There’s more money racing into India’s increasingly-competitive two-wheeler market after electric scooter maker Ather Energy said today it has raised $51 million in new funding.

The round was led by early backer Sachin Bansal, the co-founder of Flipkart, who invested $32 million. The rest of the money was provided by Hero MotoCorp, which added $19 million in convertible debt, and venture debt VC firm InnoVen Capital which put in $8 million. The deal means that the six-year-old startup has raised around $90 million to date.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Tarun Mehta, co-founder and CEO of Ather Energy, said the startup will use the fresh capital to expand to new cities, and ramp up its manufacturing capacity and supply chain network. Ather’s scooters, currently available only in Bengaluru, will be launched in Chennai followed by other unspecified cities, he said.

Ather Energy will also attempt to produce 20,000 to 25,000 scooters a year through its own manufacturing plant in Bengaluru, Mehta revealed. The company is also keen to expand its product portfolio, which currently numbers just two scooter models — Ather 340 and 450. By 2023, the startup is aiming to grow its presence to over 30 cities, with over 6,500 charging stations — up from 38 currently — and production capacity of a million scooters in a year.

There’s some way to go before it can reach those lofty goals, but Ather has built a fan following in the nation for its scooters in recent years. Its scooters sport high storage battery density (2.4 KWh Lithium-ion), a dashboard for navigation information, 75 km of mileage, and take less than three hours to fully charge.

That’s led Mehta to call the Ather 450 “the most powerful smart scooter in the Indian market.”

Ather Energy offers its scooters to consumers in three ways: outright purchase, purchase with a subscription for value-added features, and leasing, an option it only recently introduced.

The company’s competitors include Vogo, Bounce, and Yulu, which earlier this month inked a deal with Uber to conduct a trial in the nation. Another big name is also involved: Uber rival Ola has invested about $100 million in startup Vogo, which operates in Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Mehta said that he thinks electric scooters are a good fit for ride-hailing giants, and that’s something he is open to exploring at a later stage. But for now, his startup will stick to its B2C (business to consumer) play.

In a prepared statement, Sachin Bansal, who has emerged as one of the most prolific VCs in India, said, “Their [Ather Energy’s] focus on end to end customer experience will open up new revenue opportunities and accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles in India. The future is electric and I am excited to be a part of this journey in shaping the future.”

A legal challenge to the EU-US Privacy Shield, a mechanism used by thousands of companies to authorize data transfers from the European Union to the US, will be heard by Europe’s top court this summer.

The General Court of the EU has set a date of July 1 and 2 to hear the complaint brought by French digital rights group, La Quadrature du Net, against the European Commission’s renegotiated data transfer agreement which argues the arrangement is still incompatible with EU law on account of US government mass surveillance practices.

Privacy Shield was only adopted three years ago after its forerunner, Safe Harbor, was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2015 following the 2013 exposé of US intelligence agencies’ access to personal data, revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The renegotiated arrangement tightened some elements, and made the mechanism subject to annual reviews by the Commission to ensure it functions as intended. But even before it was adopted it faced fierce criticism — with data protection and privacy experts couching it as an attempt to put lipstick on the same old EU-law breaching pig.

The Shield’s continued survival has also been placed under added pressure as a consequence of the Trump administration — which has entrenched rather than rolled back privacy-hostile US laws, as well as dragging its feet on key appointments that the Commission said the arrangement’s survival depends on.

Ahead of last year’s annual Privacy Shield review the EU parliament called for the mechanism to be suspended until the US came into compliance. (The Commission ignored the calls.)

In one particularly embarrassing moment for the mechanism it emerged that disgraced political data company, Cambridge Analytica, had been signed up to self-certify its ‘compliance’ with EU privacy law…

La Quadrature du Net is a long time critic of Privacy Shield, filing its complaint back in October 2016 — immediately after Privacy Shield got up and running. It argues the mechanism breaches fundamental EU rights and does not provide adequate protection for EU citizens’ data.

