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India has issued a notice to Twitter, warning the American social firm to comply with New Delhi’s order to block accounts and content related to a protest by farmers and not “assume the role of a court and justify non-compliance.” Failure to comply with the order may prompt penal action against Twitter, the notice warns.

The warning comes days after Twitter blocked dozens of high-profile accounts in India in compliance with New Delhi’s request, but later lifted the restriction.

Twitter “cannot assume the role of a court and justify non-compliance. Twitter being an intermediary is obliged to obey the directions as per satisfaction of authorities as to which inflammatory content will arouse passion and impact public order. Twitter cannot sit as an appellate authority over the satisfaction of the authorities about its potential impact on derailing public order,” said the notice, a copy of its summary was reviewed by TechCrunch.

India’s IT ministry expressed concerns over what it deemed derogatory and factually incorrect tweets and hashtags that have been circulating in India this week that it said were designed to spread hate. “It is thus clear that, the offending tweets/ hashtag remained in public domain and must have been tweeted and re-tweeted several times at the risk and cost of public order and at the risk of incitement to the commission of offences,” the letter said.

Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

For more than three months, tens of thousands of farmers (if not more) in India and elsewhere have been protesting against three laws passed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government that they say allow greater private sector competition.

Twitter, which reaches more than 75 million users through its apps in India, has emerged as the single-most important online forum for people seeking to voice their opinion on this matter. Singer Rihanna, who has more followers on Twitter than any Indian actor or politician, tweeted a CNN news story on Tuesday about the protests in India and asked “why are’t we talking about this!?

High-profile Indian actors including Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Karan Johar, and Ekta Kapoor cautioned Indians on Wednesday to not fall for “propaganda.”

Raman Chima, a senior international counsel and Asia Pacific Policy director at Access Now, a non-profit internet advocacy organization, said in a series of tweets that instead of threatening social media platforms, India’s IT ministry “needs to explain why blocking entire handles & seeking the banning of hashtags does not violate the Indian Constitution.” He said the ministry has neither been transparent nor respected the rights.

“You can choose to disagree, correct, ridicule, or engage with such fears, outcry. Seeking to ban & precensor such discussions is a travesty of India’s Constitution + international human rights law. This is not what 21st Century India should permit, nor what our founders envisaged. The Ministry of Electronics and IT should release its actual orders and all documentation behind the Govt’s decisions to – (1) issue these orders and (2) press the matter with Twitter and other social media platforms. Don’t hide; explain & justify how this is not unconstitutional.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/india-sends-warning-to-twitter-over-lifting-block-on-accounts-and-noncompliance-of-order/

Embedded finance — the idea of offering financial products where customers are already congregating via white label solutions and APIs – isn’t an entirely new concept. In fact, in one form or another, such as point of sale credit, the concept has existed for years and long before Silicon Valley venture capital firm and media company (ha!) Andreessen Horowitz made it a thing. However, fuelled by cloud technology and a plethora of new fintech and Banking-as-a-Service startups, there is no doubt the embedded finance trend is accelerating.

The latest company to declare its hand is Berlin-based Banxware, which offers embedded finance in the form of loans for SMEs, in partnership with marketplaces, payments providers, and others. It launched in December and today is disclosing that it has raised €4 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Force over Mass, and VR Ventures. They are joined by HTGF, and private investors in banking, payment and e-commerce.

Banxware says it will use the investment to develop and grow its embedded white label financial services offering, and expand its team. In addition to lending, the startup will also soon offer card-based products and other financial services.

Banxware’s tech and infrastructure enables any company to offer loans and other banking services to SME customers. The idea is to act as the link between banks (lenders), digital platforms, and merchants. Banks get access to hard to reach SME customers. Platforms, such as online marketplaces, can up-sell financial products beyond their core offering. And merchants benefit from speedy access to working capital.

