Technology

Today in lovely Beirut, Lebanon TechCrunch held its first Startup Battlefield in the country. Over 700 people watched the show on site, which featured speakers from throughout the Middle East and 15 startups competing in Startup Battlefield.

A winner will be chosen at the end of the day and they will walk away with a $25,000 prize. As of this postpublication, a winner has not been picked.

What follows, is each companyStartup Battlefield pitch in the order that they appeared on stage.

[Please note: Videos will be added to this list as they become available]

Startup Battlefield Competition & Flight #1

BuildInk

Real estate construction firms nowadays are struggling to keep up with the fast-moving pace of technological advancements in order to fulfill the market constantly changing demands. Buildink is offering a revolutionary solution for construction firms, via a scalable and mobile friendly Cable Robot Concrete 3D printer and Signature Concrete Mixture. Concrete 3D printing will not only open the space for unlimited architectural designs, it will also reduce the overall construction cost.

Harmonica

Harmonics is the leading marriage making app in MENA that not only match singles but also help them build healthy relationships. Launched in Cairo with a unique matching algorithm of one match at a time, powered by a strong team of phycologists, managed to reach a 100,000 user base in only few months.

Material Solved

MaterialSolved is a data visualization software for chemical/nano compounds. MaterialSolved helps scientists and scientific illustrators create complex scientific 3D models, static illustrations, and animations in an efficient way. Unlike general purpose graphics and visualization software, we use a new model that merges several algorithms to achieve significant time and cost reduction and make many visual representations possible.

MoneyFellows

MoneyFellows enables access to interest free credit and helps savers to easily reach their saving goals. We do this by digitizing the traditional ROSCA model (Rotating Savings and Credit Association). How it works: 1- Group of people joins together to contribute a fixed monthly installment into a common pot. 2- Every month one of the users takes the whole pot as a payout. 3- Circle ends when all circle participants gets his/her payout once. 4- Circle is then usually repeated with the same group of people over again.&

Neotic AI

Neotic.ai created auto-traders for financial markets, giving the opportunity for everyone to use advanced technology to get higher returns on their savings. In other words, Neotic users can find ready to use, plug and play, live tested, AI powered trading strategies and deploy them directly on the broker account without writing any single line of code.

Startup Battlefield Competition & Flight #2

Naturansa

Naturansa produces high-quality protein from edible insect grown through pre-consumer food waste decomposition. We have built scalable technology that produces insect year-round which then get converted into a protein powder. We currently use our product in pet food market, but our target is to move into human consumption and solve major environmental problems that are present in current protein production.

IT Grapes

IT Grapes is a precision farming platform composed by an internally developed hardware for smart monitoring of environmental data and control of in-field equipment, combined with an online hub that gives access to federated data for selected actors of the agricultural sector in order to help farmers, taking the right decisions and improve the decentralized intelligence included in the in-field devices.

IN2

IN2 is a sports and activities platform that aims to streamline the activity organization process. Whether itfitness, sports, music, or other activities, IN2 makes planning and participating in activities a much more enjoyable experience. It does that by empowering businesses - organizers with management tools and connecting them to the relevant stakeholders

Seez

Seez is a mobile app that reduces the time people spend searching for a car from 17 hours down to a few seconds. By fully automating your search, seez uses its AI chatbot, Cesar, to scan all sites, identify the seller, and even negotiate the price down for you. This way you will see all cars for sale in your country and the final price of each car.

Autotell

AUTOTELL is revamping driving experience, Our aim is to give you the right advice at the right moment, helping you reduce consumption, get the maximum return out of your car by providing you with the remote monitoring, detecting faults on road, have an access to an automotive Eco-system and getting instant advice whenever needed through AI personal assistant 24/7.

Itbeen just over four months since Europetough new privacy framework came into force. You might believe that little of substance has changed for big techdata-hungry smooth operators since then — beyond firing out a wave of privacy policy update spam, and putting up a fresh cluster of consent pop-ups that are just as aggressively keen for your data.

