Southeast Asiadigital economy is tipped to grow more than six-fold to reach more than $200 billion per year, according to a report co-authored by Google, with e-commerce accounting for the dominant share. The emergence of e-commerce platforms like AlibabaLazada and U.S.-listed Shopeehave enabled online entrepreneurship across the region, but still financial support for online sellers, who are basically SMEs, is lagging.

Thatwhere Singapore-based Aspire Capital, a six-month-old organization focused on speedy SME lending, is hoping to make a difference.

The company certainly has opportunity.With a cumulative population of over 600 million consumers and a rising middle class, Southeast Asia is increasingly an attractive market for businesses of all kind, and online companies in particular. Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent have long devoted significant resources to the region where, like India, they see significant growth potential. E-commerce is the clear winner, in terms of size, with the e-Conomy SEA report — a joint research project between Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek — forecasting e-commerce revenue will hit$88 billion by 2025 from $10.9 billion in 2017.

Aspire Capital offers fast finance for SMEs in Southeast Asia

Data fromthe e-Conomy SEA report

The crux of its problem is that online sellers who useLazada, Shopeeor other platforms that are forgoing profit in order to grow, are ironically less able to scale their business since there are few ‘e-commerce friendly& financing options.

That problem became apparent to Aspire founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli during a four-year stint with Lazada Singapore where, as CMO, he identified a financing disconnect for Lazada merchants.

&I saw the problem while trying to rally small businesses trying to grow in the digital economy,&Baronchelli told TechCrunch in an interview.

&The problem is really about providing working capital to small business owners. Westarted with online sellers, but we have expanded a bit as we see demand. There are 65 million small businesses in Southeast Asia, thatten times more than the U.S. so we see so much potential,& he added.

Aspire Capital offers fast finance for SMEs in Southeast Asia

Aspire founder and CEO Andrea Baronchelli pictured while at Lazada

Today, Aspire Capital covers Singapore where it has expanded beyond e-commerce merchants to cover other things of SMEs who seek loans, primarily for working capital asBaronchelli explains. So far, he added, it has served loans to over 100 businesses. Typically, its spread goes from as low as SG$5,000 to up to SG$100,000, thataround $3,600-$73,500 in U.S. terms.

The company was founded in early 2018 and already it has done plenty. It was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2018 cohortand it has closed a $9 million seed round to kick its business off with the working capital that it needs itself.

That round included a range of investors such as Europe-based Hummingbird, New YorkMark II Capital, ex-Sequoia partner Yinglan TanInsignia Ventures Partners andY Combinator.

The principle behind the business is to make business financing quick and simple,Baronchelli said.

So rather than stacks of paperwork, SME owners fill out online forms and get a response the same day. Large parts of the application and review process are automated using a proprietary risk assessment engine, but Baronchelli said that ultimately a human makes the final call on whether to accept the application or not.

&We want to really be fast,& Baronchelli explained. &SMEs need quick decisions, they cannot wait three months for a bank. They need super quick, fast and no paperwork.&

Aspire Capital offers fast finance for SMEs in Southeast Asia

The application process for companies seeking loans from Aspire Capital

He paints an example of online merchants who typically buy inventory from China which is sold customers within three to six months. If the business has a track record, it can take a loan to increase its stock and grow its revenues and profit, he explained.

Singapore may be a key market in Southeast Asia, but with a population of just over five million expansion is top of mind for Aspire.Baronchelli said he is doing due diligence on the first market expansion which he expects will happen before the end of this year. He expects that the business will raise further capital, perhaps towards the tail end of this year, which would be used to expand more aggressively across Southeast Asia in 2019.

He is also occupied building out the team. Right now, Aspire has ten people but he is keen to bring in ten to fifteen more staff, particularly on the tech side of the business.

