Technology

Two years ago, Kickstarter acquired Drip, an indie musician crowdfunding platform, on the eve of the serviceuntimely demise. After relaunching Drip last year, Kickstarter is again reinventing the Patreon-like artist platform. This time, by placing it under the stewardship of two guys who love indie creators so much they dreamed up a whole festival about it.

The idea grew out of conversations between Kickstarter principal founder Perry Chen and Andy Baio, Kickstarter former (and first) chief technology officer and one half of XOXO Fest, a sometimes annual, very beloved celebration of independent artists and creators. XOXO co-founder Andy McMillan will join Baio on the project, with an undisclosed round of seed funding provided by Kickstarter.

&Andy [McMillan] and I had been thinking about this for some time,& Baio said in an interview with TechCrunch. &The whole thing being about celebrating independent artists, bringing them together to talk about difficult things… So much of what we&ve focused on was that: helping independent artists who use the internet to make a living.&

The two Andys (as they&re known at XOXO) maintain a very active year-round Slack composed of former XOXO attendees, a responsibility thatseen them grow into their role as stewards of a community thattaken on a life of its own, both online and off.

For their new project — the evolution of Drip into a yet-to-be-named community and crowdfunding hub — Baio and McMillan have formed a public-benefit corporation to reflect their values and those of Kickstarter, also a public-benefit corporation. Chen clarifies that the new site is separate from Kickstarter and will ¬ be a subsidiary in any way, wholly its own thing [with] its own leadership.&

Ittoo early to say if Baio and McMillan plan to weave the new platform into XOXO Fest, but the two projects are &really closely aligned in mission,& Baio said. Some of Dripexisting creators are XOXO Fest regulars and the event itself grew out of a successful Kickstarter that raised $175,511 back in 2012.

&I think we&re all used to seeing at this point how the platforms that we use have failed,& Baio said. &The challenges that independent artists face are so profound already — to then have the tools and the platforms that you&re using work against you has been a painful thing.&

That pain was a central theme at XOXO Fest this year, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I was also an early member of the XOXO Outpost, a year-round creative space that grew out of the festival.) Across genres, writers, musicians and developers alike expressed concerns that unaddressed harassment, racism and misogyny had turned once well-loved social platforms against some of the users who need them most.

&We really hope that we can show people that this platform reflects the values and care we have for the artists that we care about,& Baio said. &We want it to be sustainable and independent for a long time.&

NBC is looking to reach a younger audience with todayannouncement of a new streaming news network, NBC News Signal. Instead of airing on traditional pay TV platforms, Signal will be available through NBCnews mobile and over-the-top apps, as well as on other services including PlutoTV, YouTube, and Twitter. The focus will be on the &political and social issues in America,& the company says.

The service will include an evening show hosted bySimone Boyce at 7 PM ET on weekdays. At launch, this program is available on Thursdays at 7 PM ET only. Other programming consists ofa morning and afternoon show and hourly news updates called &Brieflies,& which launches later this quarter and in early 2019.

There will also be aSteve Kornacki-hosted digital show &218: Race for the House& which will air daily at 12pm ET and on Election Day, November 6th; as well as a Katy Tur-hosted pre-show on the network from 7-9pm ET.

The channel will have 24/7 news coverage starting in mid-2019, NBC says.

&There is a growing segment of people who have never had a cable subscription, but who are just as hungry for smart news as the prior generations of news watchers who have consumed NBC News for decades,& said Nick Ascheim, SVP of digital at NBC News Group, about the launch. &These consumers & who are up-to-date on the headlines but are seeking a deeper understanding of the news of the moment & are increasingly turning to OTT devices for ‘lean back& news consumption or an on-the-go informative experience and thatexactly what NBC News Signal will deliver,& he added.

The streaming network isn&t NBConly attempt at wooing millennial viewers. The company also operates a Snapchat show called &Stay Tuned.&

However, it is now one of many digital-first initiatives in the news industry, aimed to reach the younger, cord cutter crowd.

CBS last year added streaming news from CBSN to its offering for cord cutters, CBS All Access, which it plans on augmenting with local newsfrom CBS stations.

Fox News will soon launch its own over-the-top streaming service, Fox Nation. ABCnew streaming network ABC News Live partnered with Roku to be featured on its devices& free channel.

Meanwhile, Cheddar has been doing deals left-and-right with various streaming TV services for inclusion in their lineups.

Therealso VICE News Tonight on HBO, and others, like Plexnews service, based on its Watchup acquisition.

