Wednesday, January 30, 2019
Your smartphone may soon pack 1TB in storage thanks to Samsung’s new memory chip – TechCrunch
Sick of filling the limited space on your phone with apps, photos and videos? Sometime in the near future, your smartphone could ship with more than one-terabyte (1TB) of internal storage and run 10 times faster than a standard memory card.
Samsung is best known for making smartphones but the company’s memory division — one of its most profitable units — just announced that it has begun mass-producing a 1TB flash storage chip for phones. There’s no word on when they’ll be inside smartphones but Samsung said it plans to increase production during the first half of this year.
“Smartphone enthusiasts will soon be able to enjoy storage capacity comparable to a premium notebook PC, without having to pair their phones with additional memory cards,” Samsung said.
That 1TB capacity is double the previous highest that the Korean firm has produced. Its newest chip gave the Galaxy Note 9 a 512GB model which passes the terabyte milestone when a 512GB SD card is added. This new breakthrough promises to offer that without the help of a card, but the company also boasted of improved performance.
Samsung said its new tech reaches speeds of up to 1,000 megabytes per second (MB/s) — that would transfer a 5GB-sized full HD video in just five seconds to transfer, as opposed to nearly one minute with conventional microSD cards. Increased memory will also enable better quality high-resolution video shooting thanks to faster random read speed, it said.
Sounds good, but might this ship before the end of the year? The Samsung rumor mill is already speculating that the upcoming Galaxy Note 10 could include a 1TB model, but at this stage there is no concrete evidence. Keep an eye out for future leaks for more hints.
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Lizzo “Juice” Performance on The Ellen Show Jan. 2019
If you're not yet familiar with the talented, hilarious, body-positive, stunning singer Lizzo, I think her recent performance on The Ellen Show is the perfect introduction. On Tuesday, the 30-year-old had Ellen, her audience, and likely everyone watching at home on their feet while belting out her new hit "Juice" — the high-energy, feel-good anthem is already enough to have you moving and grooving, but you'll also be in awe at how Lizzo holds the crowd in the palm of her hand.
Another thing you need to know about Lizzo (real name Melissa Jefferson) is that in addition to being a fantastic singer, she's also a classically trained flautist. She gained a much-deserved reputation for her signature "flute and shoot," and has people all over Beyoncé's internet trying to re-create her moves. Press play to watch Lizzo's electrifying Ellen Show performance now, then be prepared to have "Juice" in your head for the rest of the day.
Pinterest puts an IPO on its pinboard, hiring Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan to lead an offering this year – TechCrunch
Pinterest, the 11-year-old, San Francisco-based site known for the photos its users post about everything from wedding to beauty trends, has hired Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as lead underwriters for an IPO that it’s planning to stage later this year.
Reuters first reported the news. TechCrunch sources have since confirmed the development. A Pinterest spokesperson declined to “comment on rumors and speculation” when asked this afternoon for more information.
Pinterest has raised roughly $1.5 billion over the years and was valued at $12 billion by its private investors during its last fundraising round in 2017. Notably, its backers include Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, among many other investment firms, both early and later-stage, like Valiant Capital Partners, Wellington Management, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The company’s revenue last year was $700 million, more than double what the company generated in revenue in 2017.
It has 250 million monthly active users, compared with the 200 million monthly active users who were on the platform as of mid 2017.
Whether Pinterest has ever been profitable, we couldn’t learn this afternoon. But the company employs 1,600 people across 13 cities globally, including Chicago, London, Paris, São Paulo, Berlin, and Tokyo, and half its users now live outside the U.S., with the international market its fastest-growing segment.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, more than 80 percent of people access the service via its mobile app.
Assessing how Pinterest’s shares might be received by public market shareholders has become a favorite parlor game for Silicon Valley denizens. In a recent report, the outlet The Information posited that Pinterest’s offering could suffer because it’s a social media company that’s frequently lumped together with companies like Facebook and Twitter that have repeatedly raised concerns about users’ privacy and have faced a nearly year-long backlash as a result.