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HTCblockchain phone is real, and itarriving later this year

HTC isn&t gone just yet. Granted, itcloser than itever been before, with a headcount of fewer than5,000employees worldwide — thatdown from 19,000 in 2013. But in spite of those &market competition, product mix, pricing, and recognized inventory write-downs,& the companystill trucking on.

And while its claim to being &the leading innovator in smart phone devices,& is up for debate, the Taiwanese manufacturer has never shied away from a compelling gimmick. Announced earlier this year, the Exodus definitely fits the bill. The &worldfirst major blockchain phone& is still shrouded in mystery, though the company did reveal a couple of key details this week at RISE in Hong Kong intended to keep folks interested while it irons out the rest of the producthiccups.

Chief among the reveals is an admittedly nebulous release date of Q3 this year. Ithardly specific, but it does make the phone a little bit more real — unlike the images, which are still limited to the above blueprint picture at press time.

Herea quote from the companychief crypto officer, a position that really exists.

In the new internet age people are generally more conscious about their data, this a perfect opportunity to empower the user to start owning their digital identity. The Exodus is a great place to start because the phone is the most personal device, and it is also the place where all your data originates from. I&m excited about the opportunity it brings to decentralize the internet and reshape it for the modern user.

Prior to the launch, the company is partnering with the popular blockchain title, CryptoKitties. The game will be available on a small selection of the companyhandsets starting with the U12+. &This is a significant first step in creating a platform and distribution channel for creatives who make unique digital goods,& the company writes in a release tied to the news. &Mobile is the most prevalent device in the history of humankind and for digital assets and dapps to reach their potential, mobile will need to be the main point of distribution. The partnership with Cryptokitties is the beginning of a non fungible, collectible marketplace and crypto gaming app store.&

The company says the partnership marks the beginning of a &platform and distribution channel for creatives who make unique digital goods.& In other words, itattempting to reintroduce the concept of scarcity through these decentralized apps. HTC will also be partnering with Bitmark to help accomplish this.

If HTC is looking for the next mainstream play to right the ship, this is emphatically not it. That said, it could be compelling enough to gain some adoption among those heavily invested enough in the crypto space to pick up a handset built around the technology.

HTC promises more information on the device in &the coming months.&

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As consumers become more discerning about the food they eat, a wave of startups has emerged that is catering to that demand with convenient alternatives to the more ubiquitous options that are available today. One of these, GrubMarket — which sources organic and healthy food directly from producers and then delivers it to other businesses (Whole Foods is a customer) as well as consumers at a discount of 20-60 percent over other channels — is today announcing a $32 million round to grow its already profitable business, including making acquisitions and expanding on its own steam as it eyes a public listing.

&We are looking to buy companies to make more revenues ahead of anupcoming IPO,& said Mike Xu, the founder and CEO. He said GrubMarket is &in proactive steps& to expand from its home base in California to the East Coast, starting in New York and New Jersey, by October this year. The plan, he said, will be to file with the SEC sometime between the end of this year and early 2019, with the IPO taking place in the second half of 2019.

E-commerce, and in particular food-related businesses with perishable items and associated waste, can be tricky when it comes to margins, and indeed, there have been many casualties in the world of food startups. Xu said in an interview that GrubMarket is already profitable and working at a $100 million run rate.

One of the reasons itprofitable may also be the same reason you may have never heard of GrubMarket. Currently, between 60 and 70 percent of its business is in the B2B space. Xu says that customers number in the thousands and include offices, grocery stores and restaurants across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.

And so, if you don&t know GrubMarket, you might know some of its customers, which include all WeWorks between San Diego and San Francisco, Whole Foods, Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Chipotle. GrubMarket has also cornered some very specific niches: It has become the biggest mushroom supplier in all of Northern California, and itthe biggest supplier of Hawaiian farm produce in the Bay Area.

Another point in the companyfavor is the technology it uses. Working directly with farmers and other producers, GrubMarket has built apps that allow it and its partners to manage the logistics of the business in an efficient way. The idea will be to bring more AI to the platform over time: for example, to be able to run better modelling to figure out how much fruit and veg might sell during a given season, and how to price items.

