Facebook cloning Snap to death may be old news, but others are only just following suit. Line, the Japanese messaging app that’s popular in Asia, just became the latest to clone Snap’s ephemeral story concept.

The company announced today that it is adding stories that disappear after 24-hours to its timeline feature, a social network like feed that sits in its app, and user profiles. The update is rolling out to users now and the concept is very much identical to Snap, Instagram and others that have embraced time-limited content.

“As posts vanish after 24 hours, there is no need to worry about overposting or having posts remain in the feed,” Line, which is listed in the U.S. and Japan, wrote in an update. “Stories allows friends to discover real-time information on Timeline that is available only for that moment.”

Snap pioneered self-destructed content in its app, and the concept has now become present across most of the most popular internet services in the world.

In particular, Facebook added stories to across the board: to its core app, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, the world’s most popular chat app with over 1.5 billion monthly users. Indeed, Facebook claims that WhatsApp stories are used by 500 million people, while the company has built Instagram into a service that has long had more users than Snap — currently over one billion.

The approach doesn’t always work, though — Facebook is shuttering its most brazen Snap copy, a camera app built around Instagram direct messages.

Line doesn’t have anything like the reach of Facebook’s constellation of social apps, but it is Japan’s dominant messaging platform and is popular in Thailand, Taiwan and Indonesia.

The Japanese company doesn’t give out global user numbers but it reported 164 million monthly users in its four key markets as of Q1 2019, that’s down one million year-on-year. Japan accounts for 80 million of that figure, ahead of Thailand (44 million), Taiwan (21 million) and Indonesia (19 million.)

While user growth has stagnated, Line has been able to extract increase revenue. In addition to a foray into services — in Japan its range covers ride-hailing, food delivery, music streaming and payments — it has increased advertising in the app’s timeline tab, and that is likely a big reason for the release of stories. The new feature may help timeline get more eyeballs, while the company could follow the lead of Snap and Instagram to monetize stories by allowing businesses in.

In Line’s case, that could work reasonably well — for advertising — since users can opt to follow business accounts already. It would make sense, then, to let companies push stories to users that opted in follow their account. But that’s a long way in the future and it will depend on how the new feature is received by users.

Following a week-long release from an Alexandria, Virginia detention center, Chelsea Manning is back in jail. Manning was jailed in March for her refusal to cooperate with a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks.

Manning has made her position on the grand jury well known and refuses to cooperate with its proceedings on principle. Her release last week came as the grand jury that issued her a subpoena in January expired, though the grand jury that issued Manning her latest subpoena won’t expire for another 18 months.

“We are of course disappointed with the outcome of today’s hearing, but I anticipate it will be exactly as coercive as the previous sanction — which is to say not at all,” Manning’s attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen said of the day’s events.

A former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army, Manning leaked more than 250,000 diplomatic cables, a large body of military field reports and harrowing footage of U.S. airstrikes to the secret-sharing organization WikiLeaks in 2010. Manning was convicted of most of the more than 20 charges against, but President Obama commuted her sentence before leaving office.

After her release last week, Manning shared a YouTube video in providing a bit of insight about why she objects to grand juries on moral grounds.

She doesn’t appear likely to back down. Aware of that, Judge Anthony Trenga made the unusual choice to fine Manning $500 for each day she remains uncooperative and in custody, starting after 30 days. After 60 days, that amount will increase to $1000 per day. Prior to her brief period of freedom in the last week, Manning spent two months jailed, a portion of which was served in solitary confinement like conditions, according to her legal team.

“Grand Juries and prosecutions like this one broadcast an expanding threat to the press and function to undermine the integrity of the system according to the government’s own laws,” Meltzer-Cohen said.

During her brief interlude walking free, Manning streamed Apex Legends and Red Dead Redemption 2 on Twitch.

Baidu, widely seen as the Google of China, felt the heat from its spending on artificial intelligence and other next-gen technologies that have yet to reach the mass market as it unveiled troubled first-quarter financials on Thursday.

The company logged a net loss attributable to shareholders of $49 million in the quarter ended March 31, marking the first quarterly loss since it went public in 2005. That compares to net income of 6.69 billion yuan a year before.

Baidu is the biggest search service in China and has reaped huge rewards from search ads in the PC era. But as consumers allocate their attention to new forms of mobile services — notably recommendation-based apps to discover content — Baidu is losing its appeal.