Yet Pinterest is far afield from what most users think of as social media and more akin to a visual search and discovery platform, with people looking for ideas and inspiration rather than to reach other people. So thinks venture capitalist Venky Ganesan of Menlo Ventures, who noted on a recent TechCrunch podcast that “there are no Russian trolls” on Pinterest. More, he’d said, “I haven’t seen Pinterest sell [users’] data. They’re using data to [figure out] advertising on Pinterest; they aren’t brokering [that information] to others.”
Another potential concern for Pinterest is its reliance advertising, which is often the easiest expense for companies to slash when an economy begins to cool, as may be happening here in the U.S. Ads make up 100 percent of the company’s revenue. Here, too, however, Pinterest could prove more durable than some of its competitors. While brand-image driven advertising often gets cut when budgets tighten, direct response advertising often does even better in down markets, as companies seek out clearer returns on their investment, and much of Pinterest’s revenue is driven by direct response advertising. Users see, they click, and they buy. As Ganesan offered during that same podcast visit, “I’ve got three daughters at home, and they spend a lot of time on Pinterest, and they buy stuff.” (Ganesan isn’t an investor in the company; neither is the broader Menlo Ventures team.)
Pinterest could reportedly seek to raise up to $1.5 billion in an offering, according to past media reports. Whether it targets more or less, we’re likely to learn soon, but an IPO has been expected for some time, in part because the company is now getting up there in years as startups go, in part because of its continued growth, and in part because of some new hires that seemed to suggest the company has been gearing up to become publicly traded.
In November, for example, Pinterest brought aboard its first-ever chief marketing officer in Andréa Mallard, who joined the company from Athleta, Gap’s activewear brand, and who now oversees its global marketing and creative teams.
Roughly a year ago, Pinterest also recruited its first COO, hiring Francoise Brougher, who was previously a business lead at Square and a VP of SMB global sales and operations at Google before that.
In fact, unlike many of today’s buzziest companies, Pinterest seems to have retained almost all of the executives who work at the company with one notable exception, In late 2017, it parted ways with its then president, Tim Kendall, who’d been with Pinterest for more than five years at the time and who left to start his own health wellness company.
Facebook has been paying teens $20 a month for total access to their phone activity
Facebook has run a program to collect intimate user data from paid volunteers for the past three years, according to a new report. TechCrunch reported that the company has been paying people ages 13 to 25 as much as $20 month in exchange for installing an app called Facebook Research on iOS or Android, which monitors their phone and web activity and sends it back to Facebook. The company confirmed the existence of the research program to TechCrunch.
Facebook was previously collecting some of this data through Onavo Protect, a VPN service that it acquired in 2013. The data has proven extremely valuable to Facebook in identifying up-and-coming competitors, then acquiring or cloning them. Facebook removed the app from the App Store last summer after Apple complained that it violated the App Store’s guidelines on data collection.
The Research app requires that users install a custom root certificate, which gives Facebook the ability to see users’ private messages, emails, web searches, and browsing activity. It also asks users to take screenshots of their Amazon order history and send it back to Facebook.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The program appears to violate Apple’s policies for developers using enterprise certificates to grant root access to iPhones. The certificates, which are intended to grant employers access to employees’ work devices, are prohibited from being installed on customers’ phones. TechCrunch reported that a Facebook spokesperson said the program did not violate Apple’s policies but could not explain how.
Facebook took steps to hide its involvement in the project until just before it installed the app, TechCrunch reported. Beta-testing services Applause, BetaBound and, uTest all provide services related to the research program:
Facebook began distributing the Research VPN app in 2016. It has been referred to as Project Atlas since at least mid-2018, around when backlash to Onavo Protect magnified and Apple instituted its new rules that prohibited Onavo. Facebook didn’t want to stop collecting data on people’s phone usage and so the Research program continued, in disregard for Apple banning Onavo Protect.
Ads (shown below) for the program run by uTest on Instagram and Snapchat sought teens 13-17 years old for a “paid social media research study.” The sign-up page for the Facebook Research program administered by Applause doesn’t mention Facebook, but seeks users “Age: 13-35 (parental consent required for ages 13-17).”
If Apple decides that Facebook Research violates its policies, the company could move to block its use of enterprise certificates, heightening the already high tensions between the companies. In the meantime, we’ve learned about one more way Facebook is hoovering up the most intimate details of our lives, for $20 a month.