GrubMarket also is dabbling in areas that you might not normally associate with a grocery-on-demand delivery company: it built an educational app called Farmbox, which — when you play it — can be used to collect points to spend on GrubMarket; and italso exploring how blockchain technology can be used in a &next-generation open platform for direct farm-to-table.&

Xu says that as the company continues to grow, it will shift more into direct-to-consumer deliveries to complement its wholesale business.

This latest round is a mixture of equity and debt and is being led by GGV with other previous investors Fusion Fund (formerly New Gen Capital) and Great Oaks Venture Capital participating, along with new investorsMax Ventures, Castor Ventures, Bascom Ventures, Millennium Technology Value Partner, Trinity Capital Investment, Investwide Capital and others. The company is not publicly disclosing its valuation; it has raised around $64 million to date.

Many eyes are on Amazon these days, and what moves it might make next in groceries after acquiring Whole Foods, ramping up its own Pantry offerings, courting restaurants for delivery and making its own meal kits. This is not a question that keeps up Xu at night, however.

&Food is the largest and biggest opportunity in e-commerce,& he said, estimating that today the total value for the global food and agricultural industry is around $9 trillion (versus $8 trillion in 2017), with only about one percent of buying done online. &Thata big enough opportunity to have a few giant companies, and not just Amazon.&

Italso an opportunity that could sustain some slightly smaller companies, too: One of my favorite e-commerce businesses in England is a service that I&ve been using for years, an organic grocery delivery called Abel - Cole that brings us a box of organic fruit and vegetables (and whatever else I order on top of that) each week. Like GrubMarket, itworking directly with smaller producers who might have otherwise found it hard-going to find a way of selling their produce directly to buyers (and buyers would have found it hard-going to ever buy directly from these producers). Unlike GrubMarket, it takes a more modest approach that doesn&t involve eventually becoming a leviathan itself. May they all be around for years to come.

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A multi-year legal battle over the ability to distribute computer models of gun parts and replicate them in 3D printers has ended in defeat for government authorities who sought to prevent the practice. Cody Wilson, the gunmaker and free speech advocate behind the lawsuit, now intends to expand his operations, providing printable gun blueprints to all who desire them.

The longer story of the lawsuit is well told by Andy Greenberg over at Wired, but the decision is eloquent on its own. The fundamental question is whether making 3D models of gun components available online is covered by the free speech rights granted by the First Amendment.

This is a timely but complex conflict because it touches on two themes that happen to be, for many, ethically contradictory. Arguments for tighter restrictions on firearms are, in this case, directly opposed to arguments for the unfettered exchange of information on the internet. Ithard to advocate for both here: restricting firearms and restricting free speech are one and the same.

That at least seems to be conclusion of the government lawyers, who settled Wilsonlawsuit after years of court battles. In a copy of the settlement provided to me by Wilson, the U.S. government agrees to exempt &the technical data that is the subject of the Action& from legal restriction. The modified rules should appear in the Federal Register soon.

What does this mean It means that a 3D model that can be used to print the components of a working firearm is legal to own and legal to distribute. You can likely even print it and use the product — you just can&t sell it. There are technicalities to the law here (certain parts are restricted, but can be sold in an incomplete state, etc.), but the implications as regards the files themselves seems clear.

Court victory legalizes 3D-printable gun blueprints Wilsonoriginal vision, which he is now pursuing free of legal obstacles, is a repository of gun models, called DEFCAD, much like any other collection of data on the web, though naturally considerably more dangerous and controversial.

&I currently have no national legal barriers to continue or expand DEFCAD,& he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. &This legal victory is the formal beginning to the era of downloadable guns. Guns are as downloadable as music. There will be streaming services for semi-automatics.&

The concepts don&t map perfectly, no doubt, but ithard to deny that with the success of this lawsuit, there are few legal restrictions to speak of on the digital distribution of firearms. Before it even, there were few technical restrictions: certainly just as you could download MP3s on Napster in 2002, you can download a gun file today.