It subsequently made a joint petition with a French NGO for its complaint to be heard before the General Court of the EU, in November 2016. Much back and forth followed, with exchanges of writing between the two sides laying out the arguments and counter arguments.

The Commission has been supported in this process by countries including the US, France and the UK and companies including Microsoft and tech industry association, Digitaleurope, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Oracle and Qualcomm (to name a few).

While La Quadrature du Net getting support from local consumer protection organisation UFC Que Choisir and the American Civil Liberties Union — which it says provided “a detailed description of the US surveillance regime”.

“The General Court of the EU has deemed our complaint serious and grave enough to open proceedings,” La Quadrature du Net says now.

It will be up to the court in Luxembourg to hear and judge the complain.

A decision on the legality of Privacy Shield will follow some time after July — perhaps in just a handful of months, as the CJEU has been known to move quickly in cases involving the defence of fundamental EU rights. Though it may also take the court longer to issue a judgement.

All companies signed up to the Privacy Shield should be aware of the risk and have contingencies in place in case the arrangement is struck down.

Nor is this complaint the only legal questions facing Privacy Shield. A challenge filed to a separate data transfer mechanism in Ireland by privacy campaigner Max Schrems — whose original challenge brought down Safe Harbor — has also now been referred by Irish courts to the CJEU, in what’s being referred to as ‘Schrems II’.

In that case Facebook has attempted to block the court’s referral of questions to the CJEU — by seeking to appeal to Ireland’s Supreme Court, even though there is not normally a right to appeal a referral to the CJEU.

Facebook was granted leave to appeal — and Ireland’s Supreme Court is expected to rule on that appeal early next month. The appeals process has not stayed the referral, though. Nor does it impinge upon La Quadrature du Net’s complaint against Privacy Shield being heard later this summer.

Even before Computex officially launched today, AMD and Qualcomm threw down the gauntlet at Intel with a new chip and a 5G PC, respectively. Today Intel responded in kind during its keynote presentation in Taipei, introducing new processors and laptops, in addition to unveiling Ice Lake, its 10th generation Intel Core chips.

Now shipping to OEMs, the 10-nm processors will increase speeds for AI computing tasks and graphics and boost wireless speeds up to three times, Intel says. Built on Intel’s Sunny Cove architecture and Gen11 graphics engine, the series includes chips with up to 4 cores and 8 threads, up to 4.1 max turbo frequency and up to 1.1GHz graphics frequency. Gen11 will enable faster graphics in laptops, 4K HDR in a billion colors and games with up to two times faster frames per second, Intel claims. With Thunderbolt 3 and Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) inside, the company says the chips will also enable up to three times faster wireless speeds. Devices powered by Ice Lake are expected to be available for purchase by the holidays.

The company also unveiled Intel’s new class of laptops, Project Athena. Laptops built to Athena 1.0 specifications wake from sleep in less than a second, claim battery life of 9 or more hours under real-life conditions based on Intel’s testing conditions (with default settings, display brightness set to 250nits and continuous Internet connection with apps like Office 365 and Google Chrome running in the background) or 16 or more hours in local video playback mode. They are built with Thunderbolt 3, Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) and OpenVINO and scheduled to be available in time for this holiday season.

Lenovo’s senior vice president of consumer devices Johnson Jia, who helped launch Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon-powered 5G laptop yesterday, returned to the stage with Intel to showcase the the ultra-lightweight (1.2kg) Yoga S940 laptop, built on Project Athena, scheduled to go on sale in time for (you guessed it) the holidays.

Yesterday, AMD revealed the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, retailing for just half of Intel Core i9 9920X’s $1,100 starting price. Intel recaptured some thunder with its Intel Core i9-9900KS processor. Part of its 9th-generation chip series, the eight-core Core i9-9900KS is aimed at gamers who want to play and livestream at the same time. Like Intel’s other 9th-generation chips, it features mobile 5Ghz, and can run all eight cores at 5GHz all the time. Pricing has not been disclosed, but Intel announced that it will also be available by the holidays.

