Technology

Bird hires Uberformer head of finance and director of corporate development

Bird, the scooter-sharing startup founded by former Uber VP of International Growth Travis VanderZanden, has brought a couple of former Uber employees to the flock.

Joining Bird as VP and Head of Finance is Dennis Cinelli, who worked as Uberhead of finance for global rides up until this month, according to his LinkedIn. Uber, of course, is not without a financial leader. In August, Uberlengthy search for a chief financial officer ended whenthe company hired Nelson Chai, the formerCEO of insurance and warranty provider Warranty Group. Bird has also brought on Ubernow-former director of corporate development Yibo Ling, who also worked at Uber up until this month, according to LingLinkedIn.

&As Bird enters its second year, we&re continuing to expand our talented executive team to build on and scale our momentum,& Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a press release. &Dennis and Yibo both bring valuable experience expanding markets and I look forward to working with them closely as we continue on our mission.&

Last month, Bird hit 10 million rides after about one year of operating. Earlier this month, Bird unveiled custom electric scooters and a delivery service for people to be able to rent scooters for a full day.

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Eva Yoo Contributor
Eva Yoo is a Shanghai-based tech writer for TechNode.

The advantage of entering an emerging market is that the market still has a lot of empty space to fill, and as a startup you can be the first player. Kazakhstan might not be the first country that comes to mind when you think of overseas expansion. However, it is the worldlargest landlocked country, and shares borders with Russia and China, which are important consumer markets as well as technology hubs.

In fact, companies in Russia and China provided good benchmarks for Chocofamily, now the biggest e-commerce holding in Kazakhstan. The 2011-founded startupcurrent capitalization is $50 million, and they&ve hired 350 employees in their office in Almaty, the countrylargest city and previous capital.

The company claims it has 2 million registered users on its platform, and expects $170 million gross billings in 2018 with 7,000 purchases per day. Chocofamily launched their payment app, Rakmet, in 2017, following in the steps of WeChat Pay.

2011: Copying from Russia

Looking at how Groupon was exploding in Russia, and how Delivery Club, a Russia-based food delivery service, was growing at a fast pace, the founder of Chocofamily, Ramil Mukhoryapov, decided the success could be replicated in Kazakhstan. So he quit his studies in Russia and went to Kazakhstan.

&Russia is three years above Kazakhstan. Check out what is happening in Russia and do the same in Kazakhstan, it is going to work in three years. Thatwhat we did, how we started the Chocofamily itself,& Nikolay Shcherbak, CEO at Chocofood says. &We just copied. If this works in Russia, it will work in Kazakhstan as well, because the markets are really close to each other.&

Ramil started with a daily deal service, Chocodaily, in Kazakhstan. After his first attempt was successful, he later started Chocofood, a food delivery service; Chocotravel, an online travel service; Lensmark, an online shop for contact lenses; and iDoctor, a platform with all the doctors in Kazakhstan where patients can find the doctor that they need and check doctor and hospital information and reviews. Now all these services are affiliates of Chocofamily Holding.

How this company consolidated the market

In Kazakhstan, Chocofamily had competitors, but they either defeated them, purchased them or merged with them.

Chocofamilyfood delivery service, Chocofood, faced stiff competition in the market. Its rival was Foodpanda, which also started in Kazakhstan in 2013. After a four-year war of attrition, Foodpanda remained as No. 2 and wanted to get out of the market — so Chocofood acquired Foodpanda and took over their customer base and the legal entity. The company got additional growth uplift after integrating with Foodpanda.

&The best we got from the deal was the team, the people. They joined the company and just doubled our orders,& Nikolay says.

Now Chocofood has an 80 percent market share in the food delivery market with 34,000 orders per month, working with 350 restaurants.

Online travel services Chocotravel merged with its rival Aviata in 2017. Now the two companies take a 67 percent combined market share. They&ve been profitable since the second half of 2018, with 80,000 air tickets and 50,000 railway tickets sold per month.