Xiang Hailong, senior vice president of Baidu’s search business, resigned after serving the company since 2005, announced the earnings report. The search giant has renamed its search business to a new ‘mobile business’.

Baidu’s revenue for the quarter rose slightly to 24.1 billion yuan ($3.5 billion), up 15 percent year-over-year.

This is a developing story. Check back for analysis.

Premium smartphone manufacturers have moved the needle on pricing, but 2019 may well go down as a kind of golden age for budget flagships. Apple, Google and Samsung are all in that business now, and OnePlus has once again shown the world how to offer more for less. And then there’s the new Zenfone.

It’s a bit of an understatement to suggest that Asus has had trouble breaking into the smartphone space. And things aren’t likely to get any easier as the market further consolidates among the top five players. But you’ve got to hand it to the company for swinging for the fences with the $499 ZenFone 6.

First thing’s first. Like the excellent OnePlus 7 Pro, the phone (fone?) forgoes the notch and hole punch, instead opting for a clever pop-up that flips up from the back. That means one camera is doing double duty, toggling between the front and rear with the push of an on-screen button. Like the OnePlus, there’s built-in fall detection that retracts the camera if it slips from your hand.

That whole dealie would be enough to help the phone stand out in a world of similar handsets, but this is a solid budget handset through and through. Inside is a bleeding edge Snapdragon 855, coupled with a beefy 5,000mAh battery. The new ZenFone also sports a headphone jack, because it’s 2019 and rules don’t apply to smartphones anymore.

Is that all enough to right the ship? Probably not, but it’s nice to see Asus stepping up with a compelling product at an even more compelling price point. More information on the phone’s U.S. release should be arriving soon.

Retail Zipline, a startup aiming to improve communication between retail stores and corporate decision makers , announced today that it has raised $9.6 million in Series A funding.

CEO Melissa Wong previously worked in corporate communications for Old Navy, where she said she saw “such a disconnect between what was decided in headquarters and what was decided in stores.” For example, management might decide on a big marketing push to sell any remaining Mother’s Day-related items after the holiday has passed, but then “the stores wouldn’t do it.”

“The stores would say there were too many messages, they didn’t see the memo, they didn’t know it was a priority,” Wong said.

So she founded Retail Zipline with CTO Jeremy Baker, with the goal of building better communication tools for retailers. Baker said that while they looked at existing chat and task management software for inspiration, those tools were “mostly built for people sitting at a desk all day,” rather than workers who are “on the floor, dealing with customers.”

Retail Zipline’s features do include messaging and task management — plus a centralized library of documents and multimedia and a survey tool to track results and feedback from stores.

To illustrate how the software is actually being used, Baker outlined a scenario where an athletic shoe company is launching “a huge initiative,” with a big-name athlete signed on to promote the latest pair of shoes.

“In a traditional environment, someone might FedEx over a package to [the store], someone might send an email down, ‘Hey, look for a package on this day,’ someone else from the marketing team might say, ‘Hey guys, we’re doing a shoe launch,’” he said. “All of this in these disparate systems, where people have to piece together the story. It’s kind of like a murder mystery.”

Baker said that Retail Zipline, on the other hand, provides a single place to find all the needed materials and tasks “tied together with a bow, instead of a store manager spending 10-plus hours in the back room trying to piece this thing together, or even worse not seeing it.”

The company’s customers include Casper, LEGO and Lush Cosmetics. Wong said Retail Zipline works “with anyone that has a retail location” — ranging from Gap, Inc. with thousands of stores, to Toms Shoes with 10.

The funding was led by Emergence, with Santi Subotovsky and Kara Egan from Emergence both joining the startup’s board of directors. Serena Williams’ new firm Serena Ventures also participated.

“As someone with an incredibly active life, I understand the need to be dynamic, and capable of quickly adapting to shifting priorities, but I’m also aware of the stress a fast-paced work environment can impose,” Williams said in a statement. “Retail Zipline is tackling this issue head-on in retail – a notoriously stressful industry – by pioneering products that help store associates get organized, communicate efficiently, and deliver amazing customer experiences.”

Developer knowledge sharing site Stack Overflow has confirmed hackers breached its systems, but said customer data is unaffected.

“Over the weekend, there was an attack on Stack Overflow,” wrote Mary Ferguson, vice president of engineering at Stack Overlow. “We have confirmed that some level of production access was gained on May 11.”

“We discovered and investigated the extent of the access and are addressing all known vulnerabilities,” said Ferguson. “We have not identified any breach of customer or user data,” she said.