Plus, todayyoungest users & like many of us & get a lot of their news from social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. That means NBCSignal will have a lot of competition fresh out of the gate.

Erica Fink and Christine Cataldi are the executive producers for the network. Rashida Jones, SVP of specials forNBCNews and MSNBC, is the executive in charge of programming forNBCNewsSignal.

The service is available here,and across the above-mentioned platforms.

Ride-hailing firm Grab branched out into payments last year and now the $11 billion-valued company, which acquired UberSoutheast Asia business earlier this year, has given its fintech division a major boost after it announced plans to introduce virtual pre-paid debit in partnership with Mastercard.

The move is the largest digital payment push in Southeast Asia to date.The deal will see its Grab Pay business offer Grab110 million registered users the option to use a virtual Mastercard to make payments both online and in-person.

Users will be able to use physical Grab Pay cards or virtual ones — the latter being a card number, expiry date, and other details that are held within the Grab app. Interestingly, TechCrunch understands that Grab had been in contact with Visa over a similar deal but it ultimately chose MasterCard . Grab declined to comment on that when asked.

Regardless of the issuer, the deal instantly gives Grab Pay the potential for serious legs.

Last November, Grab launched its first payment integration by allowing users in Singapore to pay for food at selected restaurants using its app. While it has expanded that support in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia, it has needed to onboard merchants to do so. Now, with MasterCard, it is tapping into a vast network of three million retailers across Southeast Asia, with support for worldwide and also via online merchants.

That turns Grab Pay into a serious payment network on paper, but it will also give a large chunk of Southeast Asia650 million population a chance to own a debit card for the first time.

While the regionmiddle-class is growing quickly as internet access continues to increase — Southeast Asiainternet population is larger than the total U.S. population, and growing — few people own credit or debit cards.

Many, in fact, remain unbanked. The World Bank claims 71 percent of the region is paid their salary in cash while just 30 percent own a debit card and only nine percent have a credit card. Many simply don&t qualify to own one. Grabeffort, which is the largest pre-paid push in the region, could make a difference.

‘Could& is very much the operative word here. While Grab has made progress with Grab Pay — which also runsan offline merchant network that enables those with limited internet knowledge to take advantage of e-commerce and other online services — the service is intrinsically linked to Grab.

Grab Pay can now exist as a standalone service. The question is whether Grab can market the virtual card service effectively and tap the undoubted potential that it has for its business and consumers in Southeast Asia. To date, no fintech firm has managed to build a regional network that covers over 100 million consumers, although there are plenty of promising challengers that have started out in a single market right. While Grabefforts have been periphery and, based on anecdotal evidence, not all users are convinced they need Grab Pay in their life.

Grab though is confident that its raft of non-transportation — which includes food deliveries, grocery deliveries andthird-party services on its platform — can make the Mastercard venture work.

&We see Grab Pay as a glue that goes across all the products we offer, and rewards our users for using them,& Reuben Lai, seniormanaging director at Grab Financial, told TechCrunch in an interview. &Grab Pay users spend two times more than regular users and they stay twice longer on our platform.&

Lai added that those who use Grab Pay are 30 percent more likely to use other Grab services — they, it seems, are the power users — but he added that Grabmission, beyond increasing engagement, is to digitize payments in Southeast Asia.

&What we want to do next is democratize payments and access to financial services,& he said. &Many consumers don&t have access to the things we take for granted, we want to make these available to our users, drivers and partners.&

Just as Grab founders Hooi Ling Tan and Anthony Tan have said that street hailing is Grabbiggest competitor, so Lai suggested that cash is the biggest rival to Grab Pay right now.

Thatcertainly true since the deal with Uber removed Grabmain competitor from the eight markets that it serves in Southeast Asia, but regulators are keen to see increased competition. Singapore fined Uber and Grab a collective $9.5 million from what it deemed to be an &anti-competitive& merger deal while the Philippines followed suit with a far smaller $300,000 wrap on the knuckles.

That shock to the system, coupled with a consumer backlash around more limited choice and a bodged effort to revamp Grabloyalty program, has seen Grab admit for the first time that it needs to rebuild ties. The MasterCard deal has the potential to be useful if executed right, but many Grab users will be looking for it to shore up on the basics, with complaints centered around issues like driver reliability and fair pricing.

Thatright, in the absence of Uber, Grab is learning that it isn&t easy being the top dog. But that status does give it the potential to work on major new products and with huge partners like MasterCard. A deal like this was unthinkable when Grab was the scrappy underdog, but now ita company that raises billions on a regular basis and is a category leader.