For gamers, Intel showed off its 9th-generation Intel Core-powered laptops Alienware M15 and M17, which boost mobile Ghz, a 8-core, 16-thread processor and faster frame rates and reaction times. The two laptops are expected to begin selling on June 11 at a starting price of $1,500.

Intel also announced that the Intel Performance Maximizer will be available for free download next month. The software makes overclocking more accessible by testing every core in a 9th-generation desktop processors and bringing it to maximum frequency.

The past year has seen Spotify embark on a series of acquisitions to beef up its service, particularly on podcast content. Now it is the turn of SoundCloud, another European music startup — albeit one that had lost its way in recent years — to go deal-making: the Berlin-based company has picked up Repost Network, a service that helps artists get the most out of SoundCloud.

The deal is undisclosed and it actually was announced last week, although it was not widely reported — perhaps an anecdotal sign of SoundCloud’s position as a relative outsider in today’s streaming market.

Once a pioneer of online distribution for artists, it has watched Sweden-headquartered Spotify takes its service global with a total audience of over 200 million monthly listeners. The competition includes services from Apple and Google as well as the likes of Pandora, Deezer and Jay-Z-owned Tidal.

Soundcloud had its come-to-Jesus-moment some 18 months ago when it raised a $169.5 million Series F fund led by New York investment bank Raine Group and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

That deal, announced in August 2017, was very much kiss-of-life that saved SoundCloud from bankruptcy — just a month earlier, it laid off 40 percent of its staff to slash costs. The investment also saw a change at the top as former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor replaced co-founder Alex Ljung as CEO. The new money took SoundCloud to nearly $470 million raised, and the pre-money valuation was said to be $150 million — down from a previous of high of $700 million from previous rounds.

Still, things have progressed enough for this acquisition, which is SoundCloud’s second ever. The company said the purchase will enable its top artists to access Repost Network’s tools, which include streaming distribution, analytics dashboards and content protection.

That restructuring, painful as it was, looks to have put the focus on the fundamentals. Filings from the company indicate that its revenue grew 80 percent year-on-year to reach €90.7 million ($102 million) in 2017, while losses narrowed by 27 percent to reach €51.4 million, or $58 million. Those results are from the beginning of Trainor’s tenure, we’ll have to wait on its newest filings to get a clearer picture of how things are going.

SoundCloud’s first acquisition was back in 2012 when it paid $10 million purchase of Instinctiv, a music management startup.

Future Positive Capital, an early-stage VC firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures associate Sofia Hmich, breaks cover today. The new $57.1 million pan-European fund will invest in “deep tech” startups right across the region that are attempting to solve “the world’s most pressing problems”.

Specifically, Hmich and her co-founders Alexandre Terrien and Michael Rosen are seeking entrepreneurs using advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, genetics, and other deep technologies to address global problems such as how to feed the growing population sustainably, how to tackle climate change, and how society will cope with an ageing population.

More broadly, the Paris and London-based VC firm is working from an investment thesis which argues that too much venture capital remains highly concentrated in a handful of sectors, such as consumer, fintech, and marketing, and focuses on web and mobile technologies that target mainly “upper class demographic groups”. And because of this there is a “long tail” of investment opportunities for investors willing to back a new generation of entrepreneurs building businesses that want to solve global problems that are in need of solutions, fast.

Coupled with this, Hmich says we are seeing a number of changes — such as the acceleration of advanced technologies, new aspirations from the workforce and consumers, huge macro demographic shifts and stronger regulation — which has led to a “tipping point” in the global economy that’s creating the conditions for these new types of companies to thrive.

Of course, it could also be argued that the Future Positive Capital thesis broadly contains ideas that many venture capital firms are now leaning more towards, not least because a lot of the lower hanging fruit has already been picked. However, Hmich insists that in Europe at least, having an early-stage VC solely dedicated to these types of startups is quite rare if not unique.