“SMEs have a hard time to access capital when needed, especially when they are less than three years old or do not have the most pristine credit history,” explains co-founder and CEO Jens Röhrborn. “On top of this, loan applications, i.e. loan decisions and loan payout, still take several weeks in most cases.

“More and more sellers and merchants are using digital platforms through which they sell their products or process their digital payments. By using the recent historic data on these merchants provided by the platforms, we can lend against their future revenues”.

This has seen Banxware build an instant lending tool that includes AML and KYC compliance, and a scoring engine that analyzes historic platform data and data from third party providers, such as account information providers and external scoring services. The promise is an instant loan decision and loan payout, “all in less than 15 minutes”.

“On the lending side, we work with both balance sheet lenders and lending vehicles with whom we pre-agree on lending terms and loan decision criteria and on whose behalf we execute the loan decision,” says Röhrborn. “Merchants repay their loan in such a way that platforms subtract a certain percentage of the future merchant payouts”.

Röhrborn says the company’s instant lending tool is “only the beginning” and that Banxware will develop additional embedded financial services and expand internationally.

Meanwhile, the German fintech currently generates revenue by charging a one time fee for each loan that is processed through its platform and via a one off customization fee.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/banxware/

Eyelash extensions have taken off in recent years — particularly in Asia —  but the audience is only so broad. Getting extensions — semi-permanent fibers that are attached to one’s natural eyelashes — can require hundreds dollars and hours in the seat of a lash stylist. There’s always the risk, too, of irritation or worse. Little wonder that, even accounting for low-budget lashes that can be applied at home, the market stands at around $2 billion, which is too small a market to capture the attention of most venture capitalists.

Luum, a four-year-old, 15-person, Berkeley, Ca.-based robotics company, thinks it can change the math — and attract investment —  by “exponentially” expanding the market, says its CEO, Philippe Sanchez, who has overseen large chain businesses, including as a managing director for Starbucks in France.

The way forward, he says, is through robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, which Luum says it’s using to ultimately create a robot that that can apply lashes in 20 minutes and, if all goes as planned, will be widely available in beauty shops. More, because lash extensions need to be replaced every two to four weeks as the lashes fall, customers will come back again and again.

Right now, there’s a bit of magical thinking involved, admits Sanchez. The tech currently relies on Epson industrial robots to which a variety of arms and sensors are attached, making it look a little like something you might see in the dentist’s office. The procedure of applying lashes has been tried out 100 times on 25 brave souls alone. The process currently takes as long as it would to apply lashes by hand, too, meaning a couple of hours.

Still, Luum, which has raised $10 million to date from Foundation Capital and others and is about to begin talking with investors about a Series A round, is convinced it has the right team to chase and grow what it sees as a big and underserved opportunity in the beauty space.

We talked with Sanchez yesterday afternoon about the company and its next steps. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: So you are targeting this popular treatment in what seems like a very fragmented industry.

PS: It’s very popular and yet a little bit undiscovered and yes, it’s very fragmented. There are 34,000 lash extension services being offered right now in the U.S. alone, where you’ve got an artist coming over to you and selecting one lash extension at a time, dipping it in an adhesive, and gluing it to an existing lash, then waiting a few seconds to get the next one and the next one, and two hours later, you have amazing lashes that look extremely natural.

But these are individual lash artists. And we see this as a great opportunity to reinvent the category and take a service that’s already popular and make it even more popular with high-level execution and a new world-class brand.

TC: So the idea is that you create a brand and develop a chain of walk-in centers around the country and world where these eyelashes will be robotically attached?

PS: Correct. We want to leverage our technology to build our brand and launch a chain of studios, as well as to license the technology to people who already sell beauty services and products and and offer them a chance to either be much better at what they do if they are lash artists or, if you know, they have a hair salon or a large cosmetic retailer, they can [add lashes as an ancillary business]. They love the idea of returning customers having to come back every month for services, and lash extensions bring them back into their stores.