An investigation into the breach is ongoing.

The company otherwise remained tightlipped about the breach, its cause, and the effect. We’ve sent several questions to the company but did not immediately hear back.

Stack Overlow has more than 50 million developer members who use the site to share code and knowledge. It remains one of the top 50 most popular sites on the web, according to rankings by internet analytics site Alexa.

Read more:

• An unsecured SMS spam operation doxxed its owners
• Samsung spilled SmartThings app source code and secret keys
• Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system
• A leaky database of SMS text messages exposed password resets and two-factor codes
• Chipotle customers are saying their accounts have been hacked
• We found a massive spam operation — and sunk its server
• Dow Jones’ watchlist of 2.4 million high-risk individuals has leaked
• Robocaller firm Stratics Networks exposed millions of call recordings
• Massive mortgage and loan data leak gets worse as original documents also exposed

Over the past five years, there has been a clear drop in seed investing. Between 2010 and 2014 there was an influx of “micro” VCs, perfectly equipped to deploy seed capital. Since then, we have seen a gradual decline.

One key reason is that the Micro VCs were successful. Turns out that investing at the seed stage is a really strong strategy for generating returns. Their portfolios performed very well and, as a result, were able to raise a much larger second and third fund.

Unfortunately, once your fund size exceeds $75 million, I’d argue, it is very difficult to focus on the seed stage. It is simply too difficult to identify enough quality opportunities to deploy all that capital. Instead, you need to write bigger checks. In order to do that, you start to focus on later rounds. This leaves a gap at the seed stage, which I’d argue, is the most exciting.

Because of that, I believe there is an incredible opportunity for this gap to be filled by corporate venture funds. We, at dunnhumby, have invested here, successfully, for years. And by successfully, I don’t mean just financially, though we have returned far more than we have invested; I also mean strategically. There are incredible strategic benefits to investing at the seed stage.

Innovation

The seed stage is where the greatest innovation is happening. We invest to inform our own strategic direction and identify new technologies and business models prior to their impact on our own business. We also use it to identify and embed with emerging companies who could, one day, be great partners.

In the recent surge of corporate innovation efforts, venturing is not leveraged nearly enough. There are few ways of exposing innovation better than aligning with a company that is innovating daily as a means of survival. There is no better inspiration than watching a team of two grow into a team of 100-plus, often pulling the slower-moving corporate along for the ride.

Collaboration

There is a flexibility and eagerness with early-stage companies that allows for greater collaboration. They are not so large as to have their own, built-out bureaucracy, and are actively willing to work together. For many, it is why they take money from a strategic, in the hope that there is more than just capital that comes from the relationship.

In many cases, these synergies do not emerge right away. However, there is a closeness that forms between the two companies that begins to bear fruit, from my experience, about one year post-investment.

For the startup, there is increased exposure to the investor’s client base and resources. For the corporation, there is firsthand insight into the success of the startup’s business model, technology and market. From this, partnership and acquisition opportunities emerge.

M&A and partner pipeline

Because of the strategic nature behind these investments, they also act as an incubator for future partnerships and acquisitions.

By aligning at the seed stage, you have the unique opportunity to watch the company grow. What is the market demand and is there an opportunity to enter a new space before others have realized the opportunity? Often, we will take a board or board observer position with the company, which brings even greater insight into their performance, as well as the potential upside of an even closer relationship.

Also, nearly as important, is that you gain an even greater insight into the company culture and their alignment with your own. In most cases, these discussions will emerge from early collaborations, where your broader teams will have the opportunity to interact and form a culture of their own. This cultural alignment will increase the likelihood of a successful outcome, whether that is a partnership or full acquisition.

Value

Participating at the seed stage does not require significant capital contributions. For one later-stage investment, you could make three to four seed investments, which increases your exposure to the above items and drastically reduces the financial impact on your balance sheet. If done right, within four to five years, the fund should contribute much more than it costs.

Does this mean that the corporate should finance the entire seed round? Not typically. In fact, for almost all of our investments to date, we are participating as part of a syndicate of investors. Often this syndicate is made up of other corporate investors (often referred to as “Strategics”). This reduces risk as well as the financial burden for each investor at this stage. The goal is to get a seat at the table. For strategic purposes, there is little difference between owning 5% versus 20% at this stage. Once the company grows larger, this dynamic will change.