Out of this first fund, Future Positive Capital says it will build a portfolio of 20 to 25 investments at seed and Series A, and has a strong capacity to follow-on at Series B. Investments will range between around €300,000 and €5 million.

Backers of the fund include institutional investors such as Bpifrance, Draper Esprit, the European Investment Fund and Isomer Capital. It also counts a number of individual investors including Walter Butler, Henri de Castries, Marie Eriksson, Robin Klein and Francois Lemarchand.

Meanwhile, Future Positive Capital has quietly done two investments. They are BioBeats, an AI company focused on delivering preventative mental health, and Meatable, which is developing the “next-generation” of lab-grown meat (I was unaware the first generation of lab-grown meat was done yet, but I digress…).

Below follows an email Q&A with Future Positive Capital co-founder and General Partner Sofia Hmich, where we discuss the new fund’s remit, why Future Positive Capital says it is different from other European funds in terms of the companies it wants to back, her criticism of the status quo in venture capital, and why now is the time for a new VC fund like Future Positive.

Future Positive Capital plans to invest in startups at seed and Series A, with capacity to follow-on at Series B. Investments will range between ~€300,000 and ~€5m. Can you be more specific regarding the types of companies, technologies, business models or sectors you are focussing on?

The thing that really sets Future Positive Capital in motion is the new wave of entrepreneurs we’re seeing across Europe. These are people who are bold, long term thinkers, and who are using advances in deep tech fields like artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, and genetics, to build businesses aimed at solving large systemic challenges.

At the same time, while the solutions we invest in are diverse, we look for a common backbone in all our target companies – one that we feel represents a more holistic view of how value is created today. This revolves around four key components that, in our view, all reinforce each other: (1) business value, best represented by the creation of new markets, (2) scientific value, by way of proprietary technologies, (3) societal value, generated by solving global, complex and urgent problems, and (4) human value, via founding teams who have anticipatory visions of the future.

I wrote a blog post on our investment thesis to further explain this framework, but you can see this focus come to life in our first two investments: Meatable, a Dutch company developing in-vitro, lab-grown clean meat from stem cells, and BioBeats, an Oxford-based company that built the world’s first unified computational model for well-being. We’re absolutely thrilled to support these teams, and many more like them to come.

In your thesis you talk about a new wave of entrepreneurs who are focused on building businesses that solve the world’s biggest problems via advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, genetics. Can you elaborate a bit more on what those big problems are?

Sure and I think it helps just to frame this by considering the size of the market opportunity that those big problems represent since people are often surprised by this: we are talking about a collective ~$12 trillion annually by 2030. Putting that into perspective, that’s 10% of global GDP!

Within that, we’re currently particularly interested in environmental technologies (water management, CO2 extraction from the environment, “ocean” technologies..), sustainable construction (higher energy efficiency, next-generation building management…), sustainable manufacturing (new materials development, transformative recycling solutions/circular manufacturing…), assistive technologies (for elderly as well as disabled people) and technology-enhanced business models that foster more responsible consumption by consumers and businesses. We’re of course open to the broad spectrum of opportunity that exists here, but for now these are the areas we’re especially excited by.

At the same time, you are quite critical of the status quo in venture capital, and seem to be arguing that too much capital is chasing the same narrow set of ideas and solving problems for a narrow “upper middle class” demographic. In particular, I want to highlight one line from your thesis: “capital remains incorrectly distributed across the spectrum of opportunity”. What do you mean by this?

In our view, the European venture capital industry remains quite concentrated in terms of technologies, sectors, and demographic targets, as seen in the chart below, which leaves a funding gap for advanced tech companies solving the world’s most pressing challenges:

In Europe, only about 17% of venture capital is deployed in deep tech. This is a stagnant number —  a mere 0.5% increase over last year —  with most of it in gaming or AI for the more traditional VC sectors of fintech and enterprise software.

