Apple and air travel: iOS in the skies

Applemobile devices have changed air travel, beyond passenger experiences they are changing how people fly and maintain aircraft, manage airports and more

The travel experience

When we plan our trips, apps are essential. While many emulate online services, some provide additional features to mobile device users. We find flights using apps like Skyscanner,Hopper or airline apps such as British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, EasyJet. We check destinations with Trip Advisor, use loyalty schemes, and find places to stay with AirBnB. We can make these decisions anywhere we happen to be & even in the middle of the ocean if we use a satellite calling solution like Iridium Go.

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Korean automaker Hyundai is jumping into Indiaon-demand mobility space after it led a $14.3 million investment in car-rental startup Revv.

Hyundai, which is the second largest seller of cars in India, initially announced an undisclosed investment in Revv this week, but now the startup hasconfirmed that the capital is part of a larger 100 Crore INR (~$14.3 million) Series B round.

Other investors in the round include JapanDream Incubator,Telama Investment andSunjay Kapoor of auto component firm Sona BLW. Existing investors Edelweiss and Beenext also took part in the deal, which takes Revv to $23 million raised from investors, according to data from Crunchbase.

Revv was founded in 2015 and it offers on-demand car rentals using a model similar to Zipcar in the U.S.The startup is currently active in 11 cities in India with a fleet of around 1,000 vehicles. It claims to have served 300,000 users to date.One of its hallmarks is doorstep delivery and collection from customers, which eschews the usual process of designated collection and return locations.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Revv co-foundersAnupam Agarwal (CEO) andKaran Jain (COO) said the plan is to expand to 30 cities over the next 12-18 months while growing the fleet size to 10,000-12,000. The duo said that the investment from Hyundai didn&t include any specific clause to provide vehicles, but that it is possible that an agreement may be reached in the future.

Beyond potential support on growing the fleet,Agarwal and Jain said that Revv plans to tap Hyundai for its knowledge in vehicles, including performance upkeep, maintenance of cars and more, and other tech areas as it builds out its platform and new products.

Hyundai leads $14.3M investment in Indian car rental startup Revv

A photo of the Revv team

Thatbecause the startupexpansion plangoes beyond new geographies to includedifferent types of services, too.

Right now, Revv offers on-demand car rentals and a subscription-based product — Switch — that is designed for power-users, butAgarwal and Jain want to introduce more modular and flexible products. Already Shift users account for around one-third of rentals, but Revv wants to go further.

Agarwal and Jain hinted that could range from shorter time &on-demand& rentals, such as within 15 minutes, to longer-term alternatives to car ownership that remain financial commitments of loans and repayments.

&We are looking atinnovative business models that we can take to the consumer,& the Revv co-founders said. &We understand that the traditional model of car ownership will be diluted and alternative options of accessible mobility will be the norm.

&Cabs solve point A to B in 40 minutes, but every other need is still a largely unsolved problem in this country. India is unique [and the need for] mobility solutions is far higher because 98 percent of peopledon&t own cars,& they added.

While taxi on-demand apps like Ola and Uber are making the cab experience better in India, Revv believes it can&t address other needs like out of town trips, long-distance commuting and other requirements that it believes are common among Indian consumers. Longer term, the startupaim is to grow the ‘automobile access& rate to 50 percent across India to help cover these gaps.

Hyundai leads $14.3M investment in Indian car rental startup Revv

Revv co-founders Anupam Agarwal (left) and Karan Jain (right)

With this new funding in the bag, Revv aims to amp up its business with a &slew& of new products.Agarwal and Jain said the target is to increase revenue 10X, going from $10 million ARR right now to $100 million within 18 months.

They believe that these new services are essential and that they could account for half of that revenue target. They also plan to increase marketing spend to grow the brand, having previously focused on user retention, according toAgarwal and Jain.

When asked about the potential to add two-wheeled transportation — given the growth of startups in that space, such as Sequoia-backed Bounce — the duo, who both spent time with McKinsey, said they would remain focused on cars for at least the next year.

&We feel therea huge opportunity that hasn&t been tapped into,& they said.

Revvchief domestic rival is Zoomcar, which raised $40 million earlier this year and is backed by the likes of Ford andMahindra - Mahindra. Zoomcar has already moved into two-wheelers, and its big differentiator is a program that allows existing car owners to lease out their vehicles by adding them to the Zoomcar fleet. The five-year-old startup is also considering overseas expansion.

Elsewhere, other competitors includeVoler,Drivezy and Carzonrent.

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Tim Kentley-Klay, the co-founder and CEO of secretive self-driving vehicle company Zoox, was fired suddenly Wednesday by the companyboard.

Kentley-Klaydeparture was firstreported by The Information, which cited an unnamed source. Kentley-Klay later tweeted a statement confirming that he had been fired by the board.

Kentley-Klay and Zoox could not be reached for comment. TechCrunch will update the story as it develops.