Conclusion

At dunnhumby we invest in less than 2% of the companies we meet with. We are diligent about where we invest. However, I’d argue that the 98% we pass on are nearly as important. Because we have an investment arm, we are exposed to incredible innovation across a range of industries that most companies, that lack a seed investing strategy, do not see. At least, not until it is too late. Capital gives us a seat at the table.

These conversations provide signals into emerging trends in our industry, as well as our clients’ industries. When we pass, often the relationship does not end. Many times, they will lead to partnership discussions, referrals and introductions that are equally beneficial to the startup.

The opportunity is there. Corporations just need to seize it.

First Round Capital has both the Dorm Room Fund and the Graduate Fund. General Catalyst has Rough Draft Ventures. And Prototype Capital and a few other micro-funds focus on investing in student founders, but overall, there’s a shortage of capital set aside for entrepreneurs still making their way through school.

Contrary Capital, a soon-to-be San Francisco-based operation led by Eric Tarczynski, is raising $35 million to invest between $50,000 and $200,000 in students and recent college dropouts. The firm, which operates a summer accelerator program for its portfolio companies, closed on $2.2 million for its debut, proof-of-concept fund in 2018.

“We really care about the founders building a great company who don’t have the proverbial rich uncle,” Tarczynski, a former founder and startup employee, told TechCrunch. “We thought, ‘What if there was a fund that could democratize access to both world-class capital and mentorship, and really increase the probability of success for bright university-based founders wherever they are?’ “

Contrary launched in 2016 with backing from Tesla co-founder Martin Eberhard, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, SoFi co-founder Dan Macklin, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear, founding Facebook engineer Jeff Rothschild and MuleSoft founder Ross Mason. The firm has more than 100 “venture partners,” or entrepreneurial students at dozens of college campuses that help fill Contrary’s pipeline of deals.

Contrary Capital celebrating its Demo Day event last year

Last year, Contrary kicked off its summer accelerator, tapping 10 university-started companies to complete a Y Combinator -style program that culminates with a small, GP-only demo day. Admittedly, the roughly $100,000 investment Contrary deploys to its companies wouldn’t get your average Silicon Valley startup very far, but for students based in college towns across the U.S., it’s a game-changing deal.

“It gives you a tremendous amount of time to figure things out,” Tarczynski said, noting his own experience building a company while still in school. “We are trying to push them. This is the first time in many cases that these people are working on their companies full-time. This is the first time they are going all in.”

Contrary invests a good amount of its capital in Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard and MIT students, but has made a concerted effort to provide capital to students at underrepresented universities, too. To date, the team has completed three investments in teams out of Stanford, two out of MIT, two out of University of California San Diego and one each at Berekely, BYU, University of Texas-Austin, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and University of California Santa Cruz.

“We wanted to have more come from the 40 to 50 schools across the U.S. that have comparable if not better tech curriculums but are underserviced,” Tarczynski explained. “The only difference between Stanford and these others universities is just the volume. The caliber is just as high.”

Contrary’s portfolio includes Memora Health, the provider of productivity software for clinics; Arc, which is building metal 3D-printing technologies to deliver rocket engines; and Deal Engine, a platform for facilitating corporate travel.

“We are one giant talent scout with all these different nodes across the country,” Tarczynski added. “I’ve spent every waking moment of my life the last eight years living and breathing university entrepreneurship … it’s pretty clear to me who is an exceptional university-based founder and who is just caught up in the hype.”

Reports emerged a year ago that all the major cellular carriers in the U.S. were selling location data to third party companies, which in turn sold them to pretty much anyone willing to pay. New letters published by the FCC show that despite a year of scrutiny and anger, the carriers have only recently put to end this practice.

We already knew that the carriers, like many large companies, simply could not be trusted. In January it was clear that promises to immediately “shut down,” “terminate,” or “take steps to stop” the location-selling side business were, shall we say, on the empty side. Kind of like their assurances that these services were closely monitored — no one seems to have bothered actually checking whether the third party resellers were obtaining the required consent before sharing location data.

Similarly, the carriers took their time shutting down the arrangements they had in place, and communication on the process has been infrequent and inadequate.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who has been particularly frustrated by the foot-dragging and lack of communication on this issue (by companies and the commission).

“The FCC has been totally silent about press reports that for a few hundred dollars shady middlemen can sell your location within a few hundred meters based on your wireless phone data. That’s unacceptable,” she wrote in a statement posted today.