But don&t be fooled. This is the calm before the storm, according to the European Union data protection supervisor,Giovanni Buttarelli, who says the law is being systematically flouted on a number of fronts right now — and that enforcement is coming.

&I&m expecting, before the end of the year, concrete results,& he tells TechCrunch, sounding angry on every consumerbehalf.

Though he chalks up some early wins for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) too, suggesting its 72 hour breach notification requirement is already bearing fruit.

He also points to geopolitical pull, with privacy regulation rising up the political agenda outside Europe — describing, for example, Californiarecently passed privacy law, which is not at all popular with tech giants, as having &a lot of similarities to GDPR&; as well as noting &a new appetite for a federal law& in the U.S.

Yet healso already looking beyond GDPR — to the wider question of how European regulation needs to keep evolving to respond to platform power and its impacts on people.

Next May, on the anniversary of GDPR coming into force, Buttarelli says he will publish a manifesto for a next-generation framework that envisages active collaboration between Europeprivacy overseers and antitrust regulators. Which will probably send a shiver down the tech giant spine.

Notably, the Commissionantitrust chief,Margrethe Vestager — who has shown an appetite to take on big tech, and has so far fined Google twice ($2.7BNfor Google Shopping and staggering $5BN for Android), and who is continuing to probe its business on a number of fronts while simultaneouslyeyeing other platforms& use of data — is scheduled to give a keynote at an annual privacy commissioners& conferencethat Buttarelli is co-hosting in Brussels later this month.

Her presence hints at the potential of joint-working across historically separate regulatory silos that have nonetheless been showing increasingly overlapping concerns of late.

See, for example, Germany&sFederal Cartel Office accusing Facebook of using its size to strong-arm users into handing over data. And the French Competition Authority probing the online ad market — akaFacebook and Google — and identifying a raft of problematic behaviors. Last year the Italian Competition Authority also opened a sector inquiry into big data.

Traditional competition law theories of harm would need to be reworked to accommodate data-basedanticompetitive conduct — essentially the idea that data holdings can bestow an unfair competitive advantage if they cannot be matched. Which clearly isn&t the easiest stinging jellyfish to nail to the wall. But Europeantitrust regulators are paying increasing mind to big data; looking actively at whether and even how data advantages are exclusionary or exploitative.

In recent years, Vestager has been very public with her concerns about dominant tech platforms and the big data they accrue as a consequence, saying, for example in 2016, that: &Ifacompanyuse ofdata is so bad for competition that it outweighs thebenefits,we may have to step in to restorea level playing field.&

Buttarellibelief is that EU privacy regulators will be co-opted intothat wider antitrust fight by &supporting and feeding& competition investigations in the future.A future that can be glimpsed right now, with the EC&santitrust lens swinging around to zoom in on what Amazon is doing with merchant data.

&Europe would like to speak with one voice, not only within data protection but by approaching this issue of digital dividend, monopolies in a better way — not per sectors,&Buttarelli tells TechCrunch.

&Monopolies are quite recent. And therefore once again, as it was the case with social networks, we have been surprised,& he adds, when asked whether the law can hope to keep pace. &And therefore the legal framework has been implemented in a way to do our best but itnot in my view robust enough to consider all the relevant implications… So there is space for different solutions. But first joint enforcement and better co-operation is key.&

From a regulatory point of view, competition law is hampered by the length of time investigations take. A characteristic of the careful work required to probe and prove out competitive harms thatnonetheless especially problematic set against the blistering pace of technological innovation and disruption. The law here is very much the polar opposite of ‘move fast and break things&.

But on the privacy front at least, there will be no 12 year wait for the first GDPR enforcements, as Buttarelli notes was the case when Europecompetition rules were originally set down in 1957Treaty of Rome.

He says the newly formed European Data Protection Board (EDPB), which is in charge of applying GDPR consistently across the bloc, is fixed on delivering results &much more quickly&. And so the first enforcements are penciled in for around half a year after GDPR ‘Day 1&.

&I think that people are right to feel more impassioned about enforcement,& he says. &We see awareness and major problems with how the data is treated — which are systemic. There is also a question with regard to the business model, not only compliance culture.