By backing a concentrated set of technologies that in turn serve a smaller range of sectors, we’ve ended up with highly-capitalized companies focused disproportionately on “top of the pyramid” urban consumers who are tech-savvy and have established purchasing power. Now, I am not saying that we’ll dismiss companies whose traction come from this demographic group but the missed demographic opportunities and unaddressed demographic needs are enormous: by 2030, 1 billion people will be older than 65, and the global middle class will triple from 1.8 billion to 4.9 billion. Layer onto that the increasingly nuanced and empowered groups of consumers defining their own identity through their values or beliefs… and what you have are demographic changes of gargantuan proportions that will inevitably shift global demand.

They’ll be VCs reading this — and to some extent I would have sympathy with them — who’ll say that given the spaces that are left and that venture capital only really works by going after global problems at scale, your USP isn’t actually as unique as you are perhaps claiming. Isn’t it true that lots of VCs are already shifting their investments thesis into a similar direction as Future Positive Capital?

It’s absolutely true that some investors are moving in this direction, which we’re delighted to see!

While this is happening in the US already, with established firms like Lux Capital and new funds like OSFund making these investments, there currently isn’t enough funding to support the fast growth of these companies in Europe, and as a result, they tend to partner with strategic investors, foreign investors, or family offices. At most, funds here might have one or two investments in their portfolio that fit our thesis, but they are not yet systematically, and exclusively, investing in the kinds of companies we’re focused on.

That said, we’re confident that Europe has what it takes. With ~2 million scientists, our research community is the most prolific in the world, exceeding that of the U.S. and China. We’re energetically nurturing and developing the top of the talent funnel (we’re particularly excited to work with university initiatives like Oxford Sciences Innovation and the UCL Technology Fund and talent investors like Entrepreneur First). And we’re gaining recognition by investors and acquirers, with China investing 9x more in Europe than in North America in 2017!

Which brings us to timing: Why launch Future Positive Capital? Perhaps you can share a bit more of your thesis on why the timing is right for this kind of fund.

We’ve reached a tipping point in the global economy, which sets the stage for our target companies to thrive.

To start, we’re facing a radical shift in the aspirations of the workforce. People are seeking purpose over pay, and it’s the companies with the boldest missions that attract the best talent, giving them the best shot at transforming themselves from small businesses with big aspirations to global category leaders.

Additionally, we’re seeing an increasing universalization of challenges, where problems that once were those of “others” (i.e., the effects of climate change, poverty, etc.) have become those of everyone, and feel more pressing than ever. Even governments are increasingly focused on solving these problems through both incentives and regulation. Think about the moves China is making to reduce meat consumption by 50%, for example, or how Horizon Europe’s mission areas, announced last month, include “adapting to climate change,” “healthy oceans,” and “soil health and food.”

This is why the timing for this kind of fund is right – based on our conviction that the greatest value creation today will be driven by companies that necessarily improve the human and planetary condition.

You have previously said that by looking for blind spots to invest in, you also want to see Future Positive Capital invest in a more diverse set of founders. Does this mean you are planning to look beyond the “usual suspects” and hopefully begin to address what I call in the UK: tech’s McKinsey-Oxbridge problem?

Haha, I should be careful here given we backed a few entrepreneurs with this background!

Of course, if the founding team lacks diversity in terms of gender, ethnicity, social demographics, or lived experiences… or whatever is relevant to the problem they are solving, it raises a red flag. Only by developing what I call “multi-diversity” can organisations reflect the rich fabric of society, and teams understand the complex challenges of our time.

That said, we are less focused on resumes/profiles than on a few (rare) traits of character, and in particular, we look for individuals who thrive in uncertainty. Not simply “resilience,” but a mix of extreme perseverance with a desire and capacity to grow constantly. These people have the right agility to shift strategy when needed, a tireless capacity of execution, and a drive that can be – at times – scary, but always used as a positive force.

On that note, let’s talk deal-flow. How are you planning to generate enough and the right kind of deal-flow to ensure you get to see the types of very specific companies you want to invest in?