In the tweet, Kentley-Klay wrote:

I came to this town as a founder only to build the future of mobility, and by the metrics shared here was crushing it against the biggest. But the shocking reality is that this—without a warning, cause or right of reply—the board fired me. Today was Silicon Valley up to its worst tricks. This town sells the story that it backs founders to create real change. Rather than working through the issues in an epic startup for the win, the board chose a path of fear, optimizing for a little money in hand at the expense of profound progress for the Universe. Cheers to the true believers that have built Zoox from scratch these last four years. Don&t let anyone stand between you and what you know is right. TKK.

He also posted a graphic comparing the capital efficiency of top autonomous vehicle programs like Waymo, Uber, and Cruise with Zoox.

Kentley-Klay has since posted more than a dozen tweets, quoting others who have contacted him to express support and disappointment. He doesn&t name anyone, but the presumption is that these are Zoox employees.

The firing comes just a month after Zoox closed a massive $500 million funding roundat a $3.2 billion post-money valuation.The round, led by Mike Cannon-Brookes of Grok Ventures, brings its total amount of funding to $800 million.

Kentley-Klay founded Zoox with Jesse Levinson about four years ago. The company is infamous for its secrecy. The first real inside look into the company, and Kentley-Klay, came just a month ago in a feature by BloombergAshlee Vance.

The company, which employs about 500 people, wants to deploy autonomous vehicles on public streets and launch a ride-hailing service with its fleet by 2020.

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Australia has blocked Huawei and ZTE from providing equipment for its 5G network, which is set to launch commercially next year. In a tweet, Huawei stated that the Australian government told the company that both it and ZTE are banned from supplying 5G technology to the country, despite Huaweiassurances that it does not pose a threat to national security.

Earlier today, the Australian government issued new security guidelines for 5G carriers. Although it did not mention Huawei, ZTE or China specifically, it did strongly hint at them by stating &the Government considers that the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorized access or interference.&

Concerns that Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese tech companies will be forced to comply with a new law, passed last year, that obligates all Chinese organizations and citizens to provide information to national intelligence agencies when asked have made several countries wary of using their technology. Earlier this month, the United States banned the use of most Huawei and ZTE technology by government agencies and contractors, six years after a Congressional report first cited the two companies as security threats.

In its new security guidelines, the Australian government stated that differences in the way 5G operates compared to previous network generations introduces new risks to national security. In particular, it noted the diminishing distinctions between the core network, where more sensitive functions like access control and data routing occur, and the edge, or radios that connect customer equipment, like laptops and mobile phones, to the core.

&This new architecture provides a way to circumvent traditional security controls by exploiting equipment in the edge of the network & exploitation which may affect overall network integrity and availability, as well as the confidentiality of customer data. A long history of cyber incidents shows cyber actors target Australia and Australians,& the guidelines stated. &Government has found no combination of technical security controls that sufficiently mitigate the risks.&

Last year, Australia introduced the Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms (TSSR), which takes effect next month and directs carriers and telecommunication service providers to protect their networks and infrastructure from national security threats and also notify the government of any proposed changes that may compromise the security of their network. It also gives the government the power to &intervene and issue directions in cases where there are significant national security concerns that cannot be addressed through other means.&

HuaweiAustralian chairman John Lord said in June that the company had received legal advice that its Australian operations are not bound to Chinese laws and he would refuse to hand over any data to the Chinese government in breach of Australian law. Lord also argued that banning Huawei could hurt local businesses and customers by raising prices and limiting access to technology.

TechCrunch has contacted ZTE and Huawei for comment.

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The vast majority of environmental experts say that avoiding meat and dairy is the single most important, and most impactful action, you can take to reduce your personal impact on Earth. Why Because of the sheer amount of carbon pumped into the atmosphere from the process of meat production. Many would agree italso pretty good for your health. But when most of us have been brought up with animal protein in the middle of our plates, it often feels pretty hard to achieve. At the same time, fast food delivery has been taking off, but we&re still eating the same thing: meat.

So a Danish startup has come along to try to solve this. Simple Feast delivers sustainable food to peoplehomes in biodegradable boxes, and itnow raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital in London, with participation from 14W in New York. Existing investors Sweet Capital and ByFounders are also re-investing the round.

Simple Feast offers what it describes as ready-to-eat plant-based food that is &sustainably produced, organic, and delivered straight to the doorstep& in biodegradable boxes every week. The meal solution delivers weekly boxes with three prepared plant-based and 100 percent organic meals ready to serve in 10 minutes.

In this respect itnot unlike other startups, such as HelloFresh, with the main difference being that all the food is plant-based.

Jakob Jønck, CEO and co-founder of Simple Feast, says: &Climate change is real. There is no Planet B and we are facing what is arguably the biggest challenge in human history. This is a big investment for a small company, but ita drop in the ocean considering the challenge at hand, the politicians and industries we are up against.&

He and Thomas Ambus, co-founder/CTO, started thinking more deeply about Simple Feast when Under Armour acquired Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, their previous startups, in the spring of 2015 and got serious about it in 2016. &Ever since founding Endomondo and heading up International Operations for MyFitnessPal, I always felt a missing link when trying to move towards a healthy, sustainable diet — an actual product that didn&t compromise on taste, nor convenience, but solved the huge challenges involved with embarking on this journey towards eating plants first and foremost,& says Jønck.

Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at Balderton Capital, says: &With a global transition towards plant-based food, we believe Simple Feast is uniquely positioned to change the way we eat and create awareness about the impact of our food choices.&

The main target is families, with the parents in their 30s and 40s. &We find that women are still predominantly the decision maker when it comes to food for the family. Our most typical customers are women in a relationship in their 30s with one or two kids. Our customers are also politically interested, above the average,& says Jønck.

They are competing with restaurants, meal kits and take-away. &We are disrupting both the restaurant and the meal kit industry. Nobody has ever taken the challenge of creating climate-friendly, plant-based food seriously while serving it directly to consumers. We don´t make compromises on taste, nor convenience, and we don´t believe that we have seen that before,& he told me.

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Facebook announced today that it had banned the app myPersonality for improper data controls and suspended hundreds more. So far this is only the second app to be banned as a result of the companylarge-scale audit begun in March; but as myPersonality hasn&t been active since 2012, and was to all appearances a legitimate academic operation, ita bit of a mystery why they bothered.

The total number of app suspensions has reached 400, twice the number we last heard Facebook announce publicly. Suspensions aren&t listed publicly, however, and apps may be suspended and reinstated without any user notification. The only other app to be banned via this process is Cambridge Analytica.

myPersonality was created by researchers at the Cambridge Psychometrics Centre (no relation to Cambridge Analytica — this is an actual academic institution) to source data from Facebook users via personality quizzes. It operated from 2007 to 2012, and was quite successful, gathering data on some four million users (directly, not via friends) when it was operational.

The dataset was used for the Centreown studies and other academics could request access to it via an online form; applications were vetted by CPC staff and had to be approved by the petitioneruniversityethics committee.

It transpired in May that a more or less complete set of the projectdata was available for anyone to download from GitHub, put there by some misguided scholar who had received access and decided to post it where their students could access it more easily.

Anyone could download Cambridge researchers& 4-million-user Facebook data set for years

Facebook suspended the app around then, saying &we believe that it may have violated Facebookpolicies.& That suspension has graduated into a ban, because the creators &fail[ed] to agree to our request to audit and because itclear that they shared information with researchers as well as companies with only limited protections in place.&

This is, of course, a pot-meet-kettle situation, as well as something of a self-indictment. I contacted David Stillwell, one of the appcreators and currently deputy director of the CPC, having previously heard from him and collaborator Michel Kosinski about the dataset and Facebooksudden animosity.

&Facebook has long been aware of the applicationuse of data for research,& Stillwell said in a statement. &In 2009 Facebook certified the app as compliant with their terms by making it one of their first ‘verified applications.& In 2011 Facebook invited me to a meeting in Silicon Valley (and paid my travel expenses) for a workshop organised by Facebook precisely because it wanted more academics to use its data, and in 2015 Facebook invited Dr Kosinski to present our research at their headquarters.&

During that time, Kosinski and Stillwell both told me, dozens of universities had published in total more than a hundred social science research papers using the data. No one at Facebook or elsewhere seems to have raised any issues with how the data was stored or distributed during all that time.

&It is therefore odd that Facebook should suddenly now profess itself to have been unaware of the myPersonality research and to believe that the data may have been misused,& Stillwell said.

Facebook bans first app since Cambridge Analytica, myPersonality, and suspends hundreds more

Examples of datasets available via the myPersonality project.

A Facebook representative told me they were concerned that the vetting process for getting access to the dataset was too loose, and furthermore that the data was not adequately anonymized.

But Facebook would, ostensibly, have approved these processes during the repeated verifications of myPersonalitydata. Why would it suddenly decide in 2018, when the app had been inactive for years, that it had been in violation all that time The most obvious answer would be that its auditors never looked very closely in the first place, despite a cozy relationship with the researchers.

&When the app was suspended three months ago I asked Facebook to explain which of their terms was broken but so far they have been unable to cite any instances,& said Stillwell.

Ironically, Facebookaccusation that myPersonality failed to secure user data correctly is exactly what the company itself appears to be guilty of, and at a far greater scale. Just as CPC could not control what a researcher did with the data (for example, mistakenly post it publicly) once they had been approved by multiple other academics, Facebook could not control what companies like Cambridge Analytica did with data once it had been siphoned out under the respectable guise of research purposes. (Notably, it is projects like myPersonality that seem to have made that guise respectable to begin with.)

Perhaps Facebookstandards have changed and what was okay by them in 2012 — and, apparently, in 2015 — is not acceptable now. Good — users want stronger protections. But this banning of an app inactive for years and used successfully by real academics for actual research purposes has an air of theatricality. It helps no one and will change nothing about myPersonality itself, which Stillwell and others stopped maintaining years ago, or the dataset it created, which may very well still be analyzed for new insights by some enterprising social science grad student.

Facebook has mobilized a full-time barn door closing operation years after the horses bolted, as evident by todayban. So when you and the other four million people get a notification that Facebook is protecting your privacy by banning an app you used a decade ago, take it with a grain of salt.

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