&I&m expecting concrete first results, in terms of implementation, before the end of this year.&

&No blackmailing&

Tens of thousands of consumers have already filed complaints under Europenew privacy regime. The GDPR updates the EUlongstanding data protection rules, bringing proper enforcement for the first time in the form of much larger fines for violations — to prevent privacy being the bit of the law companies felt they could safely ignore.

The EDPB tells us that more than 42,230 complaints have been lodged across the bloc since the regulation began applying, on May 25. The board is made up of the heads of EU Member Statenational data protection agencies, withButtarelli serving as its current secretariat.

&I did not appreciate the tsunami of legalistic notices landing on the account of millions of users, written in an obscure language, and many of them were entirely useless, and in a borderline even with spamming, to ask for unnecessary agreements with a new privacy policy,& he tells us. &Which, in a few cases, appear to be in full breach of the GDPR — not only in terms of spirit.&

He also professes himself ¬ surprised& about Facebook latest security debacle — describing the massive new data breach the company revealed on Friday as &business as usual& for the tech giant. And indeed for &all the tech giants& — none of whom he believes are making adequate investments in security.

&In terms of security there are much less investments than expected,& he also says of Facebook specifically. &Lot of investments about profiling people, about creating clusters, but much less in preserving the [security] of communications.GDPR is a driver for a change — even with regard to security.&

Asked what systematic violations of the framework heseen so far, from his pan-EU oversight position, Buttarelli highlights instances where service operators are relying on consent as their legal basis to collect user data — saying this must allow for a free choice.

Or &no blackmailing&, as he puts it.

Facebook, for example, does not offer any of its users, even its users in Europe, the option to opt out of targeted advertising. Yet it leans on user consent, gathered via dark pattern consent flows of its own design, to sanction its harvesting of personal data — claiming people can just stop using its service if they don&t agree to its ads.

It also claims to be GDPR compliant.

Itpretty easy to see the disconnect between those two positions.

WASHINGTON, DC & APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

&In cases in which it is indispensable to build on consent it should be much more than in the past based on exhaustive information; much more details, written in a comprehensive and simple language, accessible to an average user, and it should be really freely given — so no blackmailing,& says Buttarelli, not mentioning any specific tech firms by name as he reels off this list. &It should be really freely revoked, and without expecting that the contract is terminated because of this.

&This is not respectful of at least the spirit of the GDPR and, in a few cases, even of the legal framework.&

His remarks — which chime with what we&ve heard before from privacy experts — suggest the first wave of complaints filed by veteran European data protection campaigner and lawyer, Max Schrems, via his consumer focused data protection non-profitnoyb, will bear fruit. And could force tech giants to offer a genuine opt-out of profiling.

The first noyb complaints target so-called ‘forced consent‘, arguing thatFacebook; Facebook-ownedInstagram; Facebook-ownedWhatsApp; and Google&sAndroidare operating non-compliant consent flows in order to keep processing Europeans& personal data because they do not offer the aforementioned ‘free choice& opt-out of data collection.

Schrems also contends that this behavior is additionally problematic because dominant tech giants are gaining an unfair advantage over small businesses — which simply cannot throw their weight around in the same way to get what they want. So thatanother spark being thrown in on the competition front.

Discussing GDPR enforcement generally, Buttarelli confirms he expects to see financial penalties not just investigatory outcomes before the year is out — so once DPAs have worked through the first phase of implementation (and got on top of their rising case loads).

Of course it will be up to local data protection agencies to issue any fines. But the EDPB and Buttarelli are the glue between Europe(currently) 28 national data protection agencies — playing a highly influential co-ordinating and steering role to ensure the regulation gets consistently applied.

He doesn&t say exactly where be thinks the first penalties will fall but notes a smorgasbord of issues that are being commonly complained about, saying: &Now we have an obvious trend and even a peak, in terms of complaints; different violations focusing particularly, but not only, on social media; big data breaches; rights like right of access to information held; right to erasure.&

He illustrates his conviction of incoming fines by pointing to the recent example of the ICOinterim report into Cambridge Analyticamisuse of Facebook data, in July — when the UK agency said it intended to fine Facebook the maximum possible (just £500k, because the breach took place before GDPR).