There is more deal-flow out there than we can process, so quantity isn’t our main challenge. Instead, we’re focusing our efforts on finding companies that truly fit our thesis. Though all entrepreneurs are of course welcome to contact us directly, we hope they approach us with a robust understanding of the types of companies we invest in.

To that end, qualified and relevant deal-flow often comes from founders who have attended our Future Positive Meetups (events that we organise every 1-2 months in Paris and London), our advisors and our community of Future Positive Catalysts (a group of 100 scientists, entrepreneurs, and other leaders who support our portfolio companies as needed), and, of course, entrepreneurs in whom we have invested historically.

Finally, you are officially the new VC kid on the block. What is the one thing you hate seeing other VCs do that you hope Future Positive Capital will never find itself doing either?

Following, instead of building our own solid convictions.

A data point that has really stuck with me is how much of the exit value in European technology is non-VC backed, between 50% and 70%, yet at the same time, there’s an increasing concentration of capital on the same number of deals. I believe these numbers are linked, and this “herd mentality” is why so many opportunities go unseen.

Capturing today’s biggest opportunities requires going back to the original mission of the founding entrepreneurs of venture capital – to invest in visionaries imagining a wildly different future – with an updated definition of value that reflects the changes restructuring our economy and societies. Our success will depend on staying true to this commitment.

Massive news just dropped for Hong Kong’s capital markets. Alibaba, one of the world’s largest tech companies, is considering raising $20 billion through a second listing in Hong Kong, Bloomberg reported on Monday citing sources.

TechCrunch has reached out to Alibaba for comment and will update the story if and when we have more information.

Unnamed people told Bloomberg that the money raised in Hong Kong is intended to help Alibaba “diversify funding channels and boost liquidity.” The Chinese ecommerce behemoth is aiming to file a listing application confidentially as early as the second half of 2019, according to the report. That would come five years after Alibaba famously scored a record $25 billion listing on the New York Stock Exchange following Hong Kong’s refusal to approve its filing due to rules around company structure.

But the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is becoming an increasingly popular destination for public offerings that put Chinese tech businesses closer to investors at home, as my colleague Jon Russell explained in 2017. The turning point came when the bourse finally introduced dual-class tech stock listings last year, a major appeal that helped HKEX attract such tech darlings as smartphone maker Xiaomi and food delivery service Meituan Dianping.

The news also arrived at a time when Chinese tech firms are coping with increasing hostility in the US amid a series of prolonged trade negotiations. Just last week, China’s largest chipmaker announced that it would delist from the NYSE and focused on its existing Hong Kong listing, although the company claimed the plan had been brewing for some time and had nothing to do with the trade war.

 

Most people wouldn’t think too much of a computer crammed into a briefcase — but if it’s one of the few remaining examples of the first computer ever built by Apple? That’s a whole different story.

An original Apple I from 1976 — as hand-built by Steve Wozniak — just sold for £371,260 (or roughly $471,000) in a Christie’s Auction. It comes set inside a leather briefcase, complete with a built-in keyboard.

So, why the briefcase? Because the Apple I didn’t come with a case of its own. $666 got you a board ready to hook right up to a TV and keyboard, but figuring out an enclosure was up to the buyer.

It’s estimated that around 200 Apple I computers were made, the majority of which are believed to have been destroyed. The enthusiast-run Apple-1 Registry knows of 68-or-so still in existence, of which the one being auctioned is listed as number 10.

As detailed by the Registry, this specific Apple I was owned by Rick Conte, who bought it to learn how to program BASIC. He donated it to the Maine Personal Computer Museum in 2009, after which it was sold to a series of private owners.

Also included in the auction were a ton of great extras and pieces of history — the original manuals, a handful of magazines with articles about the Apple I, an assortment of compatible hardware like the SWTPC PR-40 dot matrix printer, rare photocopies of some of the original Apple founding paperwork, and more.

Apple has issued a short statement on its website and in various newspapers announcing Apple Maps plans in Canada. The company plans to drive around the country with cars equipped with a ton of sensors in order to improve Apple Maps in Canada.