TC: This obviously requires the same or better precision than human fingers, along with high safety requirements given this hardware is so near to someone’s eyes. How does the robot work right now?

PS: The machine is pretty large and pretty soft and very advanced. There is a bed just like you would have in a first-class business flight. And the machine nearby that is about the size of a human, and so you lay in the bed and the machine work overs your face — you have a mask, just like if you were to do a manual extension — and it has a little robotic arm that does the job of a person but is much faster and more precise than any manual application. And it’s very safe. It’s got little prongs in the plastic at the end of these arms that are very light held by very light magnets because you need only a few grams of force to manipulate the lash.

TC: So if there was any type of external event — an earthquake or something . . .

PS:  . . . the arms literally fall because they’re held by these little very light magnets. If you you shake the machine or somebody sneezes, the arms will fall. It creates an environment that simply cannot hurt you, which is critical to the service itself.

TC: Are you licensing anyone else’s tech or building everything in-house eventually?

PS: It’s all built in house. We’re leveraging advanced robots from Epson that are very good at doing precise manipulation and that are fast. But [as for] IP in the beauty space, there was essentially no prior art, so we have secured a patent already in the U.S and Korea and Australia and [have] 25 patent cases around the world that are very broad and provide us with a moat and protection for the company at large.

TC: How much will these robots cost?

PS: They will cost about $125,000 or so, but this one-time capital expense can boost productivity of labor by four or six times, so you’ve essentially increased the throughput of one bed, one lash artist, by six. And the machine lasts four to five years.

TC: Plus other costs.

PS: You will have maintenance costs, but it’s essentially pure margin. For most of those consumer service business, most of the cost goes goes into the labor. That was for my experience at Starbucks.

TC: How far away are you from realizing this vision?

PS: COVID [slowed us down], though we can conduct consumer tests again right now [as California reopens slightly], so we’re testing the machine, which is already able to deliver a simple style at about the speed of a human. And as we continue to develop and work over the next few months and get closer to opening our first studio,  the performance of the machines will increase to twice the speed and three times the speed and four times the speed of a human application.

TC: You need more capital toward that end. How much are you looking to raise?

PS: A $15 million Series A. That will allow us to open our first studio and validate the unit economic model, as well as to build our third-generation machine. The capital will also be deployed to start to build the foundation of a world class beauty brand.

TC: Who should investors know is on your team?

PS: The company was founded by Nathan Harding, who also founded the [robotic exoskeleton pioneer] Ekso Bionics, and Kurt Amundson [who worked with Harding at Ekso Bionics for a decade]. They’ve got tremendous experience and expertise already in the world of advanced robotics, and also computer vision on the computer vision side.

TC: What’s to keep a company like Dyson from jumping into this market if you’re able to prove there is one?

PS: Some folks will realize that this is an attractive space and it’s worth looking at, but we’ve got a couple of years on them already.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/could-eyelash-extensions-become-a-huge-market-this-robotics-startup-thinks-so/

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, became profitable for the first time in the December quarter, the company announced in its earnings report.

The firm’s cloud unit achieved positive adjusted EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization) during the quarter, after being in business since 2009. The milestone is in part a result of the “realization of economies of scale,” Alibaba said.

Alibaba Cloud, which incorporates everything from database, storage, big data analytics, security, machine learning to IoT services, has dominated China’s cloud infrastructure market for the past few years and its market share worldwide continues to grow. As of 2019, the cloud behemoth was the third-largest public cloud company (providing infrastructure-as-a-service) in the world with a 9% market, trailing behind Amazon and Microsoft, according to Gartner.

COVID-19 has been a boon to cloud and digital adoption around the world as the virus forces offline activities online. For instance, Alibaba notes in its earnings that demand for digitalization in the restaurant and service industry remains strong in the post-COVID period in China, a trend that benefits its food delivery and on-demand services app, Ele.me. The firm’s cloud revenue grew to $2.47 billion in the December quarter, primarily driven by “robust growth in revenue from customers in the internet and retail industries and the public sector.”