A similarly concluded data misuse investigation under GDPR would almost certainly result in much larger fines because the regulation allows for penalties of up to 4% of a companyannual global turnover. (So in Facebookcase the maximum suddenly balloons into the billions.)

The GDPRarticle 83 sets out general conditions for calculating fines — saying penalties should be &effective, proportionate and dissuasive&; and they must take into account factors such as whether an infringement was intentional or negligent; the categories of personal data affected; and how co-operative the data controller is as the data supervisor investigates.

For the security breach Facebook disclosed last week the EUregulatory oversight process will involve an assessment of how negligent the company was; what response steps it took when it discovered the breach, including how it communicated with data protection authorities and users; and how comprehensively it co-operatives with the DPCinvestigation. (In a not-so-great sign for Facebook the Irish DPC has already criticized its breach notification for lacking detail).

As well as evaluating a data controllersecurity measures against GDPR standards, EU regulators can &prescribe additional safeguards&, as Buttarelli puts it.Which means enforcement is much more than just a financial penalty; organizations can be required to change their processes and priorities too.

And thatwhy Schrems& forced consent complaints are so interesting.

Because a fine, even a large one, can be viewed by a company as revenue-heavy as Facebook as just another business cost to suck up as it keeps on truckin&. But GDPRfollow on enforcement prescriptions could force privacy law breakers to actively reshape their business practices to continue doing business in Europe.

And if the privacy problem with Facebook is that itforcing people-tracking ads on everyone, the solution is surely a version of Facebook that does not require users to accept privacy intrusive advertising to use it. Other business models are available, such assubscription.

But ads don&t have to be hostile to privacy. For example itpossible to display advertising without persistently profiling users — as, for example, pro-privacy search engineDuckDuckGo does. Other startups are exploring privacy-by-design on-device ad-targeting architectures for delivering targeted ads without needing to track users. Alternatives to Facebooktargeted ads certainly exist — and innovating in lock-step with privacyis clearly possible. Just ask Apple.

So — at least in theory — GDPR could force the social network behemoth to revise its entire business model.

Which would make even a$1.63BNfine the company could face as a result of Fridaysecurity breach pale into insignificance.

Accelerating ethics

Therea wrinkle here though.Buttarelli does not sound convinced that GDPR alone will be remedy enough to fix all privacy hostile business models that EU regulators are seeing. Hence his comment about a &question with regard to the business model&.

And also why helooking ahead and talking about theneed to evolve the regulatory landscape — to enable joint working between traditionally discrete areas of law.

&We need structural remedies to make the digital market fairer for people,& he says. &And therefore this is we&ve been successful in persuading our colleagues of the Board to adopt a position on the intersection of consumer protection, competition rules and data protection. None of the independent regulators& three areas, not speaking about audio-visual deltas, can succeed in their sort of old fashioned approach.

&We need more interaction, we need more synergies, we need to look to the future of these sectoral legislations.&

The challenge posed by the webcurrently dominant privacy-hostile business models is also why, in a parallel track,Europedata protection supervisor is actively pushing to accelerate innovation and debate around data ethics — to support efforts to steer markets and business models in, well, a more humanitarian direction.

When we talk he highlights that Sir Tim Berners-Lee will be keynoting at the same European privacy conference where Vestager will appear at — which has an overarching discussion frame of &Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life& as its theme.

Accelerating innovation to support the development of more ethical business models is also clearly the Commissionunderlying hope and aim.

Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has been increasingly strident in his criticism of how commercial interests have come to dominate the Internet byexploiting peoplepersonal data, including warning earlier this year that platform power is crushing the web as a force for good.

He has also just left his academic day job to focus on commercializing the pro-privacy, decentralized web platform hebeen building at MIT for years— via a new startup, calledInrupt.

Doubtless he&ll be telling the conference all about that.