To provide a bit of closure, she decided to publish letters (PDF) from the major carriers explaining their current positions. Fortunately it’s good news. Here’s the gist:

T-Mobile swiftly made promises last May and in June of 2018 CEO John Legere said in a tweet that he “personally evaluated this issue,” and pledged that the company “will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”

That seems to have been before “T-Mobile undertook an evaluation last summer of whether to retain or restructure its location aggregator program… Ultimately, we decided to terminate it.” That phased termination took place over the next half a year, finishing only in March of 2019.

AT&T immediately suspended access by the offending company, Securus, to location data, but continued providing it to others. One hopes they at least began auditing properly. Almost a year later, the company said in its letter to Commissioner Rosenworcel that “in light of the press report to which you refer… we decided in January 2019 to accelerate our phase-out of these services. As of March 29, 2019, AT&T stopped sharing any AT&T customer location data with location aggregators and LBS providers.”

Sprint said shortly after the initial reports that it was in the “process of terminating its current contracts with data aggregators to whom we provide location data.” That process sure seems to have been a long one:

As of May 31, 2019, Sprint will no longer contract with any location aggregators to provide LBS. Sprint anticipates that after May 31. 2019, it may provide LBS services directly to customers like those described above [i.e. roadside assistance], but there are no firm plans at this time.

Verizon (the parent company of TechCrunch) managed to kill its contracts with all-purpose aggregators LocationSmart and Zumigo in November of 2018… except for a specific use case through the former to provide roadside assistance services during the winter. That agreement ended in March.

It’s taken some time, but the carriers seem to have finally followed through on shutting down the programs through which they resold customer location data. All took care to mention at some point the practical and helpful use cases of such programs, but failed to detail the apparent lack of oversight with which they were conducted. The responsibility to properly vet customers and collect mobile user consent seems to have been fully ceded to the resellers, who as last year’s reports showed, did nothing of the kind.

Location data is obviously valuable to consumers and many services can and should be able to request it — from those consumers. No one is arguing otherwise. But this important data was clearly being irresponsibly handled by the carriers, and it is probably right that the location aggregation business gets a hard stop and not a band-aid. We’ll likely see new businesses and arrangements appearing soon — but you can be sure that these too will require close monitoring to make sure the carriers don’t allow them to get out of hand… again.

With last fall’s release of iOS 12, Apple introduced Siri Shortcuts — a new app that allows iPhone users to create their own voice commands to take actions on their phone and in apps. Today, Apple is celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by rolling out a practical, accessibility-focused collection of new Siri Shortcuts, alongside accessibility-focused App Store features and collections.

Google is doing something similar for Android users on Google Play.

For starters, Apple’s new Siri shortcuts are available today in a featured collection at the top of the Shortcuts app. The collection includes a variety of shortcuts aimed at helping users more quickly perform everyday tasks.

For example, there’s a new “Help Message” shortcut that will send your location to an emergency contact, a “Meeting Someone New” shortcut designed to speed up non-verbal introductions and communication, a mood journal for recording thoughts and feelings, a pain report that helps to communicate to others the location and intensity of your pain, and several others.

Some are designed to make communication more efficient — like one that puts a favorite contact on the user’s home screen, so they can quickly call, text or FaceTime the contact with just a tap.

Others are designed to be used with QR codes. For example, “QR Your Shortcuts” lets you create a QR code for any shortcut you regularly use, then print it out and place it where it’s needed for quick access — like the “Speak Brush Teeth Routine” shortcut that speaks step-by-step instructions for teeth brushing, which would be placed in the bathroom.

In addition to the launch of the new shortcuts, Apple added a collection of accessibility-focused apps to the App Store which highlights a ton of accessibility-focused apps including Microsoft’s new talking camera for the blind called Seeing AI, plus other utilities like text-to-speech readers, audio games, sign language apps, AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) solutions, eye-controlled browsers, smart home apps, fine motor skill trainers, and much more.

The App Store is also today featuring several interviews with developers, athletes, musicians, and a comedian who talk about how they use accessible technology.

Apple is not the only company rolling out special GAAD-themed collections today. Google also unveiled its own editorial collection of accessible apps and games on Google Play. In addition to several utilities, the collection features Live Transcribe, Google’s brand-new accessibility service for the deaf and hard of hearing that debuted earlier this month at its annual Google I/O developer conference.

Though the app’s status is “Unreleased,” users can install the early version which listens to conversations around you, then instantly transcribes them.

Other selections include home screen replacement Nova Launcher, blind assistant app Be My Eyes, head control for the device Open Sesame, communication aid Card Talk, and more.