Commerce remained Alibaba’s largest revenue driver in the quarter accounting for nearly 70% of revenue, while cloud contributed 7%.

Tencent’s cloud segment is Alibaba Cloud’s closest rival. As of 2019, it had a 2.8% market globally, according to Gartner. The industry in China still has ample room for growth, as Alibaba executive vice-chairman Joe Tsai pointed out in an analyst call from last August.

“Based on the third-party studies that we’ve seen, the China cloud market is going to be somewhere in the $15 billion to $20 billion total size range, and the U.S. market is about eight times that. So the China market is still at a very early stage,” said Tsai.

“We feel very good, very comfortable to be in the China market and just being an environment of faster digitization and faster growth of usage of cloud from enterprises because we’re growing from such a smaller base, about one-eighth the base of that of the U.S. market.”

A key strategy to grow Alibaba Cloud is the integration of cloud into Alibaba’s enterprise chat app Dingtalk, which the company hopes can drive industries across the board onto cloud services. It’s a relationship that echoes that between Microsoft 365 and Azure, as president of Alibaba Cloud, Zhang Jianfeng, previously suggested in an interview.

“We don’t want to just provide cloud in terms of infrastructure services,” said Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang in the August earnings call. “If we just do it as an infrastructure service, as SaaS services, then price competition is inevitable, and then all the cloud service is more like a commodity business. Today, Alibaba’s cloud is cloud plus intelligence services, and it’s about cloud plus the power of the data usage.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/alibaba-cloud-turns-profitable-after-11-years/

Time is critical for healthcare providers, especially in the middle of the pandemic. Singapore-based Bot MD helps save time with an AI-based chatbot that lets doctors look up important information from their smartphones, instead of needing to call a hospital operator or access its intranet. The startup announced today it has raised a $5 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Venture.

Other backers include SeaX, XA Network and SG Innovate, and angel investors Yoh-Chie Lu, Jean-Luc Butel and Steve Blank. Bot MD was also part of Y Combinator’s summer 2018 batch.

The funding will be used to expand in the Asia-Pacific region, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, and to add new features in response to demand from hospitals and healthcare organizations during COVID-19. Bot MD’s AI assistant currently supports English, with plans to release Bahasa Indonesian and Spanish later this year. It is currently used by about 13,000 doctors at organizations including Changi General Hospital, National University Health System, National University Cancer Institute of Singapore, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore General Hospital, Parkway Radiology and the National Kidney Transplant Institute.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Dorothea Koh told TechCrunch that Bot MD integrates hospital information usually stored in multiple systems and makes it easier to access.

Image Credits: Bot MDWithout Bot MD, doctors may need to dial a hospital operator to find which staffers are on call and get their contact information. If they want drug information, that means another call to the pharmacy. If they need to see updated guidelines and clinical protocols, that often entails finding a computer that is connected to the hospital’s intranet.

“A lot of what Bot MD does is to integrate the content that they need into a single interface that is searchable 24/7,” said Koh.

For example, during COVID-19, Bot MD introduced a new feature that takes healthcare providers to a form pre-filled with their information when they type “record temperature” into the chatbot. Many were accessing their organization’s intranet twice a day to log their temperature and Koh said being able to use the form through Bot MD has significantly improved compliance.

The time it takes to onboard Bot MD varies depending on the information systems and amount of content it needs to integrate, but Koh said its proprietary natural language processing chat engine makes training its AI relatively quick. For example, Changi General Hospital, a recent client, was onboarded in less than 10 days.

Bot MD plans to add new clinical apps to its platform, including ones for electronic medical records (EMR), billing and scheduling integrations, clinical alerts and chronic disease monitoring.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/bot-md-an-ai-based-chatbot-for-doctors-raises-5-million-for-expansion-into-more-asian-markets/