In the future, Chocotravel plans to enter the South-Eastern and CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States, namely northwest Russia, Eastern Europe and the Baltic states) travel markets, and they are looking for additional funds for expansion.

2017: Copying from China

In 2017, the company launched a payment app, Rakmet, which means &thank you& in Kazakhstan. It allows users to pay for purchases by simply scanning QR codes. For users, the advantage is that every merchant gives them cash back.

The idea for the app came about in early 2017, as they were looking at other companies in different countries.

&We were looking at WeChat, and it had a good system of using QR codes for payments. We thought it was a good idea. QR code technology is really old, but it only comes to our everyday life now,& Nikolay said.

Like other payment apps, users can use the Rakmet app by connecting their bank card to the app as a payment option. With a population of 18 million in Kazakhstan, bank card penetration is quite good; 19 million bank cards have been issued in total, and there are 10 million active bank cards.

For businesses to join the Rakmet app, they must give a certain percentage of cash back to customers. The approach has been especially popular with cafes and restaurants that have been using loyalty cards to attract consumers. Nikolay says it is a marketing strategy for merchants, because they&re paying the commission to Rakmet only for those transactions. To date, 300+ predominantly small businesses in Almaty have posted their stores via the Rakmet app.

&Rakmet app will be on top of the ecosystem of all Chocofamily affiliates. We also plan to add different services to Rakmet app, such as allowing users to pay traffic fines to the government on the app and pay the parking fee using the app,& Nikolay says.

Women are typically responsible for the household in Central Asia. Thus, women make up 60 percent of their users, making transactions on mobile such as booking flight tickets, ordering food, and making doctor appointments. The biggest growth is among their users in the age group between 25 to 35.

They also are working on big data. The team is now building the infrastructure for big data analysis, such as data warehousing and the support. Then they plan to build the mechanism for data processing. In September, they signed a contract with one of the universities in Kazakhstan so they can attract students who are experts on big data analysis.

In 2011, Chocofamily started with their own money. In 2013, they received $50,000 from two angel investors, then another $150,000. Then they attained Series A funding of $1 million from Murat Abdrakhmanov, an experienced entrepreneur in Kazakhstan, and later received $2 million in Series B.

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This time instead of exposing users& data, a Facebook bug erased it. A previously undisclosed Facebook glitch caused it to delete some users& Live videos if they tried to post them to their Story and the News Feed after finishing their broadcast. Facebook wouldn&t say how many users or livestreams were impacted, but told the bug was intermittent and affected a minority of all Live videos. Itsince patched the bug and restored some of the videos, but is notifying some users with an apology that their Live videos have been deleted permanently.

Facebook mistakenly deleted some peopleLive videos The bug raises the question of whether Facebook is a reliable place to share and store our memories and important moments. In March, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told congress regarding the Cambridge Analytica scandal that &We have a responsibility to protect your data & and if we can&t, then we don&t deserve to serve you.& Between that misappropriation of user biographical data, the recent breach that let hackers steal the access tokens that would let them take over 50 million Facebook accounts, wrongful changes to users& default sharing privacy settings, and now this, some users may conclude Facebook in fact no longer deserves to serve them.

Facebook userTommy Gabriel Sparandera provided TechCrunch with this screenshot showing the apology note from Facebook on his profile. It reads &Information About Your Live Videos: Due to a technical issue, one or more of your live videos may have been deleted from your timeline and couldn&t be restored. We understand how important your live videos can be and apologize that this happened.&

When TechCrunch asked Facebook about the issue, it confirmed the problem and provided this statement: &&We recently discovered a technical issue that removed live videos from some peopleFacebook Timelines. We have resolved this issue and restored many of these videos to peopleTimelines. People whose videos we were unable to restore will get a notification on Facebook. We know saving memories on Facebook is important to people, and we apologize for this error.&

Facebook mistakenly deleted some peopleLive videos

Facebook made a huge push to own the concept of &going Live& in 2016 with TV commercials, billboards and more designed to overshadow competitors like TwitterPeriscope. It eventually succeeded, with Periscopepopularity fading while one in five Facebook videos became Live broadcasts. But in its blitz to win this market, it didn&t build adequate safety and moderation tools. That led to suicides and violence being livestreamed to audiences before Facebookcontent police could take down the videos.