Gun control advocates will no doubt argue that greater availability of lethal weaponry is the opposite of what is needed in this country. But others will point out that in a way this is a powerful example of how liberally free speech can be defined. Itimportant to note that both of these things can be true.

This court victory settles one case, but marks the beginnings of many another. &I have promoted my values for years with great care and diligence,& Wilson wrote. Ithard to disagree with that. Those whose values differ are free to pursue them in their own way; perhaps they too will be awarded victories of this scale.

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How do you fix digital information overload and the resulting life-attention deficit thatapparently afflicting smartphone owners everywhere — and even leadingsome very large tech giants to unbox &digital wellness& tools lately

San Francisco-based startupThe Nudgereckons the answer to getting millennials to spend less time sucked into screens, and more time out and about actually doingthings, is — you guessed it — another technology service! Albeit one that delivers inspirational plan ideas for stuff to do in your free time, delivered via the traditional text message conduit of SMS.

The sibling duo behind the startup, John and Sarah Peterson, havebagged $540,000 in pre-seed funding for their text planner idea, after running a year-long public beta of the servicein San Francisco. The investment is led by seed-stage VC firm NextView Ventures, with Sequoiascout fund also participating.

Peterson says the idea to send plans via SMS evolved out of his earlier (and first) startup, called Livday: Also a planner app for friends to share their favorite ideas for weekend hikes and so on. But being just another app meant having to compete for attention with noisy social content, so the siblings hit on the idea of using SMS — as a sort of artisanal reversion of current state consumer tech — to &find a way to rise above the noise,& as they put it. Or, well, attempt to circumvent app notification fatigue/mute buttons.

As is often the case in fashion-led consumer tech, old ways can get polished up to feel shiny and new again once whatever displaced them has lost enough sheen to start to look old.

The Nudge has garnered around 10,000 active weekly users at this point, launching out of its year-long public beta. Peterson describes the typical user as &an active millennial woman,& with the community skewing 70 percent female at this point.

For the active user metric the team defines an active user as someone who isreading and engaging with the text messages they&re sending — either by clicking a link or replying.

They further claim to have signed up 5 percent of San Franciscomillennials to their lifestyle &nudges.&

&While our new rebrand has a somewhat feminine aesthetic itinteresting that we initially were targeting men. It just really resonated with millennial women,& says Peterson.

&They need this because takingtheinitiative istheessential yet hardest part of living our lives tothefullest, and thatwhat we give them,& he adds. &Anudge. We&re laser-focused on that demo right now but have plans to help other demographics long-term. My empty nest parents badly need this.&

Nudges take the form of — initially — an SMS text message, containing a handwritten brunch idea or a hike plan, or details of a hip coffee venue or volunteering opportunity which the startup reckons will appeal to its SF community.

The texts may also containa link to a more fully fledged plan (with photos, address, logistics etc.). You can see some of theirsample plans here.

While the core delivery mechanism is SMS, there also is a Nudge app where plans can be saved for later perusal, and subscribers to the service can mark Nudges as &done& (presumably to avoid being spammed with the same plan later).

Currently, the startup has an editorial team ofthree people coming up with plan ideas to inspire subscribers — writing in a friendly, narrative style thatintended to complement the cozy SMS delivery medium.

They&re also working with local social media influencers to hit on trendy ideas that resonate with their target millennial users.

Convincing information-overloaded consumers to willingly hand over their mobile digits to get random texts might seem a bit of a counter-intuitive &fix& for digital information overload. ButPeterson reckons it boils down to getting the tone of voice right. (And, clearly, being careful not to send too many texts that you end up coming across as spam.)

