Technology

Criteo faces a privacy investigation, an e-discovery startup raises $62 million and hackers hack other hackers. Hereyour Daily Crunch for March 10, 2020.

1. Adtech giant Criteo is being investigated by Francedata watchdog

Criteo is under investigation by the French data protection watchdog, the CNIL, following a complaint filed by privacy rights campaign group Privacy International.

Back in November 2018, a few months after GDPR (Europeupdated data protection framework) came into force, Privacy International filed complaints against a number of companies operating in the space — including Criteo. A subsequent investigation by the rights group found adtech trackers on mental health websites sharing sensitive user data for ad targeting purposes.

2. Everlaw announces $62M Series C to continue modernizing legal discovery

Everlaw is bringing modern data management, visualization and machine learning to e-discovery, the process in which legal entities review large amounts of evidence to build a case. CapitalG (Alphabetgrowth equity investment fund) and Menlo Ventures led the round.

3. Hackers are targeting other hackers by infecting their tools with malware

CybereasonAmit Serper found that the attackers in this years-long campaign are taking existing hacking tools and injecting a powerful remote-access trojan. When the tools are opened, the hackers gain full access to the targetcomputer.

4. Amazon creates $5M relief fund to aid small businesses in Seattle impacted by coronavirus outbreak

The fund will provide cash grants to local small businesses in need during the novel coronavirus outbreak. The money will be directed toward small businesses with fewer than 50 employees or less than $7 million in annual revenue, and with a physical presence within a few blocks of Regrade and South Lake Union office buildings.

5. Stitch Fixsharp decline signals high growth hurdles for tech-enabled startups

Shares of Stitch Fix, a digitally-enabled &styling service,& are off sharply this morning after its earnings failed to excite public market investors. The firm, worth over $29 per share as recently as February, opened today worth just $14.75 per share. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Facebook Stories tests cross-posting to its pet, Instagram

Facebooklatest colonization of Instagram has begun — the social network is testing the option to cross-post Stories to Instagram, instead of just vice-versa.

7. Sequoia is giving away $21M to a payments startup it recently funded as it walks away from deal

Sequoia Capital has, for the first time in its history, parted ways with a newly funded company (Finix) over a purported conflict of interest and, almost more shockingly, handed back its board seat, its information rights, its shares and its full investment.

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Fujitsu has announced a new technology called Virtual Integrated File System that it says could help magnetic tape storage compete with hard disk drives as a low-cost, large capacity storage alternative.

With the feud between Sony and Fujitsu around LTO resolved late last year, all eyes are now on LTO-9, which is expected to be delivered in 2020.

Monograph, a startup working on cloud-based software that makes project and cost management easier for architects, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Hustle Fund VC and angel investors.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded last year by Robert Yuen, Alex Dixon and Moe Amaya. Each has experience in architecture, design and software development, making them well-positioned to create a management platform tailored for architects.

Monograph was designed to be easy to use, with an emphasis on the onboarding process so firms are encouraged to switch from traditional project management methods, like spreadsheets, to the software. The startup says hundreds of architects, ranging from solo practitioners to firms with more than 60 people, have already signed up. Monograph has been used to help manage more than $125 million in projects, ranging in size from bathroom and kitchen remodeling to building large hotels.

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Before Monograph, the three were partners in an agency called Dixon and Moe, working as UI/UX consultants for tech startups and architecture firms.

&Monograph really grew out of the agency as a product we saw solving problems that we saw in our day to day lives as architectural designers, and also in our everyday lives with our friends,& Yuen told TechCrunch. &Thatthe loss in the transparency of information between how much time you are spending on work, how projects are going, who is working on it. There is really no accurate way to manage a project and they are growing in complexity each year.&

Like other tech companies in the architecture space, including PlanGrid, Procore and UpCodes, Monograph is designed to streamline aspects of the design and building process, while making it easier for teams to collaborate.

Monograph is currently designed for use by architects and consultants, and includes tools to assign milestones, manage project timelines and for timesheets, billing and invoicing. Data is then used for cost and progress analytics, like MoneyGantt, a feature for budget forecasting.

Yuen says that no matter a projectsize, each team includes architects, designers and engineers. By the end of the year, the company plans to start releasing new versions of Monograph that can be used by structural, electrical and mechanical engineers, as well as other licensed professionals.

The companyfunding will be used to hire for its software engineering and customer support teams.

In a press statement, Homebrew partner Satya Patel said &Monograph offers transformative organization and project management software that is changing the way architects and designers work so that they can deliver better client service, manage costs and earn more profit. We look forward to seeing the companycontinued growth and innovation in a market that has been waiting for modern solutions.&

The 2020 season of the NRL will be kicking off this Thursday, March 12, and it’s looking to be another cracking year.

Back-to-back premiership winners the Sydney Roosters will be the team to beat this year, and the players have made it known they’re hungry for another championship win – though the road to the Grand Final will likely be a different c

Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst they assemble something, for instance.

A new U.K. startup hopes to nudge that future on further with a radical new technology which, although it resembles the HoloLens, is in fact a highly accurate helmet-mounted screen that enables construction workers to place beams or bricks in exactly the right locations, thus introducing significant savings in time normally lost due to mistakes.

To further boost its efforts, XYZ Reality has closed a £5 million Series A funding round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction. The company will build out its AR cloud and software platform and build its team to serve the EU market and expand to the U.S. and Asia.

The idea behind it is highly innovative. A dedicated helmet with an attached visor projects a highly accurate hologram — based on laser positioning —in front of the wearerface, allowing them to place objects precisely according to plans projected in front of their eyes.

The company claims its HoloSite headset is the &worldfirst engineering-grade Augmented Reality device,& that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to a five-millimeter accuracy.

The problem itsolving is an age-old one. In todayconstruction industry, buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. But tradespeople are asked to interpret those 2D drawings and turn them into 3D buildings within construction &tolerances.& This process creates inefficiencies that mean up to 80% of the construction being &out-of-tolerance.& Itestimated that 7-11% of project costs are wasted this way and, of course, in mega-projects like huge bridges, this amounts to an average of more than $100 million.

Founder, CEO and builder David Mitchell, who has spent his career in the construction industry, says: &Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. But 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.&

Mitchell came up with the idea of eliminating 2D designs after the 2008 recession devastated the industry.

I tried out the headset for myself and found that I could, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, from scratch complete a basic assembly of bricks according to the plans projected in front of my eyes.

XYZ says it is possible to build a bathroom in two hours using the headset, versus a day without it, using the technology.

The hope is that as this technology improves, any tradesperson would be able to work on a construction site with less need for training in 2D plans, but still with a high degree of accuracy.

The project is not without risk. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets for construction, shuttered its HQ last year. Earlier, Osterhout Design Group unloaded its AR glasses patents after acquisition talks with Magic Leap, Facebook and others stalled. Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, including Tencent, also sold its assets earlier this year after the company ran out of cash.

But Amadeus is bullish. Nick Kingsbury, partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said: &Construction is a sector thatripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes.&

Whisper is a social media platform and app that’s core focus is to allow its users to anonymously share secrets, often intimate in nature, and chat to people with shared interests.

An investigation by The Washington Post, however, has revealed that Whisper left the information of nearly 900 million users exposed to anyone that wanted to view it,