Nowadays, most users don&t go live frequently unless they&re some kind of influencer, public figure, or journalist. When they do see something important transpiring, Facebook has positioned itself as the way to broadcast it. But if users can&t be sure Facebook will properly save those videos, it could persuade them itnot worth becoming a camera man instead of a participant in lifemost interesting moments.

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One of the latest additions to the on-demand economy is Papa, a mobile app that connects college students with adults over 60 in need of support and companionship.

The recent graduate of Y Combinatoraccelerator program has raised a $2.4 million round of funding to expand its service throughout Florida and to five additional states next year, beginning with Pennsylvania. Initialized Capital led the round, with participation from Sound Ventures.

Headquartered in Miami, the startup was founded last year by chief executive officer Andrew Parker. The idea came to him while he was juggling a full-time job at a startup and caring for his grandfather, who had early onset dementia.

&I&ve always been a connector of humans,& Parker,the former vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE, told TechCrunch. &I&ve always naturally feltcomfortable with all walks of life and all age groups and have just felt human connection is really critical.&

Seniors can request a &Papa Pal& using the companymobile app, desktop site or by phone. The pals can pick them up and take them out for an activity or have them over to play a game, complete household chores, teach them how to use social media and other technology or simply to chat. A senior is matched with a student, who must complete a &rigorous& background check, in as little as 30 seconds.

YC-grad Papa raises $2.4M for its ‘grandkids-on-demand& service

Parker says there are 600 students working with Papa an average of 25 hours per month.

&We&ve been fortunate that this is something the students really want to bepart of,& he said. &They aren&t doing this for a couple extra dollars. They are doing this to help the community.&

The service costs seniors $20 per hour, $12 of which is paid to the students and $8 is returned to Papa. Itnot a subscription-based service, but seniors can pay for a premium option that lets them choose between three Papa Pals instead of being randomly paired with one of the several hundred options. The students do not provide any personal care, like bathing or grooming. And they are not a pick-up and drop-off service, like Uber or Lyft.

&We believe the Papa team has found a unique way to combat loneliness and depression in older adults,& said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, in a statement. &The experience that Papa Pals bring their members make it seem like they are part of a family.&

In addition to expanding to new markets, Papa is in the process of partnering with insurance companies with a goal of allowing seniors to pay for some of its services through their Medicare plans.

&Lonelinessis a crisis. Ita disease. Itkilling people prematurely,& Parker said. &We are providing a really massive impact to these peoplelives.&

Y Combinator is changing up the way it invests

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Legacy open-backed headphone makerGrado is taking their classic design into the future with the small Brooklyn companyfirst pair of wireless headphones.

The GW100s have a familiar look, but integrate Bluetooth tech and volume controls. They go for $249.

Grado headphones are a favorite of mine; they have a very unique open sound that really resonates and are perfect for home listening. Previous iterations haven&t really thrived as much on the road or in noisy offices because they tend to let in a lot of outside noise and leak a lot of your tunes. The company says that they&ve redesigned the housings and internals of the GW100s to reduce noise leakage by 60 percent — no famed wooden enclosures on this design either.

Grado takes the wraps off their first pair of wireless headphones

Part of whatgreat about Grado headphones is their history; we toured the companytiny Brooklyn HQ a few years back and took a look at their operations… really cool stuff.

TC Makers: A Walk Through The Amazing Townhouse That Grado Labs Calls Home

Ittough for a company to make do on just brand legacy alone, and even though audio tech generally has a much longer shelf life than other products, therealways a time to adapt, especially now as more hardware makers purge headphone jacks from their devices.