&We want people to really feel likeTheNudgeis just another one of their (ridiculously resourceful and fun) friends texting them, and I think we&ve succeeded there so far,& he tells TechCrunch. &Nearly all of our growth has come from word of mouth. You&re right that text messaging is a sacred space, and we&re very sensitive about that.&

Peterson claims that unsubscribe rates are less than 1 percent each week — though they&re also limiting themselves to sending three &personalized& lifestyle &nudges& per week at this point.

On the personalization front, they say plan ideas are customized based on factors such as the current weather and local trends. They are not, as a rule, customized per user though — beyond being personalized with the subscribername. So itmore &Nudge Club& than VIP personalized lifestyle advisor.

&In general, everyone is gettingthesame content, as we&ve found that therea lot of power intheshared experience (you know your friend just gotthesame text at that moment),& he says. &That said, we do sometimes create a dialogue where we ask you a question and depending upon your answer, we recommend something specific for you.

&We&re carefully not taking this part too far, as we really don&t view ourselves as a bot.&

Given they are (usually) sending ~10,000 people pretty much the same idea of what to do at the weekend or of an evening, Peterson admits that venue overcrowding has been a problem they inadvertently ended up creating — for example he says they recommended a free event that ended up getting 10x overbooked and had to cancel some tickets.

&Our answer is to only recommend small venues as a general suggestion (do this date idea this summer), and recommend larger venues specifically (do this hike tomorrow),& he says, explaining how they&ve tweaked the service to try to workaround creating unintended flash mobs of demand.

On the business model side, the plan is to make The Nudge a subscription service. Though they&re not going into details at this stage as they&re still experimenting with different options. (And they&re not currently charging for the service.)

But Peterson says the intention is not to make money via the specific things they&re recommending — which, in theory, frees them from needing to operate a creepy, privacy-hostile data-harvesting surveillance operation to determine whether an SMS can be linked to a specific bar bill or restaurant check for them to take a cut, for example.

Though, to be clear, Peterson says they&re gathering &as much data as we can about people doing a Nudge& — presumably so the team can better tailor the content and recommendations they&re making by figuring out what their users really like doing.

&We don&t promote any products or services,& he emphasizes. &Selling tickets or products or ads is tempting, and a lot of lifestyle services do that, but it would ruin or credibility. This is ultimately a subscription service based on trust.&

Despite that reassuring claim, it is worth noting that their current privacy policy states they &may periodically send promotional emails about new products/special offers/info etc via provided email addresses.& So be aware you are at least agreeing to theoretical email spam if you hand over your details.

Whatnext for The Nudge now that the team has raised their first tranche of VC Peterson says they&re planning to expand the service to LA this year — which he confirms will mean hiring a team on the ground to produce the custom content needed to power the service.

Albeit, he concedes, &right now our process is very manual.& And itnot at all clear whether their concept could sustain much automation-based scaling — at least not if they don&t want to risk generating yet more impersonal noise versus the friendly digital lifestyle advisor tone they&re aiming to strike as a strategy to stand out.

Beyond LA, Peterson says they plan to expand &pretty aggressively& in 2019.&TheNudgeas it stands now would work in any urban market as I believe ita solution to a fundamental human problem,& he says.

The Nudgespare time plans by text is by no means the only SMS-based lifestyle subscription service hoping to cut itself a slice of the attention economy.

In 2016 a startup called Shine launched on-demand life coaching by text messaging, for example.

And letnot forget Magic— the &get anything via a text message& service that had a viral moment in 2015 — and now bills itself as a &24/7 virtual assistant.&

Google has also tried texting people shopping deals. And Microsoft has dabbled in event planning specifically — outing an iMessage app for social event planning last year.

Meanwhile Facebook added &M,& a text-based assistant app (which was itself human-assisted), to its Messenger platform back in 2015— but went on to shutter the service in January this year, apparently never having found a way to scale M into a fully fledged AI assistant.

