payment option is used by a number of top direct-to-consumer and newer brands, including Allbirds, Kith, Beyond Yoga, Kylie Cosmetics, Jonathan Adler, Loeffler Randall, Blueland and others. Over 40 million buyers now regularly use Shop Pay at these merchants and others on Shopify’s platform to complete their purchases.
Image Credits: Shopify
Through the course of 2020, Shop Pay helped buyers complete 137 million orders. And by the end of the year, Shop Pay had facilitated nearly $20 billion in cumulative GMV since its launch in 2017. Through its carbon offsetting feature, this also represented 75,000 tons of carbon emissions.
In addition to the carbon offsets, Shopify claims Shop Pay on its own platform is 70% faster with a conversion rate that’s 1.72x higher than a typical checkout. It also includes order tracking and management, which, to date, have tracked over 430 million orders across over 450 million miles.
Once available on Instagram, consumers will be able to find tagged products from Shopify merchants in the app, then add them to their in-app cart. At checkout, they can then select Shop Pay as their preferred payment option from among credit card, debit card, and PayPal. The consumer will receive a confirmation code to their phone, then enter the code to complete the order without leaving Instagram. A similar experience will be available on Facebook.
These orders can also be tracked via Shopify’s Shop app, the same as those processed on Shopify itself.
Image Credits: Shopify
“People are embracing social platforms not only for connection, but for commerce,” said Carl Rivera, General Manager of Shop, in a statement. “Making Shop Pay available outside of Shopify for the first time means even more shoppers can use the fastest and best checkout on the Internet. And there’s more to come; we’ll continue to work with Facebook to bring a number of Shopify services and products to these platforms to make social selling so much better.”
This is not the first third-party payment option integrated into Facebook’s shopping platforms, as PayPal is also accepted. But it is a notable addition, given how heavily Facebook has pushed its own “shops” platform, which encourages merchants to sell and transact within its own apps — an even more critical source of revenue now that Apple’s privacy changes will impact Facebook’s ads business to the tune of billions of dollars. But likely, working with a third-party like Shopify is allowing the company to spin up a new revenue stream.
Shopify, however, declined to discuss its financial arrangement with Facebook.
Shopify isn’t limiting itself to Facebook in an effort to expand its e-commerce business. Last fall, it also partnered with TikTok on social commerce, allowing merchants to publish their marketing ads directly to the video platform.
This morning Monte Carlo, a startup focused on helping other companies better monitor their data inflows, announced that it has closed a $25 million Series B.
The round, which was co-led by GGV and Redpoint, comes mere months after its September Series A that was worth $15 million. Accel led the company’s Series A and Seed deals, participating in its Series B as well.
The round caught our attention not only for the speed at which it was raised following Monte Carlo’s preceding investment, but also because your humble servant had no idea what data observability, the startup’s niche, really was.
So we got Monte Carlo co-founder and CEO Barr Moses on a call to explain both her company’s space, and how it managed to attract so much more capital so quickly.
Data inflows
Big data was the jam a while back, but it turned out to be merely one piece in the broader data puzzle. We can see evidence of that in recent revenue growth at Databricks, which reached $425 million ARR in 2020 by building an analytics and AI service that sits on top of companies’ data.
Monte Carlo is another bet on the data space, sitting a bit earlier in the data lifecycle. Think of it this way: Snowflake can hold all your data, and Databricks can help you analyze it. But what’s checking to make sure that data flowing into your repositories is, you know, not bullshit?
Figuring out if data inflows are healthy and not bunk is what Monte Carlo does.
According to Moses, companies now have myriad data sources. That’s great in theory as more data is usually a good thing. But if one or two of those sources goes haywire, figuring that out before you collect, store, and analyze the bad information is pretty important.
So Monte Carlo sits upstream from the other data companies that are hot these days, keeping tabs on inbound data sources across a number of parameters to make sure that what’s actually arriving in your data lake is legit.
The startup does that, Moses said, by checking data freshness (how recent, or tardy the data in question is), volume (is there too little, too much?), schema (the data’s structure itself, to see if things have changed that could matter, or break downstream services), distribution (if data points suddenly jump from say, the single digits to the millions), and lineage, which can help find breakpoints in data inflows.