In the past few years, the company branched out into some more mobile-friendly products, but the magic wasn&t all there. The wireless GW100s keep the companysame drivers, though it&ll be interesting to hear what they sound like as the company tunes them to be more amenable to &on-the-go& listening. Speaking of which, they also look like theyhave a sturdier design than some of the companymore spartan headbands, which were strangely kind of part of the appeal, but are definitely welcome for something more likely to be chucked in a backpack.

The headphones charge via micro-USB and offer a 15-hour battery life, the company says. They also pack an included 3.5mm cable if you want to use them with your old gear. More details on precise audio tuning are listed on its product page.

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Musicians are celebrating as the Music Modernization Act, an attempt to drag copyright and royalty rules into the 21st century, is signed into law after unanimous passage through Congress. The act aims to centralize and simplify the process by which artists are tracked and paid on digital services like Spotify and Pandora, and also extends the royalty treatment to songs recorded before 1972.

The problems in this space have affected pretty much every party. Copyright law and music industry practices were, as you might remember, totally unprepared for the music piracy wave at the turn of the century, and also for the shift to streaming over the last few years. Predictably, it isn&t the labels, distributors or new services that got hosed — itartists, who often saw comically small royalty payments from streams if they saw anything at all.

Even so, the MMA has enjoyed rather across-the-board support from all parties, because existing law is so obscure and inadequate. And it will remain that way to a certain extent — this isn&t layman territory and things will remain obscure. But the act will address some of the glaring issues current in the media landscape.

The biggest change is probably the creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective. This new organization centralizes the bookkeeping and royalty payment process, replacing a patchwork of agreements that required lots of paperwork from all sides (and as usual, artists were often the ones left out in the cold as a result). The MLC will be funded by companies like Pandora or Google that want to enter into digital licensing agreements, meaning there will be no additional commission or fee for the MLC, but the entity will actually be run by music creators and publishers.

Previously digital services and music publishers would enter into separately negotiated agreements, a complex and costly process if you want to offer a comprehensive library of music — one that stifled new entrants to the market. Nothing in the new law prevents companies from making these agreements now, as some companies will surely prefer to do, but the MLC offers a simple, straightforward solution and also a blanket license option where you can just pay for all the music in its registry. This could in theory nurture new services that can&t spare the cash for the hundred lawyers required for other methods.

Thereone other benefit to using the MLC: you&re shielded from liability for statutory damages. Assuming a company uses it correctly and pays their dues, they&re no longer vulnerable to lawsuits that allege underpayment or other shenanigans — the kind of thing streaming providers have been weathering in the courts for years, with potentially massive settlements.

Spotify faces $1.6 billion lawsuit from music publisher alleging copyright infringement

The law also improves payouts for producers and engineers, who have historically been under-recognized and certainly under-compensated for their roles in music creation. Writers and performers are critical, of course, but they&re not the only components to a great song or album, and itimportant to recognize this formally.

The last component of the MMA, the CLASSICS Act, is its most controversial, though even its critics seem to admit that itbetter than what we had before. CLASSICS essentially extends standard copyright rules to works created before 1972, during which year copyright law changed considerably and left pre-1972 works largely out of the bargain.

Advocacy groups knock ‘unjust& copyright-extending CLASSICS Act

Whatthe problem Well, it turns out that many works that would otherwise enter the public domain would be copyright-protected (or something like it — there are some technical differences) until 2067, giving them an abnormally long term of protection. And whatmore, these works would be put under this new protection automatically, with no need for the artists to register them. That may sound convenient, but it also means that thousands of old works would be essentially copyrighted even though their creators, if they&re even alive, have asserted no intention of seeking that status.

A simple registry for those works was proposed by a group of data freedom advocates, but their cries were not heard by those crafting and re-crafting the law. Admittedly itsomething of an idealistic objection, and the harm to users is largely theoretical. The bill proceeded more or less as written.

At all events the Music Modernization Act is now law; its unanimous passage is something of an achievement these days, though God knows both sides need as many wins as they can get.

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