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UKInformation Commissioner will fine Facebook the maximum £500K over Cambridge Analytica breach

Facebook continues to face fallout over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed how user data was stealthily obtained by way of quizzes and then appropriated for other purposes, such as targeted political advertising. Today, the U.K. Information CommissionerOffice (ICO) announced that it would be issuing the social network with its maximum fine, £500,000 ($662,000) after it concluded that it &contravened the law& — specifically the1998 Data Protection Act — &by failing to safeguard peopleinformation.&

The ICO is clear that Facebook effectively broke the law by failing to keep users data safe, when their systems allowed Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who developed an app, called &This is your digital life& on behalf of Cambridge Analytica, to scrape the data of up to 87 million Facebook users. This included accessing all of the friends data of the individual accounts that had engaged with Dr Koganapp.

The ICOinquiry first started in May 2017 in the wake of the Brexit vote and questions over how parties could have manipulated the outcome using targeted digital campaigns.

Damian Collins, the MP who is the chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that has been undertaking the investigation, has as a result of this said that the DCMS will now demand more information from Facebook, including which other apps might have also been involved, or used in a similar way by others, as well as what potential links all of this activity might have had to Russia. Healso gearing up to demand a full, independent investigation of the company, rather than the internal audit that Facebook so far has provided. A full statement from Collins is below.

The fine, and the follow-up questions that U.K. government officials are now asking, are a signal that Facebook — after months of grilling on both sides of the Atlantic amid a wider investigation — is not yet off the hook in the U.K. This will come as good news to those who watched the hearings (and non-hearings) in Washington, London and European Parliament and felt that Facebook and others walked away relatively unscathed. The reverberations are also being felt in other parts of the world. In Australia, a group earlier today announced that it was forming a class action lawsuit against Facebook for breaching data privacy as well. (Australia has also been conducting a probe into the scandal.)

The ICO also put forward three questions alongside its announcement of the fine, which it will now be seeking answers to from Facebook. In its own words:

  1. Who had access to the Facebook data scraped by Dr Kogan, or any data sets derived from it
  2. Given Dr Kogan also worked on a project commissioned by the Russian Government through the University of St Petersburg, did anyone in Russia ever have access to this data or data sets derived from it
  3. Did organisations who benefited from the scraped data fail to delete it when asked to by Facebook, and if so where is it now

The DCMS committee has been conducting a wider investigation into disinformation and data use in political campaigns and it plans to publish an interim report on it later this month.

Collins& full statement:

Given that the ICO is saying that Facebook broke the law, it is essential that we now know which other apps that ran on their platform may have scraped data in a similar way. This cannot by left to a secret internal investigation at Facebook. If other developers broke the law we have a right to know, and the users whose data may have been compromised in this way should be informed.

Facebook users will be rightly concerned that the company left their data far too vulnerable to being collected without their consent by developers working on behalf of companies like CambridgeAnalytica. The number of Facebook users affected by this kind of data scraping may be far greater than has currently been acknowledged.Facebook should now make the results of their internal investigations known to the ICO, our committee and other relevant investigatory authorities.

Facebook state that they only knew about this data breach when it was first reported in the press in December 2015. The company has consistently failed to answer the questions from our committee as to who at Facebook was informed about it. They say that Mark Zuckerberg did not know about it until it was reported in the press this year. In which case, given that it concerns a breach of the law, they should state who was the most senior person in the company to know, why they decided people like Mark Zuckerberg didn&t need to know, and why they didn&t inform users at the time about the data breach. Facebook need to provide answers on these important points. These important issues would have remained hidden, were it not for people speaking out about them. Facebookresponse during our inquiry has been consistently slow and unsatisfactory.

The receivers of SCL elections should comply with the law and respond to the enforcement notice issued by the ICO. It is also disturbing that AIQ have failed to comply with their enforcement notice.

Facebook has been in the crosshairs of the ICO over other data protection issues, and not come out well.

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