Technology

U.S fitness startup ClassPass is headed to Asia after it announced plans to go live in Singapore, its first city in the continent.

Four-year-oldClassPass allows its users to book fitness classes and packages across a multitude of gyms. The company claims to work with more than 10,000 fitness partners across over 50 cities globally. Thatmostly in the U.S. but it has also forayed intoCanada, the UK and Australia and now it is seeking out additional growth opportunities.

The move into Asia has been expected for some time after ClassPass hired a head of international in May. The company told TechCrunch at the time that it would soon arrive in three countries in Asia and Singapore, which has many similarities to the West in terms of economics and culture, is a logical pick as the starting point. Added to that, the countrysovereign fund, Temasek, led ClassPass&s$70 million Series C funding round last year so you could say that is an extra factor.

The identity of the other two cities remains unclear at this point, but you&d imagine that Hong Kong will be one of them.

ClassPass hasn&t given a specific date for its launch other than it will come to Singapore &in the lead-up to National Day& — thatAugust 9. In the meantime, it has opened up a Singapore waitlist which can be found here.

The U.S. startup was the first to pioneerthe fitness subscription model but it already has competition in Singapore and other parts of Asia. SingaporeownGuavaPass operates in 12 countries across Asia and the Middle East,having previously raised $5 million, while another rival called KFit is present in four cities in Southeast Asia.

Actually, the case of KFit shows that fitness subscription is challengingin Asia. KFit raised more than $15 million from investors and scaled to over a dozen cities before it pivoted its business to Groupon-like group deals in a strategy that included the actual purchase of Groupon businesses in Southeast Asia.

The KFit business still operates but it has been scaled back significantly in response to a tough business landscape. ClassPass itself has experienced similar setbacks — including price hikes and a management reshuffle— while it is said to have seen its valuation declinefor that Series C round.

With all those factors in mind,it&ll be interesting to see how ClassPass fairs when it does touch down in Asia.

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Initialized Capital and an investor in Adquick, a new service thatlooking to bring billboard advertising into the internet age, bought his last billboard ad just this year.

For several years, the Reddit founder had turned to outdoor advertising as a tool to troll politicians and advocate for various positions (and celebrate his famous wife). The last political billboard, in 2012, was to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act.

It was also the impetus for his investment in Adquick. &I&d seen pitches from a number of competitors that were all just static websites on top of the single business,& says Ohanian.

What he was looking for, and what he eventually found in Adquick was a company that had managed to map all of the billboard advertising options available in the U.S. and was offering would-be advertisers a way to digitally distribute their ads and book inventory.

&For us the reason why it was such an exciting initial investment was because we saw the opportunity and the talent of the team,& Ohanian says.

Matthew O&Connor, Adquickchief executive previously worked at Instacart and it was there that he and his team first learned about dragging traditional businesses into the online world.

&This team had come out of Instacart… they came well recommended by the founders over there,&Ohanian said. &Working with them now I&ve just gotten more and more impressed.&

So impressed, that Ohanian doubled down on his firminitial investment into the company with a new $2.1 million round.

Therean undoubtable opportunity in outdoor advertising. O&Connor estimates that ita $33 billion global market with $8 billion spent on outdoor ads in the U.S. alone.

&They are aggregating from hundreds of vendors across the U.S. and they&re making it easy for companies to sell those ads and manage that inventory and bringing a ton of transparency to a system that is mostly phone calls and emails,& Ohanian said.

Bringing those efficiencies to an old industry can only help whatbeen the only non-digital ad channel to actually grow in the U.S. &Itthe oldest channel in the world thatabout to undergo a resurgence,& O&Connor says.

&Itthe last frontier of advertising,& says O&Connor. &This is a real world channel that can have a lot of tailwinds if we can bring these great modern technologies to it which is what we&re doing.&

Over the course of Mondaycontroversial Helsinki summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed an agenda that would ostensibly see the U.S. and Russia working side by side as allies. The two countries make stranger bedfellows than ever as just days prior, Trumpown Department of Justice indicted 12 Russian intelligence officials for the infamous 2016 Democratic National Committee hack.

Nonetheless, the Russian president revived talks of a joint group between the U.S. and Russia dedicated to cybersecurity matters. For anyone with the security interests of the U.S. at heart, such a proposal, which Trump endorsed in a tweet one year ago, would truly be a worst-case scenario outcome of the puzzlingly cozy relationship between the two world leaders.

&Once again, President Trump mentioned the issue of the so-called interference of Russia [during] the American elections and I had to reiterate things I said several times…,& Putin said in Helsinki.

&Any specific material, if such things arise, we are ready to analyze together. For instance, we can analyze them through the joint working group on cyber security, the establishment of which we discussed during our previous contacts.&

Putin added that Russia favors&continued cooperation in counter-terrorism and maintaining cyber security.&

&The most recent example is their operational cooperation within the recently concluded World Football Cup,& Putin said. &In general, the contacts among the special services should be put to a system-wide basis should be brought to a systemic framework. I reminded President Trump about the suggestion to re-establish the working group on anti-terrorism.&

After a loud bipartisan rebuke followed Trumpproposal of an &impenetrable [cybersecurity] unit& with Russia last year, the U.S. president walked his comments back a few steps, suggesting that they were hypothetical. Whether it ever materializes or not, the whole idea is a somewhat stunning departure from national security norms and one that would be broadly decried as letting the fox into the henhouse, given that evidence establishing Russia as a cyber adversary of the U.S., both currently and historically, is plentiful.

In 2017, the U.S. intelligence community issued such an assertion in no uncertain terms:

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscowlongstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

The report notes that this information is sourced broadly, stating that &insights into Russian efforts—including specific cyber operations—and Russian views of key US players derive from multiple corroborating sources.&

CrowdStrike, the security firm involved in investigating the 2016 DNC hack, uncontroversially included Russia on a list of ¬able nation-state adversaries& of the U.S. alongside China, North Korea and Iran.

Just days ago, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats cautioned that &warning lights are blinking red again& when it comes to attacks on federal, state and local U.S. entities. Coats named Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as cyber aggressors against the U.S., adding that &Russia has been the most aggressive foreign actor, no question.&

Itunclear what, if anything, the U.S. would stand to gain from such an arrangement, though it would stand to lose quite a bit, given the likelihood that Russiainterest in influencing U.S. elections is ongoing. Putincomments in Helsinki indicate the spirit of such an effort lives on, misguided as it may be.