Apple doesn’t say when it plans to finish scanning Canadian roads and processing data. If you live in Canada, it could take a few months before you notice any change.

Last year, Apple announced that it was in the process of rebuilding Apple Maps from the ground up. And you can already see some improvements in parts of the U.S. with more detailed maps, better representations of pedestrian and green areas, more accurate building shapes, etc.

The company isn’t just doing the bare minimum as its cars are equipped with a GPS rig, four LiDAR arrays and eight cameras shooting high-resolution images.

For now, Apple says it’s all about improving data quality. But the company could also leverage this data to launch new features, such as a Google Street View competitor, cycling directions and maybe turn-by-turn directions using augmented reality.

It’s hard to work on a new version of Apple Maps without telling the world about it — there are actual cars on the road. Now let’s see if the company plans to say a bit more about new features at its WWDC keynote next week.

Meet French startup Reminiz, a computer vision company that can index any type of video — it’s a sort of Googlebot, but for video content. Reminiz can add tags of people, logos or emotions on live streams and on-demand videos.

“The web is designed so that you can search for text — not video. We are making it possible to search within videos,” co-founder and CEO Jack Habra told me.

There are a few different use cases for Reminiz. First, the company works with broadcasters and telecom companies. For instance, Reminiz has a partnership with Orange so that you can learn more about who’s on the screen right now. It could potentially be leveraged for recommendations or contextual ads for external content.

Reminiz streams live channels on its servers directly, scans images and adds tags. Users then download metadata from the servers.

Second, you can use Reminiz to promote your brand on relevant videos. For instance, Hyundai sponsors Lyon’s soccer team. It wants to distribute Hyundai ads before soccer footage with the team playing. But YouTube keywords aren’t that good when it comes to targeting such a specific audience — a video might talk about the soccer team without showing any actual footage.

Brands can then whitelist videos to distribute ads on those videos in particular. You get charged based on minutes of video footage processed by Reminiz.

The company competes with AWS Rekognition and other generic video analysis APIs from cloud providers. What makes Reminiz stand out is that the company builds its own database of faces, people, brands and tags. It’s also probably easier to implement Reminiz compared to a more generic solution.

“With GDPR, everybody is contacting us to focus more on contextual data instead of personal data,” Habra said.

Writing app Ulysses has been updated with a few nifty feature additions. On the iPad, you can now split the editor into two side-by-side editors — this feature alone opens up a lot of possibilities. Ulysses also now supports the option to publish your writing directly to a Ghost blog.

Ulysses is currently available on macOS, the iPad and the iPhone. It’s a Markdown editor with a library of texts that automatically stays in sync across your devices. You can export one or multiple texts in many different formats, including Markdown, HTML, rich text, PDF, ePub, DOCX and a blog.

In addition to Medium and WordPress, Ulysses now supports blogs built using Ghost, an open source CMS platform. If your website is built on Ghost, this should be a nice addition.

But I’m more excited about the ability to open two editors at the same time on the iPad. While the iPad is a great device if you’re looking for a focused writing environment, iOS still thinks “one app = one document”. Sure, you can open two Safari tabs side by side, but most apps only let you open one document at a time.

Ulysses now lets you open two documents at once. You can drag a document from the sidebar and drop it on the right side of the screen to split the screen into two panels. This way, if you’re translating a document, if you need to look at some references, you can scroll through a second document while you write in the main document.

But Ulysses doesn’t stop there. You can also open a second editor from the editor settings to look at different parts of the same document. And if you long press on the export button, you can also open a live preview of the document you’re currently working on.

For instance, you can see what your text will look like before you publish on your blog — headers, images, links and footnotes included. If you edit your text, Ulysses automatically refreshes the preview after a second.

Opening and closing documents is a fluid experience and this split view feature is well implemented. There have been rumors that Apple has been working on improvements at the iOS level to let you open multiple documents using the same app. Today’s Ulysses update is a good example of such a feature and how it would make the iPad even better.