Hearing that Monte Carlo learns from a company’s particular data pipes to figure out what could be non-standard data inflow made me curious how long it takes to get the startup’s software set up and running; not long, per Barr, an hour to fire it up in many cases, and a week to learn.
A growing sector
Monte Carlo’s product is neat enough to warrant our attention by itself. But, fitting neatly inside the growth of the broader data space, and especially data tooling that isn’t directly concerning storage, makes it all the more worth considering.
And now with $25 million more, Monte Carlo can expand its current staff of 25, and keep attacking its mid-market and enterprise customer target. Let’s see how quickly it can scale, and how soon we can start squeezing the startup for growth numbers.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/monte-carlo-raises-25m-for-its-data-observability-service/
Polish video game maker CD Projekt, which makes Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack.
In a statement posted to its Twitter account, the company said it will “not give in nor negotiate” with the hackers, saying it has backups in place. “We have already secured our IT infrastructure and begun restoring data,” the company said.
According to the ransom note, the hackers said they would release the company’s stolen source code and other internal files if it did not pay the ransom, since the company would “most likely recover from backups.”
But the company said for now that no personal data was taken. “We are still investigating the incident, however at this time we can confirm that — to our best knowledge — the compromised systems did not contain any personal data of our players or users of our services.”
Important Update pic.twitter.com/PCEuhAJosR
— CD PROJEKT RED (@CDPROJEKTRED) February 9, 2021
It’s an increasingly hostile tactic used by ransomware actors: Hackers target high-value businesses and companies with file-encrypting malware and hold the files for a ransom. But since many companies have backups, some ransomware groups threaten to publish the stolen files unless the ransom is paid.
CD Projekt Red did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions, including what kind of ransomware was used to attack its systems.
It’s thought to be the second time in recent years that the company has been hit by ransomware. The game maker confirmed in 2017 that a hack resulted in the compromising of early work related to the Cyberpunk 2077. Weeks following the game’s launch Sony and Microsoft offered gamers refunds, citing bugs and poor performance on older consoles.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/cd-projekt-red-hit-by-ransomware-attack-refuses-to-pay-ransom/
Discovery and research of new molecular compounds is an expensive business, with development costs exceeding $10 billion per substance in some cases. Part of that comes from the need to closely examine every relevant molecule, studying its chemical composition and interactions as well as its physical structure at the atomic level. Despite advances in software to help model these compounds and molecules, there are still challenges in fully understanding their shapes through a two-dimensional computer screen.
San Diego-based startup Nanome uses virtual reality to solve that problem. The idea for Nanome came out of CEO and Founder Steve McCloskey’s time in the nanoengineering program at UC San Diego, where he saw a need for a better understanding of three-dimensional molecular structures.
“Understanding structure empowers our users to understand how their designs function,” he wrote in an email. “Yet, the R&D process for drug discovery relies on 2D monitors, keyboard, and mouse, which limits the understanding of complex 3D structures or interactions and contributes to massive R&D costs averaging $2.5B per drug.”
Nanome recently closed a funding round led by Bullpen Capital for $3 million to establish new business partnerships, build up the company’s brand, and expand their science and engineering team. “Nanome is reimagining the way we interact with science at a time when innovation in collaboration is more important than ever before,” said Bullpen Capital General Partner Ann Lai in a press release. Formic Ventures, led by Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov, also took part in the round.
McCloskey thinks that Nanome’s platform has become even more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers might be forced to work remotely on occasion, limiting their access to in-lab technology and software.
“Nanome helps scientists get on the same page quicker,” he wrote in an email. “Traditionally scientists working with molecules use screenshots or screen sharing, and rely on the mouse cursor and Zoom to communicate their insights and ask for feedback from other team members.” Nanome streamlines this process by bringing researchers to the same virtual reality space to work on molecule development together.
So far, Nanome has worked largely on projects with companies in the food and beverage industry, as well as another to develop more sustainable batteries. But they have plans to use this new funding to expand into pharmaceutical chemistry, synthetic biology, and even education. Their next product update will feature what McCloskey calls ‘Spatial Recording,’ that will allow users to record their work for later review – basically a screen recording but with a VR experience. “This is not only an amazing feature for asynchronous collaboration among researchers, it is also useful for producing lectures and lessons,” he wrote in an email.