&We are focusing on the solutions for the future,& saysButtarellion ethics. &There is a lot of discussion about people becoming owners of their data, and ‘personal data&, and we call that personal because theresomething to be respected, not traded. And on the contrary we see a lot of inequality in the tech world, and we believe that the legal framework can be of an help. But will not give all the relevant answers to identify what is legally and technically feasible but morally untenable.&

Also just announced as another keynote speaker at the same conference later this month:AppleCEO Tim Cook.

In a statement on Cookaddition to the line-up,Buttarelli writes:&We are delighted that Tim has agreed to speak at the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. Tim has been a strong voice in the debate around privacy, as the leader of a company which has taken a clear privacy position, we look forward to hearing his perspective. He joins an already superb line up of keynote speakers and panellists who want to be part of a discussion about technology serving humankind.&

So Europebig fight to rule the damaging impacts of big data just got another big gun behind it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook looks on during a visit of the shopfitting company Dula that delivers tables for Apple stores worldwide in Vreden, western Germany, on February 7, 2017. (Photo: BERND THISSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

&Question is [how do] we go beyond the simple requirements of confidentiality, security, of data,& Buttarelli continues. &Europe after such a successful step [with GDPR] is now going beyond the lawful and fair accumulation of personal data — we are identifying a new way of assessing market power when the services delivered to individuals are not mediated by a binary. And although competition law is still a powerful instrument for regulation — it was invented to stop companies getting so big — but I think together with our efforts on ethics we would like now Europe to talk about the future of the current dominant business models.

&I&m… concerned about how these companies, in compliance with GDPR in a few cases, may collect as much data as they can. In a few cases openly, in other secretly. They can constantly monitor what people are doing online. They categorize excessively people. They profile them in a way which cannot be contested. So we have in our democracies a lot of national laws in an anti-discrimination mode but now people are to be discriminated depending on how they behave online. So people are targeted with content to make them behave in a certain way. To predict but also to react. This is not the kind of democracy we deserve. This is not our idea.&

Truecaller, the app that helps screen spam calls and messages, is becoming a chat app as it continues to developinto a social service.

The company announced today that it is introducing a chat feature to its Android and iOS apps, although it is already live for Android beta users.

The move follows Truecallerrecent foray into payments. Thata localized push in India — Truecallerlargest market based on users —based on the acquisition of startup Chillrin June. Beyond adding person-to-person transfers and bill/utility payments through that deal, Truecaller is preparing to allow third-parties to integrate their services into its app. In that context, adding chat makes a lot of sense.

The feature could actually be quite handy for Android users. A Truecaller representative explained to TechCrunch that it will work much like AppleiMessage — messages sent between Truecaller users will be handled in the app for free, while messages sent to non-users will go over as SMS, which is supported by the app.

Truecaller also said its move to add messaging will help combat &fake news,& an issue that has plagued WhatsApp in India. The company said it&ll rely on its community to vet and report links via a reporting button, and there are plans to add AI and machine learning to the process.

While it is doubtless correct that Truecaller has a strong community — the information used to identify spam SMS and phone numbers inside the app comes from community reporting — but it remains to be seen if the proposed solution will be much different to what Facebook and WhatsApp have talked up. Truecaller won&t have dedicated fact-checkerseither. Itstrategy may work within smaller circles, but if the app gains a lot of traction it remains to be seen how it&ll manage the false information problem.

The messaging feature is global, but it promises to make the biggest impact in India, where it highlights how a number of different companies are converging on messaging and payments from very different starting points.

WhatsApp, which claims 200 million users in India, is moving from chat to payments; payment specialist Paytm added chat earlier last year and it just enabled SMS; while Truecaller came from spam detection into payments and now chat.

While it is smaller than WhatsApp it has more users than Paytm 120 million monthlies. Truecaller boasts an impressive 100 million daily users, 60 percent of whom are in India, a representative confirmed. With chat, Truecaller will hope to grow that number further still before it opens its platform to third parties. That could happen before the end of this year, or in early next year, the company told TechCrunch.

Note: The original version of this article has been updated to provide TruecallerIndia-based user numbers and correct that its payment feature covers bill and utility payments.